6

Military Disaster and Famine

The few months after Edward’s public reconciliation with the earls saw England more or less at peace, or at least, as peaceful as it possibly could be in Edward II’s reign. Robert Winchelsey, archbishop of Canterbury and one of Edward’s most recalcitrant enemies, had died on 11 May 1313, and on 1 October, Pope Clement V appointed Edward’s friend and ally Walter Reynolds to the position, thanks in large part to Edward’s bribes.¹ Reynolds did not impress his contemporaries: Lanercost calls him ‘unworthy of any degree of dignity’ because of his lack of learning and ‘his mode of life,’ the Flores says he was practically illiterate and indulged in ‘immoderate filthiness of lust’, and the Vita describes him as ‘a mere clerk and was scarcely literate, but he excelled in theatrical presentations, and through this obtained the king’s favour’.² Edward loved plays and enjoyed the company of actors, then considered respectively the work of the devil and the lowest of the low, though whether even he would have had Reynolds promoted solely on the grounds of his theatrical skills is debatable. More importantly, Reynolds had been a friend of Piers Gaveston, and in 1309, Edward described him to the pope as ‘not only useful, but indispensable’ and said that Reynolds ‘has come to enjoy our confidence ahead of others’.³ The king and queen attended Reynolds’ enthronement at Canterbury on 17 February 1314 and remained in the city for a week, enjoying a splendid feast with the new archbishop. They then crossed the Thames Estuary to spend a few days at the royal residence of Hadleigh Castle near Southend.⁴

In late February Edward and Isabella separated, and the queen made her way to Sandwich, from where she sailed to France. Edward had asked her to present petitions concerning Gascony to Philip IV, who was far more likely to grant them to his daughter than to his son-in-law, and ordered his Italian money-lender Antonio di Pessagno to give Isabella nearly £5,000 for her expenses.⁵ She departed for her homeland on the last day of February with a retinue of over seventy people, including her damsel Alice Leygrave, Edward’s childhood nurse. Isabella was richer than she had been a few months earlier: probably in gratitude for bearing him a son, Edward gave her lands, manors and castles in Kent, Oxfordshire, Derbyshire and Northamptonshire in 1313 and 1314.⁶

On 15 March 1314, the night before Isabella arrived in Paris, her father had Jacques de Molay, grand master of the Knights Templar, burned alive on an island in the Seine. He is said, probably apocryphally, to have screamed out a curse from his pyre, challenging Philip and Pope Clement V, who had helped the French king suppress the Templars, to meet him before God’s tribunal within a year. Both of them were dead before the end of 1314. It is possible that while she was in France, Isabella discovered that Marguerite and Blanche of Burgundy, respectively the wives of her brothers Louis and Charles, had been conducting extramarital affairs with the d’Aulnay brothers, Philip and Gautier, and informed her father.⁷ If Isabella did break this scandal, as a few fourteenth-century chroniclers claim she did, her motives were almost certainly not vindictive. She was the daughter of two sovereigns and had been raised with a sacred sense of royalty, and therefore, would have been profoundly disturbed at the notion that her sisters-in-law might foist a child not of the royal bloodline on to the French throne. Her actions here also prove the ludicrousness of the suggestion that she would have taken a lover in 1312 and presented his child as Edward’s.

Edward II, meanwhile, spent the end of March and beginning of April 1314 at St Albans Abbey, which was close to his childhood residence of Langley and must have been a place he knew well. He made an offering of a gold cross decorated with precious stones and containing relics of St Alban, and the St Albans chronicler comments approvingly on his munificence to the abbey; earlier that year, he had given them a gift of £100 and a loan of £300, and in 1325 pardoned all their debts to him.⁸ On learning that his father had intended to rebuild the choir, Edward gave the monks a hundred marks and quantities of timber for the purpose, ordering that no expense should be spared in honouring God and St Alban, the first British martyr, who had died almost exactly a millennium earlier. Edward moved on the 70 miles to Ely near Cambridge, where he celebrated Easter Sunday, 7 April, at the cathedral. St Albans Abbey possessed the remains of St Alban, but Ely Cathedral owned a reliquary which they also described as ‘St Alban’s’. A curious Edward ordered the monks to open the reliquary, telling John Ketton, bishop of Ely, ‘You know that my brothers of St Albans believe that they possess the body of the martyr, while the monks in this place claim to have the same body. By God’s soul, I wish to see in which place I should chiefly pay reverence to the holy remains of the saint’ (‘by God’s soul’ was Edward’s favourite oath). Edward raised the lid of the reliquary himself, and discovered that it was full of rough cloth, spattered with blood that appeared fresh, as if spilt only the day before. All the spectators fell to their knees at this miracle, including Edward, presumably, although he alone had the nerve to close the lid. He gave the monks of Ely many gifts and went away happy that the famous saint was venerated in two places, telling them, ‘Rejoice in the gift of God, rejoice in the sanctity and merits of so great a martyr; for if, as you say, God does many miracles here by reason of his garment, you may believe that at St Albans he does more, by reason of the most holy body that rests there.’⁹

Pope Clement V died on 20 April 1314, five weeks after Jacques de Molay cursed him from the flames; perhaps Philip IV quaked in his boots at the news. More than two years would pass before the cardinals elected Clement’s successor, and Edward wrote to them in December 1314, asking them to lose no time in choosing a new pope.¹⁰ Five days after Clement’s death, Edward spent his thirtieth birthday travelling from Torksey, north-west of Lincoln, to Hull. Isabella arrived back at Dover a few days later, where she received a gift of a porcupine, and immediately set off north to join Edward.¹¹

