7

Conflicts, Marriages and an Abduction

Parliament opened at Lincoln on 27 January 1316, and Edward announced through his spokesman William Inge that he wished proceedings to pass as speedily as possible, to ease the burden placed on the city by the presence of so many people demanding food. Unfortunately, his cousin the earl of Lancaster thwarted his wish, arriving in Lincoln on 10 February and finally deigning to attend parliament on the 12th, more than two weeks late. To Edward’s great annoyance, Lancaster was appointed his chief counsellor, finally gaining an official position despite having dominated the government for well over a year.¹ However, he thereafter took little part in government, preferring to stay at his favourite residence of Pontefract, where Edward and his council were forced to communicate and negotiate with him as though he were an independent potentate, or another king.²

During the parliament, the king’s nephew-in-law Hugh Despenser gave more proof of his recklessness and his potential for violence by attacking a baron named John Ros in Lincoln Cathedral. Angry that Ros had tried to arrest Ingelram Berenger, one of his father’s knights, Despenser repeatedly punched him in the face until he drew blood, and ‘inflicted other outrages on him’, forcing Ros to draw his sword in self-defence. Despenser claimed, with amusing implausibility, that he had merely stretched out his hand to defend himself and accidentally hit Ros in the face with his fist, after Ros ‘heap[ed] outrageous insults on the same Hugh [and] taunted him with insolent words’, and rushed at him with a knife. Despenser was fined the massive sum of £10,000, which he never paid, and Edward pardoned him for the assault four years later.³

Despenser, desperate for his wife Eleanor’s share of her brother the earl of Gloucester’s inheritance, once more raised the subject of the dowager countess’s supposed pregnancy. He had been claiming for a few months – correctly, of course – that it was impossible for Maud de Clare to be pregnant by her husband, who had died at Bannockburn in June 1314. Two royal justices told Despenser that the Countess Maud ‘at the due time according to the course of nature, felt a living boy … and that although the time for the birth of that child, which nature allows to be delayed and obstructed for various reasons, is still delayed, this ought not to prejudice the aforesaid pregnancy’. The justices reprimanded Despenser and Eleanor for failing to apply to Chancery for a writ to have the countess’s belly inspected, and as they had not observed due process, their negligence would redound to their own shame and prejudice. This took place a full twenty months after Gloucester’s death; the legal system at its finest.

The king must have been delighted to learn that Queen Isabella was expecting another child, and on 22 February asked the dean and chapter of the church of St Mary in Lincoln to ‘celebrate divine service daily for the good estate of the king and Queen Isabella and Edward their first-born son’.⁴ The reference to ‘their first-born son’ probably indicates that Edward knew of Isabella’s pregnancy by then. On 27 March, he gave twenty pounds to John Fleg, horse dealer of London, for a bay horse ‘to carry the litter of the lady the queen’ during her pregnancy.⁵ He also paid the Lucca banking firm the Ballardi almost four pounds for pieces of silk and gold tissue, and flame-coloured silk, to make cushions for Isabella’s carriage so that she and her ladies could travel in greater comfort.⁶ The news of their child was a glimmer of happiness in an otherwise depressing world. The terrible famine still gripped England, and even in a hand-to-mouth economy where food shortages were common, nothing as bad as this had ever been seen before: ‘Such a mortality of men in England and Scotland through famine and pestilence as had not been heard of in our time,’ says Lanercost.⁷ The unsuccessful regulations concerning the price of foodstuffs were abolished at Lincoln.

And more bad news came from South Wales. The earl of Gloucester had been lord of Glamorgan, and after his death, royal administrators ruled the lordship on Edward’s behalf. One of them, Payn Turberville, was hated for his arrogance and tyranny. The famine raged as hard in South Wales as anywhere else, and the inhabitants, starving, beaten and extorted of money by Turberville, suffered terribly. Llywelyn Bren, lord of Senghenydd and Meisgyn, decided he had had enough. The earl of Gloucester had thought highly of Llywelyn and granted him high office, but Payn Turberville removed his authority and treated him with contempt, which led a furious Llywelyn to tell a room full of his supporters that ‘the day will come when I will put an end to the insolence of Payn and give him as good as he gives me’. Turberville promptly denounced him to Edward for sedition, and the king summoned Llywelyn to court to explain himself. Llywelyn went cautiously, not sure of the reception he would get from the unpredictable Edward, intending to gloss over his insults to Turberville if he possibly could and, more importantly, to inform the king of his Welsh subjects’ suffering. His worst fears came true: Edward refused to meet him, and promised that if Bren had truly uttered such things against a royal official, he would be hanged. He ordered Bren to appear at the Lincoln parliament to defend his actions.⁸

