Edward II: The Unconventional King (40 page)

The envoys stayed at the archbishop of Canterbury’s castle of Saltwood in Kent. Edward arrived there at the end of May, and, keen as ever on the outdoors and physical exercise, went into the park with his steward Thomas le Blount, Hugh Despenser’s nephew-in-law Robert Wateville and others to play a ball game.
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He then met the envoys and did his best to allay their fears by spending a convivial few days in their company, and paid all their expenses. Hugh Despenser also met them and rebutted the accusations the queen had made against him (Despenser and Edward talked to the envoys in French, their words later translated into Latin for the pope). Although Isabella had sworn by God and all the saints that she would not return to England unless her enemies the Despensers were removed from her husband’s side, she did inform Roger Mortimer in the spring or early summer of 1326 that she had decided to return to Edward.
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A furious Mortimer ‘caused her to believe if she came to him [Edward] he would have killed her with a knife or murdered her in another manner … and by his other subtle scheming, he caused the said queen not to come to her said lord’. Mortimer’s rage is understandable; if Isabella returned to England with her son, his plans and his daring escape from the Tower would count for nothing, and he would be forced to remain an impoverished exile on the Continent, with no chance of seeing his home and his family again. It is unclear whether the ‘he’ who would kill Isabella meant Mortimer or Edward, though Hugh Despenser thought Mortimer was referring to himself when he (Despenser) related the story to the bishop of Rochester soon afterwards. Whether she believed Mortimer’s threats or not, Isabella changed her mind again and decided to go ahead with the plans for invasion.

John XXII wrote frequently to Hugh Despenser, telling him in February 1326 that

his participation in the king’s government is given by the queen as a reason for her being unable, without personal danger, to return to the king. The pope suggests that Hugh should retire, and should devise methods by which the queen may no longer fear to return to her husband.

