12

Tyranny, Miracles and an Escape

The year 1322 marked the beginning of Edward II’s tyranny. The Vita comments, ‘The harshness of the king has today increased so much that no one however great and wise dares to cross his will … the nobles of the realm, terrified by threats and the penalties inflicted on others, let the king’s will have free play … whatever pleases the king, though lacking in reason, has the force of the law.’¹ The Brut says at the time of Boroughbridge, ‘So much unkindness was never seen in England before,’ and ‘The land was without law, for Holy Church had no more reverence than it had been a brothel’ – though in fact the author doesn’t blame Edward for the lawlessness, and Sir Thomas Gray, author of the Scalacronica, considered that ‘the commons of his [Edward’s] time were wealthy and protected by strong laws’.² Whether the common people of England suffered under a higher crime rate in the 1320s than at any other time in the fourteenth century is doubtful; it was the land-owning class who were victims of the Despensers and their greed. Despenser treated the widows of Contrariants and other vulnerable women cruelly, imprisoning, for example, Elizabeth Comyn for a year until she handed over some of her lands to his father and himself. At his trial in November 1326, Despenser was even accused of torturing a ‘Lady Baret’ by breaking her limbs until she went insane – presumably a reference to Joan Gynes, widow of Stephen Baret, a Contrariant executed in 1322.³ As Despenser was perfectly willing to force widows to grant him their lands but is not known to have been a sadist who had people tortured for fun, his motive must presumably have been to gain control of Joan’s lands. In 1324, however, her three manors were in Edward’s hands, not Despenser’s.⁴ The charge of torture against Despenser sounds too specific to have been completely invented, yet it is extremely odd that neither Joan nor any of her family later petitioned Edward III for restitution, and even stranger that none of the contemporary chroniclers noticed such a horrific act; the alleged torture is not mentioned anywhere. They might have ignored the torture of a lowborn woman, but never a highborn one. Whatever happened between Despenser and Joan, the story of her broken limbs and insanity is likely to be, at best, a gross exaggeration at a time when all the ills of the 1320s were being heaped on one man’s head.

Edward granted the peninsula of Gower, ownership of which had begun the civil war in the first place, to Hugh Despenser, and Despenser subsequently forced his sister-in-law, Roger Damory’s widow Elizabeth de Burgh, to give up her valuable lordship of Usk (worth £770 a year) in exchange for the peninsula (worth £300 a year), nastily ordering his men to ‘strip Gower for our profit’ before handing it over to her. Using quasi-legal methods, he deprived her of Gower as well in 1324.⁵ Elizabeth did keep all her English and Irish lands, if only because Despenser, busily building himself an empire in South Wales, had no interest in them. According to Elizabeth’s own testimony of May 1326, Edward arrested her counsellors and threatened that if she refused to submit to his will, he would allow her to hold none of her lands as long as he lived.⁶ Edward made no attempt to protect his niece, and not only did he tolerate Despenser’s appalling treatment of her, he actively colluded in it, behaviour which shows him in the worst possible light.

Despenser was restored to his position of royal chamberlain after his return from exile, which he would hold until his death in November 1326, and came to enjoy supreme power at court and over the king. Scalacronica comments on Despenser’s vast influence over the king, and says that Edward ‘after his example, did everything that wholly unfitted him for chivalry, delighting himself in avarice and in delights of the flesh’.⁷ By 1326, Despenser enjoyed an annual income of over £7,000 – and this does not even include the value of his goods in Wales, by far the largest part of his landholdings – which made him by far the richest man in the country after Edward and even wealthier than his brother-in-law the earl of Gloucester had been.⁸ Despenser’s riches grew and grew over the next few years, and he was by far the most important English customer of the Italian banking firms the Bardi and Peruzzi, holding almost £6,000 with them in January 1324.⁹ The king’s infatuation with his favourite knew no bounds, and despite Despenser’s wealth, Edward even paid for his household essentials, spending, for example, thirty shillings on wax for him, and giving five pounds to the keeper of Despenser’s horses for taking good care of the animals.¹⁰ When Edward paid £130 for a new royal ship, it was called, inevitably, La Despenser.¹¹ Despenser’s father also came to wield great influence, and the hundreds of petitions which followed hard on their 1326 downfall reveal how they were able to extort, imprison and take anything they wanted. Hugh Despenser, untouchable, engaged in any act of lawlessness he felt like, all of which took place with Edward’s full knowledge and acquiescence, and as the king he must be held accountable for the flagrant breaches of the law he permitted and in many cases encouraged and facilitated. The man who loved the company of the lowborn, who delighted in digging and thatching and being wildly generous, became a despot, willing to trample over the rights of many to please his beloved favourite.

