Edward II: The Unconventional King (21 page)

Edward spent late April, including his thirty-third birthday, and the first half of May 1317 at Windsor, then returned to Westminster, where he stayed for a month. During his stay there, he gave twenty ells of striped cloth to William de Horsham and three others for ‘singing before the king in his chamber’, and two pounds to his violist Richard to help support his wife and children. He also paid Peter de Foresta two pounds for making him ‘a crown of wax of various colours and of various devices’ for the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist on 24 June.
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It was now exactly three years since his humiliating defeat at Bannockburn, but Edward had still not given up hope of defeating Robert Bruce; on 12 June, he ordered 1,400 barrels of wine, given to him by the inhabitants of Bordeaux and Saint Macaire for his use in the Scottish wars, to be sent to England.
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And Piers Gaveston was still on Edward’s mind. On 29 June, five years and ten days after his friend’s death, he ordered the abbot and convent of Thame to take on six additional monks to celebrate divine service daily for Gaveston’s soul and the souls of the king’s ancestors.
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Edward’s demands for prayers for Gaveston’s soul could be onerous. In the spring of 1317, the king asked Tupholme Abbey in Lincolnshire to take in a retired servant of his, but they replied, ‘Although they would gladly obey him in all things, their very small income is already heavily burdened with the charge of finding a chaplain to say Mass for the soul of Sir Piers Gaveston, late earl of Cornwall.’
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Pope John XXII was concerned about the state of affairs in England, telling Edward that the land and its inhabitants ‘are oppressed by wars, the Church is persecuted, and God’s judgements are ready to fall’, in contrast to the past, when England was ‘a terror to barbarians’.
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The cardinals he sent to negotiate between Edward and Robert Bruce arrived in Canterbury on 24 June 1317. They were Gaucelin D’Eauze or Duèse, a relative of the pope, and Luca Fieschi, an Italian nobleman by birth and a distant cousin of the king. Edward was at Woodstock when the cardinals arrived, attending the wedding of his squire Oliver de Bordeaux to Maud Trussell; he gave two pounds and ten shillings to be thrown over the heads of the couple at the chapel door, distributed nineteen pence in oblations during the nuptial mass, and gave Oliver and Maud rings worth thirty shillings each.
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On 7 July 1317, Edward founded the King’s Hall (
Aula Regis
) at Cambridge University, which maintained thirty-two scholars from 1319.
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It was the second college founded at the university, after Peterhouse in 1284. In 1546, Edward’s descendant Henry VIII incorporated King’s Hall and Michaelhouse – founded in 1324 by the chief justice Hervey Staunton, a staunch ally of Edward – into his new foundation of Trinity College. Edward and his almoner Adam Brome also established Oriel College at Oxford in 1326, and Edward was the first king of England to found colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as one of two people throughout history to establish colleges at both universities, which he called ‘the twin jewels in our crown’.
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Fulfilling his vow after Bannockburn to found a friary in Oxford, Edward granted the Carmelites his palace of Beaumont in February 1318, and the Carmelites promised in return to celebrate divine service daily for Edward, Isabella and their children, and for the souls of Edward’s ancestors.
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Edward II is especially important in the history of Cambridge: in March 1317, he asked the pope to recognise its official status as a university, and John XXII duly granted a bull to this effect on 9 June 1318.
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The king also asked John to ‘extend and perpetuate the privileges’ of the university in March 1318.
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Edward II liked books: he owned an illuminated biography of Edward the Confessor in French which cost fifty-eight shillings, a French romance (any kind of fiction, not necessarily a love story) which had belonged to his grandmother Eleanor of Provence and was delivered to him in 1298, a Latin history of the kings of England, a Latin prayer book, a book called
De
Regimine Regum
(On the Ruling of Kings), and gave a romance of Tristan and Isolde to his favourite Hugh Despenser in 1326.
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Unlike his father Edward I and son Edward III, however, he showed little interest in the exploits of King Arthur. Edward borrowed books – the lives of St Thomas Becket and St Anselm – from the library at Canterbury Cathedral, which he failed to return.
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An inventory carried out at the Exchequer in 1323 revealed a booklet written ‘in a language unknown to the English’, which was in fact Welsh, and a book bound in green leather containing the chronicle of Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada, one of the predecessors of Edward’s uncle Sancho as archbishop of Toledo.
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Edward also loved drama, and in May 1306 spent five shillings and five pence on silk and other material ‘for tunics made in the Gascon fashion, for the prince [of Wales]’s plays’.
