Edward II: The Unconventional King (29 page)

Once back at Pontefract, some of the Contrariants decided to throw themselves on Edward’s mercy. The earl of Lancaster, however, believed that this was unnecessary and that his close kinship to the king would save him.
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After much debate, they decided to flee to Dunstanburgh, another of Lancaster’s great castles on the Northumbrian coast. According to the very pro-Lancastrian
Brut
, Lancaster at first refused, protesting that they would be seen as treacherously fleeing towards the Scots, but Roger Clifford’s waving his sword in his face soon changed his mind, and they set off for the north.
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Queen Isabella wrote to Andrew Harclay, sheriff of Cumberland, and Simon Warde, sheriff of Yorkshire, ordering them to cut off the retreating rebels.
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The Contrariants had only managed the thirty miles to Boroughbridge, where the Great North Road met the River Ure, when they found Harclay waiting for them, and were forced into battle on 16 March. Boroughbridge had, perhaps ironically, once belonged to Piers Gaveston.
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The royalist army led by Harclay took up schiltron formations, used to such great effect against Edward at Bannockburn, and defeated the Contrariants, despite the greatly superior numbers of the Contrariants’ army. The earl of Hereford died horribly, with a lance thrust up his back passage by a Welsh soldier hiding under the bridge; whether Edward felt sorrow, pity, triumph or something else for his brother-in-law’s terrible death is unfortunately not recorded.
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A document proving the Contrariants’ traitorous alliance with Scotland was, perhaps rather conveniently, found on Hereford’s body, and the possessions he had stored at Fountains Abbey were sent to Harclay, including a gold cup, a silver cup, forty dishes and two horses worth three pounds.
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Lancaster asked for an overnight truce, during which many of the Contrariants’ soldiers deserted, and surrendered to Harclay the following day. The
Vita
gives an account of how the Contrariant knights and noblemen who had fought tried to escape:

Some left their horses and putting off their armour looked round for ancient worn-out garments, and took to the road as beggars. But their caution was of no avail, for not a single well-known man among them all escaped. O calamity! To see men lately dressed in purple and fine linen now attired in rags and imprisoned in chains!

The author, however, who disliked the rebels even more than he disliked the Despensers, immediately goes on to describe the royalist victory as ‘a marvellous thing, and one indeed brought about by God’s will and aid, that so scanty a company should in a moment overcome so many knights’.
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As well as pretending to be beggars, some men tried to flee the country or to hide by donning religious habits.
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Edward sent members of his household to round up the escaping Contrariants and seize their goods, and inhabitants of Yorkshire joined in the hunt. One knight gave himself up to the rector of Escrick and handed over to him his sword and the seven shillings he was carrying, and another surrendered to the abbot of Fountains and gave him his money, sword, silver cups, dishes, saucers and a horn. Two knights caught in Knaresborough were among those who had thrown away their fine possessions, and were ‘taken bare’. Eleven men were captured thirty-five miles away at Selby the day after the battle, and their goods were sent to the king. They included a pair of silk garters adorned with silver and red enamel with a cross bar of silver, a ‘great silver chain containing twelve links with a pipe at the end,’ twelve buttons of green glass adorned with silver gilt, eight of silver wire and five of white silver, seven pearls the size of peas, a purse of silk worth a mark, a book worth ten shillings, eight horses, six silver dishes, two ‘worn swords’ and an old dagger. Three Contrariants captured at Ripon handed over seven horses, armour, a bed and nine ells of striped cloth, men of Edward’s marshalsea seized a red doublet worth forty marks which belonged to John, Lord Giffard, and a John Ryther took possession of a ‘coat of armour of great price, and a pack with robes and good furs’ belonging to John, Lord Mowbray. Hundreds of horses were also seized.
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The earl of Lancaster was taken to Pontefract Castle, his own favourite residence, whose constable had surrendered to Edward without a fight. He was forced to put on garments of the striped cloth which the squires of his household wore, an intentional humiliation of a man of high birth and rank. On the way to York, a crowd of people threw snowballs at him, called him a traitor, and shouted, ‘Now shall you have the reward that long time you have deserved!’
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Edward waited for his cousin at Pontefract, where rumour had it that the earl had built a tower in which to hold the king captive for the rest of his life. Lancaster was imprisoned there instead.
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A triumphant Hugh Despenser hurled ‘malicious and contemptuous words’ into Lancaster’s face on his arrival.
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Lancaster was put on trial in the great hall of his own castle, the justice Robert Malberthorpe, Edward, the Despensers, the earls of Kent, Pembroke, Richmond, Surrey, Arundel and the Scottish earls of Angus and Atholl sitting in judgement on him.
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The result was a foregone conclusion, and Lancaster was not allowed to speak in his own defence as his crimes were deemed ‘notorious’, known to everybody. He exclaimed, ‘This is a powerful court, and great in authority, where no answer is heard nor any excuse admitted,’ but given that he had executed Piers Gaveston without a trial, he was hardly innocent on that score himself.
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The list of charges comprised the many grievances Edward managed to dredge up against his cousin, going back to Lancaster’s seizure of his possessions at Tynemouth in 1312.

