8

Robbery, Holy Oil and an Impostor

The year 1317 saw a further deterioration in the already dreadful relations between Edward II and the earl of Lancaster, and the king foolishly allowed his friends Roger Damory, Hugh Audley and William Montacute to encourage him in his hatred and distrust of his cousin. At a council meeting at Clarendon in early 1317, they openly attacked him, calling him a traitor.¹ Lancaster sent messengers to the king, claiming that ‘he fears [their] deadly stratagems’ and complaining that ‘they have already carried off the earl’s wife to his disgrace and shame’.² Lancaster asked Edward to expel the earl of Surrey, Damory, Audley and Montacute from court, and demanded ‘such satisfaction as he can get for the wrong done to him’.³ He wrote to Edward to complain that his companions were ‘not suitable to stay beside you or in your service … but you have held them dearer than they ever were before … every day you give them of your substance, so that little or nothing remains to you’.⁴ Pope John XXII was also concerned about his extravagance and ability to pick the wrong friends, and wrote to the king frequently in 1317 and 1318 suggesting that he reduce his household expenses, hear divine offices with attention and reverence, and ‘remove those friends whose youth and imprudence injure the affairs of the realm’.⁵ Edward, as usual, ignored this sound advice, and responded to Lancaster, abruptly and impatiently, ‘I will avenge the despite done to the earl when I can; I refuse to expel my household; for the abduction of his wife let him seek a remedy in law only.’⁶

Damory, Audley and Montacute had no intention of allowing Lancaster to diminish their vast influence over Edward, and selfishly counselled the king to remain hostile to his cousin. The Flores calls them ‘men who stir up discord and many problems for the kingdom … supporting his [Edward’s] arrogance and lawless designs’.⁷ The three men may have had more sinister motives for their plots and schemes against Lancaster: if they managed to engineer his downfall on the grounds of treason, his lands would be forfeit to the Crown, and it is possible that they hoped to persuade Edward to share them out among themselves.⁸ Lancaster therefore had good reason to fear the royal favourites and to distrust the king, and in the summer and autumn of 1317, civil war threatened to break out.⁹

Edward asked his household and friends for advice about his hated cousin: ‘You see how the earl of Lancaster has not come to parliament. You see how he scorns to obey our commands. How does it seem to you?’ Some, no doubt Damory, Audley and Montacute among them, replied, ‘Let the king pursue and take his despiser, and when he is taken put him in prison or exile him.’ Other, wiser heads disagreed.¹⁰ Edward, who had not forgotten his vow to avenge Gaveston’s death on Lancaster, was inclined to agree with those who urged him to pursue the earl. Still, in the interests of trying to preserve the fragile peace, he summoned a council meeting to Westminster for 15 April 1317, inviting Lancaster and his confidant, Robert Holland. However, the two men failed to turn up, and Edward himself arrived three days late. He did send envoys to Lancaster, but to no avail.¹¹

Edward or his advisers made another attempt to meet and come to terms with Lancaster, and he and members of Edward’s council were summoned to a meeting to begin at Nottingham in July 1317. Roger Damory, Hugh Audley and William Montacute were not invited, but attended anyway. Edward arrived at Nottingham on 16 July and stayed there for three weeks, but once again, Lancaster failed to turn up. Edward sent him a letter remonstrating with him for holding private assemblies and for employing an unusual number of armed retainers, ‘whence the people are considerably frightened’.¹² Lancaster refused to meet Edward unless Damory, Audley, Montacute and the earl of Surrey left court, and Edward refused once again to send them away. It seemed that the two men would never be reconciled. Lancaster spent most of his time at his favourite residence of Pontefract and was by now almost completely isolated politically, but far too powerful for Edward to ignore, thanks to his vast wealth and his five earldoms; ‘By the size of his patrimony you may assess his influence,’ comments the Vita.¹³ Most of the magnates were, in 1317 and 1318, co-operating loyally with Edward, and Lancaster was very much a political outsider, followed only by some of the northern barons. For all Edward’s faults and excessive favour to his friends, he had proved himself skilled over the previous years at attracting, and maintaining, the support of a vast majority of his magnates.

Edward spent late April, including his thirty-third birthday, and the first half of May 1317 at Windsor, then returned to Westminster, where he stayed for a month. During his stay there, he gave twenty ells of striped cloth to William de Horsham and three others for ‘singing before the king in his chamber’, and two pounds to his violist Richard to help support his wife and children. He also paid Peter de Foresta two pounds for making him ‘a crown of wax of various colours and of various devices’ for the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist on 24 June.¹⁴ It was now exactly three years since his humiliating defeat at Bannockburn, but Edward had still not given up hope of defeating Robert Bruce; on 12 June, he ordered 1,400 barrels of wine, given to him by the inhabitants of Bordeaux and Saint Macaire for his use in the Scottish wars, to be sent to England.¹⁵ And Piers Gaveston was still on Edward’s mind. On 29 June, five years and ten days after his friend’s death, he ordered the abbot and convent of Thame to take on six additional monks to celebrate divine service daily for Gaveston’s soul and the souls of the king’s ancestors.¹⁶ Edward’s demands for prayers for Gaveston’s soul could be onerous. In the spring of 1317, the king asked Tupholme Abbey in Lincolnshire to take in a retired servant of his, but they replied, ‘Although they would gladly obey him in all things, their very small income is already heavily burdened with the charge of finding a chaplain to say Mass for the soul of Sir Piers Gaveston, late earl of Cornwall.’¹⁷