One notable feature of the period in and after 1322 is the deterioration of Edward’s relationship with Queen Isabella. For fourteen years, she had been his loyal and supportive ally and helpmate, but after the victory at Boroughbridge, Isabella appears so rarely in the records as to give the impression that she had retired to a convent.¹² It is impossible to know what happened, but the impression is one of a sudden crisis in the marriage. The couple had no more children after 1321, which may be a symptom of their declining relationship (or possibly also of the declining fertility of one or both of them). In later years, Isabella blamed Hugh Despenser for coming between her husband and herself and took to dressing in widow’s weeds to mourn the death of her marriage, though whether this necessarily meant that Edward and Despenser had a sexual relationship is not certain. Despenser’s relations with his wife Eleanor certainly continued: she bore more children in 1323 and 1325.¹³ It is likely that Despenser, who as royal chamberlain strictly controlled access to Edward, managed to stop or curtail considerably Isabella’s ability to communicate with her husband, though why Edward permitted Despenser to do this is an unanswerable question. Isabella’s hatred of Despenser is painfully apparent, and he was the only one of her husband’s favourites to arouse her ire to such an extent. Other than the period soon after her wedding, there is no evidence that she complained about Piers Gaveston, and if she disliked Roger Damory and Hugh Audley or objected to their relationship with her husband, there is likewise no evidence of it. Hugh Despenser was different: he had a definite agenda, to become as rich as possible and the most powerful man in the country. Isabella did not form part of his plans. After his return from exile, his position as royal favourite was unassailable; there is nothing to show that Edward was ever willing to give him up or send him away from court, as he had done with Damory and Audley, not even in 1326 when his throne depended on it. The later chronicler Jean Froissart wrote about Despenser, ‘Without him nothing was done, and through him everything was done, and the king trusted him more than everybody else,’ and the Polychronicon noted that as Despenser’s power waxed, the queen’s waned.¹⁴ The deterioration of Edward and Isabella’s relationship was to have tragic consequences for the king.

Edward summoned his army in March 1322 to go, yet again, against the Scots that July, ‘to repel with God’s help their obstinate malice’.¹⁵ Robert Bruce invaded England in mid-June and burned and pillaged as far south as Preston in Lancashire, andLanercostclaims that he even plundered the monastery of Holm Coltran, although his father was buried there.¹⁶ Edward had still not given up hope of defeating Bruce and becoming overlord of Scotland, though one wonders if even he had to admit to himself that he was at least fourteen years too late. He left York on 21 July, the day he sent Hugh Despenser’s eldest son Hugh, who was probably only thirteen, to take ‘fat venison’ in the royal forests, parks and chases in twenty-three counties, also sending his huntsman William Twyt or Twici to Lancashire for the same purpose.¹⁷ Twici wrote a French treatise called Le Art de Venerie around 1320; the earliest text on hunting written in England, it opens, ‘Here begins the art of hunting, which Master William Twici, huntsman of the king of England, made in his time to instruct others.’¹⁸ The records are sparse, but it appears that Edward enjoyed hunting; Queen Isabella certainly did, and in 1325 boarded her hunting dogs with the prior of Canterbury, who wrote to Hugh Despenser to complain that they were eating him out of house and home.¹⁹

