The Dukedom of Gloucester has a dark record – two of its holders are among the most notorious figures in English history
The Gloucester Arms is a pub near Gloucester Road with nineteen hundred and eighty-one reviews and a 4.2 – a large, solid sample – and it is named, like the road and the area, after the Dukedom of Gloucester, a royal title with one of the darkest and most dramatic histories of any in England.
The cursed dukedom
The Dukedom of Gloucester has long had a grim reputation. Several of its holders met violent ends or were involved in the bloodiest episodes of English royal history, to the point where the title acquired an air of being almost cursed.
The most famous – or infamous – Duke of Gloucester was Richard, who became King Richard III. As Duke of Gloucester, Richard was the younger brother of Edward IV, and on Edward’s death he took the throne in 1483 in circumstances that have been debated ever since. His two young nephews – the Princes in the Tower, one of them the boy-king Edward V – disappeared, presumed murdered, and Richard has been blamed for their deaths for over five centuries, most powerfully by Shakespeare, who made him the great limping villain of English drama.
Richard III’s short, violent reign ended at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, where he was killed – the last English king to die in battle – and his body was stripped, abused, and eventually buried without ceremony. In one of the strangest historical stories of modern times, his remains were rediscovered in 2012 beneath a car park in Leicester, identified by DNA, and reburied with belated dignity.
The earlier Gloucester
Richard was not the first Duke of Gloucester to come to a bad end. An earlier holder, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester – “Good Duke Humphrey,” brother of Henry V – was a great patron of learning who donated his library to the University of Oxford, where the oldest reading room of the Bodleian Library still bears his name. But he too fell from power, was arrested for treason, and died in custody in 1447 in suspicious circumstances, widely believed to have been murdered.
So the Gloucester title gives us a murdered “good duke” who founded a great library, and a king accused of murdering his own nephews. It is a dukedom soaked in the blood and intrigue of medieval royal politics.
Gloucester the place
Behind the title lies the city of Gloucester itself – an ancient cathedral city in the west of England, on the River Severn, founded by the Romans as “Glevum.” Its magnificent cathedral holds the tomb of King Edward II, murdered in 1327 (traditionally in nearby Berkeley Castle, in a manner too grim to dwell on) – so even the place, not just the title, carries a royal murder. Gloucester Road and the whole area take their name from this royal and rather bloodstained connection.
The pub
A solid, popular pub doing a fair 4.2 across a large sample of nearly two thousand people. It carries a name that sounds pleasantly genteel but conceals one of the darkest strands of English royal history.
Verdict
Solid, popular, and named after a royal dukedom soaked in murder, treason and the bones beneath a Leicester car park.
Have a pint, and consider that the pleasant name over the door belonged to Richard III, the Princes in the Tower, and the grimmest chapters of the English crown.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The layer of love underneath the rage makes this matter. You only write this well about things you despise.