Bren had no intention of going to Lincoln when it would probably result in his swinging at the end of a rope. He took the only other option open to him and prepared for war, and on 26 January 1316 attacked the great stronghold of Caerphilly, which had been built by the earl of Gloucester’s father in the 1270s. The news took a few days to travel the more than 200 miles from Caerphilly to Lincoln, and when Edward finally heard on 7 February, he immediately sent men to capture Bren and nip his rebellion in the bud, exclaiming, ‘Go quickly, and pursue this traitor, lest from delay worse befall us and all Wales rise against us.’⁹

Bren was quickly overcome by the force sent by the king and submitted to the earl of Hereford, who sent him to Edward. Hereford, impressed with Bren’s bearing and courage, asked the king to show him leniency, and Edward, perhaps regretting his earlier outburst, sent Bren, his wife, his five sons, his adopted son, and five others ‘under safe custody at the king’s expense’ to the Tower. They were granted three pence a day for their maintenance (Bren and his wife) or two pence (the others).¹⁰ By June 1317, only Bren and two of his sons are mentioned as prisoners in the Tower, the others presumably having been released.¹¹ The campaign against Llywelyn Bren was of short duration, but expensive; William Montacute alone took 150 men-at-arms and 2,000 footmen, at Edward’s expense, and the royal treasury was still in a parlous state.¹² Trouble also broke out in North Wales, where Edward’s chamberlain John Charlton and his wife Hawise Gadarn had a long-running feud with her uncle Gruffydd de la Pole over the lordship of Powys. In March 1316, Edward told Chancery, ‘If this riot be not hastily quenched much greater evil may come in other parts of Wales,’ and sent his steward John Cromwell to settle the row.¹³ The last thing he wanted was a widespread uprising in the land of his birth, which, fortunately, never happened. On 24 April, the day before his thirty-second birthday, Edward asked the Dominicans of Toulouse to pray for him, perhaps in the belief that he and his realm needed all the intervention he could get.¹⁴ It was fairly common for Edward to request the prayers of Dominicans in other countries for himself and his family: a year later, he asked the chapter of Pamplona to say prayers ‘for the good estate’ of himself, Queen Isabella and their children, and in later years, made the same request of the Dominicans of Marseilles, Paris, Rouen, Citeaux, Florence, Venice, Barcelona and Vienna.¹⁵ Edward also gave twenty pounds to the Dominicans of Pamplona to pay for three days’ entertainment, one day for himself, one for Isabella, and one for their son Edward.¹⁶ The conflict with Scotland dragged on in the summer of 1316; the Scots invaded England as far south as Richmond in Yorkshire and the Furness peninsula in Lancashire, which they burnt and plundered.¹⁷

That spring, Edward received the sad news that his thirty-three-year-old sister Elizabeth, countess of Hereford, had died in childbirth on 5 May, and that her daughter Isabel, her tenth child, had also died. Elizabeth was only twenty months Edward’s senior, and they had been close in childhood.¹⁸ Edward got on well with his sisters, as he had with his stepmother Marguerite before she opposed Piers Gaveston, and there is no reason to think that he did not like women or enjoy their company. In 1305, when his father banished him from his presence, drastically reduced his income and took away most of his household, Edward’s sisters came to his rescue. Joan of Acre – mother of the de Clare siblings, and twelve years Edward’s senior – invited him to stay with her and lent him her seal so that he could continue to order goods, and Mary also invited him to stay. Elizabeth had previously been married to Count John I of Holland, but he died childless in November 1299, at the age of only fifteen. Edward spent most of the rest of Elizabeth’s life chasing up the dower to which she was entitled, including the town of Dordrecht, from John’s cousin and successor John II and John II’s son William III, counts of Hainault and Holland.¹⁹