Edward’s illegitimate son Adam, in his mid-teens or thereabouts, accompanied him to Scotland, probably serving his father as page or squire. The king’s wardrobe accounts record four payments totalling thirteen pounds and twenty-two pence to the boy between 6 June and 18 September to buy himself equipment and other necessities, given either to Adam directly or to his tutor (magister) Sir Hugh Chastilloun. He was openly acknowledged as ‘the bastard son of the lord king’.²⁰ All the English earls alive in 1322, excepting nine-year-old Chester and the ever-obscure Oxford – that is, Surrey, Arundel, Winchester, Carlisle, Richmond, Pembroke, Kent and Norfolk, as well as the earls of Atholl, Angus and Louth – also went to Scotland with the king. It is hardly worth noting that the campaign, the last one Edward would ever lead, ended in failure and disaster. He left Scotland at the beginning of September and spent most of that month in Newcastle. On 2 October he summoned the sheriff of Yorkshire, the earl of Carlisle, the bishop of Durham, William Aune and others to bring horsemen and footmen to him at ‘Blakhoumor’ (Blackhow Moor) between Thirsk and Helmsley.²¹ Presumably, he had been made aware that Robert Bruce and his army were ravaging around Carlisle, about 110 miles to the north-west. He could hardly have guessed what would come next: Bruce gathered his entire army and marched towards Yorkshire, and by 13 October had reached Northallerton, only fifteen miles from where Edward was staying at Rievaulx Abbey.²² Hearing of their arrival, Edward scrambled a force to meet them, while he himself remained at the abbey. On 14 October, the king’s cousin John of Brittany, earl of Richmond, met the Scottish army at Roulston Scar, about seven miles from Rievaulx. The much smaller English force was defeated, and Richmond himself was captured. Now fifty-six, he would spend two years as a prisoner in Scotland until Edward raised Bruce’s ransom demand of 14,000 marks.²³ His sacrifice gave Edward enough time to flee before the Scots could capture him. Humiliatingly, the king was forced to hard to the abbey of Bridlington on the coast, fifty miles away, leaving all his plate, treasure, food and even his horse trappings and harness behind, ‘to the great shame and ruin of the king and the realm’.²⁴ Even his privy seal was captured, though the Scots courteously returned it.²⁵ The Bridlington chronicler asks rhetorically, ‘What worse fate could befall the English than to behold their king fleeing from place to place in the face of the Scots?’²⁶ Flores describes Edward as ‘spurring on his horse, trembling and defenceless’, and the Lanercost chronicler, the armchair general who unfairly condemned the men who left the field of Bannockburn as ‘miserable wretches’, says, ‘Ever chicken-hearted and luckless in war and having already fled in fear from them in Scotland, he [Edward] now took to flight in England’.²⁷

For the second time in eight years, the king was forced to flee from a Scottish force, and this occasion was far more humiliating than in 1314. Leaving the field after Bannockburn was really the only sensible thing Edward could have done, and he had at least fought courageously in the battle. In 1322, by contrast, he was over a hundred miles inside the borders of his own kingdom, and did not even face Bruce on the battlefield – though given that most of his army had been disbanded and he was attended by a small retinue, this was most probably not cowardice but pragmatism; he simply could not allow the numerically far superior Scottish force to capture him. Still, this flight was a deep humiliation, and the French Chronicle of London says that Edward ‘returned to England in shame’ and subsequently ‘much oppressed his people with misery and hardship’.²⁸ Scalacronica says that after the debacle, Edward ‘kept himself quiet, undertaking nothing of honour or prowess, but only acting on the advice of Hugh le Despenser so as to become rich’.²⁹ Having spent the first fifteen years of his reign short of money thanks to the enormous debts left to him by his father and his own extravagance, Edward showed himself from 1322 onwards to be almost pathologically obsessed with increasing and holding on to his wealth, and the Flores also comments on his ‘insatiable avarice’.³⁰

At the time of the battle, Queen Isabella was staying at Tynemouth, about ninety miles to the north of her husband’s position. She later accused Hugh Despenser of ‘falsely and treacherously counselling the king to leave my lady the queen in peril of her person’ at Tynemouth.³¹ Edward’s concern for his wife is in fact apparent in the number of letters he rushed off at this time. Unable to ride all the way to Tynemouth and fetch her himself, he did the next best thing: he ordered men he trusted to help her. He commanded the constable of Norham Castle to take Isabella under his protection; should Scottish troops approach Tynemouth, he was to enlist the assistance of the constables of all the castles in the north-east.³² Edward also ordered the earls of Richmond and Atholl and his steward Richard Damory (Roger’s brother) to raise troops, who included some of Hugh Despenser’s men, and go to her aid. Isabella, who loathed Despenser, refused to accept the presence of his soldiers, even though they would be commanded not by Despenser himself but by three men she had no reason to distrust, one of whom (Richmond) was her kinsman. Edward then sent Isabella’s countryman Henri, lord of Sully and butler of France, visiting England, to Tynemouth with his troops to protect her. Unfortunately Sully was caught up in the chaos, and the Scots captured him at Byland – though Bruce treated him as a honoured guest.³³ With hindsight, Edward’s decision to send Isabella to Tynemouth seems absurd, but she had safely accompanied him on campaign in 1310 and 1314, staying much farther north than Tynemouth, and it probably never occurred to him that she would be in danger.