The pope, evidently irritated with Despenser, asked him in April ‘to abstain from provoking enmities, and to study to promote friendships’. He had evidently recovered from his irritation two weeks later when he commended Despenser for his ‘good offices’ in promoting concord between Edward and Isabella, and urged him to continue.
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John was doing his best to remain neutral, and wrote several times to Isabella urging her to reconcile with her husband, also saying that he ‘supposes that the queen has not delayed … to betake herself to the king’s presence’ on the advice of others.
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As late as May 1327, more than three months after Edward’s deposition, John XXII was urging Charles IV to use his influence to bring the couple back together, and there is no reason to suppose that the pope, despite his annoyance with the king over his mistreatment of some of the English bishops, favoured Isabella over Edward.
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Edward gave another generous gift of twenty marks to Eleanor Despenser in early June, sent pomegranates to two members of Hugh Despenser’s household lying ill at Saltwood, and gave a pound to a fiddler for an especially pleasing performance.
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On their way to London in mid-June, the king and Despenser met Hamo Hethe, bishop of Rochester, at Boxley Down in Kent; during the journey, Edward borrowed three shillings from his usher Peter Bernard to give to ‘a poor man’ he encountered.
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Hethe had long been an ally of Edward, and almost uniquely was kindly disposed towards Despenser, and rode with the two men for a while. According to the Rochester chronicler William Dene, an associate of Hethe, Despenser informed the bishop that the papal envoys had sought guarantees for the safe return of Isabella, her son and Kent, and pointed out that no such guarantees were necessary as they could return to England in safety at any time. Despenser also told Hethe that Roger Mortimer had threatened to kill Isabella should she return to Edward. The king and Despenser spent the night of 15/16 June at Rochester with Hethe, and Edward asked the bishop if it were true that a queen of England who had defied her husband had been put down out of her royalty, perhaps an indication that he was by now considering an annulment of his marriage, though if he was, there is no confirmation of it in any other source. The following day, Hethe accompanied Edward and Despenser as far as Gravesend, and Edward told him ruefully, ‘You have not asked me for anything. For you have done many things for me and the Lord Hugh, and I have not rewarded you. I have done much for those who are ungrateful, whom I promoted to high rank, and who are now my chief enemies.’
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In late June, Edward sent envoys to negotiate with Robert Bruce, yet again.
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Bruce had signed a treaty with France in April, which provided for mutual military aid against Edward – clearly a breach of the 1323 truce – and some Scotsmen attempted to seize Carlisle Castle and four castles in Northumberland.
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Edward could not, however, have known the astonishing fact that Isabella and Mortimer had come to an agreement with Bruce that they would recognise him as king of Scots, and Scotland as an independent kingdom, if he agreed not to invade England at the same time as their own invasion and thus prejudice their chances of success.
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Things went from bad to worse for Edward II in the summer of 1326: in addition to the growing tension with Scotland and the impending invasion of England, the situation with France deteriorated again. Edward set out his claims to be ‘guardian and administrator of Gascony’ in Edward of Windsor’s name in late June, in an attempt to limit the damage caused by the loss of his son. Charles IV, claiming to be protecting his nephew’s rights in the duchy, began reoccupying the areas of Gascony from which he had been in the process of withdrawing, and Edward would end his reign once more at war with France. He asked the citizens of Bayonne on 6 July to ‘annoy and injure’ all Charles IV’s subjects, and, still fearing an invasion from that country, ordered all monks who were citizens of France and who lived near the coast to be moved inland.
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Charles IV arrested all English people in France and seized their goods, and Edward retaliated in kind as soon as he heard the news.
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Edward appointed Oliver Ingham as steward of Gascony in March 1326. Ingham raised an army of Gascon and Spanish mercenaries and regained Saintonge and the Agenais from the French, and on 7 July Edward gave twenty marks to two sailors of Bayonne who brought him letters from Ingham, informing him that two great cities which had been opposed to him had been taken back into his hands out of the power of the king of France.
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Isabella, however, handed all these lands back to Charles IV in March 1327 when she signed a humiliatingly one-sided treaty with him, also agreeing – astonishingly – to give up the whole of Gascony with the exception of a narrow coastal strip to France and to pay her brother 50,000 marks in reparation.
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Edward II gave ten marks on 9 June 1326 to his chamber squire Garsy Pomit ‘for what he did in the king’s chamber when he ate, in aid of the said Garsy because his son came with news from the parts of Gascony’, though the news was unspecified.
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Edward, perhaps remembering happier times and never a man to forget someone he had loved deeply, asked the convent of Leeds in Kent on 28 June 1326 to pray for Piers Gaveston’s soul, fourteen years and nine days after Gaveston’s death.
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He spent early July at Sheen, Byfleet and Henley-on-Thames, where he gave a pound to a Spanish minstrel who played the gittern and lute for him, and on 11 July dined with his niece Eleanor Despenser in the park at Windsor. The king gave his cook Will Balsham, formerly of the queen’s retinue in France, two pounds to buy a hackney horse on which to follow the pair into the park; the money was given to Balsham ‘by the king’s own hands between two silver dishes’. Edward was at his Westminster cottage of Burgundy on the 15th, where twenty-eight men were hired to clean the ditches around it ‘in the king’s presence’ – he paid for drinks for them – and visited Sir Robert Wateville, Hugh Despenser’s nephew-in-law, at his London house on the 20th.
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The king returned to his palace of Sheen where he spent two days with Eleanor Despenser, then travelled by water to Byfleet still in Eleanor’s company; he also gave or lent her husband Hugh a manuscript of the doomed love story of Tristan and Isolde around this time. Edward, as he so often did, handed out generous gifts to fishermen and women, and bought roach and dace for Eleanor. A John of Walton, who ‘sang before the king every time he passed through these parts by water’ and presented the king with a bucket of fish, received two shillings for his efforts. Edward wrote to his daughters in Marlborough on 25 July and to Hugh Despenser in Wales at the same time, the king and his favourite being apart yet again.
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The
Annales Paulini
say that there was a great drought in England in the summer of 1326. On 24 July, Edward met several of his subjects at or near Sheen: he gave six pence to Jack le Frenche, who brought him fresh well-water at his command (perhaps an indication of the heat); six pence to Robyn atte Hethe, ‘who suffers from a great illness’; three pence to Wille de Pykingham, who retrieved a knife one of Edward’s squires had dropped in the Thames; twelve pence to Jack Meryn, who brought him a gift of lampreys; and five pence to Edward le Parker, who brought the king two pike and needed the money ‘to repair his house’.
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Roger Mortimer’s uncle Roger Mortimer of Chirk died in the Tower of London on 3 August 1326, though as he was about seventy, well beyond average life expectancy for the era, and had outlived all his siblings by decades, there is no reason to suppose that his death was suspicious.
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Maurice, Lord Berkeley and Hugh Audley the Elder, father of Edward’s former favourite, also died in 1326, still in captivity. The king dined on or shortly before 8 August with Hugh Despenser’s sister Isabel Hastings, formerly in charge of his daughters’ household, who had been replaced in February by Joan Jermy. Edward gave Joan a gift of twenty marks, and forty shillings to her damsel Jonete.
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On 22 August, at the royal palace of Clarendon in Wiltshire, Edward himself joined in when twenty-two men made hedges and a ditch in the park, and he borrowed twelve pence from his servant Elis Pek to give to a man named Gibbe working with him in the ditch, so that he could buy himself shoes.
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On 27 August, Edward’s son was formally betrothed to Philippa, daughter of the count of Hainault and granddaughter of Charles of Valois. As King Charles IV still had no son, Valois’s son Philip was heir to the French throne. There was a chance that Queen Isabella might try to claim the throne for her son, who was, apart from his younger brother John of Eltham, Philip IV’s only grandson. The Valois family therefore had an interest in allying with Isabella so that she would renounce her son’s claim to the French throne. Edward’s reaction to his son’s betrothal is not recorded, but he must have been furious and anxious. At some point before this date, Isabella had left France and gone to Hainault; whether she left France of her own accord or was expelled by her brother Charles IV is a matter of some debate. The
Brut
says that Hugh Despenser sent masses of silver to the French court as a bribe to send her back, but that his envoy was captured and Isabella herself seized the money.
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The
Flores
claims that Charles IV and the entire nobility of France had promised to help Isabella’s invasion of England, a ludicrous statement, although the dramatic story that Charles was about to arrest her and she fled to Hainault in the night after receiving a warning from her cousin Robert of Artois is also unlikely.
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Charles did nothing to prevent Isabella’s invasion, but there is nothing to indicate that he actively helped her, either.

