11
When he heard the news of his and his son’s perpetual banishment from their homeland, Hugh Despenser the Elder ‘cursed the time that ever he begot Sir Hugh his son, and said that for him he had lost England’. He immediately departed from Dover, and took himself off abroad somewhere.1 As for his son Hugh Despenser, Edward II placed his friend under the protection of the men of the Cinque Ports, and Despenser, never one to sit around when there was money to be made, became a pirate in the English Channel, where he was ‘master of the seas, their merchandise and chattels, and no ship got through unharmed’. Despenser attacked two great Genoese ships off Sandwich, killed their crew, and took for himself the vast wealth he found, supposedly £40,000.2 Edward II’s son paid compensation in the 1330s.3 In June 1325, Edward officially pardoned Despenser for his piracy, on the extremely dubious grounds that ‘he through fear of death adhered to diverse malefactors at sea and on land, and stayed with them to save his life, while they perpetrated depredations and other crimes’.4
Parliament ended on 22 August 1321, and Edward left Westminster five days later and travelled to the island of Thanet in Kent. It seems as though he sent most of his household away while he stayed with Despenser, plotting revenge on their enemies, as the well-informed royal clerk and chronicler Adam Murimuth suggests.5 In the meantime, the Marchers retired to Oxford to stay close at hand in case Edward attempted to recall the Despensers. As they surely knew, Edward had no intention of allowing his friends to remain in exile. Over the next few months, he proved himself energetic and extremely capable in bringing about their return, which must have caused some people to wonder why he didn’t behave like that more often; only when his favourites were threatened and his personal feelings were involved did he stir himself to action. Edward had a very loyal ally in the autumn of 1321: Queen Isabella. Between 3 and 24 August, and again between 23 October and 5 November, he granted her custody of the great seal, demonstrating the enormous trust he placed in his wife.6 Isabella hated the Despensers and must have been glad to see them go into exile, but she hated to see her husband’s royal powers eroded even more.
The king arrived at Portchester on 4 October, and stayed for eight days. It is likely that Edward secretly met Hugh Despenser again there, to discuss their next moves; at his 1326 trial, Despenser was charged with returning to England illegally during his exile. Despenser’s crimes of 1321 might have encompassed more than piracy: Robert Batail of Winchelsea, baron of the Cinque Ports, and his allies attacked Southampton on 30 September. A petition by the people of Southampton claims that Batail and his men burnt and stole their ships, chattels, merchandise and goods to a loss of £8,000 in conspiracy with Hugh Despenser, who accused the townspeople of supporting the earl of Lancaster against the king.7 Given that Edward placed Despenser under the care of the men of the Cinque Ports, and that the king arrived at Portchester four days after the attack on Southampton, the two men’s involvement in this latest piece of lawlessness seems quite possible.
The plan which Edward and Despenser conceived centred around Bartholomew Badlesmere. Edward was furious with his former steward for switching sides and betraying him, and probably saw a kind of poetic justice in using Badlesmere as a dupe to strike at his other enemies. The king asked Isabella to set off for a pilgrimage to Canterbury, and on her way back to London, to ask for a night’s accommodation at Leeds Castle, which belonged to Badlesmere. In fact, the usual route from Canterbury to London went through northern Kent and nowhere near Leeds. Badlesmere was with the Marchers at Oxford, having put his Kent castles in a state of defence in response to Edward’s sending men into the county against him, but his wife was in residence at the castle. Edward hoped that she would refuse to allow Isabella entry, which would be a gross insult to the royal family and would give Edward an excuse to attack the castle.8 Badlesmere owned many lands in Kent, which isolated him geographically from his allies in the Welsh Marches and the south-west of England. Roger Clifford was the nephew of Badlesmere’s wife and Badlesmere’s daughter was married to Roger Mortimer’s son, so if Edward struck at Badlesmere, the Marchers would probably feel honour-bound to come to his aid and would thus be in armed rebellion against the king. Edward and Despenser knew that the earl of Lancaster detested Badlesmere, and gambled that the powerful magnate would not help him. In addition, although Lancaster and Isabella were not allies, she was his niece and the queen of England, and he could hardly be seen to defend a man who had insulted her. In this way, Edward could divide and conquer his enemies, and pick them off piecemeal.