Lancaster’s judges sentenced him to death by hanging, drawing and quartering, though Edward commuted the sentence to mere beheading, respiting the hanging and drawing out of love for Queen Isabella according to the
Brut
, and out of respect for Lancaster’s royal blood according to the
Vita
and the Sempringham annalist.
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The parallels between the deaths of Gaveston and Lancaster did not unnoticed: he was ‘beheaded in like manner as this same Earl Thomas had caused Piers Gaveston to be beheaded’.
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The
Vita
agrees, saying, ‘The earl of Lancaster once cut off Piers Gaveston’s head, and now by the king’s command the earl himself has lost his head. Thus, perhaps not unjustly, the earl received measure for measure’.
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Edward arranged Lancaster’s execution as a parody of Gaveston’s death, and had him taken outside to a small hill, mirroring Gaveston’s 1312 death on Blacklow Hill. Lancaster was forced to ride ‘some worthless mule’ and ‘an old chaplet, rent and torn, that was not worth a half-penny’ was set on his head. A crowd of spectators again threw snowballs at him.
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Scalacronica
also makes the connection between the deaths of Lancaster and Gaveston, and says that Lancaster was executed ‘at the very place where he had once hooted, and made others hoot, at the king as he [Edward] was travelling to York’.
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Edward had never forgiven Lancaster’s jeering at him in 1317; it was one of the charges against his cousin.

It had taken him just under ten years to do it, but finally Edward had forced Thomas of Lancaster into a position where he could take revenge for the death of Piers Gaveston. Presumably at the king’s order, Lancaster was forced to kneel facing towards Scotland, in a pointed reminder of his treasonous correspondence with Robert Bruce, and was ‘beheaded like any thief or vilest rascal’ with two or three strokes of the axe.
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The sudden downfall and death of Lancaster, enormously wealthy and of royal blood, shocked the country; not counting Piers Gaveston, Lancaster was the first English earl to be executed since Waltheof in 1076. Miracles were being reported at the site of his execution within weeks, his numerous faults forgotten, people remembering only that he had opposed the king’s tyranny.
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A campaign to canonise Lancaster – surely one of the unlikeliest saints of all time – began in 1327, and his cult grew in popularity; as late as the Reformation, his hat and belt preserved at Pontefract were used as remedies in childbirth and for headaches.
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The day after Lancaster’s execution, Edward sent men to pronounce judgement on the other Contrariants, and bearing in mind that they had made war on him and wrought great and needless destruction on his realm and subjects, he had some of them sentenced to death.
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During their trials, they were forced to wear the green and yellow tunics they had adopted as their uniform in May 1321.
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Twenty or twenty-two noblemen, including Lancaster and six of his knights, were executed in various towns in March and April 1322, including Roger, Lord Clifford, John, Lord Mowbray and Sir Jocelyn Deyville, whom
Lanercost
calls ‘a knight notorious for his misdeeds’, in York. Fourteenth-century chronicles were consistent in recording the names of the men executed, though the figures have been inflated in some modern books by the inclusion of knights killed at Boroughbridge, and the executions of men who had committed treason, theft, assault and other crimes are often emotively described nowadays as a ‘bloodbath’ or a ‘reign of terror’.
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The king’s loyal Scottish friend Donald of Mar captured Bartholomew Badlesmere and took him to Canterbury. On 14 April, Badlesmere was dragged three miles to the crossroads at Blean, hanged and then beheaded, and his head set on a spike over the gate into Canterbury at Edward’s own command as an example to those who would betray the king. Badlesmere is the only Contrariant known to have been hanged, drawn and quartered, because he had fled and because he had been Edward’s steward.
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Chroniclers give variously sixty-two, eighty-three and a hundred Contrariants imprisoned.
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The total is difficult to ascertain, as dozens of men were released on payment of a fine between 1322 and 1325, such as Sir Thomas Gurney – a man who would play an essential role in Edward II’s life some years later – who was released from the Tower and restored to his lands in exchange for £100. The fines varied wildly between £2 and £3,000.
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Edward gave many men, including Gurney, permission to pay off their fines in instalments, a form of political blackmail also used by his father Edward I and great-grandfather King John.
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The Contrariants in prison were granted three pence a day for their sustenance, the same amount as the Welsh lord Llywelyn Bren had received in 1316, though Roger Mortimer of Chirk received six pence.
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The Contrariants probably deserved their treatment, but the nastiest aspect of Edward II’s behaviour is the way he ordered the arrest and imprisonment of some of their wives or widows and children, at least for a few months. Badlesmere’s widow Margaret, for example, was temporarily imprisoned but released from the Tower on 3 November 1322 and given a reasonably generous financial allowance, but Roger Mortimer’s wife Joan was held in some form of captivity, with eight attendants, for the rest of Edward’s reign. This was not unprecedented: Edward’s father had incarcerated the women of Robert Bruce’s family in 1306, and sent Bruce’s ten- or twelve-year-old daughter Marjorie to the Tower of London and his nephew Donald of Mar, the same age or younger, to Bristol Castle.

