Edward II: The Unconventional King (41 page)

Edward could hardly, in his worst nightmares, have guessed how astonishingly quickly the force would progress through his realm and how little support he had; his and Hugh Despenser’s ruthless rule and greed for the last few years ensured that most of his influential subjects, and even many of his own household, abandoned him. The destruction of his fleet in Normandy some weeks before and the alacrity with which the earl of Norfolk joined the rebels ensured that the small invading force, which could easily have been destroyed on arrival, progressed with little or no opposition. Isabella and her allies headed west in triumph and, perhaps, amazement at the lack of resistance or hostility; most of Edward’s men either fled from them or joined them. Five days after the landing, they arrived at Bury St Edmunds, where Isabella helped herself to – or ‘caused to be taken for his [her son’s] affairs’ as she euphemistically glossed the theft – £800 which Edward II’s ally Hervey Staunton, chief justice of the court of Common Pleas, had stored at the abbey, to pay her soldiers. Staunton died a year later without recovering the money.
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On 9 October Isabella placed a reward of £2,000 on the head of Hugh Despenser as a response to the king’s declaring on 28 September that Roger Mortimer and others ‘have brought with them alien strangers for the purpose of taking the royal power from the king’, and offering a ransom of £1,000 on Mortimer’s head.
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At Wallingford on 15 October, a proclamation was read out in the name of the queen, the duke of Aquitaine and the earl of Kent, in which Hugh Despenser was accused of damaging the realm and Church, sending great men to their deaths and much else. Edward II himself incurred no criticism and was never, at this time or later, said to be a tyrant, but presented instead as the victim of an evil counsellor, whom Isabella and her allies had come to destroy in order to end the oppressions suffered by the people of England.
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Shortly afterwards, the bishop of Hereford, Adam Orleton, publicly accused Edward of being a sodomite, and preached a sermon from Genesis: ‘I shall put enmity between you and the woman, and thy seed and hers, and she shall bruise your head’. Orleton was to claim in 1334 that he had been referring to Hugh Despenser, not Edward II.
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Ian Mortimer points out that Edward had become ‘the target of political lies and anti-royalist propaganda’.
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Isabella, daughter of the master propagandist Philip IV, well knew the benefits of public relations, far better than Edward did. With Edward’s son, the future king, in their party, few men were willing to fight against them, especially as they marched under the royal banner. The defection of his half-brother Norfolk must have been a bitter blow to Edward; an even worse one was soon to come when his cousin Henry of Lancaster declared for the rebels, joined Isabella at Dunstable, and seized money and goods belonging to Hugh Despenser the Elder, earl of Winchester.
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Henry brought the northern lords with him, including his son-in-law Thomas Wake and Henry Percy, and with the loss of the influential Lancaster, Edward’s cause was doomed. The earl of Arundel remained loyal, and apparently so did Arundel’s brother-in-law the earl of Surrey, but the grand coalition of the queen, the Contrariants, Lancaster, at least three or four bishops, the northern lords and the king’s half-brothers was unassailable. Edward heard the bad news of Henry of Lancaster’s defection on 10 October and seized his lands, sending his teenage great-nephew, Hugh Despenser’s eldest son Hugh (known as Huchon or Hughelyn), to take possession of them.
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As early as 28 September, the day after he learned of the force’s arrival, Edward must have realised how little support he had, and offered all felons in prison a pardon, excepting the murderers of Roger Belers and any adherents of Roger Mortimer, if they would join him.
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On this day, he ordered men in four counties to raise hundreds of footmen to ‘repel the invaders’ and take them alive or dead. The order was repeated to his Welsh allies Rhys ap Gruffydd and Gruffydd Llwyd, while Sir Robert Wateville was ordered to raise footmen in six counties and ‘do what harm he can to [the rebels] except to the queen, the king’s son and the earl of Kent’.