The plan went off brilliantly. Isabella approached the castle with a military escort, and Lady Badlesmere refused to admit her, announcing that the queen must seek accommodation elsewhere.9 Isabella ordered her escort to force an entry into the castle, and the garrison opened up a volley of arrows at them, killing six. Feigning outrage at the insult to his consort, when he must have been delighted that all had gone according to plan, Edward mustered men to attack Leeds. Badlesmere’s wife had played right into his hands, and so did Badlesmere himself, informing Edward that he approved of his wife’s conduct.10 To ‘punish the disobedience and contempt against the queen’, Edward ordered the sheriffs of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire and Essex to muster knights and footmen ‘with horses and arms and as much power as possible’ at Leeds on 23 October, and sent the earls of Pembroke and Richmond and the Scottish earl of Atholl as an advance guard. The city of London sent 500 men to the siege.11 Edward arrived at Leeds on 26 October, and, apparently bored, ordered his hunting dogs sent to him.12 His half-brothers Norfolk and Kent, now twenty and twenty-one, joined the siege, as did the earls of Surrey and Arundel.13 With Pembroke and Richmond, this represented all the English earls alive in 1321 except Lancaster and Hereford, the shadowy Oxford who played no role whatsoever in Edward’s reign, and Edward’s son Edward of Windsor, earl of Chester, who was not yet nine.
Badlesmere begged the Marchers to take their armies and relieve the siege of Leeds. This put them in a very awkward position. Badlesmere was their ally, yet the men willing to fight against the Despensers were reluctant to take up arms against their king, and probably also reluctant to help a man who had so recently switched sides. Neither were they willing to be seen to acknowledge Badlesmere’s insult of the queen, and indeed two chroniclers say they refused to go to the aid of the Leeds garrison out of respect for Isabella.14 And the earl of Lancaster also played into Edward’s hands, as Edward and Despenser had no doubt predicted he would: he sent the Marchers a letter, ordering them to not to aid the detested Badlesmere.15 Leeds surrendered on 31 October, and thirteen members of the garrison were drawn and hanged shortly afterwards.16 Although this was not unprecedented – King Stephen hanged nearly a hundred of the Shrewsbury Castle garrison for holding out against him in 1138 – men had never been executed for holding a castle against the king within living memory.17 Edward’s father and grandfather had not hanged the men who held Kenilworth Castle against them in the 1260s. Still, the author of the Vita, at least, approved of Edward’s actions and described the executed men as ‘robbers, homicides, and traitors’, stating that ‘just as no one can build castles in the land without the king’s licence, so it is wrong to defend castles in the kingdom against the king’.18
By 12 November, Edward had heard that the earl of Lancaster was planning to hold an assembly at Doncaster, and forbade him, the earl of Hereford and more than 100 others from attending. Some of the men Edward ordered not to attend were in fact his allies, such as his half-brother Norfolk, his and Hugh Despenser’s brother-in-law Ralph Monthermer, the earls of Arundel, Surrey, Atholl and Angus, and Ralph Camoys, another of Despenser’s brothers-in-law.19 Lancaster’s attempts to win over men whose support he had no hope of gaining is a measure of the weakness of his position; he had hoped that the northern barons would help him, but they refused to go against the king.20 Lancaster and his Marcher allies, despite Edward’s prohibition, did meet on 29 November, probably at Pontefract rather than Doncaster.21 They drew up a petition which accused Edward of supporting Hugh Despenser in his piracy and his attempts to persuade the king to attack the peers of the realm, and asked the king to respond by 20 December. Edward had no intention of doing so, and informed Lancaster, in a surprisingly mild letter, that imposing a deadline on him gave the impression that the king was the earl’s subject, not vice versa.22
Edward ordered Walter Reynolds, archbishop of Canterbury, to summon the prelates to a provincial meeting at St Paul’s on 1 December, and the day before, sent the earls of Pembroke and Richmond and Robert Baldock, lawyer, archdeacon of Middlesex and Despenser adherent, to present the Despensers’ petition protesting their banishment.23 Owing to the difficulty of winter travel and the short notice of the meeting, only four bishops attended the convocation.24 Reynolds and the four bishops dutifully agreed to petition for the annulment of the judgement on the Despensers, while the earls of Arundel, Pembroke and Richmond claimed they had only consented to the exile through fear.25