Not entirely unexpectedly, Edward’s long-suffering subjects did not have much longer to enjoy the fragile peace currently reigning in England, and the Scottish question soon raised its ugly head again. Although Robert Bruce had failed to capture Berwick-on-Tweed in 1312 while Edward was preoccupied with Piers Gaveston, he enjoyed numerous successes elsewhere. In 1313 and 1314, he and his lieutenants conducted a series of increasingly daring raids on Scottish castles still in English hands, including Perth, Edinburgh and Dumfries, and razed them to the ground.¹² Roxburgh fell to James Douglas in February 1314, despite the brave efforts of the Gascon custodian Guillemin de Fenes, who died during the attack.¹³ The Scalacronica says that Edinburgh fell because of the treachery of the custodian Piers Lubaud, also a Gascon and apparently a cousin of Piers Gaveston, who subsequently joined Bruce’s service. The Vita calls Lubaud ‘perjurer and traitor’.¹⁴

The news that so many vital Scottish castles were lost distressed Edward, who ‘could scarcely restrain his tears’.¹⁵ He could hardly have been surprised, however, given that he had done nothing to defend the castles or made any effort whatsoever to exert dominance over Bruce, except for the feeble campaign of 1310/11, either because he didn’t know how or because he simply didn’t care. Although he refused to accept the fact, any chance he might have had to take up his claim to overlordship of Scotland had by now disappeared, and the Scalacronica says, ‘The king of England undertook scarcely anything against Scotland, and thus lost as much by indolence as his father had conquered.’¹⁶ And Edward had far more than the loss of Scottish castles to worry about: beginning in the late summer of 1311, as soon as Edward departed from Berwick after his unsuccessful campaign, Bruce and his adherents made frequent incursions into the north of England, where they burnt and plundered towns and villages and carried off goods, crops and livestock, unless the inhabitants agreed to pay them tribute to protect themselves. Bruce raised a great deal of money in this way, as much as £20,000.¹⁷ These border raids would continue for much of Edward’s reign. This was not entirely Edward’s fault; he did make some attempts to strengthen the defence of the north.¹⁸ However, his inability to protect his subjects from Scottish raids hardly helped to revise their low opinion of him.

In June 1313, however, came a challenge that even Edward could not ignore. Edward Bruce was besieging Stirling Castle, the most vital stronghold of them all: the castle controlled the crossing over the River Forth and thus access to the northern Lowlands and Highlands. Stirling was virtually impregnable, and the only hope Bruce had of capturing the stronghold was to starve it into submission. This would take a very long time, which didn’t impress Bruce much. Neither, however, did it impress the castle’s constable Philip Mowbray, Scottish but loyal to Edward II, who was staring months of discomfort and hunger in the face. Mowbray suggested a compromise, and proposed that if Bruce called off the siege, the constable would surrender the castle to him – on condition that an English army did not appear within three miles of Stirling to relieve the fortress within a year and a day.¹⁹

And so Edward II marched into Scotland in June 1314, to relieve Stirling – or Strivelyn, as it was then called – and, he hoped, to face Robert Bruce in battle and finally defeat him. He took probably the greatest army that had ever been seen in England, consisting of English knights and footmen, Irish soldiers, Welsh archers, Bruce’s Scottish enemies, and knights from all over Europe, comprising 15,000 to 20,000 men. Edward took with him a vast baggage train of 216 carts, with jewellery, napery, costly plate, and ecclesiastical vestments for celebrating the victory. His nobles followed his example, and took along luxurious pavilions, silver eating vessels and selections of fine wines; the personal possessions of the earl of Hereford alone required an entire ship.²⁰Lanercostsays that Edward marched with great pomp and elaborate state, purveying goods from monasteries as he passed, and that he ‘did and said things to the prejudice and injury of the saints’, whatever that means.²¹ Edward passed the time hunting, gambling and listening to music, having taken a trumpeter, fiddlers, bagpipers and other musicians with him.²² He also took a travelling wine cellar.²³ Queen Isabella, who accompanied him as far north as Berwick, took a wooden altar which could be packed up and carried by a sumpter-horse.²⁴ Before Edward left England, he ordered the mayor of London to issue a proclamation forbidding ‘rumpuses with large footballs’ in public fields, an early reference to the enormously popular sport of later centuries. An entry in Edward’s wardrobe account of 1299/1300 shows that he played a game called ‘creog’, perhaps an early reference to another sport, cricket.²⁵ On his way to Bannockburn, the king patched up his quarrel with Richard Kellaw, bishop of Durham, whom he held as his enemy because the bishop had not supported himself and Gaveston in 1308, after Kellaw gave him gifts of 1,000 marks and a magnificent war horse.²⁶

Despite Edward’s lack of military ability and experience, he seems to have believed that all he needed to do was show up, and he would win. This was, to put it mildly, a huge miscalculation, and the subsequent Battle of Bannockburn has gone down in history as arguably the greatest English military defeat of all time. Overconfidence was the biggest problem, both for Edward and the men around him, and the later chronicler Geoffrey le Baker points out that never before had a noble army been swollen with such arrogance.²⁷ A Latin song written shortly after the battle describes the English knights as ‘too showy and pompous’.²⁸