Pope John XXII was concerned about the state of affairs in England, telling Edward that the land and its inhabitants ‘are oppressed by wars, the Church is persecuted, and God’s judgements are ready to fall’, in contrast to the past, when England was ‘a terror to barbarians’.¹⁸ The cardinals he sent to negotiate between Edward and Robert Bruce arrived in Canterbury on 24 June 1317. They were Gaucelin D’Eauze or Duèse, a relative of the pope, and Luca Fieschi, an Italian nobleman by birth and a distant cousin of the king. Edward was at Woodstock when the cardinals arrived, attending the wedding of his squire Oliver de Bordeaux to Maud Trussell; he gave two pounds and ten shillings to be thrown over the heads of the couple at the chapel door, distributed nineteen pence in oblations during the nuptial mass, and gave Oliver and Maud rings worth thirty shillings each.¹⁹

On 7 July 1317, Edward founded the King’s Hall (Aula Regis) at Cambridge University, which maintained thirty-two scholars from 1319.²⁰ It was the second college founded at the university, after Peterhouse in 1284. In 1546, Edward’s descendant Henry VIII incorporated King’s Hall and Michaelhouse – founded in 1324 by the chief justice Hervey Staunton, a staunch ally of Edward – into his new foundation of Trinity College. Edward and his almoner Adam Brome also established Oriel College at Oxford in 1326, and Edward was the first king of England to found colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as one of two people throughout history to establish colleges at both universities, which he called ‘the twin jewels in our crown’.²¹ Fulfilling his vow after Bannockburn to found a friary in Oxford, Edward granted the Carmelites his palace of Beaumont in February 1318, and the Carmelites promised in return to celebrate divine service daily for Edward, Isabella and their children, and for the souls of Edward’s ancestors.²² Edward II is especially important in the history of Cambridge: in March 1317, he asked the pope to recognise its official status as a university, and John XXII duly granted a bull to this effect on 9 June 1318.²³ The king also asked John to ‘extend and perpetuate the privileges’ of the university in March 1318.²⁴

Edward II liked books: he owned an illuminated biography of Edward the Confessor in French which cost fifty-eight shillings, a French romance (any kind of fiction, not necessarily a love story) which had belonged to his grandmother Eleanor of Provence and was delivered to him in 1298, a Latin history of the kings of England, a Latin prayer book, a book called De Regimine Regum (On the Ruling of Kings), and gave a romance of Tristan and Isolde to his favourite Hugh Despenser in 1326.²⁵ Unlike his father Edward I and son Edward III, however, he showed little interest in the exploits of King Arthur. Edward borrowed books – the lives of St Thomas Becket and St Anselm – from the library at Canterbury Cathedral, which he failed to return.²⁶ An inventory carried out at the Exchequer in 1323 revealed a booklet written ‘in a language unknown to the English’, which was in fact Welsh, and a book bound in green leather containing the chronicle of Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada, one of the predecessors of Edward’s uncle Sancho as archbishop of Toledo.²⁷ Edward also loved drama, and in May 1306 spent five shillings and five pence on silk and other material ‘for tunics made in the Gascon fashion, for the prince [of Wales]’s plays’.²⁸

Although Edward’s taste in books and decoration usually ran to the religious, he did enjoy more secular themes too, and ordered his painter Jack of St Albans to paint scenes from the life of Edward I in the lesser hall at Westminster, while a picture of four knights on their way to a tournament adorned his hall at Langley.²⁹ In February 1326, various items including colours, Arabic gum and white lead were bought for Jack to illustrate a book he was making for the king.³⁰ Edward bought a painting of St John the Baptist from John the Painter of Lincoln, which he kept in his chamber, and in 1322, ordered his tent on a Scottish expedition to be decorated with a picture of the evangelists.³¹ Shortly before he turned seventeen in April 1301, he ordered a painter named William of Northampton to make ‘a picture of blessed Thomas the martyr with the four knights who slew him’ at Chester Castle.³² This means Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury murdered in 1170 at the instigation of Edward’s great-great-grandfather Henry II. Like his father, Edward venerated Becket: he was taken on pilgrimage to Canterbury for the first time at the age of fifteen months in July 1285, visited Becket’s shrine sixteen times in the nineteen and a half years of his reign, and made offerings on Becket’s feast day every year.³³ He inherited from his father, and passed on to his son, a large number of holy relics, including a thorn from the Crown of Thorns ‘in a gold box ornamented with diverse precious stones’, a fragment of the True Cross ‘in a precious gold cross’, the blood and a bone of St George, the blood and hair of St Stephen, a tooth of St Edward the Confessor, and sundry relics from other saints including John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Agatha, Agnes, Jerome, James the Less and the 11,000 virgins.³⁴