Of Edward’s eleven or more sisters, only two, Margaret and Mary, remained alive. Margaret, the widowed duchess of Brabant, was nine years older than Edward and forty-one in 1316. She is the most obscure of his sisters who survived into adulthood, and seems never to have visited England after 1308, when she attended her brother’s coronation. The other sister, Mary, five years Edward’s senior, was a nun with no vocation. She had a private room, a luxurious bed, servants and hunting dogs at Amesbury Priory, Edward paid her gambling debts and sent her expensive gifts, and she often visited his court. Sometime in 1316, he spent over twenty-six pounds on fifteen pieces of tapestry for Mary to take back to Amesbury after one of her many visits to him, and the two were clearly deeply fond of each other.²⁰ Edward’s only other remaining siblings were his two young half-brothers. The elder, Thomas, earl of Norfolk, was fifteen in early 1316, and would grow up to be a man whose achievements fell some way short of modest. Edmund was only fourteen months younger than his brother, but more than seventeen years younger than Edward. He still had no title, but Edward granted him lands, castles and manors for his sustenance.²¹

On 17 May 1316, Edward asked his brother-in-law Louis X of France and Navarre to strive to continue their friendly relationship. He sent another letter in the same vein to Louis’s wife Clemence of Hungary, whom his clerk wrongly addressed as ‘Queen Elizabeth’.²² Louis died less than three weeks later on 5 June at the age of only twenty-six, supposedly from drinking chilled wine after a vigorous game of jeu de paume, an early form of tennis. He had married Clemence on 19 August 1315, five days after the death, in decidedly suspicious circumstances, of his adulterous first wife Marguerite of Burgundy. Louis left Clemence pregnant, and she gave birth on 15 November 1316 to a son who became king of France as soon as he took his first breath: John I, the Posthumous. The baby king died only five days later, and Queen Isabella’s second brother the count of Poitiers succeeded as Philip V. Philip and Edward seem to have been on reasonably good terms, on a personal level at least, if not as kings: in 1316, the French king sent his brother-in-law bunches of new grapes, and a year later, a box of rose sugar.²³ Edward gave a generous gift of twenty marks on 7 August 1316 to the messenger who brought him the news that Philip’s wife Joan of Burgundy had borne a son, Louis, on 24 June.²⁴ The boy lived for little more than six months, and Philip was, like his brothers, destined to die with no surviving son.

Edward spent most of June and July 1316 at Westminster, and on 23 July, he and a very pregnant Isabella travelled to Eltham Palace in Kent, which he had granted her in 1311. Three days later, he left her there and headed north, for a campaign against the Scots which he later cancelled. On his way from Kent to York, Edward touched and blessed 135 people suffering from scrofula, or the ‘king’s evil’, and in the period between mid-August and the end of November performed the same service for another seventy-nine.²⁵ Edward blessed fewer people with scrofula than his father had; Edward I touched almost 1,000 sick in 1299/1300, for example.²⁶ Edward II did, however, once give eighty pence to a Maud of Newark, who had come to court seeking a cure from him.²⁷He arrived in York on 16 August, accompanied by his niece Margaret Gaveston, and stayed in the convent of the Franciscans (Greyfriars, or Friars Minor) near the River Ouse. He stayed there for five weeks and gave the Franciscans ten pounds for the expenses of himself and his household, a sum which only covered a fraction of them.²⁸ Sometime in August he met his cousin the earl of Lancaster in York, and the two men had a furious row, probably because of Edward’s ongoing and ever-increasing reluctance to accept the Ordinances of 1311, to which Lancaster was dedicated.²⁹

On 7 August 1316, the cardinals at Avignon finally chose a new pope, after a delay of more than two years: Jacques Duèse, cardinal-bishop of Porto and a Gascon as Clement V had also been, who chose the name John XXII. Edward sent John gifts worth £1,604, including a cope ‘embroidered and studded with large white pearls’, several golden ewers, thirteen golden salt cellars, numerous golden dishes and bowls, a golden basin and a golden chalice. He also paid £300 for an incense boat, a ewer and a ‘gold buckle set with diverse pearls and other precious stones’ to be sent in Queen Isabella’s name, and 100 marks for another cope embroidered by Roesia, wife of London merchant John de Bureford, also sent in the queen’s name.³⁰ The gifts were intended, at least in part, as a bribe to encourage the new pope to treat Edward favourably in his disputes with Scotland. Around this time, Edward demonstrated his great generosity by giving a gift of £500 to Isabella’s former nurse Theophania de Saint Pierre, lady of Brignancourt.³¹

