Edward II: The Unconventional King (30 page)

Some people did benefit from the events of 1322: Andrew Harclay, for example, sheriff of Cumberland and the victor of Boroughbridge, became earl of Carlisle.
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The men who benefited the most were, of course, Hugh Despenser father and son, who were granted numerous manors forfeited by Contrariants. Edward also granted five forfeited manors to his niece Eleanor Despenser, to pass after her death to her third son, Gilbert.
¹⁰⁷
One person who did not benefit, though, was Queen Isabella – perhaps a sign that the royal marriage was starting to deteriorate. Isabella apparently joined her husband in the north before her uncle Lancaster’s execution: Edward’s squire Oliver de Bordeaux informed the earl of Richmond that the king and queen ‘were well and hearty, thank God’ on St Cuthbert’s day, 20 March, which seems to mean that he saw them together.
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The king reached Pontefract on 19 March, which would imply that Isabella was also in the castle when Lancaster was tried and executed on the 22nd.

Edward wrote to inform the pope of recent events on 25 March 1322; John XXII advised him to ascribe his victory to God. Far from showing sympathy to the men whom Edward had executed and imprisoned, John excommunicated ‘those nobles and magnates who attack the king and his realm’.
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Edward finally revoked the hated Ordinances of 1311, and annulled the judgement of exile and disinheritance on the Despensers. Hugh Despenser the Elder became earl of Winchester, an appointment which perhaps surprisingly attracted little criticism from contemporaries, though for some reason his son’s claims to the earldom of Gloucester were not pressed. Although Despenser would one day inherit the earldom of Winchester from his father, it was a considerably less prestigious title. Either Edward had finally learned some sense, or more likely, Despenser was by now so powerful and wealthy that even the earldom of Gloucester hardly sufficed for him, though evidently it didn’t occur even to him to award himself the grandiose earldom of March, or earl of all the English-Welsh borderlands, as the next royal favourite Roger Mortimer would do in 1328.

The spring of 1322 marked Edward II’s triumph. But from now on, everything began to go wrong for him, and the remaining years of his reign were a downward spiral that ended in complete ignominy. He and Despenser ruled so capriciously, arbitrarily and repressively as to make countless more enemies and, with hindsight at least, to make their downfall seem inevitable. Solvent for the first time in his reign – the vast income from the Contrariants’ forfeited lands and Despenser’s despotic efficiency combined to make him ‘the richest king that ever was in England after William Bastard of Normandy’, as the
Brut
has it – and with his enemies dead, in prison or in exile, Edward had the chance to rescue his disastrous reign.
¹¹⁰
He failed to take it.

The year 1322 marked the beginning of Edward II’s tyranny. The
Vita
comments, ‘The harshness of the king has today increased so much that no one however great and wise dares to cross his will … the nobles of the realm, terrified by threats and the penalties inflicted on others, let the king’s will have free play … whatever pleases the king, though lacking in reason, has the force of the law.’
¹
The
Brut
says at the time of Boroughbridge, ‘So much unkindness was never seen in England before,’ and ‘The land was without law, for Holy Church had no more reverence than it had been a brothel’ – though in fact the author doesn’t blame Edward for the lawlessness, and Sir Thomas Gray, author of the
Scalacronica
, considered that ‘the commons of his [Edward’s] time were wealthy and protected by strong laws’.
²
Whether the common people of England suffered under a higher crime rate in the 1320s than at any other time in the fourteenth century is doubtful; it was the land-owning class who were victims of the Despensers and their greed. Despenser treated the widows of Contrariants and other vulnerable women cruelly, imprisoning, for example, Elizabeth Comyn for a year until she handed over some of her lands to his father and himself. At his trial in November 1326, Despenser was even accused of torturing a ‘Lady Baret’ by breaking her limbs until she went insane – presumably a reference to Joan Gynes, widow of Stephen Baret, a Contrariant executed in 1322.
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As Despenser was perfectly willing to force widows to grant him their lands but is not known to have been a sadist who had people tortured for fun, his motive must presumably have been to gain control of Joan’s lands. In 1324, however, her three manors were in Edward’s hands, not Despenser’s.
⁴
The charge of torture against Despenser sounds too specific to have been completely invented, yet it is extremely odd that neither Joan nor any of her family later petitioned Edward III for restitution, and even stranger that none of the contemporary chroniclers noticed such a horrific act; the alleged torture is not mentioned anywhere. They might have ignored the torture of a lowborn woman, but never a highborn one. Whatever happened between Despenser and Joan, the story of her broken limbs and insanity is likely to be, at best, a gross exaggeration at a time when all the ills of the 1320s were being heaped on one man’s head.