After the meeting with Lancaster at Pontefract, the Marchers returned to the west of England and Wales with a great armed force.26 By now, it was clear to everyone that Edward would go after the men who had had the nerve to attack his friends, kill, assault and rob his subjects, hold castles against him, and steal from him personally, ‘because they had taken for their own use and wasted the goods of the exiles, which ought rather to have gone to the treasury’.27 On 30 November 1321 he began to make preparations for a campaign against the Marchers, despite the season – in the interests of his friends, he was no longer ‘paralysed by sloth’, as the Flores describes him.28 The alacrity with which he set off against the Marchers in the dead of winter stands in stark contrast to his frequent postponement and cancellation of Scottish campaigns. Queen Isabella, supporting her husband, allowed Edward to give custody of her castles at Devizes and Marlborough to Oliver Ingham and Robert Lewer (whom Edward had forgiven).29 Edward issued a safe-conduct for Hugh Despenser to return to England on 8 December, and the same was issued to Hugh Despenser the Elder on Christmas Day.30
Edward spent the first few days of December 1321 at Westminster and Isleworth. He sent a letter on the 10th to the treasurer, Walter de Norwich, asking him to ‘provide sixteen pieces of cloth for the apparelling of ourselves and our dear companion [Isabella], also furs, against the next feast of Christmas’, also ordering more cloth and linen for Isabella and her damsels and ‘other things of which we stand in need, against the great feast’. He paid £115 for these items.31 He then travelled to Cirencester, accompanied by the earls of Kent, Norfolk, Pembroke, Richmond, Surrey, Arundel, Atholl and Angus, and additionally, ‘many powerful barons … promised to lend aid to the lord king’.32 He spent Christmas 1321 at Cirencester, spending eighty-seven pounds on the festivities, while Queen Isabella probably remained at Langley.33
The king wrote on 4 January to ten of the bishops who had not attended Walter Reynolds’ convocation in December, asking their opinion on the judgement that the Despensers’ exile had been unlawful and should be revoked, demanding a response ‘without delay’.34 Thomas Cobham, bishop of Worcester, endorsed the verdict, but Walter Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter – who would be murdered in 1326 for his alliance with Edward and the Despensers – responded that although the judgement was unjust, only parliament could revoke it. An annoyed Edward rebuked Stapeldon for sending such a churlish reply and ordered the bishop to send a different answer and to come to him in person immediately. Stapeldon, a principled man, courageously risked the king’s wrath and repeated his first answer.35
Before Edward’s arrival in the west, the Marchers had seized Gloucester and thus controlled the bridge over the Severn. When they heard that the king was approaching Gloucestershire, they fled from him rather than engage him in battle, although their army was nearly four times bigger than his, burning and devastating the countryside as they went.36 Too afraid to confront the king directly, they once more vented their anger and frustration on innocents.37 The Marchers were desperately hoping for the earl of Lancaster’s support, but he failed to come to their aid – although he had begun besieging the royal castle of Tickhill near Doncaster by 10 January, presumably because its constable William Aune was Edward’s spy in the north.38 On 5 January, Edward sent letters to the pope and his brother-in-law Philip V of France, unaware that Philip had died three days earlier, and on the 9th, renewed the safe-conduct for Hugh Despenser.39
The Marchers retreated up the western side of the Severn, burning the bridges as they went to prevent Edward and his army crossing, but still not daring to confront him directly. Roger Mortimer, his uncle Roger Mortimer of Chirk and the earl of Hereford arrived in Bridgnorth before Edward, and ‘made a serious attack upon the king. They burned a great part of the town and killed very many of the king’s servants’.40 Edward ordered the constable of Bristol Castle to arrest those who had beaten, wounded and killed townspeople, stolen ‘garments, jewels, beasts and other goods,’ and imprisoned people ‘until they made grievous ransoms’.41 The Vita says bitterly that in 1322 the Marchers ‘killed those who opposed them, [and] plundered those who offered no resistance, sparing no one’.42 Edward sent men to attack the lands of his former chamberlain John Charlton, whose son and heir was married to one of Roger Mortimer’s daughters, forcing Charlton to leave his allies to go to defend his lands.43 Edward pardoned Charlton some months later, which in 1326 would prove to have been a bad mistake.44
Edward arrived at Shrewsbury on 14 January and finally gained the west bank of the Severn. He offered safe-conducts to those Marchers who were in the vicinity, the earl of Hereford and both Roger Mortimers, to come to him.45 Edward pointedly excluded Bartholomew Badlesmere by name from the safe-conducts, which demonstrates his fury at Badlesmere’s switching sides; Edward II was not a man to forgive and forget a betrayal. Hereford did not go to the king, but on 22 January the two Roger Mortimers ‘deserted their allies, and threw themselves on the king’s mercy’.46 The Vita goes on to say that the other Marchers were astonished and tearful at this desertion, but in fact the Mortimers had little choice but to submit to Edward: Sir Gruffydd Llwyd, a staunch ally of the king, and the violent Robert Lewer had been attacking their lands, the Mortimers’ men were deserting them, and they were running out of money. On 13 February, the two men were taken to be imprisoned in the Tower of London.47 Given the numerous crimes they had committed and encouraged in the previous few months – homicide, assault, theft, plunder, vandalism, false imprisonment, extortion – this fate was hardly undeserved, and a petition to Edward from ‘the community of Wales’ later that year begged the king not to let them return there.48