According to a French chronicle which, with Isabella’s accusation of Despenser, is the only source for the incident, the queen’s squires fortified Tynemouth Priory against a possible Scottish raid and arranged a boat for her, and she sailed down the coast to safety. The chronicle also claims that two of Isabella’s attendants died on the journey, one when she went into premature labour.³⁴ Had the Scots captured Isabella, they would have demanded an enormous ransom, and it would have unthinkable for Edward not to pay it. For Despenser, whose main interest in life was amassing vast amounts of money for himself and the king, this would have been anathema, and therefore it is hard to imagine that he would have wanted the Scots to capture the queen, as some commentators have suggested.³⁵ Besides, his own wife was attending the queen: Edward wrote to Eleanor Despenser at Tynemouth on 13 September, and after he reached York in mid-October sent twenty pieces of sturgeon to his wife and thirteen to Eleanor.³⁶Pope John XXII commended Despenser in January 1324 for his ‘good services, as related by Henry, lord of Sully’, whom Edward had sent to Isabella’s aid.³⁷ It is difficult to believe that Sully, who was in a good position to know what had really happened, would have recommended Despenser to the pope had he held him in any way responsible for Isabella’s ordeal, and John XXII, who wrote frequently to both Edward and Isabella, never mentioned the incident.

Whoever was to blame, Isabella was incensed, and relations between king and queen worsened further. Edward gave a messenger ten shillings on 19 December for bringing him letters from his wife, but there is little evidence of contact between the couple for the next few months.³⁸ Four days later, the king informed sheriffs that Isabella was going on pilgrimage at ‘diverse places within the realm’ until the following autumn.³⁹ It is not certain that she ever went, and although perhaps she did, this may also have been Edward’s putting a politic face on her angry departure from him, or that he had sent her away from him.

Edward lost two people in the autumn of 1322: the brutal Robert Lewer, whom he had once pardoned for threatening to dismember his servants and who subsequently played an important role in the campaign of 1321/22, was ordered to be arrested on 20 September.⁴⁰ Lewer stole goods belonging to Hugh Despenser the Elder, earl of Winchester, then went to manors which had belonged to the executed Contrariants Henry Tyes and Warin Lisle and ostentatiously handed them out as alms. Lewer seems here to have been acting against the Despensers, rather than Edward himself. Edward ordered all his sheriffs to pursue and take Lewer dead or alive.⁴¹ Lewer’s rebellion, if it may be dignified by the name, soon petered out, and Edward gave two pounds on 19 December to a messenger who brought him news of his capture.⁴² Lewer was subjected to the terrible, but usual, punishment for those who refused to plead: peine forte et dure, lying on the floor in thin clothes pressed with a great weight of iron.⁴³ Flores says he died on 26 December 1322.⁴⁴

And sadly for the king, his illegitimate son Adam died on the Scottish campaign, perhaps of the dysentery which decimated the English army. Edward’s reaction to this loss is unfortunately unrecorded, though he had his son buried at Tynemouth Priory on 30 September, with a silk cloth with gold thread placed over his body.⁴⁵ The identity of Adam’s mother or what became of her is also unknown, but we may surmise that as Edward acknowledged Adam as his son, he must have had a fairly serious relationship with her. Adam is very obscure and no reference to him before 1322 has yet been found, but a letter of that summer which is almost certainly talking about him says that ‘all good qualities and honour are increasing in him’.⁴⁶

After his flight from Rievaulx, Edward spent late October and early November in York, where he gave a pound to the earl of Louth’s minstrel Sourelius for performing before him, and two pounds to a monk of Rievaulx to buy a habit.⁴⁷ The king probably saw the sky ‘of a colour like blood’ on 31 October from terce to vespers, or 9 a.m. to sunset, as recorded by the Sempringham annalist and the Brut.⁴⁸ On the way back to York, Edward stayed at Thorne near Doncaster, where he gave two shillings each to ten fishermen ‘who fished in the king’s presence and took great pike, great eels and a large quantity of other fish’. A John Waltham gave him two salmon.⁴⁹ It is hard to think of another medieval king of England who would willingly have stood by a river in damp chilly November to watch people fishing, and the king’s chamber account sheds more light on Edward’s enjoyment of ‘low’ pursuits and fondness for the company of the lowborn: for example, he went to the forge at Temple Hirst to chat to his blacksmith, John Cole.⁵⁰The account also records a payment of two pounds to the Carmelite friar Walter Mordon, ‘whose Mass the king often heard in the chapel’ at Temple Hirst.⁵¹ Edward decided to spend the winter in the north, and on 27 December, once more ordered a muster of his army at York on 2 February 1323, a campaign destined never to take place.⁵²