Only three of Edward’s earls accompanied him to Scotland. One was his brother-in-law Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford, who had drawn closer to Edward since Gaveston’s death; the second, his nephew Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester; and the third his cousin Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke. The earls who did not attend said that, because Edward had not received the consent of parliament to lead an army to Scotland, they would not accompany him, ‘lest it should happen that they infringed the Ordinances’.²⁹ Many Scotsmen fought for the English king, including young John Comyn, who had good reason to hate the man who had stabbed his father the Red Comyn to death in the Greyfriars church in 1306. David de Strathbogie, earl of Atholl, whose father John had been hanged by Edward I in November 1306 but who was loyal to Edward II, did not participate in the battle but attacked the Scottish stores at Cambuskenneth, and the earl of Angus and his brother fought for Edward.

Edward did not fight on the first day of the battle, Sunday 23 June 1314, a series of skirmishes which went the way of the Scots. The earls of Gloucester and Hereford, respectively constable of the army and constable of England, quarrelled over who should command the vanguard, which tellingly demonstrates Edward’s lack of leadership skills and control of his own army.³⁰ Gloucester was humiliatingly unhorsed during a clash, Hereford’s nephew Henry de Bohun was killed by Robert Bruce himself, who cleaved Bohun’s head in with his battleaxe, and the advance party of Edward’s army, led by Robert Clifford and Henry Beaumont, sustained heavy losses against the schiltrons of Thomas Randolph. Schiltrons were formations consisting of a few hundred men in concentric rings, kneeling by pikes facing outwards. The pikes were about fourteen–eighteen feet long, made of ash with a sharpened steel point, and positioned at the height of a horse’s neck or chest. Schiltrons can be visualised as a forest of pikes sticking out in every direction, a kind of enormous and deadly hedgehog, and were extremely effective against knights charging at them on horseback.

Edward awoke early in his silken pavilion on the morning of 24 June, and his squires dressed him in hose (leggings), a shirt, a gambeson or aketon – a thickly padded jacket – and his chainmail. A wrought-iron great helm protected his head, and he carried a sword, a mace, perhaps a dagger, and a lance, couched under his arm. Sir Roger Northburgh acted as his shield-bearer. Edward mounted his war-horse, which had armour and padding to protect its face and chest, and was dressed in trappings – material embroidered with the royal arms of England, which covered most of the horse except its eyes, chest and lower legs. Riding in the last battalion of cavalry, the royal banner of three leopards flying above his head, Edward went out to face the Scots. The evening before, Edward had had a heated row with his nephew Gloucester, unjustly and unreasonably accusing him of treachery and deceit for his suggestion that they take a day’s rest and allow the army to recuperate. Desperate to prove himself, crying out ‘Today, it will be clear that I am neither a traitor nor a liar’, and also keen to take precedence over the earl of Hereford, twenty-three-year-old Gloucester galloped full tilt towards the Scots without waiting for an order from Edward to advance, his retainers riding close behind him. They expected the Scots to break ranks and flee on seeing hundreds of heavily armed men and horses thundering towards them. They didn’t, and Gloucester and his men hit one of the Scottish schiltrons full on. The young earl came off his horse and ‘was pierced by many wounds and shamefully killed’, having made the horrible mistake of forgetting to put on the surcoat which identified him as a great magnate; had the Scottish soldiers known who he was, they would have captured him to raise an enormous ransom.³¹ Many of his men died too, as the rest of the vanguard, following closely behind, couldn’t pull up in time, and crashed into Gloucester’s men, pushing them onto the pikes. Robert, Lord Clifford was probably also killed during this first assault. The schiltrons advanced, and the English cavalry advanced towards them, but were unable to make headway against the deadly forest of stakes. Horses reared in fright and screamed in pain, throwing their riders onto the ground or the pikes, and the battlefield became a nightmare scene: the cavalry continued to press forward, those behind unable to see what was happening at the front, pushing the men in front into range of the lethal pikes. Dead bodies, of men and horses, began to pile up before the schiltrons; riderless horses ran around, adding to the terrible confusion. Within minutes, the battle had slipped beyond Edward’s control.

Edward, showing great courage and foolhardiness, was right in the thick of the mêlée, attacking ferociously ‘like a lioness deprived of her cubs’.³² At one point, his horse was killed beneath him, and Scottish soldiers rushed forward to capture him. His shield-bearer Roger Northburgh was captured, but the king managed to mount another horse. Again, Scottish soldiers pressed forward to try to capture him, grabbing hold of his horse’s trappings. Edward ‘struck out so vigorously behind him with his mace there was none whom he touched that he did not fell to the ground’.³³ After perhaps no more than an hour or two of dreadful fighting, with countless men and horses lying dead underfoot and the ground wet and slippery with blood and gore, the earl of Pembroke realised the battle was lost. He grabbed the reins of Edward’s horse and dragged the king, protesting, off the field. Five hundred knights surrounded Edward, their only thought to protect him at all costs. The Lanercost chronicler, a monk and armchair general, says unfairly, ‘To their perpetual shame they fled like miserable wretches,’ but given that the battle was lost, there was nothing else they could do but ensure the king’s safety.³⁴