Isabella, now twenty or twenty-one, gave birth to their second son on 15 August 1316, thus ensuring that Edward now had the proverbial heir and spare. It was fairly conventional at the time for a second son to be named after his maternal grandfather, Philip in this case, but the name John was chosen, probably in honour of John XXII.³² Edward gave £100 to Isabella’s steward who rode the 230 miles from Eltham to York to bring him the happy news, and Trokelowe comments on his joy at the birth of his son.³³ He had heard the news by 24 August, on which date he asked the Dominicans of York to say prayers for himself, Isabella, their son Edward of Windsor, ‘and John of Eltham our youngest son, especially on account of John’.³⁴ Edward had a piece of Turkey cloth and a piece of cloth of gold delivered to Eltham to cover the font in the chapel during John’s baptism, and ordered Isabella’s tailor to make her a robe from five pieces of white velvet for her churching ceremony.

At the end of July, Isabella sent her messenger Godyn Hautayn with letters to the bishop of Norwich and her uncle the earl of Lancaster, asking them to stand sponsor to her soon-to-be-born child, but Lancaster failed to show up for the ceremony, a gross insult.³⁵ This is probably because the already tense relationship between Edward and Lancaster had deteriorated still further, and the Flores claims that Edward armed himself against his cousin.³⁶ Whether that is true or not, Edward was concerned enough about Lancaster’s hostility to summon Isabella to him in York with all speed, fearing for her safety. The queen travelled very fast: on 22 September she was at Buntingford in Hertfordshire, 175 miles from York, and must have been reunited with Edward soon after the 27th, as on that date, the king paid her messenger a pound for informing him of the queen’s imminent arrival.³⁷ It is possible that Edward took a malicious pleasure in the fact that he now had two healthy sons, while his overweening cousin Lancaster, in his late thirties, had no legitimate children and was not likely to have any. He and his wife Alice de Lacy detested each other and lived apart, while Lancaster ‘defouled a great multitude of women and of noble wenches’ and fathered at least two illegitimate sons.³⁸

The king and queen spent most of October and November 1316 in and around York, and the king’s minstrel ‘King’ Robert came to him for help, evidently because he was ill: Edward gave him a gift of seventy shillings, and another one of forty shillings a few months later, to cover his expenses.³⁹ On 1 November, the king gave five pounds to a violist named Robert Daverouns, sent to him by his second cousin Philip, king of Albania, prince of Achaea and Taranto, despot of Epirus and titular emperor of Constantinople.⁴⁰Edward also made some significant appointments: his friend William Montacute became steward of his household, replacing John Cromwell.⁴¹ Roger Mortimer became lieutenant of Ireland, the position formerly held by Piers Gaveston, while his uncle Roger Mortimer of Chirk was reappointed justiciar of North Wales.⁴² And the earl of Arundel, who had drawn closer to Edward since Gaveston’s death – although he hadn’t fought at Bannockburn – became captain of the king’s forces between the River Trent and the Scottish town of Roxburgh.⁴³ Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, was almost exactly a year younger than the king, and half-Italian through his mother Alesia, daughter of Tomasso I, marquis of Saluzzo. His great-grandmother Beatrice of Savoy had been queen of Sicily, and his uncle Filippo was governor of Sardinia. He had married Alice, sister of John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, in 1306, having initially rejected her two years before.⁴⁴