Edward granted the peninsula of Gower, ownership of which had begun the civil war in the first place, to Hugh Despenser, and Despenser subsequently forced his sister-in-law, Roger Damory’s widow Elizabeth de Burgh, to give up her valuable lordship of Usk (worth £770 a year) in exchange for the peninsula (worth £300 a year), nastily ordering his men to ‘strip Gower for our profit’ before handing it over to her. Using quasi-legal methods, he deprived her of Gower as well in 1324.
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Elizabeth did keep all her English and Irish lands, if only because Despenser, busily building himself an empire in South Wales, had no interest in them. According to Elizabeth’s own testimony of May 1326, Edward arrested her counsellors and threatened that if she refused to submit to his will, he would allow her to hold none of her lands as long as he lived.
⁶
Edward made no attempt to protect his niece, and not only did he tolerate Despenser’s appalling treatment of her, he actively colluded in it, behaviour which shows him in the worst possible light.

Despenser was restored to his position of royal chamberlain after his return from exile, which he would hold until his death in November 1326, and came to enjoy supreme power at court and over the king.
Scalacronica
comments on Despenser’s vast influence over the king, and says that Edward ‘after his example, did everything that wholly unfitted him for chivalry, delighting himself in avarice and in delights of the flesh’.
⁷
By 1326, Despenser enjoyed an annual income of over £7,000 – and this does not even include the value of his goods in Wales, by far the largest part of his landholdings – which made him by far the richest man in the country after Edward and even wealthier than his brother-in-law the earl of Gloucester had been.
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Despenser’s riches grew and grew over the next few years, and he was by far the most important English customer of the Italian banking firms the Bardi and Peruzzi, holding almost £6,000 with them in January 1324.
⁹
The king’s infatuation with his favourite knew no bounds, and despite Despenser’s wealth, Edward even paid for his household essentials, spending, for example, thirty shillings on wax for him, and giving five pounds to the keeper of Despenser’s horses for taking good care of the animals.
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When Edward paid £130 for a new royal ship, it was called, inevitably,
La Despenser
.
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Despenser’s father also came to wield great influence, and the hundreds of petitions which followed hard on their 1326 downfall reveal how they were able to extort, imprison and take anything they wanted. Hugh Despenser, untouchable, engaged in any act of lawlessness he felt like, all of which took place with Edward’s full knowledge and acquiescence, and as the king he must be held accountable for the flagrant breaches of the law he permitted and in many cases encouraged and facilitated. The man who loved the company of the lowborn, who delighted in digging and thatching and being wildly generous, became a despot, willing to trample over the rights of many to please his beloved favourite.

One notable feature of the period in and after 1322 is the deterioration of Edward’s relationship with Queen Isabella. For fourteen years, she had been his loyal and supportive ally and helpmate, but after the victory at Boroughbridge, Isabella appears so rarely in the records as to give the impression that she had retired to a convent.
¹²
It is impossible to know what happened, but the impression is one of a sudden crisis in the marriage. The couple had no more children after 1321, which may be a symptom of their declining relationship (or possibly also of the declining fertility of one or both of them). In later years, Isabella blamed Hugh Despenser for coming between her husband and herself and took to dressing in widow’s weeds to mourn the death of her marriage, though whether this necessarily meant that Edward and Despenser had a sexual relationship is not certain. Despenser’s relations with his wife Eleanor certainly continued: she bore more children in 1323 and 1325.
¹³
It is likely that Despenser, who as royal chamberlain strictly controlled access to Edward, managed to stop or curtail considerably Isabella’s ability to communicate with her husband, though why Edward permitted Despenser to do this is an unanswerable question. Isabella’s hatred of Despenser is painfully apparent, and he was the only one of her husband’s favourites to arouse her ire to such an extent. Other than the period soon after her wedding, there is no evidence that she complained about Piers Gaveston, and if she disliked Roger Damory and Hugh Audley or objected to their relationship with her husband, there is likewise no evidence of it. Hugh Despenser was different: he had a definite agenda, to become as rich as possible and the most powerful man in the country. Isabella did not form part of his plans. After his return from exile, his position as royal favourite was unassailable; there is nothing to show that Edward was ever willing to give him up or send him away from court, as he had done with Damory and Audley, not even in 1326 when his throne depended on it. The later chronicler Jean Froissart wrote about Despenser, ‘Without him nothing was done, and through him everything was done, and the king trusted him more than everybody else,’ and the
Polychronicon
noted that as Despenser’s power waxed, the queen’s waned.
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The deterioration of Edward and Isabella’s relationship was to have tragic consequences for the king.