James Douglas pursued Edward and his large bodyguard a full 60 miles to Dunbar on the south-east coast. After a long, desperate gallop, with Douglas and his men picking off stragglers and so close behind it was said Edward and his knights had no time to stop and pass water, the king finally reached Dunbar Castle safely. His ally Patrick, earl of Dunbar, opened up the drawbridge for him.³⁵ Edward later granted one William Franceis an income of fifty marks annually in gratitude for the unspecified ‘kind service he lately performed for the king in his presence at Dunbar’.³⁶ Earl Patrick commandeered a fishing boat, and Edward sailed down the coast, with a handful of attendants, to Berwick.³⁷ He was incredibly lucky to escape capture by Douglas, and vowed to found a Carmelite friary at Oxford to give thanks for his deliverance.³⁸

Queen Isabella and several noblewomen, including Edward’s sister Elizabeth, waited at Berwick for the glorious army to return, proclaiming its glorious victory. Instead, the king arrived not at the head of a victorious army, but in flight, forced to travel by fishing boat. His shock and humiliation must have been profound. If Isabella felt any shame over her husband’s awful defeat, however, she kept it to herself, and lent him her own seal to replace his, so that government business could continue. She tended her husband’s wounds herself, and even cleaned his armour.³⁹ Edward spent forty marks on new clothes for a small group of knights from Germany who had fought for him at Bannockburn and arrived at Berwick dressed, or disguised, as paupers.⁴⁰

The terrible toll soon became clear. Over 500 knights and noblemen had been killed or captured, including the young Scotsman John Comyn, who had been so keen to avenge his father’s murder at Bruce’s hands, and thousands of common soldiers. Other men lying dead on the battlefield were Edward’s steward Edmund Mauley, his former steward Miles Stapleton, and Giles Argentein, said to be the third-greatest knight in Christendom after the Holy Roman Emperor and Robert Bruce himself.⁴¹ Argentein had been captured and held prisoner on Rhodes in 1311 on his way to the Holy Land, and in October 1313 Edward sent letters to eleven people, including the Byzantine emperor Andronikus Palaeologus and Edward’s cousin the Empress Eirene, asking them to procure Argentein’s release, a major diplomatic effort which had the desired result.⁴² Argentein, once he had made sure that Edward was safe, returned to the battlefield and was killed. His reckless courage earned him the approval of contemporaries: ‘Those who fall in battle for their country are known to live in everlasting glory,’ comments the Vita.⁴³ Edward’s brother-in-law the earl of Hereford was captured after Bannockburn, as were the Scottish earl of Angus and Lord Berkeley. Roger Mortimer was also captured, though Bruce released him without ransom and sent him home with Edward’s captured shield and great seal, for which he courteously demanded no payment.⁴⁴ Edward’s vast baggage train, said, probably with great exaggeration, to have been worth £200,000, fell into Scottish hands – a great and welcome windfall.⁴⁵

As well as losing his dignity and his numerous valuable possessions, Edward was now deprived of the influence of his nephew Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, loyal to him and also respected by the barons as the scion of an ancient noble family and grandson of the old king. Gloucester’s death meant that his vast lands and wealth would ultimately pass to ambitious and unscrupulous men. Robert Bruce treated Gloucester’s body with considerable honour and respect: he personally kept an overnight vigil over the body, and the following day sent it back to England with full military honours, at his own expense. The men were second cousins – Bruce’s grandmother was a de Clare – and were married to sisters, Elizabeth and Maud de Burgh. The body of Robert Clifford, the next highest-ranking Englishman to die in the battle, was also sent back to England with no payment demanded.⁴⁶

Edward II has been condemned for military incompetence since 1314, and also for cowardice because he left the field. Yet remaining behind would not have won the battle and would only have resulted in his being captured, which would have been catastrophic. The ransom demanded by Bruce would have been massive, and Edward’s giving up all claims to English overlordship of Scotland a basic requirement of release. His death would have brought his nineteen-month-old son to the throne, which meant a regency of many years standing until the boy was old enough to rule in his own right – and as later events were to prove, the people who replaced Edward in power were not one whit more competent than he was. Nor is it fair to condemn Edward for physical cowardice, as some writers have; he was no general, but he fought bravely, even recklessly, with disregard for the danger to his life.⁴⁷

As disastrous as Edward’s defeat at Bannockburn was, his capture or death would have been far worse. However, for the king of England, galloping away in ignominious flight from a battle he had fully expected to win, the realisation that he had at least spared his kingdom a crippling ransom or the perils of a long regency was no consolation whatsoever. And the humiliation was not yet over. In August 1314, Edward Bruce and James Douglas ‘devastated almost all Northumberland with fire’, plundering as far south as Swaledale in Yorkshire, burning Cumberland towns on their return, and carrying off livestock and crops.⁴⁸ Edward announced in late September that he had received a letter from Robert Bruce, in which the king of Scots declared that ‘the one thing in the world he [Bruce] desires most is to have complete accord and friendship with us’, and on 6 October he commissioned five men to negotiate a truce with Bruce.⁴⁹ He had little other choice.