Edward took to calling the baronial rebels the ‘Contrariants’ around this time.49 Claiming that Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford, was supporting them, Edward publicly upbraided him when he reached Hereford, and went hunting in Orleton’s parks with his brother the earl of Kent, without Orleton’s permission.50 He spent thirty-five pounds to celebrate the feast of the Purification on 2 February at Hereford.51 On 6 February, Lord Berkeley and Hugh Audley the Elder, father of Edward’s former favourite, surrendered to Edward, who sent them to prison at Wallingford Castle. The following day he took Berkeley Castle into his own hands, unaware of the tragic role it would play in his life in 1327.52 The remaining Contrariants fled towards Yorkshire to seek refuge with the earl of Lancaster, their last hope of defeating Edward. Lancaster, using the pseudonym ‘King Arthur’, wrote to Robert Bruce’s adherent James Douglas to inform him that the earl of Hereford, Roger Damory, Hugh Audley and even the hated Bartholomew Badlesmere had come to him at Pontefract. The men were, treasonably, prepared to treat with the Scots, as long as the Scots did what had previously been discussed: ‘to come to our aid, and to go with us in England and Wales’ and ‘live and die with us in our quarrel’.53 Although Bruce remarked of Lancaster, ‘How will a man who cannot keep faith with his own lord keep faith with me?’ the Scots king was willing to take advantage of anything or anyone that might distract Edward from Scotland and sow discord in England.54 Lancaster had been suspected for some years of conspiring with the Scots; it was noticed that when their forces raided the north of England, they left his lands alone, and although Lancaster had a great army at Pontefract, he did not attempt to pursue the Scottish raiders.
Edward pointed out in a letter to Lancaster that joining the Contrariants would render him guilty of treason.55 His cousin responded untruthfully that he had drawn no rebels to himself, nor was he accustomed to nourish rebels, but if he knew where such were to be found, he would kill them or expel them from the country.56 Precisely when Edward decided to attack Lancaster is not clear, but it is possible that he had had it in mind for a long time; the man who had stated at the siege of Berwick in September 1319, ‘I have not forgotten the wrong that was done to my brother Piers’ was hardly likely to miss the opportunity to go after Lancaster and finally take revenge for the death of Gaveston. Still working on the principle of dividing and conquering his enemies, he may well have gambled that Lancaster would not intervene and help the Marchers until it was too late, as indeed happened. Edward knew his cousin well; he knew of his lethargy and his desire to stay at his favourite castle of Pontefract and take little active role in events while he did his best to control them from a distance. He also understood his cousin’s willingness to allow his personal feuds, the most obvious example being Bartholomew Badlesmere, to affect his political decisions; after all, he did exactly the same thing himself. Lancaster’s siege of Tickhill Castle gave him the excuse he needed to mount a campaign against his overbearing cousin, and on 13 February, he announced his intention of going to raise the siege.57 The king also issued another safe-conduct for the Despensers to return to England.58 By 16 February he had heard that Charles IV, Queen Isabella’s only surviving brother, had succeeded Philip V as king of France, and asked him to send men to help him fight Lancaster and the Contrariants. Given that Charles was Lancaster’s nephew, this was a rather impertinent request.59
Edward left Gloucester on 18 February, captured the earl of Lancaster’s great Warwickshire stronghold of Kenilworth on the 26th, and arrived at Coventry the following day. By 1 March, William Melton, archbishop of York, had discovered the treasonable correspondence between Lancaster and Scotland and sent it to Edward, who ordered him, the archbishop of Canterbury and all his sheriffs to make the letters public.60 Edward wrote on the same day to the barons and men of Winchelsea that they should ‘bear in mind how the king began what he has now done in part by their counsel lately given to the king on the water’, and reminded them that they had promised to help him wherever he went.61 When Edward met the sailors of Winchelsea at sea is uncertain; presumably it had something to do with Hugh Despenser’s piracy or the attack on Southampton. The Despensers met Edward on 3 March, bringing a large number of armed men with them. Edward must have been overjoyed to be reunited with Hugh Despenser, though no doubt most people were considerably less thrilled that the avaricious favourite and his unpopular father had returned. On the day he met them, Edward asked the Dominicans of Vienna to pray for himself, Isabella and their children.62 In a splendid piece of theatre, Hugh Despenser prostrated himself in the snow before the king, arms outstretched, and begged Edward not to unfurl his banners against the opposition, which would mean an outright declaration of war.63