The Sempringham annalist says, oddly, that in 1317 ‘there issued from the earth water-mice with long tails, larger than rats, with which the fields and meadows were filled in the summer and in August’.³⁵ Edward passed through Shelford in Nottinghamshire on 8 August 1317, where he attended Masses and distributed five shillings and sixpence in oblations at the church for the soul of his nephew the earl of Gloucester, ‘whose heart lies there inhumed’, although the rest of the young man’s body was buried at Tewkesbury Abbey, Gloucestershire.³⁶ At Lincoln, the king and queen stayed at the Gilbertine priory of St Catherine’s, where the body of Edward’s mother Queen Eleanor had rested in November 1290 before her funeral cortège wound its way south to Westminster Abbey. Whether Edward stopped to admire the Eleanor Cross at Lincoln and to remember his mother is not known, but his journey to York itself is interesting: he stayed as far to the east of Pontefract, the earl of Lancaster’s stronghold, as possible. The most direct route would have taken him right through the town, but Lancaster had blocked his way by placing armed guards on the roads and bridges south of York.³⁷ Edward was furious that one of his subjects would dare to impede his progress through his own kingdom, and later brought it up as one of the charges against Lancaster at his trial. Civil war between Edward and Lancaster, the two most powerful men of the kingdom, loomed once more, and the Scottish situation – despite the peace treaty arranged by the pope a few months earlier – did not improve. The Scots invaded the north of England in early July 1317, and Edward summoned an army at Newcastle in mid-September to go against them, though, as frequently happened, he later postponed and then cancelled the campaign.³⁸

The king and queen arrived in York in early September, and sometime that month must have conceived their third child, Eleanor of Woodstock, born in June 1318. Before Edward’s arrival in York, he sent envoys to Pontefract to negotiate with the earl of Lancaster, to try to make peace so that the Scottish campaign could proceed.³⁹ The envoys’ aim was to persuade the king and the earl to meet face-to-face and resolve their difficulties; ‘a love-day without the clash of arms,’ as the Vita puts it. Unfortunately, Lancaster claimed to have heard a rumour that if he came to Edward’s presence, the king would ‘either have his head or consign him to prison’, and, whether that was true or not, refused to meet Edward.⁴⁰ At the instigation of the two cardinals who had recently arrived in the country – they were with Edward at York in September – a date was finally set for a meeting, although it was eventually postponed until October 1318.⁴¹ For now, at least, Edward agreed to take no hostile action against Lancaster and his adherents, and Lancaster agreed to attend the next parliament, due to be held at Lincoln in January 1318. Finally, Edward dismissed most of his soldiers, and Lancaster removed his guards from the roads and bridges south of York.

At the beginning of October 1317, Edward left York to return to London. The road through Pontefract was now clear, but instead of doing the sensible thing and ignoring Lancaster, Edward unwisely took it into his head, despite his promise a few days earlier not to take action against his cousin, to command his men to take up arms and attack him. One of Edward’s friends – most likely Roger Damory – had persuaded him, in his own selfish interests, that the earl posed a threat to Edward and that he should attack him first. Fortunately for the stability of his kingdom, Edward, who was incapable of distinguishing between good and bad advice and who tended to believe and act on whatever the last person had told him, informed the earl of Pembroke beforehand what he was intending to do. He said, ‘I have been told that the earl of Lancaster is lying in ambush, and is diligently preparing to catch us all by surprise.’⁴² The astute Pembroke, who fortunately still retained some influence over the wayward king, managed to convince Edward that this was not the case, and the party returned to London safely – despite the fact that Lancaster did his utmost to make matters worse by leading his men out to the top of the castle ditch and jeering at Edward as he and his retinue travelled past.⁴³Edward was understandably incensed at this appalling rudeness and lèse-majesté, and he was not a man to forgive and forget an insult; it would be another of the charges against Lancaster at his trial. On his journey to London, Edward’s spirits might have been raised somewhat by Dulcia Withstaff, mother of his fool ‘King’ Robert, who came to visit him and received ten shillings.⁴⁴