Edward arrived in York on 17 July, and parliament opened there on 9 September. The king left the city on 7 September and rode the 17 miles to the village of Oulston, empowering three men to open parliament in his absence. He claimed that he was ‘unable to be present on account of some important and special business’ concerning himself, though what urgently required his attention in a small village is unclear, and this was perhaps an attempt on Edward’s part to avoid facing his enemies.⁵⁰ If so, he evidently realised he could hardly avoid them for long, as he returned to York on 10 September. The earls of Lancaster and Warwick, who had refused to fight for Edward in Scotland, gloated over his failure, choosing to see the king’s defeat as a consequence of his failure to abide by the Ordinances. Lancaster had raised an army at his stronghold of Pontefract in case Edward returned triumphant from Scotland and used the chance to avenge Piers Gaveston’s death. Now, however, the army was used against Edward himself, as a threat to force the king to accept Lancaster as de facto ruler of England. For the next few years, Edward would be little more than a puppet-king. In no position to defend himself, he sat at parliament, forced to hear how his expenses would be reduced drastically to a mere ten pounds a day, and that his household would be purged and replaced by men sympathetic to Lancaster.⁵¹ Queen Isabella, faithfully supporting her husband, attended parliament at his side. She had helped her husband to the best of her ability since Gaveston’s death, and even her own uncle Lancaster came to regard her as an enemy. He ordered her income to be reduced, although Edward did his best to help her with grants from his own limited resources.⁵²

Lancaster and Warwick were not the only ones to interpret the defeat at Bannockburn as evidence that God was showing his disfavour with Edward. A few weeks after the battle, a member of Edward’s own household was arrested for speaking ‘irreverent and indecent words’ against the king: a messenger called Robert de Newington commented that nobody could expect the king to win a battle when he spent all his time idling, digging and ditching when he should have been hearing Mass.⁵³ (How listening to Mass would have helped Edward win the battle was not explained.) Edward’s reaction is unrecorded, and he was, in fact, sincerely and genuinely pious. Other men expressed their displeasure with Edward: in January 1315 a London goldsmith was accused of saying ‘certain evil and shameful things about the king’, and in December that year a clerk of Oxford said in public that Edward was not his father’s son – perhaps only meaning that he was very different from Edward I, which was true.⁵⁴

To please his sister Elizabeth, Edward arranged for the release of all his Scottish prisoners in exchange for his brother-in-law Hereford. The Scottish prisoners in England included Robert Bruce’s wife Elizabeth de Burgh, his sisters Mary and Christina, his daughter Marjorie, and the bishops of Glasgow and St Andrews.⁵⁵ Another Scot in England was Bruce’s young nephew Donald, earl of Mar, imprisoned as a child at Bristol Castle in 1306 but a member of Edward’s household since around 1309, who received fifteen pence a day in wages for serving his uncle’s enemy.⁵⁶ Mar set off to return to Scotland, the homeland he hadn’t seen for eight years, got as far north as Newcastle, changed his mind, and went back to Edward.⁵⁷ For many years, Mar was to be a close friend and supporter of the king.

In December 1314, Edward assigned dower to the earl of Gloucester’s widow Maud, the customary third of his nephew’s lands.⁵⁸ Maud was claiming to be pregnant, which must have delighted Edward, as the enormous de Clare revenues would pour annually into his own coffers until the child turned twenty-one. People considerably less delighted at Maud’s pregnancy were Gloucester’s three sisters – Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth – and Eleanor’s husband Hugh Despenser, as if Gloucester had died childless, the sisters would have divided his lands between them. It would later become apparent, however, that the pregnancy was not all it would seem.

Philip IV of France died in a hunting accident on 29 November 1314. Edward had heard of his father-in-law’s death by 15 December, when he ordered the archbishops of Canterbury and York, all the bishops and twenty-eight abbots to ‘celebrate exequies’ for him.⁵⁹ Philip was only forty-six in 1314, and had three sons aged between twenty and twenty-five. No one could have guessed that within fourteen years all of them would be dead with no male heirs, and that the great Capetian dynasty would come to an end and the throne of France pass to Philip IV’s nephew Philip de Valois. Queen Isabella’s eldest brother the king of Navarre, known as le Hutin, the Stubborn or Quarrelsome, succeeded as Louis X, which meant that Edward owed homage to the new king for his French lands. As Louis reigned for little more than eighteen months, though, he managed to avoid the unpleasant duty of kneeling to his brother-in-law.

Edward and Isabella were at Langley on 6 December 1314, the feast day of St Nicholas, and the king gave two pounds to Robert Tyeis, who officiated as boy-bishop in his chapel. The royal couple spent the festive season at Windsor, where Edward played at ‘tables’ on Christmas Eve with members of his entourage.⁶⁰ He was a great fan of ‘cross and pile’, the fourteenth-century equivalent of heads and tails, and frequently borrowed money from his servants to play it, returning five shillings to his barber Henry on one occasion and eight pence to his usher Peter Bernard ‘which he lent to the lord king and which he lost at cross and pile’ on another.⁶¹ Edward was at a low ebb, personally and politically, in late 1314, and his thoughts turned to his lost love, Piers Gaveston. On 27 December, he gave the chancellor and scholars of Oxford University twenty pounds to pray for Gaveston’s soul, and a week later finally buried his friend, two and a half years after his death, at the Dominican priory he had founded at Langley in 1308.⁶²Since June 1312, Edward had paid two custodians to watch over the body, and they lived very well at his expense; for a mere twenty-eight days in December 1314, he paid them fifteen pounds.⁶³ Edward had already demonstrated his concern for Gaveston’s remains, spending, for example, £144 and fifteen shillings between 8 July 1312 and 7 July 1313, the sixth year of his reign. This included payment for 5,000 lbs of wax for candles to burn around the embalmed body.⁶⁴