Hearing of Edward’s advance, the earls of Lancaster and Hereford and their allies left Pontefract on 1 March, broke the siege of Tickhill, and took up position at Burton-on-Trent near Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire, which belonged to Lancaster. Edward seized Lancaster’s vast lands on 3 March.64 The Contrariants held the bridge at Burton against the king, but after three days of skirmishing their army was outflanked and they fled back to Pontefract. Edward pronounced them traitors, and ordered all the sheriffs of England, the justice of Chester and the bishop of Durham to arrest Lancaster, Hereford, Damory, Audley, Badlesmere, and others. Edward’s letter also mentions that he had been unable to cross the fords because of flooding, and the Sempringham annalist says that the earl of Lancaster lost many supplies ‘through a great flood of water’ when travelling from Pontefract to Tutbury on 1 March.65 The Rochester chronicler says that snow lay on the ground for most of the first three months of 1322, and that the roads were hazardous, impeding Edward’s progress; presumably a temporary thaw and a mass of melted snow caused the flooding.66 Edward reached Tutbury on 11 March, where the rebels had left some of their goods behind at the priory, including a barrel of sturgeon worth three pounds. The prior presented it to Edward, who allowed him to keep it, although he ordered the prior to send the other goods, which included jewels, to John Sturmy and Giles of Spain, squires of his chamber.67 The king also seized a vessel of gold and silver valued at over £140, which belonged to Roger Damory.68
When the Contrariants fled from Burton-on-Trent, they left Damory, who had been badly wounded while trying to prevent the royal army crossing the river, behind. He was condemned to the traitor’s death, but the court informed him that because Edward had loved him well in the past, the king would respite the punishment – although the charge of treason stood, which meant that Damory’s heir, his daughter Elizabeth, and her descendants were perpetually disinherited.69 Damory died of his wounds at Tutbury Priory on 12 March, though Lanercost and the French Chronicle of London give ‘grief’ as the cause of his death, and his widow Edward’s niece Elizabeth claimed in 1326, rather disingenuously, that he was ‘pursued and oppressed until he died’.70 The less sympatheticVitapoints out that Damory was an impoverished knight who rose to prominence through the king’s favour, so that when he turned against Edward ‘many marked him down as ungrateful’.71 Edward was not present at his deathbed, having moved on to Derby; how he felt about the man he had once loved dying in rebellion against him is a matter for speculation.
Once back at Pontefract, some of the Contrariants decided to throw themselves on Edward’s mercy. The earl of Lancaster, however, believed that this was unnecessary and that his close kinship to the king would save him.72 After much debate, they decided to flee to Dunstanburgh, another of Lancaster’s great castles on the Northumbrian coast. According to the very pro-Lancastrian Brut, Lancaster at first refused, protesting that they would be seen as treacherously fleeing towards the Scots, but Roger Clifford’s waving his sword in his face soon changed his mind, and they set off for the north.73 Queen Isabella wrote to Andrew Harclay, sheriff of Cumberland, and Simon Warde, sheriff of Yorkshire, ordering them to cut off the retreating rebels.74 The Contrariants had only managed the thirty miles to Boroughbridge, where the Great North Road met the River Ure, when they found Harclay waiting for them, and were forced into battle on 16 March. Boroughbridge had, perhaps ironically, once belonged to Piers Gaveston.75The royalist army led by Harclay took up schiltron formations, used to such great effect against Edward at Bannockburn, and defeated the Contrariants, despite the greatly superior numbers of the Contrariants’ army. The earl of Hereford died horribly, with a lance thrust up his back passage by a Welsh soldier hiding under the bridge; whether Edward felt sorrow, pity, triumph or something else for his brother-in-law’s terrible death is unfortunately not recorded.76 A document proving the Contrariants’ traitorous alliance with Scotland was, perhaps rather conveniently, found on Hereford’s body, and the possessions he had stored at Fountains Abbey were sent to Harclay, including a gold cup, a silver cup, forty dishes and two horses worth three pounds.77
Lancaster asked for an overnight truce, during which many of the Contrariants’ soldiers deserted, and surrendered to Harclay the following day. The Vita gives an account of how the Contrariant knights and noblemen who had fought tried to escape:
Some left their horses and putting off their armour looked round for ancient worn-out garments, and took to the road as beggars. But their caution was of no avail, for not a single well-known man among them all escaped. O calamity! To see men lately dressed in purple and fine linen now attired in rags and imprisoned in chains!
