The evidence incriminating William de Marisco was clearly worthless. If the would-be assassin had not been insane he would not have asserted a claim to the crown and drawn attention to himself before making the murderous attempt. De Marisco had nothing to gain by the King’s death, and he may certainly be acquitted of participation. William fled to Lundy, “impregnable from the nature of the place, and having attached to himself many outlaws and malefactors, subsisted by piracies, taking more especially wine and provisions, and making frequent sudden descents on the adjacent lands, spoiling and injuring the realm by land and by sea, and native as well as foreign merchants. Many English nobles, having learnt how that the said William and his followers could not be surprised save by stratagem, apprised the King that the securing of this malefactor must be effected not by violence, but by craft. The King therefore ordered his faithful subjects to exert themselves strenuously in order to capture him and relieve their country.” Nothing, however, was done for four years, during which the piracies continued. There was this excuse for De Marisco, that as the island grew neither corn nor wine, he was dependent on the mainland or on merchant vessels for his subsistence. As all those on the mainland were on the look-out to capture him as the supposed mover of the plot to kill the King, he was forced to live by piracy. In 1242, William of Worcester informs us, he was caught: how, he does not say, save that it was by surprise. “He was thrown into chains, and he and sixteen accomplices were condemned and sentenced to death. He was executed at the Tower on a gibbet with special ignominy, his body suspended in a sack, and when stiff in death, disembowelled, his bowels burnt, and his body divided into quarters.” After the execution of Sir William, his father, Geoffrey (or Jordan) fled to France, and the island was then seized by the King, who appointed to it governors. But in 1281 Lundy was again granted to a Marisco, Sir William, son of Jordan, another of the progeny of old Geoffrey. He died in 1284, and his son John in 1289, leaving Herbert as his son and heir. But Edward II granted the island to the elder Despenser, and Herbert was unable to obtain possession of it. He died in 1327, and from that date no more is heard of the Mariscoes in connexion with the island. From their time, however, other pirates obtained a footing on it. In the days of Henry VIII a gang of French pirates, under their captain, De Valle, seized Lundy and waylaid the Bristol traders, but the Clovelly fishermen made an expedition against them, burnt their ship, and killed or made prisoners of the whole gang.