Gaveston’s excommunication must have been lifted in order for him to be buried in consecrated ground, though when that occurred is uncertain; perhaps the visit of his elder brother Arnaud-Guilhem de Marsan to Avignon in the autumn of 1312 marks the occasion.⁶⁵ This means that Edward had, rather morbidly, kept Gaveston’s body above ground for over two years when he could have had it buried, perhaps because he couldn’t bear the thought of this final farewell to his friend, or because he had sworn ‘first to avenge Piers, and then consign his body to the grave’.⁶⁶ Edward’s weak position in late 1314 and early 1315, however, persuaded him to postpone his revenge for a time. He had not forgotten. It would just have to wait for a while. The funeral was a deeply emotional occasion for Edward, and he spent the vast sum of £300 on three cloths of gold to dress Gaveston’s body, also paying £15 for food and £64 for twenty-three tuns of wine, around 22,000 litres.⁶⁷ Edward was deeply concerned with the well-being of Gaveston’s soul and bodily remains: at the time of the funeral, he ordered a hundred Dominican friars to say Masses for Gaveston and his ancestors; between October 1315 and October 1316 he ordered every Augustinian house in England and Ireland to celebrate a daily mass for Gaveston’s soul; in 1319 he paid for a Turkish cloth to be placed over the tomb, which was replaced later by gold cloth; in 1324 he sent his confessor to Langley to mark the anniversary of Gaveston’s death, and in 1325 he sent a man there with 100 shillings to give to each friar, so they would remember Piers Gaveston. In 1326, the last year of his reign, he made provision for numerous clerks at numerous houses to pray for the soul of his lost love.⁶⁸ Edward did not forget those he loved. Sadly, Gaveston’s tomb was lost at the Dissolution, though the tomb of Edward’s grandson Edmund, duke of York, buried in the same priory in 1402, still survives. The earl of Hereford attended Gaveston’s funeral, rather bravely considering he had been one of the men who condemned him to death, and so did Queen Isabella, the earl of Pembroke, Hugh Despenser the Elder and his son Hugh Despenser, Henry Beaumont, Bartholomew Badlesmere, the mayor of London, the archbishop of Canterbury, four bishops, fourteen abbots, fifty knights, large numbers of Dominican friars, and William Inge, the royal justice alleged, somewhat improbably, to have passed judgement on Gaveston.⁶⁹ Another attendee was Edward’s fourteen-year-old half-brother Thomas of Brotherton, displaced as heir to the throne by Edward of Windsor, but created earl of Norfolk a month after his nephew’s birth.⁷⁰

As though the burial of Piers Gaveston had drawn a line under his past, another man, Roger Damory, came to Edward’s attention. Damory, a knight of Oxfordshire, had previously been a member of the earl of Gloucester’s retinue, and fought bravely at Bannockburn, which was perhaps the first time Edward noticed him. The Vita calls Damory a ‘poor and needy knight’, which seems accurate; he was a younger son with little chance of inheriting his father’s lands.⁷¹ In early 1315, Edward ordered Damory to stay at court with him, though it would take some time for the knight to really work his way into the king’s affections.⁷²

On 20 April 1315, Edward invited the archbishop of Canterbury and most of the nobility to a great banquet at Westminster Hall, which was damaged by a fire shortly afterwards.⁷³ This would be the last great feast anyone would enjoy for quite some time. Northern Europe suffered bizarre weather in the mid-1310s, and it rained heavily and constantly for much of the period from 1314 to 1316. In the flooding caused by this torrential rain, crops rotted away and livestock drowned in the waterlogged fields, and the tragic result was the Great Famine, which is estimated to have killed at least five per cent, and perhaps more, of the population of England. The rest of northern Europe suffered a similar death toll. The Vita, unaware that it was a pan-European disaster, knew exactly where to apportion blame: on the English themselves, who ‘excel other nations in three qualities, in pride, in craft, and in perjury … All this comes from the wickedness of the inhabitants’. He also blamed the fact that Saturn had been in the ascendant for three years, but now that Jupiter was about to succeed, the rain would cease and the fields be filled with abundance.⁷⁴

In March and April 1315, Edward did his best to mitigate his subjects’ misery by ordering the price of basic foodstuffs to be regulated. According to the Anonimalle, Edward passed these regulations with the advice of his privy council and without the consent of the magnates, and the chronicler rather unreasonably calls Edward’s council ‘feeble’ and the regulations ‘foolish’, claiming that the king and his advisors were trying to ‘deceive the common people’.⁷⁵ Among the foodstuffs regulated were: ‘fat sheep’, which should cost no more than twenty pence if unshorn and fourteen pence if shorn; a maximum of sixteen shillings for an ox not fed with corn, or twenty-four shillings if fed with corn and fattened; twelve shillings for a live fat cow; one and a half pence for a fat chicken; one pence for twenty-four eggs. The price regulations could not, however, be maintained for long; Edward’s attempts to improve the situation resulted only in traders refusing to sell what few goods they had at an artificially low price.⁷⁶ AnonimalleandLanercost state that a quarter of wheat cost forty shillings or more, six or eight times the normal price, and Anonimalle that ‘two little onions’ cost a penny, a few hours’ wages for most people.⁷⁷ Such bread as was available could not satisfy hunger, as the grain was soaked from the endless rain and had to be dried in ovens before it was cooked, and contained minimal nutrients.⁷⁸