Edward spent Christmas at York, and ate porpoise, sturgeon, swans, peacocks, herons, pigeons, venison and wild boar, among much else.⁵³ He paid two women for singing for him in the garden of the Franciscans on 26 December, presumably a mild day.⁵⁴Whether Isabella was with her husband is not clear, though Edward’s niece Elizabeth was present, and he threatened her that she would hold no lands from him if she refused to agree to Despenser’s demands to exchange her rich lordship of Usk. It is difficult to reconcile the two images of the ever-contradictory king here: the amiable, easy-going man chatting with fishermen and blacksmiths, and the harsh, angry man hurling threats at his own niece.

The queen was in London by 12 January 1323, with Hugh Despenser’s wife Eleanor, and spent the next few weeks in residence at the Tower. Isabella wrote a letter to the treasurer on 17 February, from the Tower, asking him to ensure that her ‘dear and beloved cousin’ Joan Mortimer, wife of Roger Mortimer and held under house arrest with eight attendants, received promptly the money allocated for her sustenance. This has sometimes been seen as evidence of the queen’s collusion with Joan’s husband Roger, with whom the queen began a relationship in about late 1325. Although it is possible that Mortimer smuggled a message from his cell to Isabella asking for her help, it is more likely that the queen was simply motivated by concern for a noblewoman who was her distant cousin. Eleanor Despenser also wrote a letter on Joan’s behalf, on the same date and also from the Tower; it is safe to say that she was not colluding with Mortimer.⁵⁵

Eleanor Despenser had grown very close to her uncle Edward, who in 1323 gave her a huge gift of one hundred pounds for her illness after childbirth and paid all her expenses during her stay at the royal manor of Cowick. The king owned a ship named La Alianore la Despensere after his niece.⁵⁶ Although Edward had always been extremely fond of Eleanor, in the last year or two of his reign there is abundant evidence that they had become extremely familiar: there are numerous entries in his chamber account relating to privy dining, visits and many gifts including caged larks and goldfinches, jewels, horses, clothes and large sums of money. So close were they, in fact, that a Hainault chronicle even stated that they were having an affair.⁵⁷ Michael Prestwich suggests that the chronicler may have heard the story from Isabella’s entourage when the queen was in Hainault in 1326.⁵⁸ The Flores wrote of Edward’s ‘infamy and illicit bed, full of sin’ and said that he was ‘condemned by God and men’ and had ‘removed from his side his noble consort and her sweet conjugal embraces’.⁵⁹ Whether Edward’s ‘illicit bed’ meant sexual relations with men, an incestuous affair with his niece, both, something else entirely, or was merely an invention of a man who detested the king in order to discredit him, is unclear. Edward lavished gifts on those he loved, most notably his male favourites and his son Edward of Windsor, and by that token he certainly loved Eleanor. No English chronicler even hinted at an incestuous relationship between the two, however, except perhaps the much later writer Henry Knighton, who made the rather cryptic comment that when Isabella was abroad in 1325/26, Eleanor was treated as though she were queen.⁶⁰

There is no evidence for the twenty-first-century suggestion that Hugh Despenser had sex with Isabella or raped her, a theory based solely on Isabella’s statement in 1326 that Despenser had ‘dishonoured’ her, which means his success in drastically limiting her influence over her husband and even her ability to communicate with him, his reduction of her income, and other issues she raised against him which distressed her.⁶¹ If Isabella really had accused Despenser of such a serious and shocking crime, it is odd that no one mentioned it – neither chroniclers, the pope nor Isabella’s brother the king of France ever hinted at a sexual assault, nor was it one of the charges against Despenser at his trial when Isabella accused him of many other things. Despenser harried widows and others in his overwhelming desire to possess ever more lands, certainly deeply unpleasant behaviour, but there are no grounds for accusing him of sexual violence, and no reason to suppose that he had any carnal interest in Isabella.