In the meantime a shocking event had taken place near Rushyford, between Darlington and Durham. On 1 September, Sir Gilbert Middleton attacked the new bishop of Durham, Edward’s cousin Louis Beaumont, Louis’s brother Henry, and the cardinals Gaucelin D’Eauze and Luca Fieschi, while the party was on its way to Durham for Beaumont’s consecration. Middleton robbed the four men and imprisoned the Beaumonts at Mitford Castle until mid-October 1317, though the cardinals were soon freed, and the sheriff of Yorkshire gave them twelve horses to continue their way to Durham.⁴⁵ It is possible that the earl of Lancaster was involved in the attack, and it was believed at the time that the Scots were involved too, though this was never proved. Although the cardinals had come to mediate between Edward and Robert Bruce, their sympathy and support, like the pope’s, were entirely in Edward’s favour, and Bruce had already declared that he would refuse to meet them unless they acknowledged him as king.⁴⁶ John XXII, rightly or wrongly, blamed the Scots, telling Edward that he knew Robert Bruce had perpetrated outrages on the cardinals and ‘laid violent hands’ on the bishop of Carlisle as well.⁴⁷ The furious Gaucelin D’Eauze and Luca Fieschi excommunicated Middleton and his adherents, and Thomas of Lancaster, mortified, escorted the cardinals to Boroughbridge, twenty miles north-west of York, where the earls of Pembroke and Hereford met them and took them to Edward.⁴⁸ On 20 September, Edward, also furious and embarrassed that two high-ranking and well-connected churchmen, one of them his own relative, had been attacked in his kingdom, declared that he would ‘punish the sons of iniquity’ who had perpetrated the outrage.⁴⁹ He was as good as his word: three of his squires captured Middleton and his brother John at Mitford Castle in January 1318 and sent them to Edward, and the king ordered fourteen other squires to deliver them to the Tower of London.⁵⁰ On 24 January 1318, royal justices sentenced Gilbert Middleton to execution, and he suffered a terrible death by hanging, drawing and quartering.⁵¹ Thomas of Lancaster escaped punishment over the episode.

And the powerful earl’s lawlessness had not yet run its course. In early October 1317, he seized Knaresborough Castle in Yorkshire, which his retainer John Lilburn didn’t surrender to the king until January 1318, and by the beginning of November had also forcibly gained possession of Alton Castle in Staffordshire.⁵² Knaresborough had formerly belonged to Piers Gaveston, Alton to Theobald Verdon, but far more importantly as far as Lancaster was concerned, Roger Damory was the custodian of both.⁵³ Clearly, Lancaster saw Damory as his chief enemy at court, and determined to attack him. Edward ineffectually sent out orders to various sheriffs to retake the castles, and commanded Lancaster to ‘desist completely from these proceedings’.⁵⁴ Not only did Lancaster fail to obey, he took numerous armed men to besiege and capture castles in Yorkshire which belonged to John de Warenne, earl of Surrey: Sandal, Conisborough and Wakefield. Lancaster also ejected Maud Nerford, Surrey’s mistress, from her property in Wakefield, and by the beginning of 1318 had taken firm control over Surrey’s Yorkshire lands.⁵⁵ Edward’s chief priority, as ever, was the safety and well-being of his ‘favourites’, and he took Damory’s lands in Yorkshire, Herefordshire and Lincolnshire into his own hands on 18 October 1317 in an attempt to protect Damory from his cousin’s aggression, also ordering a clerk to remove Damory’s stud-farm from Knaresborough to Burstwick. He restored Damory’s lands to him on 2 December, assuming the danger from Lancaster was past.⁵⁶

Lancaster must have been dismayed on 15 November 1317 when the English, Welsh and Irish lands of the late earl of Gloucester were finally partitioned, nearly three and a half years after his death at Bannockburn, among his three sisters and their husbands. Hugh and Eleanor Despenser, who had fought so hard for their inheritance, now held lands worth £1,415 a year, Hugh and Margaret Audley lands worth £1,292, and Roger and Elizabeth Damory £1,287.⁵⁷ Although they were nowhere near the same league as Lancaster, who had a gross annual income of £11,000, this wealth catapulted all three men to the forefront of the nobility. Hugh Despenser had still not reached the lofty position he would later occupy as Edward’s favourite – Edward seems barely to have noticed him before 1318 – but as co-owner of the de Clare inheritance and the new lord of Glamorgan, he had become far more significant than previously. Lancaster’s nemesis Damory, now the king’s nephew-in-law, rich in his own right and not merely dependent on Edward’s favour, with vast influence over the king, had become a much more powerful enemy. Lancaster’s fear and hatred of him knew no bounds: the following July, he accused Damory of trying to murder him, and also claimed that he had intercepted letters at Pontefract, written by Edward and sent to Scotland, inviting the Scots to help kill the earl.⁵⁸