John Langton, bishop of Chichester, finally excommunicated the earl of Surrey in 1316 for abandoning his wife and keeping a mistress, which the bishop of Norwich had tried to do in 1313 before Edward II stepped in to prevent him. Grateful to Surrey for his support, Edward asked the bishop to defer the sentence, though he added piously, ‘The king hopes that the earl will obey the orders of the Church.’⁴⁵ Surrey, now thirty, had several children with his mistress Maud Nerford, and decided to try to annul his unhappy marriage to Edward’s niece Joan of Bar in order to marry Maud instead and make their children his heirs. Maud began legal action against Joan, who was cited while in Queen Isabella’s presence in the lower chapel of Westminster Palace.⁴⁶ Edward did his best to steer the difficult course between loyalty to his niece and loyalty to a steadfast, politically useful ally. In August 1316, he allowed Surrey to surrender his lands to him, and granted them back with reversion to John and Thomas, two of his sons with Maud – meaning that he accepted Surrey’s illegitimate children as the earl’s heirs.⁴⁷ On the other hand, Edward paid all Joan’s legal costs, and appointed his clerk Aymon de Juvenzano ‘to prosecute in the Arches at London, and elsewhere in England’ on his niece’s behalf from July to November 1316. In November Joan left to go abroad, probably to stay with her brother Edouard, count of Bar in eastern France, and Edward gave her more than £166 to pay for the trip, having also paid her living expenses at the Tower of London for some years.⁴⁸

In late December 1316, Edward sent an embassy to Pope John XXII, including Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke. In Pembroke’s absence, Edward offered personally to act as his attorney, a very unusual act and proof of his great affection for and trust in his cousin – although, given the king’s general ineptitude, probably something of a mixed blessing for the earl.⁴⁹ Edward excused himself shortly before Christmas from attending his brother-in-law Philip V’s coronation, to be held on 9 January 1317, in an attempt to avoid having to pay homage for his French lands in Gascony and Ponthieu.⁵⁰ This was to no avail: on 12 January, Philip invited Edward to present himself at Amiens for the purpose, though Edward managed to put off this annoying duty for several more years.⁵¹He spent Christmas Day 1316 at Nottingham with Queen Isabella, though whether their sons Edward and John were with them is uncertain. Edward of Windsor, the four-year-old earl of Chester, lived at the centre of a great household at Wallingford Castle – which, significantly, had formerly belonged to Piers Gaveston – while little John was cared for by his nurse Matilda Pyrie, in his brother’s household.⁵²

The court spent New Year 1317 at Clipstone, and a knight named William de la Beche played ‘King of the Bean’ – the person lucky enough to find the bean the cooks had added to the food, which gave him the right to preside over the seasonal festivities. Edward gave Beche ‘a silver-gilt chased basin, with ewer to match’, worth seven pounds, thirteen shillings and ten pence, on the Feast of the Circumcision, 1 January 1317.⁵³ He also gave six shillings and eight pence to John, son of Alan of Scrooby, who officiated as boy-bishop in his chapel on St Nicholas’s Day, 6 December, and ten shillings to the unnamed child who acted as boy-bishop in his presence at St Mary’s Church in Nottingham on 28 December, the Feast of the Holy Innocents.⁵⁴

On 1 January 1317, Pope John XXII confirmed a two-year truce between Edward and Robert Bruce, calling Edward ‘our dearest son in Christ, Edward, illustrious king of England’, and Bruce ‘our beloved son, the noble man, Robert de Bruce, holding himself king of Scotland’. On 17 March, John exhorted Edward to make peace with Bruce, and appointed two cardinals to travel to England and negotiate between the two kings.⁵⁵ However, the pope soon changed his tune, possibly because the embassy led by the earl of Pembroke had talked him round to Edward’s point of view: eleven days later, he excommunicated Robert and Edward Bruce, and all those who were hostile to Edward II or invaded his kingdom. This time, John addressed Robert Bruce by his former title of earl of Carrick, and said he was ‘unjustly pretending to occupy the throne of Scotland’.⁵⁶ In January, Edward appointed his cousin James of Spain as one of the Chamberlains of the Exchequer of the Receipt.⁵⁷ James was said to be illegitimate and was the nephew of Eleanor of Castile, presumably the son of one of her many brothers, although which one is uncertain.⁵⁸ Edward’s Castilian uncles included Sancho, elected archbishop of Toledo at the age of eighteen; Felipe, who became archbishop of Seville also at eighteen and who gave up his ecclesiastical career to marry the Norwegian woman betrothed to one of his brothers; and the colourful Enrique, who was at various times a mercenary in North Africa, a senator of Rome and the regent of Castile, who spent thirty years in a Naples gaol and four in England at Henry III’s expense after he rebelled against his brother Alfonso X and was exiled from Castile. Alfonso X himself was known as el Sabio or the Wise, and was a well-known writer, musician, lawmaker and astrologer; the Alphonsus crater of the moon is named after him. Alfonso knighted Edward II’s father the future Edward I in 1254, when Edward was fifteen, just before he married Alfonso’s half-sister Leonor.