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Edward surely remembered the Marchers trapping him in London in 1321 and realised the impossibility of holding a city hostile to him, and so he left his capital on 2 October, leaving his beloved niece Eleanor Despenser – the last time he or Hugh Despenser would see her – in charge of the Tower. His ten-year-old younger son John of Eltham also remained there. The king and the two Hugh Despensers travelled west, carrying at least £29,000 from the treasury with them, towards South Wales, where Despenser held the majority of his lands and where Edward was popular and hoped to be able to raise support. The king left some personal items with Simon Swanland, future mayor of London and a draper who provided cloth for the royal household, which included two ‘good and beautiful’ Bibles; a cloth-of-gold cloak edged with white pearls and silver; three velvet garments with green stripes and matching hat; a green coverlet with three matching tapestries; a cushion cover of vermilion sendal (a fine, light silk); and three ‘gilded acorn branches’.
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The king also left behind a silver ship for alms and a number of silver cups, plates, pots and saucers at the Tower.
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Edward wrote from Acton on 3 October that he had heard his wife was writing to all the cities and commonalties of the realm, and ordered them not to open the letters but to arrest the bearer and send him to the king. No one was to favour ‘the king’s wife or his son Edward or anyone in their company so long as they behave as they do now’, and all others in their company were to be treated as his enemies.
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Even at this desperate stage, Edward refused to name Isabella, their son or his brother Kent as his enemies, though he pointedly referred to Isabella as ‘the king’s wife’, not as queen (his chamber account of this period, however, continues to call her ‘my lady the queen’). Isabella, meanwhile, was ransacking the manor of Baldock in Hertfordshire, apparently for no other reason than it belonged to the brother of the detested Robert Baldock, chancellor of England and ally of Despenser.
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London exploded into anarchy and chaos. The city tended to be politically volatile and anti-royalist, or rather anti-authority; Mortimer and Isabella would find out for themselves two years later that the affections of the Londoners were fickle, but for the moment, the city stood firmly on their side. The mayor Hamo de Chigwell had been one of the men who sentenced Roger Mortimer to death in 1322, so had every reason to feel trepidation at Mortimer’s return, and indeed he was replaced as mayor by Mortimer’s adherent Richard de Béthune soon afterwards and saved his life only by swearing to support Isabella.
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Eleanor Despenser soon had little choice but to surrender the Tower to the mob, who appointed John of Eltham as nominal guardian of the city. An emergency convocation of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of London, Rochester, Winchester, Exeter and Worcester held at Lambeth on 13 and 14 October decided to send two envoys to the queen. The following day, tragedy struck when Walter Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter, former treasurer of England, founder of Exeter College at Oxford in 1314 and ally of Edward II, was pursued by an angry crowd and beheaded with a bread knife in Cheapside while trying to reach sanctuary inside St Paul’s.
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Two of his squires were killed with him, and his head was sent to the queen, who had been so furious with him for ‘dishonouring’ her a few months previously. A merchant named John Marshal, a close ally of Hugh Despenser, was also dragged out of his house and beheaded, and Bernard or Arnold of Spain, a wine merchant, likewise, at a place called ‘Nomanneslond’.
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The bishop of London Stephen Gravesend was lucky to avoid the same fate, and Edward’s remaining allies in London thought it prudent to leave the city: Geoffrey Scrope, chief justice of King’s Bench, escaped across the Thames on a horse belonging to Archbishop Reynolds, Reynolds commandeered the horses of the bishop of Rochester Hamo Hethe, and Hethe himself was forced to flee on foot.
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Edward II and the Despensers travelled west, followed at some distance by the invaders. It is interesting to note that the annals of Newenham Abbey written shortly afterwards remarked that
rex et maritus eius
, ‘the king and his husband’, fled to Wales; evidently some contemporaries believed that Edward’s relationship with his chamberlain was sexual or romantic.
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Edward was aware of his wife’s movements: he gave two shillings to a man who brought him news of Isabella when she was near Cambridge, and later gave a pound to a valet sent to Gloucester to spy on her arrival.
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The king and his chamberlain spent 9–12 October in Gloucester, and by the middle of the month were at the great castle of Chepstow. Despenser the Elder, meanwhile, went to Bristol. Edward’s bad temper and anxiety are apparent from an entry in his chamber account of 12 October, when four of his valets were refused their wages because ‘the king has long had ill-will towards them’.
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This was unfair and not the fault of his valets, who had done nothing wrong; twenty-four of them loyally remained with him until at least 31 October, the last day the chamber journal was kept.