The earl of Lancaster was not the only man to fear the malign influence of the men who surrounded Edward. By late November 1317, a group of barons and prelates, sick of the dreadful relations between Edward and Lancaster and the constant political instability it engendered, had formed themselves into a loose coalition known to early twentieth-century historians as the ‘Middle Party’. The nucleus of the ‘party’ – an anachronistic term for the early fourteenth century – was the earl of Pembroke and Bartholomew Badlesmere, and also included the earl of Hereford, the archbishops of Canterbury and Dublin, and the bishops of Norwich and Winchester. The group was loyal to the king and determined to improve the relations between himself and Lancaster. In order to achieve this, they needed to limit the harmful and self-serving influence his friends, especially Roger Damory, held over him. To this end, the earl of Pembroke and Bartholomew Badlesmere signed an indenture with Damory on 24 November 1317, wherein the favourite promised that he would do his best to prevent Edward from taking action prejudicial to himself or his kingdom – a telling comment which demonstrates what little faith Pembroke and Badlesmere had in Edward – and if he were unable to dissuade him, would inform Pembroke and Badlesmere as soon as possible so that the three of them together could talk Edward out of whatever foolishness he might be planning. This was a sensible idea; the Flores, fairly, criticises Edward for making decisions ‘in secret in his chamber, with his intimates’, and complains that he broke his word, ‘forgetting in the morning what he had said in the evening’.⁵⁹ This indenture may be unique, or it may be one of a series which Pembroke and Badlesmere signed around this time with Edward’s friends, and the only one which happens to survive.⁶⁰

On 3 November 1317, Edward appointed another friend and ally as the new steward of Gascony: his rather extraordinary choice was Antonio di Pessagno, a merchant of Genoa.⁶¹ Pessagno, whose enormous wealth enabled him to make frequent loans to Edward, enjoyed a great deal of influence at the English court. In 1313, Biagio Aldobrandini of the banking firm the Frescobaldi wrote to his colleagues that Pessagno’s influence equalled Piers Gaveston’s: ‘He is now in such a condition that he fears nobody, and what he wants is made in the court … and the court is led according to his judgement.’⁶² A grateful Pessagno gave the king a gift of two camels.⁶³ Edward had owned a camel as a child, which he kept in the stables at Langley, and his father brought a lion and a lynx back to England in 1289, when he was five.⁶⁴ In the early 1300s, Edward took a lion with him on his travels around the country, with its own cart, a collar, a silver chain and a keeper called Adam of Lichfield.⁶⁵ He kept a lion and a leopard in the Tower of London throughout his reign, allowing each animal six pence a day for sustenance, while Peter Fabre of Montpellier, ‘keeper of the king’s lion and leopard’, received only one and a half pence a day in wages.⁶⁶ Both the lion and the leopard ate a quarter of mutton daily, even during the Great Famine, while six pence a day was more than most people in the country earned. Edward loved animals: he kept and bred greyhounds, bought the stud-farm of the late earl of Surrey in 1304, and frequently sent men to Spain to purchase horses for him. In the first year of his reign alone, he spent almost £1,200 buying horses.⁶⁷

Edward and Queen Isabella spent Christmas 1317 at Westminster, where Edward spent one pound, thirteen shillings and six pence on a ‘great wooden table’ to be placed in the palace hall, and also paid thirty pounds to Thomas de Hebenhith, mercer of London, for ‘a great hanging of wool, woven with figures of the king and earls on it’. By New Year, someone had realised that constantly taking the hanging up and down was damaging it, so Edward paid Thomas de Verlay six shillings and three pence to make and sew a border of green cloth around it.⁶⁸ The court spent New Year at Windsor, where Edward gave silver-gilt goblets worth seven pounds each to twenty-five knights, including Robert Umfraville, earl of Angus, who had been captured after Bannockburn.⁶⁹ This year, it was the turn of Thomas de Weston, a squire of Edward’s household, to act as King of the Bean, and he received ‘a silver-gilt basin with stand and cover, and a silver-gilt pitcher to match’ from the king.⁷⁰ Edward gave rings to his nieces Margaret and Elizabeth and his sons Edward and John, although the latter was only sixteen months old. His five-year-old great-niece Joan Gaveston, Piers’ daughter, received a gold ring with two emeralds and three pearls, worth thirty-two shillings, and another gold ring with six emeralds, worth twenty marks, went to his sister Mary, the nun. Queen Isabella’s gift from her husband was an enamelled silver-gilt bowl, with foot and cover, worth seventeen pounds.⁷¹ Edward received a New Year gift of a sort from Pope John XXII, who on 29 December once more excommunicated ‘all those who invade the realm of England or disturb its peace’.⁷²

By New Year 1318, Isabella had probably passed the first trimester of pregnancy, and it is likely that the king knew she was expecting their third child. Now twenty-two, Isabella had so far played little discernible role in English politics, although she had by the mid-1320s gained a reputation as a mediator between the king and his barons. Isabella’s attitude towards Roger Damory and her husband’s other male favourites is a matter for conjecture, although at some point she gave Damory a number of splendid gifts for his chapel, including a chasuble of red cloth ‘sprinkled with diverse flowers of Indian colour’, and there is no evidence of any hostility towards them on her part.⁷³ In July 1317, Edward gave his wife the county of Cornwall, formerly Piers Gaveston’s, and in March 1318 granted her his county of Ponthieu for life.⁷⁴ And Isabella became even richer after 14 February 1318, when her aunt and Edward’s stepmother Queen Marguerite died at her castle of Marlborough in Wiltshire, in her late thirties, and the dower lands she had held passed by right to Isabella.⁷⁵