When Edward stayed at St Albans Abbey from 10 to 12 August 1315, even he had difficulties buying bread for himself and his household.⁷⁹ Still, the king was in a far better position than the majority of his subjects: in Northumbria, already weakened and despoiled by Scottish raids, ‘dogs and horses and other unclean things were eaten’, and Trokelowe says that horse meat was precious and that ‘fat dogs’ were stolen.⁸⁰ And for others, imminent starvation drove them to far worse horrors than eating pets. Rumours of cannibalism were rife, and Trokelowe even claims, one hopes with great exaggeration, that some people resorted to eating children.⁸¹ After the famine came a ‘severe pestilence’ which claimed many more victims. Dead bodies were so numerous they could hardly be buried.⁸²

Although most people were too concerned with their own suffering to pay much notice, more bad news reached England. Robert Bruce’s brother Edward invaded Ireland in late May 1315, and in May 1316 was crowned high king of Ireland at Dundalk, having taken control of almost the entire country except Dublin and a few castles.⁸³ The kings of England had been lords of Ireland for a century and a half: a papal bull issued in 1155 by Adrian IV, the only English pope in history, had authorised Edward’s great-great-grandfather Henry II to take possession of the country, and granted him and his descendants the right to the title ‘lord of Ireland’. In 1185, Henry II sent his teenage son, Edward’s great-grandfather John, to govern the parts of the country under English control. Fortunately for Edward II in 1315, Roger Mortimer had returned to Ireland, where he spent much of his career, after the debacle of Bannockburn, and the king therefore had an ally in the country he could trust. Unfortunately, even Roger Mortimer’s undoubted military ability was not sufficient to avoid a catastrophic defeat at the hands of Edward Bruce at the Battle of Kells in December 1315, and almost his entire army was annihilated.⁸⁴ Practically the only bright spot in the wet, hungry, desperate summer of 1315 was one of Robert Bruce’s rare failures: he laid siege to the town of Carlisle for ten days, but failed to take it, thanks to the stout defence of Andrew Harclay, sheriff of Cumberland. The Scots ‘marched off in confusion to their own country’ on 1 August.⁸⁵ And in January 1316, Bruce failed in his second attempt to seize the important port of Berwick-on-Tweed. He and a large force launched a simultaneous attack by land and sea at night, by moonlight, but failed to capture the port, and James Douglas, Edward’s pursuer after Bannockburn, barely escaped capture.⁸⁶

In the summer of 1315, Maud de Clare, dowager countess of Gloucester, was still claiming to be pregnant, despite the length of time that had passed since her husband fell at Bannockburn. Hugh Despenser (the Younger), understandably, did not believe in the pregnancy. As the husband of the earl of Gloucester’s eldest sister Eleanor, Despenser was in line for a big handout of lands, and he wanted them badly. The young man – he was about twenty-seven – gave warning of his hot-headed and impetuous behaviour when he seized Tonbridge Castle in Kent, which had belonged to the earl of Gloucester, in May 1315. Precisely what he was hoping to achieve by this is not clear, but he had to give it back, though he avoided a fine over the strange episode.⁸⁷ Five years in the future, Edward would become utterly infatuated with Hugh Despenser and fall over himself to give him any lands he wanted, once again bringing his country to civil war over his passion for a favourite. Although Lanercost claims that Despenser became ‘the king of England’s right eye’ soon after the death of Piers Gaveston, Edward’s behaviour here, by refusing to partition the de Clare lands, proves conclusively that Despenser was not yet in his favour.

Hugh Despenser’s maternal uncle Guy Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, died on 12 August 1315 at the age of about forty-three, leaving his eighteen-month-old son, named Thomas after the earl of Lancaster, as his heir. Many decades later, the chronicler Thomas Walsingham reported a rumour that friends of Edward II poisoned Warwick in revenge for Piers Gaveston’s death.⁸⁸ This is most unlikely to be true, though doubtless Edward didn’t mourn much for him. Warwick’s death left the earl of Lancaster politically isolated, and it became ever clearer to all that he had no more aptitude than Edward at ruling the country. In fact, the situation was becoming dire. Lancaster and Edward found it extremely difficult to work together, but Lancaster had no means of deposing the king, and Edward was not yet strong enough to overthrow his cousin. They and their respective households spitefully did their best to thwart each other, and their rivalry left England, in effect, ungoverned at a time when natural disaster called out for strong leadership.⁸⁹

Edward spent most of 1315 with Queen Isabella, and from 10 to 12 June, they went to Canterbury on pilgrimage; both of them revered St Thomas Becket. On the 14th, Edward gave a pound to sailors named Thomas Springet, William Kempe and Edmund of Greenwich ‘for their labour in taking a whale, lately caught near London Bridge’.⁹⁰ The Scalacronica says that Edward ‘tarried in the south, where he amused himself with ships, among mariners, and in other irregular occupation unworthy of his station’.⁹¹ That August, Edward proclaimed that the magnates of the realm should limit the number of courses served at their tables, on account of the ‘excessive and abundant portions of food’ they ate while many of their countrymen starved. The proclamation also limited the number of minstrels permitted to go to the houses of great lords to three or four a day, and they were not to go to the houses of ‘smaller people’ at all – ‘unless requested to do so’, it added helpfully.⁹² Edward’s enormous household of a few hundred people necessitated lavish expenditure on food, and the accounts for his ninth regnal year, 8 July 1315 to 7 July 1316, show that he spent £887 on food and £1,160 on wine.⁹³