Edward summoned his army in March 1322 to go, yet again, against the Scots that July, ‘to repel with God’s help their obstinate malice’.
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Robert Bruce invaded England in mid-June and burned and pillaged as far south as Preston in Lancashire, and
Lanercost
claims that he even plundered the monastery of Holm Coltran, although his father was buried there.
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Edward had still not given up hope of defeating Bruce and becoming overlord of Scotland, though one wonders if even he had to admit to himself that he was at least fourteen years too late. He left York on 21 July, the day he sent Hugh Despenser’s eldest son Hugh, who was probably only thirteen, to take ‘fat venison’ in the royal forests, parks and chases in twenty-three counties, also sending his huntsman William Twyt or Twici to Lancashire for the same purpose.
¹⁷
Twici wrote a French treatise called
Le Art de Venerie
around 1320; the earliest text on hunting written in England, it opens, ‘Here begins the art of hunting, which Master William Twici, huntsman of the king of England, made in his time to instruct others.’
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The records are sparse, but it appears that Edward enjoyed hunting; Queen Isabella certainly did, and in 1325 boarded her hunting dogs with the prior of Canterbury, who wrote to Hugh Despenser to complain that they were eating him out of house and home.
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Edward’s illegitimate son Adam, in his mid-teens or thereabouts, accompanied him to Scotland, probably serving his father as page or squire. The king’s wardrobe accounts record four payments totalling thirteen pounds and twenty-two pence to the boy between 6 June and 18 September to buy himself equipment and other necessities, given either to Adam directly or to his tutor (
magister
) Sir Hugh Chastilloun. He was openly acknowledged as ‘the bastard son of the lord king’.
²⁰
All the English earls alive in 1322, excepting nine-year-old Chester and the ever-obscure Oxford – that is, Surrey, Arundel, Winchester, Carlisle, Richmond, Pembroke, Kent and Norfolk, as well as the earls of Atholl, Angus and Louth – also went to Scotland with the king. It is hardly worth noting that the campaign, the last one Edward would ever lead, ended in failure and disaster. He left Scotland at the beginning of September and spent most of that month in Newcastle. On 2 October he summoned the sheriff of Yorkshire, the earl of Carlisle, the bishop of Durham, William Aune and others to bring horsemen and footmen to him at ‘Blakhoumor’ (Blackhow Moor) between Thirsk and Helmsley.
²¹
Presumably, he had been made aware that Robert Bruce and his army were ravaging around Carlisle, about 110 miles to the north-west. He could hardly have guessed what would come next: Bruce gathered his entire army and marched towards Yorkshire, and by 13 October had reached Northallerton, only fifteen miles from where Edward was staying at Rievaulx Abbey.
²²
Hearing of their arrival, Edward scrambled a force to meet them, while he himself remained at the abbey. On 14 October, the king’s cousin John of Brittany, earl of Richmond, met the Scottish army at Roulston Scar, about seven miles from Rievaulx. The much smaller English force was defeated, and Richmond himself was captured. Now fifty-six, he would spend two years as a prisoner in Scotland until Edward raised Bruce’s ransom demand of 14,000 marks.
²³
His sacrifice gave Edward enough time to flee before the Scots could capture him. Humiliatingly, the king was forced to hard to the abbey of Bridlington on the coast, fifty miles away, leaving all his plate, treasure, food and even his horse trappings and harness behind, ‘to the great shame and ruin of the king and the realm’.
²⁴
Even his privy seal was captured, though the Scots courteously returned it.
²⁵
The Bridlington chronicler asks rhetorically, ‘What worse fate could befall the English than to behold their king fleeing from place to place in the face of the Scots?’
²⁶
Flores
describes Edward as ‘spurring on his horse, trembling and defenceless’, and the
Lanercost
chronicler, the armchair general who unfairly condemned the men who left the field of Bannockburn as ‘miserable wretches’, says, ‘Ever chicken-hearted and luckless in war and having already fled in fear from them in Scotland, he [Edward] now took to flight in England’.
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