While the queen was at the Tower in early 1323, Edward remained in Yorkshire, where he gave two pounds to four clerks for playing interludes before himself and Hugh Despenser in the great hall at Cowick, and spent three shillings playing dice.⁶² The royal favourite now controlled a huge area of South Wales, and after the earl of Pembroke’s death in 1324 would gain even more. Edward received a ‘private message’ from Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent, on 13 January.⁶³ Edward seems to have been very fond of the younger of his half-brothers, whom he trusted and sent on various important missions abroad. By contrast, his other half-brother Thomas of Brotherton, earl of Norfolk, rarely appears in Edward’s accounts, and the king showed him little favour.⁶⁴

The end of 1322 was mostly peaceful, but inevitably, this was not to last. Andrew Harclay, earl of Carlisle, growing tired of Edward’s endless failures in Scotland and his inability to protect the north of England, met Robert Bruce at Lochmaben on 3 January 1323.⁶⁵ They agreed that England would recognise Bruce as king, that Edward would be granted the marriage of Bruce’s son and heir – Bruce in fact had no son until March 1324 – and that Bruce would pay England 40,000 marks of silver over ten years.⁶⁶ On 8 January, Edward declared that truces with the Scots must not be made without his consent and ordered Harclay to come to him immediately.⁶⁷ It is probable that Harclay’s rival Sir Anthony Lucy had prior knowledge of the meeting and informed the king, as Edward gave Lucy’s messenger a pound on 2 January for bringing his letters to him; for only five days to pass between the Lochmaben meeting and Edward’s response to it, 3 to 8 January, otherwise seems impossibly fast.⁶⁸ Harclay failed to obey Edward’s summons, and the king, ‘exceedingly put out (and no wonder!)’ ordered his arrest on 1 February.⁶⁹ Lanercost gives a colourful account: Anthony Lucy and a group of knights and men-at-arms hid their weapons under their clothes to disguise their hostile intent, and arrested Harclay while he was dictating letters in the great hall of Carlisle Castle.⁷⁰ Edward sent the earl of Kent, the chief justice of the King’s Bench and others to ‘degrade’ Harclay. This involved tearing the golden spurs of knighthood from his boots and removing his belt of earldom, and, according to the Brut, breaking his sword over his head.⁷¹ Lucy told him, ‘Now art thou no knight, but a knave.’⁷²

Harclay was condemned to the full horrors of the traitor’s death by hanging, drawing and quartering, his head to be set on London Bridge and the four quarters of his body publicly displayed in Carlisle, Newcastle, Shrewsbury and York. On 3 March, Harclay died well and bravely at Carlisle: when he heard the sentence, he announced, ‘You have divided my carcass according to your pleasure, and I commend myself to God,’ and gazed towards the heavens, hands clasped and held aloft, as horses dragged him through the streets of the town he had defended so staunchly for many years.⁷³ Harclay’s sister Sarah Leyburne finally received permission to bury his remains in August 1328.⁷⁴ Lanercost points out that he was ‘a single individual, none of whose business it was to transact such affairs’, and certainly he had considerably overstepped his authority, but it is easy to sympathise with his growing frustration with Edward.⁷⁵ The king, with his usual malice towards family members of people who angered him, ordered the treasurer and barons of the exchequer to remove Harclay’s cousin Patrick Corewen from his position as sheriff of Westmorland, and appoint instead ‘a successor of undoubted loyalty’.⁷⁶ Harclay had certainly committed treason, though unlike the earl of Lancaster did not do so for his own benefit, but to spare the inhabitants of northern England the endless suffering inflicted on them by Scottish raids. Although Edward had no choice but to punish Harclay, he thus destroyed a man who had always been loyal to him, who had staunchly defended Carlisle and Cumberland against Robert Bruce for years and who was one of the very few men of the reign to enjoy military success.

Still unwilling to take responsibility for his own failures in Scotland, Edward sent a bitterly sarcastic letter to his kinsman Louis Beaumont, bishop of Durham, on 10 February 1323, reminding Louis that his brother Henry had once told the king that if Louis were appointed to the bishopric, ‘a defence like a stone wall would be provided for those parts’, in contrast to the negligence of Louis’s predecessor Richard Kellaw. Edward fumed, ‘The king knows actually that greater damage is done in the bishopric by the bishop’s default, negligence and laziness than in the time of his predecessor.’⁷⁷ Given that Edward himself had few equals when it came to negligence and laziness, there is much of the pot calling the kettle black about this letter. On a happier note, he gave five shillings to a girl who had travelled the thirty miles from York to Pontefract to bring him ale as a gift from her mother Alice de Brunne, and amusingly, one of his clerks had to pay four pence to replace a key which opened a chest of money, ‘which the king himself lost’.⁷⁸ Somewhat mysteriously, Edward gave twenty-two shillings to John Sturmy and other squires of his chamber, ‘sent secretly on the king’s business without other mention’, in late January. In February at Pontefract, Edward accompanied his valet Edmund ‘Monde’ Fisher (father of his page Little Will Fisher) to buy fishing nets.⁷⁹