Edward did show mercy on occasion when he considered his sheriffs to have been excessively zealous in arresting and imprisoning Contrariant adherents. Between March and May 1322, he ordered the release of a number of men on the grounds that proof of their adherence to the Contrariants was insufficient, and pardoned well over a hundred of Lancaster’s adherents within weeks of the earl’s execution.
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The Lancastrian knight Thomas le Blount became Edward’s steward, and another, Richard Talbot, captured after Boroughbridge, joined the Despensers’ retinue. Yet these instances of clemency were all too rare, and Edward’s often arbitrary vindictiveness ensured the existence of numerous disaffected, desperate men, deprived of their lands and income and, in some cases, their families. Some men managed to escape from England, and later caused conflict between Edward and his brother-in-law Charles IV when the French king allowed them at his court. Chroniclers were horrified at the way the king behaved towards the defeated rebels in 1322, though they had been considerably less concerned about Edward I’s executions of numerous Scottish opponents (including the earl of Atholl) and his imprisonment of their families in 1305/07, behaviour which Edward II presumably took as an example. Edward I had also ordered Dafydd ap Gruffydd, brother of the last Welsh prince of Wales, to be hanged, drawn and quartered in 1283 and thereby set two precedents: that rebellion against the king could be considered treason, and that men of high rank could die for the crime.
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Anonimalle
calls Edward in 1322 ‘a man of great vengeance’, while
Lanercost
cries, ‘O the excessive cruelty of the king and his friends!’ Edward’s most vicious critic the Westminster chronicle
Flores Historiarum
goes over the top as usual by claiming that Edward ‘hated the magnates with such mad fury that he plotted the complete and permanent overthrow of all the great men of the realm together with the whole English aristocracy’.
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On 14 July 1322, five men – the mayor of London, three justices of the court of Common Pleas and the chief baron of the exchequer – condemned Roger Mortimer and his uncle Mortimer of Chirk to death. Eight days later, Edward commuted their sentence to life imprisonment, which would prove to be one of the worst mistakes he ever made.
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Edward’s change of heart is sometimes assumed to have been the result of Queen Isabella’s influence, which is unlikely and based solely on hindsight, given her later relationship with Mortimer. Why Edward changed his mind is unknown, but after Hugh Despenser’s return from exile, Isabella’s influence over her husband was limited, and it is debatable if she would have been able to convince him to spare the Mortimers. Perhaps Edward remembered that Mortimer had previously been his loyal ally and Piers Gaveston’s, and had voluntarily surrendered to him. Whatever the reason for his decision, it is likely to have been made against the wishes of Hugh Despenser, who loathed the Mortimers.