Once more at war with France, Edward could use Charles as a useful scapegoat for all his problems, and wrote in May 1326 that Charles was detaining his son, ‘whom the king, trusting to his affection, sent to him, against the king’s will’.
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Edward found it easier to pretend that Charles was detaining Isabella and his son than to admit that the queen did not want to return because of Hugh Despenser and that it had been his own error – however understandable when seen in its proper context – to send Edward of Windsor to France. Edward II asked for the prayers of the Dominicans of Paris, of all places, on 12 April and from the Dominicans of Oxford on 6 September, on behalf of himself and his realm; for the first time, Isabella and Edward of Windsor were not included in the prayers.
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On or around 31 August, the king attacked Normandy with a force of about 140 ships, possibly in an attempt to seize his son, said in 1327 to have been ‘in those parts’ – though the king told the archbishops of Canterbury and York and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge that his intention was ‘to restrain the malice of the men of the king of France in case they wish to enter the realm’. The force was repulsed with heavy losses, the last thing Edward needed with his wife’s invasion imminent, though a French ship called
la Dorre
was captured and taken to Winchelsea.
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Hugh Despenser, aware that the invasion could come at any moment, withdrew a massive £2000 from his Italian bankers the Peruzzi on 16 September.
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Edward was at the Tower of London on 27 September when he received the shocking news. The invasion force of Queen Isabella, Roger Mortimer and their allies had finally arrived.

Isabella and Mortimer’s invasion force left Dordrecht on 21 or 22 September 1326, ninety-five ships containing perhaps 700 mercenaries and the queen’s allies including Edward of Windsor, the king’s half-brother the earl of Kent, his former steward John Cromwell, and Contrariants who had fled the country in 1322. In total the force consisted of perhaps 1,000–1,500 men.
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They landed on 24 September at Orwell in Suffolk, on or near the lands of Edward’s other half-brother the earl of Norfolk, who immediately went to join them, despite having been appointed to defend the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Hertfordshire against the invaders. The bishops of Hereford, Lincoln, Ely and probably Norwich also joined the queen.
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On the day the fleet arrived, Edward II, as yet unaware of the situation and as keen on buying himself fish as ever, went to the postern gate of the Tower of London and paid a passing fisherman three shillings for two salmon, while one of his servants paid nine pence for a pair of buckskin gloves for him. News of the landing reached him on 27 September.
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