The author, however, who disliked the rebels even more than he disliked the Despensers, immediately goes on to describe the royalist victory as ‘a marvellous thing, and one indeed brought about by God’s will and aid, that so scanty a company should in a moment overcome so many knights’.78 As well as pretending to be beggars, some men tried to flee the country or to hide by donning religious habits.79 Edward sent members of his household to round up the escaping Contrariants and seize their goods, and inhabitants of Yorkshire joined in the hunt. One knight gave himself up to the rector of Escrick and handed over to him his sword and the seven shillings he was carrying, and another surrendered to the abbot of Fountains and gave him his money, sword, silver cups, dishes, saucers and a horn. Two knights caught in Knaresborough were among those who had thrown away their fine possessions, and were ‘taken bare’. Eleven men were captured thirty-five miles away at Selby the day after the battle, and their goods were sent to the king. They included a pair of silk garters adorned with silver and red enamel with a cross bar of silver, a ‘great silver chain containing twelve links with a pipe at the end,’ twelve buttons of green glass adorned with silver gilt, eight of silver wire and five of white silver, seven pearls the size of peas, a purse of silk worth a mark, a book worth ten shillings, eight horses, six silver dishes, two ‘worn swords’ and an old dagger. Three Contrariants captured at Ripon handed over seven horses, armour, a bed and nine ells of striped cloth, men of Edward’s marshalsea seized a red doublet worth forty marks which belonged to John, Lord Giffard, and a John Ryther took possession of a ‘coat of armour of great price, and a pack with robes and good furs’ belonging to John, Lord Mowbray. Hundreds of horses were also seized.80
The earl of Lancaster was taken to Pontefract Castle, his own favourite residence, whose constable had surrendered to Edward without a fight. He was forced to put on garments of the striped cloth which the squires of his household wore, an intentional humiliation of a man of high birth and rank. On the way to York, a crowd of people threw snowballs at him, called him a traitor, and shouted, ‘Now shall you have the reward that long time you have deserved!’81 Edward waited for his cousin at Pontefract, where rumour had it that the earl had built a tower in which to hold the king captive for the rest of his life. Lancaster was imprisoned there instead.82 A triumphant Hugh Despenser hurled ‘malicious and contemptuous words’ into Lancaster’s face on his arrival.83Lancaster was put on trial in the great hall of his own castle, the justice Robert Malberthorpe, Edward, the Despensers, the earls of Kent, Pembroke, Richmond, Surrey, Arundel and the Scottish earls of Angus and Atholl sitting in judgement on him.84The result was a foregone conclusion, and Lancaster was not allowed to speak in his own defence as his crimes were deemed ‘notorious’, known to everybody. He exclaimed, ‘This is a powerful court, and great in authority, where no answer is heard nor any excuse admitted,’ but given that he had executed Piers Gaveston without a trial, he was hardly innocent on that score himself.85 The list of charges comprised the many grievances Edward managed to dredge up against his cousin, going back to Lancaster’s seizure of his possessions at Tynemouth in 1312.
Lancaster’s judges sentenced him to death by hanging, drawing and quartering, though Edward commuted the sentence to mere beheading, respiting the hanging and drawing out of love for Queen Isabella according to the Brut, and out of respect for Lancaster’s royal blood according to the Vita and the Sempringham annalist.86 The parallels between the deaths of Gaveston and Lancaster did not unnoticed: he was ‘beheaded in like manner as this same Earl Thomas had caused Piers Gaveston to be beheaded’.87The Vitaagrees, saying, ‘The earl of Lancaster once cut off Piers Gaveston’s head, and now by the king’s command the earl himself has lost his head. Thus, perhaps not unjustly, the earl received measure for measure’.88 Edward arranged Lancaster’s execution as a parody of Gaveston’s death, and had him taken outside to a small hill, mirroring Gaveston’s 1312 death on Blacklow Hill. Lancaster was forced to ride ‘some worthless mule’ and ‘an old chaplet, rent and torn, that was not worth a half-penny’ was set on his head. A crowd of spectators again threw snowballs at him.89 Scalacronica also makes the connection between the deaths of Lancaster and Gaveston, and says that Lancaster was executed ‘at the very place where he had once hooted, and made others hoot, at the king as he [Edward] was travelling to York’.90 Edward had never forgiven Lancaster’s jeering at him in 1317; it was one of the charges against his cousin.
