The de Marisco Afair
A Pirate King of Lundy
Sir William de Marisco was convicted in 1238 of the murder of a messenger of King Henry III named Henry Clement, slain at the very gates of Westminster “to our no small dishonour and scandal of the realm.” The murder occurred in 1235: suspicion settled on the Mariscos, who might have been motivated by Clement’s boasting of having killed in battle in 1234 the Earl of Pembroke, a magnate and great rival to the king who was the grandson of William Marshal. William de Marisco, son of Geoffrey was lord of Coonagh Castle, County Limerick in Ireland. Geoffrey and William were both disgraced, and outlawed in a sensational and controversial London trial. Geoffrey retreated to Ireland where the king could not touch him: his son became a pirate.
William de Marisco "took up his quarters on an island near Bristol, called Lundy, a place impregnable by the nature of its situation, where he lived like a pirate with a number of proscribed and wicked men, indulging in plunder and rapine, and, attended by his companions, traversed the places on the neighbouring coast, despoiling the inhabitants of their property, especially wine and other provisions. By sudden incursions lie frequently carried off vast booty from the country lying near the island, and in many ways injured the kingdom of England both by land and sea, and caused great loss to the native and foreign merchants."
William de Marisco has spent seven years as a pirate king, seizing shiploads of goods and ransomable hostages and mocking the king he could from his island fastness. He’d been dispossessed of his lands in Ireland and nursed against King Henry the personal grudge of an aggrieved nobleman. He then joined forces with Llewelyn ap Gruffyd and tried to take the king and rescue Hubert de Burgh from Gloucester Castle in 1234 in an attack that failed with a terrible outbreak of dysentery among the attackers. William cut the roads behind him and made himself permanently anathema by allegedly sending an assassin after Henry III in 1238. Matthew Paris, again, with a story that will easily bear the interpretation that Marisco’s name was put into a deranged regicide’s mouth by his torturers:
on the day after the Nativity of St. Mary, a certain learned esquire, as it is said, came to the king’s court at Woodstock, pretending that he was insane, and said to the king, “Resign to me the kingdom, which you have unjustly usurped, and so long detained from me;” he also added, that he bore the sign of royalty on his shoulder. The king’s attendants wanted to beat him and drive him away from the royal presence, but the king prevented those who were rushing on him from violence, saying, “Let the insane man rave as becomes him, for such people’s words have not the influence of truth.” In the middle of the night, however, this same man entered the king’s bedchamber window, carrying an open knife, and approached the king’s couch, but was confused at not finding him there, and immediately began to look for him in the several chambers of his residence. The king was, by God’s providence, then sleeping with the queen. But one of the queen’s maids, named Margaret Biseth, was by chance awake, and was singing psalms by the light of a candle (for she was a holy maid, and one devoted to God), and when she saw this madman searching all the private places, to kill the king, and frequently asking in a terrible voice where the king was, she was greatly alarmed, and began to utter repeated cries. At her dreadful cry the king’s attendants awoke, and leaped from their beds with all speed, and running to the spot, broke open the door, which this robber had firmly secured with a bolt, and seized the robber, and, notwithstanding his resistance, bound him fast and secured him. He, after some time, confessed that he had been sent there to kill the king, after the manner of the assassins, by William de Marisco , son of Greoffrey de Marisco. “William boldly denied all these charges, yet he did not obtain any credit, nor was he listened to."
William's grandfather and Geoffrey's father is Sir Walter de Marisco of Camerley, companion of Avalon Covenant (Ed Woods).