Edward’s reaction to Marguerite’s death is not recorded. He had been close to her before his accession, but possibly had never forgiven her for her opposition to Piers Gaveston in 1308. He appointed Marguerite’s sons, his teenage half-brothers Thomas and Edmund, as the executors of her will.⁷⁶ On 8 March, Edward sent two pieces of Lucca cloth to lie over Marguerite’s body at Marlborough, and sent six more pieces after it was moved to London shortly afterwards. He visited his stepmother’s remains at St Mary’s church in Southwark on 14 March, and attended her funeral at the Greyfriars church the following day, purchasing six pieces of Lucca cloth for himself and two pieces each for his sister Mary and Roger Damory.⁷⁷ After Marguerite’s funeral, Edward travelled via Bow, Thundersley and Cressing to Clare Castle in Suffolk, where he spent 23–27 March 1318 with Roger Damory and his wife, Edward’s niece Elizabeth, who was about seven months pregnant. Shortly before 18 May, she gave birth to a daughter, also Elizabeth, who would be Damory’s only legitimate child and therefore his heir. Edward gave Damory’s valet the huge sum of twenty pounds for bringing him news of the birth, an enormous increase on the price of the silver cup he had sent to little Elizabeth’s half-sister Isabella Verdon the year before, although both girls were his great-nieces – probably evidence of his strong feelings for Roger Damory.⁷⁸ The Damorys had a household of at least fifty people, and their extant accounts of 1319 provide a fascinating insight into what they ate and drank in a day: forty gallons of ale and eight of wine, a hundred and fifty eggs, two ducks, six hens, thirteen pullets, half a carcass of salt beef, half a pig, a quantity of mutton, forty herrings, two salt stockfish, two ling, salmon, whiting and eels.⁷⁹

On 18 March 1318, Edward sent more envoys, led by his good friend and ally William Melton, archbishop of York, to Scotland to arrange a peace treaty with Robert Bruce. A year later, he belatedly remembered to obtain the pope’s permission to negotiate with an excommunicate.⁸⁰ Unfortunately for him, Robert Bruce finally managed to take the vital port of Berwick-on-Tweed on 2 April, after several unsuccessful attempts, although the castle, under the command of Sir Roger Horsley, held out until July.⁸¹ The treachery of the Englishman Peter Spalding, who was responsible for a section of the town wall and whom the Scots ‘bribed by a great sum of money … and the promise of land’, contributed in large part to James Douglas’s success.⁸² Edward, declaring himself ‘justly incensed’ at the ‘carelessness’ of the burgesses of Berwick, ordered their goods and chattels to be seized.⁸³ It was vital for Edward to retake Berwick, and on 10 June he summoned the earl of Lancaster and many others to muster against the Scots.⁸⁴However, because of the endless conflict with Lancaster, the expedition did not take place until the following year, allowing Robert Bruce ample time to strengthen the town fortifications and make it much harder for Edward to retake. In May 1318, Scottish forces invaded Yorkshire, drove off many cattle, and ‘made men and women captives, making the poor folks drive the cattle, carrying them off to Scotland without any opposition’.⁸⁵ The year 1318 was not, however, an unqualified success for the Bruces: the pope excommunicated Robert again on 28 June, and Robert’s brother Edward, high king of Ireland, was killed at the battle of Faughart in October.⁸⁶ The Vita Edwardi Secundi in 1318 recalls the story of the biblical king Nebuchadnezzar, who ‘began to flourish and the nations and kingdoms to bow down to him’ only in the twelfth year of his reign, and goes on to say that ‘neither has our King Edward who has reigned eleven years and more, done anything that ought to be preached in the market place or upon the house-tops’.⁸⁷

In late April, Edward turned his attention to Langley Priory, which he had founded in 1308 and where he had buried Piers Gaveston, and wrote to the pope asking his permission to found a house of Dominican nuns there.⁸⁸ He probably intended to make his foundation independent of his own grants of money from the Exchequer, and as the Dominicans were not allowed to own property, he planned for the nuns to hold lands in trust for them.⁸⁹ Although Edward wrote again to John XXII in October 1318 and January 1319 asking him to appropriate the church of Kingsclere for the sisters and to expedite the process, and wrote to the master of the Dominicans asking him to have seven sisters ready to send, his plans foundered.⁹⁰ In 1349, his son Edward III finally established the sisters’ house. Edward II took a great interest in Langley Priory: he gave them his garden next to the parish church, two plots of land, his dwelling called ‘Little London’ until the priory was ready for habitation, 700 marks for the costs of building the priory, and increased its annual grants to 500 marks a year in September 1312.⁹¹