It had taken him just under ten years to do it, but finally Edward had forced Thomas of Lancaster into a position where he could take revenge for the death of Piers Gaveston. Presumably at the king’s order, Lancaster was forced to kneel facing towards Scotland, in a pointed reminder of his treasonous correspondence with Robert Bruce, and was ‘beheaded like any thief or vilest rascal’ with two or three strokes of the axe.91 The sudden downfall and death of Lancaster, enormously wealthy and of royal blood, shocked the country; not counting Piers Gaveston, Lancaster was the first English earl to be executed since Waltheof in 1076. Miracles were being reported at the site of his execution within weeks, his numerous faults forgotten, people remembering only that he had opposed the king’s tyranny.92 A campaign to canonise Lancaster – surely one of the unlikeliest saints of all time – began in 1327, and his cult grew in popularity; as late as the Reformation, his hat and belt preserved at Pontefract were used as remedies in childbirth and for headaches.93
The day after Lancaster’s execution, Edward sent men to pronounce judgement on the other Contrariants, and bearing in mind that they had made war on him and wrought great and needless destruction on his realm and subjects, he had some of them sentenced to death.94 During their trials, they were forced to wear the green and yellow tunics they had adopted as their uniform in May 1321.95 Twenty or twenty-two noblemen, including Lancaster and six of his knights, were executed in various towns in March and April 1322, including Roger, Lord Clifford, John, Lord Mowbray and Sir Jocelyn Deyville, whom Lanercost calls ‘a knight notorious for his misdeeds’, in York. Fourteenth-century chronicles were consistent in recording the names of the men executed, though the figures have been inflated in some modern books by the inclusion of knights killed at Boroughbridge, and the executions of men who had committed treason, theft, assault and other crimes are often emotively described nowadays as a ‘bloodbath’ or a ‘reign of terror’.96 The king’s loyal Scottish friend Donald of Mar captured Bartholomew Badlesmere and took him to Canterbury. On 14 April, Badlesmere was dragged three miles to the crossroads at Blean, hanged and then beheaded, and his head set on a spike over the gate into Canterbury at Edward’s own command as an example to those who would betray the king. Badlesmere is the only Contrariant known to have been hanged, drawn and quartered, because he had fled and because he had been Edward’s steward.97
Chroniclers give variously sixty-two, eighty-three and a hundred Contrariants imprisoned.98 The total is difficult to ascertain, as dozens of men were released on payment of a fine between 1322 and 1325, such as Sir Thomas Gurney – a man who would play an essential role in Edward II’s life some years later – who was released from the Tower and restored to his lands in exchange for £100. The fines varied wildly between £2 and £3,000.99 Edward gave many men, including Gurney, permission to pay off their fines in instalments, a form of political blackmail also used by his father Edward I and great-grandfather King John.100 The Contrariants in prison were granted three pence a day for their sustenance, the same amount as the Welsh lord Llywelyn Bren had received in 1316, though Roger Mortimer of Chirk received six pence.101 The Contrariants probably deserved their treatment, but the nastiest aspect of Edward II’s behaviour is the way he ordered the arrest and imprisonment of some of their wives or widows and children, at least for a few months. Badlesmere’s widow Margaret, for example, was temporarily imprisoned but released from the Tower on 3 November 1322 and given a reasonably generous financial allowance, but Roger Mortimer’s wife Joan was held in some form of captivity, with eight attendants, for the rest of Edward’s reign. This was not unprecedented: Edward’s father had incarcerated the women of Robert Bruce’s family in 1306, and sent Bruce’s ten- or twelve-year-old daughter Marjorie to the Tower of London and his nephew Donald of Mar, the same age or younger, to Bristol Castle.