In the face of such overwhelming opposition, few men were willing to fight for the king, not even the household knights who had served him so faithfully during the Marcher campaign of 1321/22. Even long-term Despenser adherents such as John Inge, Ingelram Berenger and Despenser’s brothers-in-law Ralph Camoys and John St Amand are conspicuous by their absence in 1326. The fact that Edward II lost the support of all those who mattered most is beyond question, but he was not quite as friendless as is often assumed. Roger Mortimer and Isabella paid 158 men in three ships for pursuing the Gascon lord Arnaud Caillau along the coast of Devon and Cornwall between 8 and 20 December 1326.
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Caillau served Edward faithfully and had long been in favour with the king, who made him a household knight in March 1313 and keeper of the island of Oléron, and raised him to other positions in Gascony. The timing of Caillau’s pursuit strongly suggests that he had been with Edward until shortly before his capture in mid-November, and the fact that Mortimer and Isabella sent 158 men after him implies they were very keen to catch him. Edward’s devoted friend Donald, earl of Mar, Robert Bruce’s nephew, remained with the king until at least late October, when he returned to his homeland after an absence of twenty years and tried to persuade Bruce to invade England and help Edward. Nor was this the end of Mar’s involvement in Edward’s affairs: he spent much of 1327 attempting to free him and restore him to the throne, and joined the earl of Kent’s conspiracy to free the supposedly long-dead Edward in 1330. On 12 October 1326, Edward II ordered Malcolm Musard to raise footmen in Worcestershire. Musard was a knight and notorious gang leader who supported Edward in 1321/22, but subsequently turned against the king: Edward ordered his arrest in December 1323 for adhering to the Contrariants, and he was imprisoned in the Tower by June 1324.
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Musard acknowledged a debt of £100 to Isabella – not Edward – on 6 August 1326, six weeks before the invasion, ‘to save his life and to have his lands again’ and was pardoned the following day for his adherence of 1322.
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Given that Edward had imprisoned him for over two years, it would hardly be surprising to find that Musard joined the queen. He didn’t: Isabella seized his lands and goods in May 1327 on the grounds that he had supported Despenser the Elder against herself and her son, and Musard was in prison at Worcester by 8 November that year.
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He also joined the earl of Kent’s conspiracy to free Edward in 1330.
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John de Toucestre was a member of Edward’s household whom the king sent to Reading Abbey in November 1325 to receive ‘sustenance for life’ on his retirement.
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Evidently, however, he left his abbey to fight for Edward after the invasion, as he was ordered on 10 October 1326 ‘to select all men at arms wherever he goes and to lead them to the king’. Toucestre, like Musard and Mar, joined Kent’s conspiracy in 1330. A John Beauchamp of Somerset claimed in 1327 that Toucestre and Richard Brown of Halford led men of Shepperton to Bristol to fight against Isabella and her son, supposedly against their will.
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Another of the king and Despenser’s supporters was Adam of Sodbury, abbot of Glastonbury, indicted before the sheriff of Somerset shortly before 1 December 1326 – within days of Hugh Despenser’s execution – for concealing treasure belonging to Despenser and his ally Robert Baldock in his abbey.
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Abbot Adam was accused in 1327 of committing crimes in the company of men known to be plotting to free Edward from captivity. John Giffard of Essex claimed that his manor had been attacked by Roger Wodeham and more than fifty armed men, who said that Giffard was an enemy of Edward and Despenser and belonged to the queen’s faction, and stole some of Giffard’s horses to ride against Isabella. Wodeham was a valet of Edward II’s chamber and constable of Hadleigh Castle in Essex, and the petition says that he and his dozens of armed men went to South Wales with Edward and Despenser, and remained with them until they sailed from Chepstow on 20 October. Presumably after Edward’s capture, they returned to Essex and, according to Giffard, tried to kill him and his men for their adherence to Isabella.
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The speed and success of the invasion took the king’s supporters by surprise, and most of his loyal Welsh allies failed to meet up with him in Wales. Edward II was popular there, but Despenser was hated for his tyranny and his 1318 execution of Llywelyn Bren. If Edward had sent Despenser away from him, he would no doubt have had far more success in attracting support; but then, if he had been willing to send Despenser away from him, he wouldn’t have been in this position in the first place.