But yet more problems beset the king in early 1323: Lord Berkeley and Hugh Audley the Elder almost escaped from Wallingford Castle when they overcame their guards and took over the castle. The Vita says that only the quick thinking of a boy in the gatehouse, who realised that something was amiss and raised the hue and cry, prevented their flight.⁸⁰ The Sempringham annalist has a completely different story, saying that the castle was taken by Lord Berkeley’s wife Isabel, the much older half-sister of Eleanor Despenser.⁸¹ Edward sent his steward Richard Damory and the sheriffs of Oxfordshire and Berkshire to besiege the castle, though the Vita gives the earls of Kent and Winchester as the men responsible.⁸² This was, or at least Edward believed that it was, the first stage of a plan to seize Windsor Castle and the Tower of London, where many Contrariants were imprisoned.⁸³

It was around this time that Edward suddenly took it into his head to try to claim a share of Provence in the south-east of France, and wrote several letters to this effect to the pope, asking for his help.⁸⁴ His claim came through his grandmother Queen Eleanor, second of the four daughters of Count Raymond-Berenger V of Provence, and also through the third daughter, Sanchia, who married Richard of Cornwall, brother of Edward’s grandfather Henry III; Edward was also her heir. In fact Edward had no genuine claim to Provence, as Raymond-Berenger had left the entire county to his fourth daughter Beatrice in his will. Edward wrote to Beatrice’s grandson Robert, king of Sicily and count of Provence, asking him to ‘restore to the king amicably’ the portions of the county that Edward said fell to him by inheritance.⁸⁵ Although Edward wrote again to John XXII and Robert in August 1323, nothing came of it, and he abandoned his efforts.⁸⁶ His envoys to Robert of Sicily were Rigaud d’Assier, the French bishop of Winchester, and John Stratford, archdeacon of Lincoln; d’Assier died on the trip, and John XXII appointed Stratford to his vacant bishopric.⁸⁷ Edward, who had written to the pope several times asking him to elect Hugh Despenser’s ally Robert Baldock, was furious, and asked John XXII to revoke Stratford’s appointment.⁸⁸ Subsequently Edward petulantly refused to grant a petition simply because it was supported by Stratford, with whom he declared himself ‘exceedingly incensed’ and described as ‘faithless and ungrateful’.⁸⁹ In November 1323, Edward ordered the keepers of more than seventy ports and the sheriffs of twenty counties not to permit Stratford to leave the country.⁹⁰ He forced Stratford to acknowledge a huge debt of £10,000 to him in June 1324, and began proceedings against him before the King’s Bench. Hugh Despenser extorted £1,000 from the unfortunate bishop, which he deposited with his Italian bankers, the Peruzzi.⁹¹

Late 1321 had seen the beginning of an extraordinary vendetta on the king’s part against some of the English bishops, which he continued into 1323 and beyond. Edward wrote to the pope about Henry Burghersh, bishop of Lincoln, whose appointment he himself had actively promoted, complaining that Burghersh was insufficiently qualified and that he, Edward, had been deceived by him.⁹² That Burghersh was the nephew of the executed Bartholomew Badlesmere was not, of course, a coincidence. The king asked John XXII to translate Burghersh and John Droxford of Bath and Wells to other offices outside England and replace Droxford as bishop with Edward’s friend William, abbot of Langdon; Droxford had supported the Marchers in 1322, or at least Edward believed that he had.⁹³ John Hothum of Ely – who had acted as Piers Gaveston’s attorney in 1311 – also fell from favour in 1322 for obscure reasons and William Airmyn of Norwich infuriated the king in 1326, though Edward reserved his most virulent hatred for Adam Orleton of Hereford, whom he persecuted.⁹⁴ Always prone to emotional outbursts, Edward told the pope that Burghersh, Droxford and Orleton were ‘the worst poison’ and ‘descended from the race of traitors’, and declared that they had brought notorious misfortunes to England and that he could no longer bear the scandal of having them in his kingdom.⁹⁵ John XXII refused to translate them from their bishoprics, and told John Stratford that ‘God is offended’ by the king’s actions.⁹⁶ Even Edward’s friend and ally Walter Reynolds, archbishop of Canterbury, was not immune from the king’s wrath. On one occasion, Edward flew into such a screaming fury with Reynolds that the archbishop was forced to invent a hasty excuse in order to escape from the king’s presence.⁹⁷Edward’s vile temper and unpredictable moods became ever worse as he grew older. Still, his rages were an exercise in restraint by the standards of his Castilian cousins Sancho IV and Alfonso XI, who on occasion beat their relatives and dissident nobles to death with their own hands.⁹⁸