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Although Edward’s taste in books and decoration usually ran to the religious, he did enjoy more secular themes too, and ordered his painter Jack of St Albans to paint scenes from the life of Edward I in the lesser hall at Westminster, while a picture of four knights on their way to a tournament adorned his hall at Langley.
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In February 1326, various items including colours, Arabic gum and white lead were bought for Jack to illustrate a book he was making for the king.
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Edward bought a painting of St John the Baptist from John the Painter of Lincoln, which he kept in his chamber, and in 1322, ordered his tent on a Scottish expedition to be decorated with a picture of the evangelists.
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Shortly before he turned seventeen in April 1301, he ordered a painter named William of Northampton to make ‘a picture of blessed Thomas the martyr with the four knights who slew him’ at Chester Castle.
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This means Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury murdered in 1170 at the instigation of Edward’s great-great-grandfather Henry II. Like his father, Edward venerated Becket: he was taken on pilgrimage to Canterbury for the first time at the age of fifteen months in July 1285, visited Becket’s shrine sixteen times in the nineteen and a half years of his reign, and made offerings on Becket’s feast day every year.
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He inherited from his father, and passed on to his son, a large number of holy relics, including a thorn from the Crown of Thorns ‘in a gold box ornamented with diverse precious stones’, a fragment of the True Cross ‘in a precious gold cross’, the blood and a bone of St George, the blood and hair of St Stephen, a tooth of St Edward the Confessor, and sundry relics from other saints including John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Agatha, Agnes, Jerome, James the Less and the 11,000 virgins.
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The Sempringham annalist says, oddly, that in 1317 ‘there issued from the earth water-mice with long tails, larger than rats, with which the fields and meadows were filled in the summer and in August’.
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Edward passed through Shelford in Nottinghamshire on 8 August 1317, where he attended Masses and distributed five shillings and sixpence in oblations at the church for the soul of his nephew the earl of Gloucester, ‘whose heart lies there inhumed’, although the rest of the young man’s body was buried at Tewkesbury Abbey, Gloucestershire.
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At Lincoln, the king and queen stayed at the Gilbertine priory of St Catherine’s, where the body of Edward’s mother Queen Eleanor had rested in November 1290 before her funeral cortège wound its way south to Westminster Abbey. Whether Edward stopped to admire the Eleanor Cross at Lincoln and to remember his mother is not known, but his journey to York itself is interesting: he stayed as far to the east of Pontefract, the earl of Lancaster’s stronghold, as possible. The most direct route would have taken him right through the town, but Lancaster had blocked his way by placing armed guards on the roads and bridges south of York.
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Edward was furious that one of his subjects would dare to impede his progress through his own kingdom, and later brought it up as one of the charges against Lancaster at his trial. Civil war between Edward and Lancaster, the two most powerful men of the kingdom, loomed once more, and the Scottish situation – despite the peace treaty arranged by the pope a few months earlier – did not improve. The Scots invaded the north of England in early July 1317, and Edward summoned an army at Newcastle in mid-September to go against them, though, as frequently happened, he later postponed and then cancelled the campaign.
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The king and queen arrived in York in early September, and sometime that month must have conceived their third child, Eleanor of Woodstock, born in June 1318. Before Edward’s arrival in York, he sent envoys to Pontefract to negotiate with the earl of Lancaster, to try to make peace so that the Scottish campaign could proceed.
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The envoys’ aim was to persuade the king and the earl to meet face-to-face and resolve their difficulties; ‘a love-day without the clash of arms,’ as the
Vita
puts it. Unfortunately, Lancaster claimed to have heard a rumour that if he came to Edward’s presence, the king would ‘either have his head or consign him to prison’, and, whether that was true or not, refused to meet Edward.
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At the instigation of the two cardinals who had recently arrived in the country – they were with Edward at York in September – a date was finally set for a meeting, although it was eventually postponed until October 1318.
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For now, at least, Edward agreed to take no hostile action against Lancaster and his adherents, and Lancaster agreed to attend the next parliament, due to be held at Lincoln in January 1318. Finally, Edward dismissed most of his soldiers, and Lancaster removed his guards from the roads and bridges south of York.