Edward II spent the whole of February and March and part of April 1317 at his palace of Clarendon near Salisbury in Wiltshire, where he presided over a meeting of his great council. Possibly, the Clarendon meeting was the location where Edward and some of his courtiers planned to abduct Alice de Lacy, as her husband Thomas of Lancaster would later claim. Alice, when staying at her manor of Canford in Dorset in early May 1317, was snatched by Richard Martin, a household knight of the earl of Surrey, who took her to Surrey’s castle of Reigate in Sussex.⁵⁹ Presumably Surrey, who was otherwise engaged with Maud Nerford, had no romantic inclinations towards the countess, although precisely what his motives were in abducting Alice remain unknown. It is possible that the powerful Lancaster had been instrumental in Surrey’s failure to annul his marriage and in persuading the bishop of Chichester to excommunicate him, and that Surrey, whom the Flores calls ‘one of the worst sycophants’, saw a chance for revenge. If so, antagonising the powerful Lancaster was foolish in the extreme. The Flores writes that the abduction came about as the result of ‘the violent boiling anger of the king’, and that Edward convened a malicious assembly to cook up a deceitful plot against Lancaster, jealous of his great wisdom and integrity.⁶⁰ The Vita, better informed and considerably less hysterical than the Flores, reports without comment Lancaster’s belief that Edward’s friends plotted the abduction.⁶¹

In April 1317, Edward turned his attention to the vital question of his sons’ future marriages, and received permission from John XXII to marry his children, now aged four and a half and eight months, to relatives in the fourth degree of consanguinity – that is, people with whom they shared a set of great-great-grandparents. The licence also applied to any future children he might have.⁶² That month Edward finally bowed to the inevitable, stopped pretending that the dowager countess of Gloucester was pregnant nearly three years after her husband’s death, and ordered the partition of the earl of Gloucester’s lands among his three sisters.⁶³ The two widowed sisters, Margaret and Elizabeth, would become great landowners, and it was important for Edward to marry them to men he trusted, as their husbands would wield an enormous amount of influence. He saw a chance to promote his friends Roger Damory and Hugh Audley even further. Damory was now the supreme influence at the English court, rich and powerful thanks to Edward’s favour.⁶⁴ The grants to him which had begun in late 1315 continued unabated throughout 1317, and his influence over Edward is obvious in the grants and favours issued at his request. Edward gave Damory many splendid presents, including a silver-gilt chalice ‘with the cross engraved in the foot and six enamelled knots in the centre’, an altar ‘of black stone ornamented in the circumference with silver and gilded’, an ivory image of the Virgin and Child, and a magnificent cross of ivory and cedar ‘painted with four images standing on each side … and round the base six images of ivory, painted, standing in tabernacles’.⁶⁵ Hugh Audley was also in favour, though not nearly to the same extent as Damory. In June 1315, Edward ordered the chancellor to complete some of Audley’s business as soon as possible, so that Audley ‘can return to us as quickly as we have instructed him to do’.⁶⁶ Audley swore an oath sometime in 1317 that he would ‘aid him [Edward] in all things throughout his whole life, and in no wise depart from him come what might, on pain of forfeiture of all his lands’, an oath he broke in 1321 after he and Damory became the king’s enemies.⁶⁷ Audley owned war horses called Grisel le Kyng and Ferant de Roma; Grisel’s name implies that the horse had been a gift to Audley from Edward.⁶⁸ And finally, William Montacute was also a significant man at court by 1317: as Edward’s steward, he held an important position close to the king, and commanded the royal cavalry.⁶⁹