Edward spent the first half of March 1323 at Knaresborough Castle, which had once belonged to Piers Gaveston. He had not forgotten his earlier wish to found a house of Dominican nuns at Langley, and wrote to the master of the Dominican order asking him to find four devout women.⁹⁹ Presumably Hervey was unable to find any, as nothing came of it. Miracles were still being reported at the site of the earl of Lancaster’s execution in 1323: 2,000 people, some from as far away as Kent, gathered to pray and make oblations at Lancaster’s tomb in Pontefract.¹⁰⁰ The archbishop of York twice had to remind his archdeacon that Lancaster was not a canonised saint and order him to disperse the throng gathering at the earl’s tomb, some of whom were crushed to death.¹⁰¹Edward sent his clerk Richard Moseley to investigate, the king’s attitude to the situation apparent from his description of the crowd as ‘malefactors and apostates’ and his comment that they were praying ‘not to God but rather to idols’. The crowd made their feelings clear, too: Moseley was assaulted, and two of his servants killed.¹⁰² The Brut includes a bizarrely disgusting story in which Hugh Despenser, troubled and angered by the ‘great heresy’ of the alleged miracles, sent a messenger to Edward to inform him about them. As the messenger passed through Pontefract, he ‘made his ordure’ at the place where Lancaster had been beheaded – and later suffered punishment for this sacrilegious act when he ‘shed all his bowels at his fundament’.¹⁰³ Miracles were also said to have taken place at the execution site of the Contrariants Henry Montfort and Henry Wilington: the mayor of Bristol told the king that Montfort’s brother bribed a poor child with two shillings ‘to pronounce to the people that he received healing of his sight’.¹⁰⁴

Less than four months after Andrew Harclay’s abortive negotiations with Robert Bruce, Edward finally bowed to the inevitable and signed a thirteen-year peace treaty with Scotland. He still refused to recognise Bruce as king of Scots, which has far less to do with his own stubbornness or stupidity than the fact that such a recognition would make him profoundly unpopular among his magnates; he had already been accused several times of ‘losing’ Scotland, and this would be one of the charges against him at his deposition. In 1328, Queen Isabella and her favourite Roger Mortimer, ruling the country in the name of the underage Edward III, signed the deeply unpopular Treaty of Northampton, or the ‘Shameful Peace’ as many people in England called it, which finally recognised Bruce as king and arranged the marriage of Edward II’s daughter Joan of the Tower to Bruce’s son and heir David. Thomas Randolph, earl of Moray, travelled to England to negotiate terms in May 1323, and Edward sent several hostages to Tweedmouth to assure Bruce of his safe return.¹⁰⁵ Edward signed the treaty on 30 May; Bruce ratified it a week later.¹⁰⁶

Early June 1323 found Edward in communication with King Sancho of Majorca regarding a robbery committed by some Englishmen on Sancho’s subjects, and with Queen Isabella’s uncle Charles, count of Valois, who had proposed a marriage alliance between one of his many daughters and Edward’s ten-year-old son Edward of Windsor.¹⁰⁷ Valois also sent envoys to England sometime before January 1324 to negotiate other marriages between his family and Edward’s, this time involving the latter’s two daughters Eleanor and Joan, one of whom was proposed as a bride for Valois’s youngest son and the other for one of his grandsons.¹⁰⁸ The queen had joined Edward at Cowick by 10 June. The king spent the rest of the summer in Yorkshire, and Isabella probably remained with him, though once again her whereabouts are uncertain and it is possible that she resumed her pilgrimage. Edward gave two pounds to the minstrel of Hugues de Bouville, chamberlain of his brother-in-law Charles IV, who played before him and perhaps Isabella at Pickering, and on 15 August sent a gift of ