The Perfect King (10 page)

you cannot avoid the wrath of God, the reproach of men, and our great indignation
...
You should by no means marry, nor suffer yourself to be married, without our previous consent and advice; for nothing that you could do would cause us greater injury and pain of heart. And since you say that you cannot return to us because of your mother, it causes us great uneasiness of heart that you cannot be allowed by her to do your natural duty.

Had Isabella returned to England when ordered to do so, the king added, then she would still be high in the king's affections. But her pretences for not returning, said the king, were against her duty. Then he added a particularly hurt line:

You and all the world have seen that she openly, notoriously, and knowing it to be contrary to her duty, and against the welfare of our Crown, has attached to herself, and retains in her company, the Mortimer, our traitor and mortal foe, proved attainted and judged, and
she accompanies him in the house and abroad,
despite of us, of our Crown, and the right ordering of the realm - him the malefactor
...
And worse than this she has done, if there can be worse, in allowing you to consort with our said enemy, making him your counsellor, and allowing you to associate with him in the sight of all the world, doing so great a villainy and dishonour both to yourself and us, to the prejudice of our Crown, and the laws and customs of our realm, which you are supremely bound to hold, preserve and maintain.

Edward could not have been anything but distressed at this letter. Here was his father using words which were an accusation of his mother's adultery: 'she accompanies him in the house and abroad'. Worse, it amounted to an accusation of treason on Edward's part, which would incur the wrath of God as well as his father's indignation. How on earth was he to make an impression as a monarch when the time came for him to inherit if he was a traitor even before he inherited? But that was not all. The king continued:

We are not pleased with you; and you should not so displease us, neither for the sake of your mother nor for anyone else's sake. We charge you, by the faith, love and allegiance which you owe us, and on our blessing, that you come to us without delay, without opposition or any further excuse, for your mother has written to us to say that if you wish to return to us she will not prevent it
...
Fair son, do not disregard our orders, for we hear much that you have done which you ought not to have done.

The letter was designed to strike fear into the prince. Among the things he had done which 'he ought not to have done' were two royal appointments. When the king had allowed him to travel to France, he had authorised him to renew the appointments of his agents in the duchy of Aquitaine, both the seneschal of Gascony and the constable of Bordeaux. Edward had instead appointed Richard Bury to be constable of Bordeaux, and had appointed a friend of Mortimer's, Oliver Ingham, seneschal of Gascony. In the latter appointment especially, Edward was probably leaned on by Mortimer, who seems also to have appointed himself Edward's tutor in Bury's place. But the king was laying guilt on to the young duke with seething indignation, and Edward can have felt no pride in not acquiescing to his father's demands. If his father thought that he was defying him, he would be deemed traitorous. If the king knew he had no choice in the matter, he would be perceived to be weak.

By May
1326
Edward knew he
was going to be used in a battl
e between his parents. He could not return to England - he was practically a prisoner — and his marriage to a daughter of Hainault had been agreed. Mortimer had secured the initial contact and forged the strategy in
1324.
In December
1325
the countess of Hainault - Isabella's cousin - had travelled to Paris and met Isabella. The pope, seeing that war was likely, despatched envoys to try to secure peace, but their mission was doomed. At the coronation of the queen of France on
11
May
1326,
Mortimer carried Edward's robes, an especially prominent position. The papal envoys travelling to England relayed this news to the king, who was furious. To the bishop of Rochester he shouted: 'was there not a queen of England once who was put down out of her royalty for disobeying her husband's orders?' He was referring to Queen Eadburga, who killed her husband in
802
and was exiled from Wessex." The bishop advised the king not to pursue that line of argument any further. But if he hoped thereby to quell the king's anger, he was to be disappointed. The rebels were gathering in France. Edmund, earl of Kent - the king's own half-brother - had decided to stay with Isabella and Mortimer, and had married Mortimer's cousin, Margaret Wake. Sir Henry Beaumont - one of the guardians of the young prince - had also decided to stay. Isabella was marshalling her finances in the county of Ponthieu to pay for ships to invade England.'
3

On
19
June the king could bear it no longer. He sent a final series of letters to King Charles, to the bishop of Beauvais, and to his son. The one sent to Edward fumed that he had 'not humbly obeyed our commands as a good son ought, since you have not returned to us .
..
but have notoriously held companionship with Mortimer, our traitor and mortal enemy, who was publicly carried to Paris in your company'. The king insisted that his son had 'proceeded to make various alterations,
injunctions and ordinances with
out our advice and contrary to our orders'. A key line in the letter was 'you have no governor other than us, nor should you have'. Once again the king exhorted his son not to marry without his advice and consent. And, finally, there was a postscript to the letter. The last sentence was as cold a threat as the king could have written:

Understand certainly, that if you now act contrary to our counsel, and continue in wilful disobedience, you will feel it all the days of your life, and you will be made an example to all other sons who are disobedient to their lords and fathers.

And with that all communication between the king and his son ceased. Edward probably concluded that, no matter what happened now, he could never be restored to his father.

In July
1326
Edward and his mother left France and entered Hainault. Despenser had tried bribing Frenchmen to kidnap Isabella and Mortimer. Several chronicles mention that Isabella was in fear of her life, one even stating that she fled by night,
secretly
advised of her peril by her cousin, Robert d'Artois.'
4
They had
little
time left to organise and mount their invasion. Mortimer had travelled ahead, to see to the arrangement of the fleet. Beyond his presence, and a few disaffected English lords, including the earl of Kent, Henry Beaumont, Sir Thomas Roscelyn and Sir John Maltravers, they would have to rely on Hainaulter mercenaries. And foreign troops on English soil was yet another problem they had to bear in mind. The English were not used to being overrun by foreign armies.