At the beginning of October 1317, Edward left York to return to London. The road through Pontefract was now clear, but instead of doing the sensible thing and ignoring Lancaster, Edward unwisely took it into his head, despite his promise a few days earlier not to take action against his cousin, to command his men to take up arms and attack him. One of Edward’s friends – most likely Roger Damory – had persuaded him, in his own selfish interests, that the earl posed a threat to Edward and that he should attack him first. Fortunately for the stability of his kingdom, Edward, who was incapable of distinguishing between good and bad advice and who tended to believe and act on whatever the last person had told him, informed the earl of Pembroke beforehand what he was intending to do. He said, ‘I have been told that the earl of Lancaster is lying in ambush, and is diligently preparing to catch us all by surprise.’
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The astute Pembroke, who fortunately still retained some influence over the wayward king, managed to convince Edward that this was not the case, and the party returned to London safely – despite the fact that Lancaster did his utmost to make matters worse by leading his men out to the top of the castle ditch and jeering at Edward as he and his retinue travelled past.
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Edward was understandably incensed at this appalling rudeness and
lèse-majesté
, and he was not a man to forgive and forget an insult; it would be another of the charges against Lancaster at his trial. On his journey to London, Edward’s spirits might have been raised somewhat by Dulcia Withstaff, mother of his fool ‘King’ Robert, who came to visit him and received ten shillings.
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In the meantime a shocking event had taken place near Rushyford, between Darlington and Durham. On 1 September, Sir Gilbert Middleton attacked the new bishop of Durham, Edward’s cousin Louis Beaumont, Louis’s brother Henry, and the cardinals Gaucelin D’Eauze and Luca Fieschi, while the party was on its way to Durham for Beaumont’s consecration. Middleton robbed the four men and imprisoned the Beaumonts at Mitford Castle until mid-October 1317, though the cardinals were soon freed, and the sheriff of Yorkshire gave them twelve horses to continue their way to Durham.
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It is possible that the earl of Lancaster was involved in the attack, and it was believed at the time that the Scots were involved too, though this was never proved. Although the cardinals had come to mediate between Edward and Robert Bruce, their sympathy and support, like the pope’s, were entirely in Edward’s favour, and Bruce had already declared that he would refuse to meet them unless they acknowledged him as king.
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John XXII, rightly or wrongly, blamed the Scots, telling Edward that he knew Robert Bruce had perpetrated outrages on the cardinals and ‘laid violent hands’ on the bishop of Carlisle as well.
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The furious Gaucelin D’Eauze and Luca Fieschi excommunicated Middleton and his adherents, and Thomas of Lancaster, mortified, escorted the cardinals to Boroughbridge, twenty miles north-west of York, where the earls of Pembroke and Hereford met them and took them to Edward.
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On 20 September, Edward, also furious and embarrassed that two high-ranking and well-connected churchmen, one of them his own relative, had been attacked in his kingdom, declared that he would ‘punish the sons of iniquity’ who had perpetrated the outrage.
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He was as good as his word: three of his squires captured Middleton and his brother John at Mitford Castle in January 1318 and sent them to Edward, and the king ordered fourteen other squires to deliver them to the Tower of London.
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On 24 January 1318, royal justices sentenced Gilbert Middleton to execution, and he suffered a terrible death by hanging, drawing and quartering.
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Thomas of Lancaster escaped punishment over the episode.

And the powerful earl’s lawlessness had not yet run its course. In early October 1317, he seized Knaresborough Castle in Yorkshire, which his retainer John Lilburn didn’t surrender to the king until January 1318, and by the beginning of November had also forcibly gained possession of Alton Castle in Staffordshire.
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Knaresborough had formerly belonged to Piers Gaveston, Alton to Theobald Verdon, but far more importantly as far as Lancaster was concerned, Roger Damory was the custodian of both.
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Clearly, Lancaster saw Damory as his chief enemy at court, and determined to attack him. Edward ineffectually sent out orders to various sheriffs to retake the castles, and commanded Lancaster to ‘desist completely from these proceedings’.
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Not only did Lancaster fail to obey, he took numerous armed men to besiege and capture castles in Yorkshire which belonged to John de Warenne, earl of Surrey: Sandal, Conisborough and Wakefield. Lancaster also ejected Maud Nerford, Surrey’s mistress, from her property in Wakefield, and by the beginning of 1318 had taken firm control over Surrey’s Yorkshire lands.
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Edward’s chief priority, as ever, was the safety and well-being of his ‘favourites’, and he took Damory’s lands in Yorkshire, Herefordshire and Lincolnshire into his own hands on 18 October 1317 in an attempt to protect Damory from his cousin’s aggression, also ordering a clerk to remove Damory’s stud-farm from Knaresborough to Burstwick. He restored Damory’s lands to him on 2 December, assuming the danger from Lancaster was past.
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