Edward did show mercy on occasion when he considered his sheriffs to have been excessively zealous in arresting and imprisoning Contrariant adherents. Between March and May 1322, he ordered the release of a number of men on the grounds that proof of their adherence to the Contrariants was insufficient, and pardoned well over a hundred of Lancaster’s adherents within weeks of the earl’s execution.102 The Lancastrian knight Thomas le Blount became Edward’s steward, and another, Richard Talbot, captured after Boroughbridge, joined the Despensers’ retinue. Yet these instances of clemency were all too rare, and Edward’s often arbitrary vindictiveness ensured the existence of numerous disaffected, desperate men, deprived of their lands and income and, in some cases, their families. Some men managed to escape from England, and later caused conflict between Edward and his brother-in-law Charles IV when the French king allowed them at his court. Chroniclers were horrified at the way the king behaved towards the defeated rebels in 1322, though they had been considerably less concerned about Edward I’s executions of numerous Scottish opponents (including the earl of Atholl) and his imprisonment of their families in 1305/07, behaviour which Edward II presumably took as an example. Edward I had also ordered Dafydd ap Gruffydd, brother of the last Welsh prince of Wales, to be hanged, drawn and quartered in 1283 and thereby set two precedents: that rebellion against the king could be considered treason, and that men of high rank could die for the crime.103 Anonimalle calls Edward in 1322 ‘a man of great vengeance’, while Lanercost cries, ‘O the excessive cruelty of the king and his friends!’ Edward’s most vicious critic the Westminster chronicle Flores Historiarum goes over the top as usual by claiming that Edward ‘hated the magnates with such mad fury that he plotted the complete and permanent overthrow of all the great men of the realm together with the whole English aristocracy’.104
On 14 July 1322, five men – the mayor of London, three justices of the court of Common Pleas and the chief baron of the exchequer – condemned Roger Mortimer and his uncle Mortimer of Chirk to death. Eight days later, Edward commuted their sentence to life imprisonment, which would prove to be one of the worst mistakes he ever made.105 Edward’s change of heart is sometimes assumed to have been the result of Queen Isabella’s influence, which is unlikely and based solely on hindsight, given her later relationship with Mortimer. Why Edward changed his mind is unknown, but after Hugh Despenser’s return from exile, Isabella’s influence over her husband was limited, and it is debatable if she would have been able to convince him to spare the Mortimers. Perhaps Edward remembered that Mortimer had previously been his loyal ally and Piers Gaveston’s, and had voluntarily surrendered to him. Whatever the reason for his decision, it is likely to have been made against the wishes of Hugh Despenser, who loathed the Mortimers.
Some people did benefit from the events of 1322: Andrew Harclay, for example, sheriff of Cumberland and the victor of Boroughbridge, became earl of Carlisle.106 The men who benefited the most were, of course, Hugh Despenser father and son, who were granted numerous manors forfeited by Contrariants. Edward also granted five forfeited manors to his niece Eleanor Despenser, to pass after her death to her third son, Gilbert.107 One person who did not benefit, though, was Queen Isabella – perhaps a sign that the royal marriage was starting to deteriorate. Isabella apparently joined her husband in the north before her uncle Lancaster’s execution: Edward’s squire Oliver de Bordeaux informed the earl of Richmond that the king and queen ‘were well and hearty, thank God’ on St Cuthbert’s day, 20 March, which seems to mean that he saw them together.108 The king reached Pontefract on 19 March, which would imply that Isabella was also in the castle when Lancaster was tried and executed on the 22nd.
Edward wrote to inform the pope of recent events on 25 March 1322; John XXII advised him to ascribe his victory to God. Far from showing sympathy to the men whom Edward had executed and imprisoned, John excommunicated ‘those nobles and magnates who attack the king and his realm’.109 Edward finally revoked the hated Ordinances of 1311, and annulled the judgement of exile and disinheritance on the Despensers. Hugh Despenser the Elder became earl of Winchester, an appointment which perhaps surprisingly attracted little criticism from contemporaries, though for some reason his son’s claims to the earldom of Gloucester were not pressed. Although Despenser would one day inherit the earldom of Winchester from his father, it was a considerably less prestigious title. Either Edward had finally learned some sense, or more likely, Despenser was by now so powerful and wealthy that even the earldom of Gloucester hardly sufficed for him, though evidently it didn’t occur even to him to award himself the grandiose earldom of March, or earl of all the English-Welsh borderlands, as the next royal favourite Roger Mortimer would do in 1328.
The spring of 1322 marked Edward II’s triumph. But from now on, everything began to go wrong for him, and the remaining years of his reign were a downward spiral that ended in complete ignominy. He and Despenser ruled so capriciously, arbitrarily and repressively as to make countless more enemies and, with hindsight at least, to make their downfall seem inevitable. Solvent for the first time in his reign – the vast income from the Contrariants’ forfeited lands and Despenser’s despotic efficiency combined to make him ‘the richest king that ever was in England after William Bastard of Normandy’, as the Brut has it – and with his enemies dead, in prison or in exile, Edward had the chance to rescue his disastrous reign.110 He failed to take it.