On 18 June 1318, Queen Isabella gave birth to a daughter, Eleanor, at Woodstock Palace in Oxfordshire. Edward had been on pilgrimage in Canterbury, but managed to arrive at Woodstock on the day of his daughter’s birth. The king and queen followed contemporary convention by naming their first daughter after her paternal grandmother, Eleanor of Castile, although the spelling ‘Eleanor’ didn’t appear until much later, and in the fourteenth century was spelt Alianor, Alianore or Alienora. Edward’s wardrobe accounts record a payment of 500 marks to Isabella for the ‘feast of her purification’.⁹² Shortly after her birth, Eleanor of Woodstock joined the household of her brothers Edward and John, under the care of a nurse named Joan du Bois.⁹³

In July, Edward summoned a meeting of his great council at Northampton, and he and Queen Isabella left Woodstock on 27 June, only nine days after she had borne Eleanor. The council meeting at Northampton is best known for a ‘certain unknown and ignoble individual’ named John of Powderham, who came before Edward, claiming to be the rightful king of England. John said that he ‘was the true heir of the realm, as the son of the illustrious King Edward [I]’, and declared that ‘my lord Edward [II] … was not of the blood royal, nor had any right to the realm’. Edward, who never lacked an ironic sense of humour, greeted John with the words ‘Welcome, my brother’. John answered, ‘Thou art no brother of mine, but falsely thou claimest the kingdom for thyself.’⁹⁴ John claimed to be the real son of Edward I and to have been switched in the cradle for a peasant baby.⁹⁵ In fact he was the son of a tanner from Exeter, and Edward summoned his parents to Northampton to have them questioned and examined.⁹⁶ John’s claims became the gossip of the kingdom and ‘annoyed the queen unspeakably’, though it is extremely doubtful that Isabella believed them.⁹⁷ The Anonimalle claims that Edward decided not to execute John, but to employ him as a court fool. However, several magnates, not named, ordered him to be hanged and drawn.⁹⁸ There was no truth at all to the story, but the impostor was given widespread credence; most people found it hard to accept the fact that their king preferred hedging, ditching and swimming to governing, fighting and jousting, and believed John ‘all the more readily because the said lord Edward resembled the elder lord Edward [I] in none of his virtues’, according to Lanercost.⁹⁹ John of Powderham suffered death by drawing and hanging sometime between 20 and 24 July, and his body remained on public display until long afterwards.¹⁰⁰ It is unclear whether Edward witnessed the execution.

The appearance of the impostor might have encouraged Edward to pursue a topic he had been thinking about for some time, and he wrote to the pope asking for permission to be re-anointed with the holy oil of St Thomas Becket. His sister and brother-in-law the duke and duchess of Brabant had brought the oil to his coronation in 1308, but Edward decided not to use it.¹⁰¹ Dwelling now on the many misfortunes that had befallen himself and his realm since his accession and preferring not to accept his own culpability, he decided that his failure to be anointed with the oil, which was connected with a miraculous vision that the fifth king after the time of St Thomas Becket – Edward – would be a good man and a champion of the Church, was to blame. A friar named Nicholas de Wisbech, formerly the confessor of Edward’s sister Duchess Margaret, persuaded the king to take up the matter with the pope, so that the miraculous properties of the oil might end his political troubles. The pope cautiously agreed, declaring that it would be ‘no superstition or sin’ for Edward to have himself re-anointed, but refused to send a cardinal and advised him to conduct the ceremony privately to avoid scandal.¹⁰² Edward eventually came to his senses and sent an astonishingly candid letter to John XXII condemning his own weakness and ‘dove-like simplicity’ in believing the friar’s blandishments.¹⁰³

Since April 1318, a group of barons and prelates had been negotiating with the earl of Lancaster, and trying to persuade Edward and his unruly cousin to overcome their hostility to each other. In June, they came to a preliminary agreement: Edward would uphold the hated Ordinances, govern by the counsel of his magnates, and conciliate Lancaster, who was threatened with sanctions if he continued to hold armed assemblies. The Bridlington chronicler wondered at this agreement, declaring that bits were fastened on the king’s teeth and that those who merited execution were given absolution instead, which, he thought, fostered hatred.¹⁰⁴ Lancaster’s violence and lawlessness were thus condoned, as he was too powerful for the king to ignore and his co-operation with Edward was essential if England was ever to find peace. Lancaster eventually consented to meet the king on 7 August 1318, and the two men exchanged the kiss of peace. Edward gave his cousin a fine palfrey horse ‘in recognition of his great love’ of Lancaster.¹⁰⁵ A formal agreement, the Treaty of Leake, was signed in the town of Leake near Loughborough two days later.¹⁰⁶ Part of the agreement was for Roger Damory, Hugh Audley and William Montacute to be sent away from court. Surprisingly, Edward agreed. He would never have consented to Piers Gaveston’s removal from court, at least not without being threatened and digging his heels in for months on end, and his actions here suggest that he had grown tired of his friends and was not willing to fight for them. On 20 October, Bartholomew Badlesmere replaced William Montacute in the key role of Edward’s household steward, while Montacute himself was appointed steward of Gascony a month later, replacing Antonio di Pessagno.¹⁰⁷ Although this was an honour, Montacute must have known that he was deliberately being sent far away from Edward to limit his influence over the king. And although Roger Damory’s friendship with Edward was certainly not over, without constant access to the king’s presence, his influence over him would henceforth be severely limited. And more good news came in the autumn of 1318. On 14 October, Roger Mortimer’s ally John de Bermingham defeated and killed Edward Bruce, high king of Ireland, at the Battle of Faughart (also called the Battle of Dundalk), one of the very few military successes of Edward’s reign. Bermingham sent Bruce’s head to Edward for inspection; one hopes that Edward’s friend Donald of Mar, who was Bruce’s nephew, didn’t have to see it. In gratitude, the king granted the earldom of Louth to Bermingham.¹⁰⁸

