Even in the first flush of victory, Isabella and Mortimer were too insecure and too bitter to allow Edward of Carnarvon to remain quietly in prison under the custody of the Earl of Lancaster.  As long as he was alive, he might always become the possible instrument of their degradation.  At Orleton’s instigation the deposed king was transferred in April from his cousin’s care to that of two knights, Thomas Gurney and John Maltravers.  He was promptly removed from Kenilworth and hurried by night from castle to castle until, after some sojourn at Corfe, he was at last immured at Berkeley.  Every indignity was put upon him, and the systematic course of ill-treatment, to which he was subjected, was clearly intended to bring about his speedy death.  But the robust constitution of the athlete rose superior to the persecutions of his torturers, and to save further trouble he was barbarously murdered in his bed on the night of September 21.  Piercing shrieks from the interior of the castle told the peasantry that some dire deed was being perpetrated within its gloomy walls.  Next day it was announced that the lord Edward had died a natural death, and his corpse was exposed to the public view that suspicion might be averted.  He was buried with the state that became a crowned king in the Benedictine Abbey Church of St. Peter, Gloucester.  A few years later the piety or remorse of Edward III. erected over his father’s remains the magnificent tomb which still challenges our admiration by the delicacy of its tabernacle work and the artistic beauty of the sculptured effigy of the murdered monarch.

The tragedy of Edward’s end soon caused his misdeeds to be forgotten, and ere long the countryside flocked on pilgrimage to his tomb, as to the shrine of a saint.  By a curious irony the burial place of Edward of Carnarvon rivalled in popularity the chapel on the hill at Pontefract where Thomas of Lancaster had perished by Edward’s orders.  Like his cousin, Edward became a popular, though not a canonised, saint.  From the offerings made at his tomb the monks of Gloucester were in time supplied with the funds that enabled them to recast their romanesque choir in the newer “perpendicular” fashion of architecture, and embellish their church with all the rich additions which contrast so strangely with the grim impressiveness of the stately Norman nave.  There was only one impediment to the people’s worship of the dead king.  The secrecy which enveloped his end led to rumours that he was still alive, and the prevalence of these reports soon proved almost as great a source of embarrassment to his supplanters, as his living presence had been in the first months of their unhallowed power.