On
27
August it was settled that Edward would marry Philippa, youngest daughter of Count William of Hainault within two years. This was the lynchpin of the plan, agreed in outline in December the previous year. It was on this marriage that Hainaulters' faith in the whole project rested.

Many stories have been told about the marriage, and how Edward and Philippa first met. Biographers in the past, struggling for something to say about him in his youth, have seized on his relationship with his wife and used it to amplify die romantic element in his character. One tale often told is that Bishop Stapeldon, while engaged on his mission in
1319,
looked over Philippa and reported that she was fitting as a bride for the future king.
Another
appears in the pages of Froissart's chronicle,
that
when Edward arrived in Hainault with his mother, Edward paid more attention to Philippa than Count William's other daughters, and so Edward chose her for his bride. Modernist historians, finding Froissart a fanciful writer, generally dismissed the latter story and accepted the former, stating that Philippa had already been chosen to be his bride, and even claiming that Philippa was born on
24
June
13
n on the assumption that she was the eight-year-old girl Stapeldon saw in
1319.
But as a close examination of the evidence shows, it was not Philippa but her older sister, Margaret, whom Stapeldon examined (see Appendix One). As for Froissart's story, he states that he heard the details from Philippa herself: how Edward met four daughters of the count and liked her the best in the eight days they spent together at Valenciennes. Certainly Froissart could be telling the truth, for he served in the English royal household from
1361,
and presented Philippa with his poetic and historical works, and relied on her as a historical source for parts of his chronicle. The specific eight-day stay at Valenciennes is entirely plausible, and he correctly names the four girls, apparently in age order: Margaret, Philippa, Jeanne and Isabella. Perhaps Philippa passed over the fact that her elder sister was already married to Ludwig of Bavaria to make it seem that Edward had preferred her to Margaret, his first intended bride, so that she would not appear a second choice. Either way, there is no reason to doubt Froissart's statement that Edward took a great liking to Philippa on this occasion,'
5
especially as they were practically the same age, and got on so well together in later years. We may thus have some confidence that, as Froissart mentions in a later entry, when the eight days were up, and it was time for the English to move on, twelve-year-old Philippa burst into tears at Edward's departure.

The fleet set sail from Brill on
22
September, straight into a storm. After two days of rough seas and high winds, they landed at Walton on the coast of Suffolk, in the lands of the earl of Norfolk, Edward's uncle. And that was the beginning of another storm, a proverbial whirlwind, as first Norfolk sent one thousand men to their aid, and then other knights and lords joined them. Mortimer's secret messages, smuggled in barrels and other merchandise, and relayed by word of mouth by men travelling as pilgrims, had worked a political miracle.

England had never seen anything like it. Although the invaders had come with probably only fifteen hundred soldiers, men hastened to support them as soon as they landed.'
6
Isabella, dressed in her widow's weeds, played the part of a lady in distress, come to avenge the wrongs of Hugh Despenser. She travelled as if on pilgrimage wherever she went. Mortimer, fearful that his presence would cast doubts on the queen's morality and the justification of their invasion, kept a very low profile. Edward on the other hand was championed, as earl of Chester and duke of Aquitaine. It was under the royal banner that the army marched, and no one dared to draw a sword against the future king Although Edward II ordered the largest army ever to have been summoned - more than forty-seven thousand men - most of these troops did not respond at all, and those who did simply joined the insurgent army as it swept across East Anglia into Cambridgeshire.

Five days after landing, the invaders moved into Bury St Edmunds. Edward and his mother lodged at the abbey, playing the part of dispossessed royalty, while Mortimer stayed with the army. In London, authority was collapsing around the king. Although the Tower had been provisioned for a siege, the king soon saw that he and Despenser would not be able to hold out against the citizens, let alone Mortimer's army. Panic set in, and the king decided to flee westwards before Mortimer cut him off. Already the invading army was moving to the west of London. The royal household and men-at-arms marched out of the gates of the capital in confusion. Weighed down by the sixty thousand pounds of gold that remained in the royal treasury, Edward II and Hugh Despenser began the long journey towards South Wales.

As the king moved westwards, the invaders turned to pursue him. When the king entered the royal fortress of Wallingford on
6
October, they were approaching Baldock. Three days later, as the king marched into Gloucester, they came to Dunstable. On
10
October, while both armies were still far apart, the decisive blow was struck. Edward heard the devastating news that Henry of Lancaster — the most powerful man in the realm, his cousin - had declared for the invaders. Mortimer had succeeded in bringing about the most powerful alliance possible: between the lords of the Welsh Marches, the royal uncles, and the confederacy of northern barons led by Lancaster. This closed off the last avenues of hope for the king. He and Hugh Despenser abandoned their men-at-arms and tried to flee by boat from Chepstow but failed, with the wind against them. They paid a priest to sing a mass in the hope that God would favour them, but God was not listening to his dejected royal supplicant. The wind blew the king back to shore.

Young Edward could never have expected to be greeted with such relief and joy. He and his mother were feted in town after town across England. His father's promise to make him an example to all disobedient sons now seemed a complete delusion. But if Edward's life and position had been saved by Mortimer's strategic genius, the spectres which Mortimer had summoned up were equally worrying. In London there was anarchy. The mob had broken into the Tower and dragged out Edward's nine-year-old brother, John, and had set him up as ruler of the city. This was a joke in itself, for there was no rule in the city. Rioters and thieves were on the loose. Anyone suspected of collaborating with the Despenser regime was robbed and killed. Bishop Stapeldon, hearing that his house had been looted and was on fire, rode across the city in armour to confront the robbers. The mob caught him in the churchyard of St Paul's and dragged him from his horse and down Cheapside, cutting his head off with a bread-knife in their mad fury. They sent the head as a present to Isabella.