Hugh Despenser, the new lord of Glamorgan, committed a shocking act sometime in 1318: he removed Llywelyn Bren, the Welsh rebel, who in 1316 had attacked Caerphilly Castle (which now belonged to Despenser), from the Tower of London, and had him grotesquely executed in Cardiff. Despenser’s murder of Bren – for such it was, as he had no authority to commit such a dreadful act – attracted little censure or condemnation at the time, but was used against him three years later, and came back to haunt him in 1326. Edward did not punish Despenser, which is perhaps explicable by the fact that Despenser had already begun his rise in the king’s affections. The parliament of October 1318 confirmed him as Edward’s chamberlain, and he thus became the man who controlled access to the king both in person and in writing, a very influential position which Despenser exploited to the hilt. About thirty in 1318, Despenser was very well connected. His elder half-sister Maud Chaworth married the earl of Lancaster’s brother Henry, the earl of Norfolk who died in 1306 was his step-grandfather and the earl of Warwick who died in 1315 his uncle, and the earl of Ulster his mother’s first cousin. Despenser married Edward II’s thirteen-year-old niece Eleanor de Clare on 26 May 1306 in the presence of her grandfather Edward I, who paid Hugh Despenser the Elder £2,000 for his son’s marriage and gave Eleanor £29 to buy herself jewels.¹⁰⁹ Although the Despensers were reasonably wealthy and owned close to seventy manors in the Midlands and south-east of England, Despenser would not inherit an earldom and was thus hardly a brilliant match for the king of England’s eldest granddaughter. The marriage seems to have been successful on a personal level, however, and the couple had at least ten children together during their twenty-year marriage.

The later chronicler Geoffrey le Baker writes of Edward’s intense indignation at Despenser’s 1318 appointment as chamberlain, as he hated him.¹¹⁰ Although this is surely an exaggeration, Edward had never shown Despenser any favour before 1318, except for granting him permission to hunt in 1312, two wardships and the lands of two Scotsmen shortly before Bannockburn, which Despenser never obtained thanks to Edward’s failures in Scotland.¹¹¹ Edward ordered the seizure of Despenser’s goods at the beginning of 1310 as he had gone overseas without permission to attend a jousting tournament in Mons, and Despenser seems to have allied himself in the early years of Edward’s reign with his uncle Warwick rather than his royalist father, to the anger of Edward’s followers: the Ordainers demanded in 1311 that the members of the king’s household who had attacked Despenser be removed from court.¹¹² Despite being Edward’s nephew by marriage (though only about three to five years his junior) and son of one of his closest allies, Despenser’s political influence prior to 1317 was severely limited, and he owned no lands at all; his father had to grant him the revenues of six of his own manors to give Despenser at least some income.¹¹³ It is even possible that one of Edward’s motives in pretending to believe in the countess of Gloucester’s pregnancy was reluctance to hand over a wealthy lordship to a man he disliked and distrusted, although in 1317, the king, presumably recognising that Despenser would become rich and influential and it might be a good idea to court him as an ally, granted him several castles and manors in South Wales in lieu of 600 marks he owed Despenser.¹¹⁴ Despenser’s wife Eleanor, born in 1292, was a lady-in-waiting of Queen Isabella, and Edward’s favourite niece (rather than her sister Elizabeth, as he pretended in 1316); he even paid her expenses out of court, a sign of great favour.¹¹⁵ Roger Damory’s departure from court – which Despenser, as one of the negotiators of the Treaty of Leake, may well have had a hand in – gave him free rein to exercise his charms over the king.

Parliament confirmed Despenser as chamberlain ‘at the request and counsel of the magnates’, which suggests that the earl of Pembroke and his allies trusted him, and even the earl of Lancaster did not object to his appointment, even though he hated Despenser’s father.¹¹⁶ The magnates’ trust of Despenser implies that he had kept his true nature – his boundless ambition, greed, ruthlessness, cruelty and potential for despotism – hidden; they would never have placed him so close to the king if they had had the slightest idea how he would behave in office, how dangerous he would prove to be, and how much cause they would have to regret his appointment.