In the autumn of 1315, Edward went on holiday to the Fens with ‘a great concourse of common people’, despite the awful weather that year (it rained from May until October).⁹⁴ Centuries ahead of his time in recognising the pleasures of taking holidays by water, he spent a congenial month from mid-September to mid-October rowing and swimming at King’s Lynn in Norfolk and at Fen Ditton and Impington near Cambridge, though he fell into the water and nearly drowned ‘while rowing about on various lakes’ one day, and his companions had to haul him out. Perhaps this was cosmic revenge for the occasion in February 1303 when eighteen-year-old Edward had to pay his fool Robert Bussard four shillings’ compensation for playing a trick on him while they were swimming in the Thames at Windsor, and hurting him.⁹⁵ Edward was a great fan of water: Archbishop Walter Reynolds once returned to him a belt he had lost in the Thames, which probably means he was again swimming in the river.⁹⁶ While in the Fens, on 6 October 1315, Edward made a quick trip to Walsingham without his household to visit the shrine of Our Lady there.⁹⁷

The author of the Flores, Edward’s most vicious critic, sneered at the king’s holiday, saying sarcastically that Edward went to the Fens to ‘refresh his soul with many waters’, a perfectly normal thing to do in later centuries but very strange to the fourteenth-century mind. No less a person than the pope condemned the king’s amusements as ‘childish frivolities’ a few months later, and most of Edward’s contemporaries must have found the concept of the king of England willingly spending time with a group of lowborn people profoundly shocking, a violation of the natural order.⁹⁸ In its haste to ridicule Edward, the Flores got the date of his holiday wrong and placed it at Christmas and New Year, but it is evident from Edward’s itinerary that he was in the Fens in autumn, not December and January.⁹⁹ Winters of the era were often harsh: the French Chronicle of London says that in 1308/09 people walked across the frozen Thames from London to Southwark, and the city annalist vividly describes the Great Frost of the following year: ‘There was such cold and such masses and piles of ice on the Thames and everywhere else that the poor were overcome by excessive cold,’ adding that the river froze so solidly bonfires could be lit on it.¹⁰⁰ According to the Flores, the summer of 1305 saw burning heat, drought and a subsequent epidemic of smallpox, which afflicted young and old, rich and poor. This unusually hot summer was followed by an extremely cold winter, with snow and ice lying on the ground from 15 December 1305 to 27 January 1306 and again from 13 February to 13 April, and the winters of 1312/13, 1313/14, 1316/17 and 1321/22 were also bitterly cold, with much snow and frost.¹⁰¹

After his holiday, Edward spent most of the next few months at the royal hunting lodge at Clipstone in Nottinghamshire with Queen Isabella, and probably sometime in November they conceived their second son John of Eltham, who was born on 15 August 1316. As with their elder son Edward of Windsor, there is no doubt that they were together at the right time to conceive John, and no reason at all to think that anyone other than Edward II was John’s father. While at Clipstone, Edward paid twenty marks to the London goldsmith Roger Frowyk for making a gold crown for him, with forty marks still owing, and gave thirty-five shillings to seventy Dominicans for ‘performing divine service at the anniversary of the lady the queen, mother of the present lord the king’.¹⁰²28 November 1315 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Eleanor of Castile, the mother Edward had barely known. Edward’s parents were much on his mind in the early winter of 1315: he gave five pounds to a Nicholas Percy for compiling a book about the life and times of his father Edward I for him.¹⁰³ While at Clipstone, Edward sent his friend Sir William Montacute, with three other knights and thirty-six squires, to Barnard Castle in County Durham to rescue Maud, widow of Robert Clifford killed at Bannockburn. The unfortunate lady had been abducted by John le Ireys (‘the Irishman’), and shortly afterwards married Sir Robert Welle, one of her rescuers.¹⁰⁴

It was probably in late 1315 that Roger Damory, the impecunious knight who fought bravely at Bannockburn, began to gain a firmer hold on the king’s affections. A series of grants to Damory, beginning in early December 1315 and continuing until 1317, track Edward’s growing feelings for him.¹⁰⁵ It is possible to exaggerate the significance of this; the grants were by no means excessive, and in this part of his reign, Edward was for once using his powers of patronage sensibly and fairly. However, it would become clear a little later that Damory, a mere household knight, had gained far greater influence over the king than his rank and position warranted, and that once more, Edward was allowing his personal feelings to dictate his policy. And two other men grew close to Edward around this time, or perhaps the following year. One was Hugh Audley, who had joined Edward as a household knight at the time that Piers Gaveston went into his third exile, and who was a close relative of Roger Mortimer. The other was William Montacute, from an old noble family, whose father Simon had been an associate of Edward I. Whether these three men were Edward’s friends or something more cannot be known, but whatever the nature of their relationships with the king, the men described by the Flores as ‘worse than Piers’ had begun their rise to power and influence, and would in time do their best to wreck any chances of peace between the king and the earl of Lancaster and to disrupt the fragile stability of the middle years of Edward II’s reign.¹⁰⁶