Edward’s niece, Joan of Acre’s third daughter Elizabeth de Burgh (née de Clare), gave birth to her daughter Isabella Verdon, probably named after the queen, at Amesbury Priory on or shortly before 21 March 1317. This was eight months after the death of Elizabeth’s second husband Theobald Verdon, who had abducted her from Bristol Castle in early 1316 and forcibly married her. Edward sent a silver-gilt cup with stand and cover worth a pound and ten shillings as a christening gift for his latest great-niece.⁷⁰He was determined to marry Roger Damory to Elizabeth and bring him into the royal family, as he had done with Piers Gaveston, and sent his chamberlain John Charlton to Elizabeth with a letter to this effect even before Theobald Verdon’s funeral in September 1316. Using flattery in a transparent attempt to persuade her to do his bidding, he described her as his favourite niece, which was a lie; he rarely showed her any kindness or support, in stark contrast to her older sisters Eleanor and Margaret and their cousin Joan of Bar.⁷¹In February or March 1317, when Elizabeth was heavily pregnant, Edward travelled the 10 miles from Clarendon to Amesbury, taking Damory with him, to put more pressure on her to marry his friend.⁷² Damory was far beneath Elizabeth by birth and status; she was a king’s granddaughter and would have become countess of Ulster if her first husband John de Burgh had lived longer, while he was merely the younger son of an obscure knight. However, she agreed to marry him. Realistically, she had little choice.

Edward also arranged the marriage of another niece to another friend, and on 28 April 1317 at Windsor Castle, attended the wedding of Piers Gaveston’s widow Margaret to Hugh Audley. On the same day, William Montacute’s eldest son John married Joan Verdon, stepdaughter of Margaret’s sister Elizabeth de Burgh and one of the four co-heiresses of her father Theobald; another advantageous marriage arranged by the king for one of his friends. Audley and Margaret’s wedding was a lavish affair, and Edward gave three pounds in coins to be thrown over the heads of the bride and groom – generous though this was, it was less than half the amount he had provided for the same purpose at Margaret’s wedding to Piers Gaveston. He also gave half a mark (eight shillings and six pence) in oblations, distributed in his presence in the chapel in Windsor park.⁷³ Roger Damory married Elizabeth around the same time; Edward stayed at Windsor from 23 April to 16 May 1317, and presumably attended the wedding there. The date is not recorded but the couple had married by 3 May.⁷⁴ Edward took the homage of Hugh Despenser, Hugh Audley and Roger Damory for the lands they would now control in right of their wives, although it would take another six months before the lands were partitioned.⁷⁵While at Windsor, Edward paid half a mark to his goldsmith Walter de Spalding ‘for making a silver image, weighing ten marks, for the use of the lord king’.⁷⁶

Perhaps to postpone married life with Damory, Elizabeth – who continued to use her first husband’s name, de Burgh, throughout both her subsequent marriages – went on pilgrimage to Canterbury with her aunt Mary the nun and their young cousin Isabella, one of the six daughters of the earl of Lancaster’s brother Henry and also a nun at Amesbury Priory. Edward paid all their expenses.⁷⁷ William Montacute’s newly married son John died that summer, still in his teens, and his widow Joan Verdon married again in February 1318 – a wife for the second time at fourteen and a half.⁷⁸ John Montacute was buried in the cathedral church at Lincoln on 14 August 1317, his funeral conducted with unusual ceremony: Edward paid forty clerks to pray for his soul, and thirteen widows to watch over his body. He arrived at Lincoln three days after the funeral, and gave generous alms at the Masses celebrated in the cathedral for the repose of John’s soul.⁷⁹ Perhaps he felt sorrow that John had died while still a teenager and just married, or perhaps this is proof of his affection for John’s father William. John’s younger brother, also William, later became the closest friend and confidant of Edward’s son Edward III, who made him earl of Salisbury.

It was probably Hugh Audley and Roger Damory’s marriages to the most eligible women in England that prompted one of Edward’s household knights to stage a theatrical protest against the king’s promotion of new favourites in May 1317. As Edward dined at Westminster Hall at Pentecost, a woman entered, dressed as a stage-player – which must have pleased Edward, who loved actors – and riding a magnificently caparisoned horse. She rode around the hall, then turned to Edward on the dais, placed a letter in front of him, and rode out. Edward, amused, began to read the letter, but soon stopped, horrified; it was an indictment of the favouritism he showed his friends.⁸⁰ Although Edward released the woman and, impressed with the integrity of his household knight who had written the letter, gave him ‘abundant gifts’, he failed to take the sage advice. In 1317 and 1318, the pernicious influence of Edward’s favourites grew ever stronger, and unknown to anyone, the worst of them all, the man who would one day bring about the king’s downfall, waited in the wings for his opportunity.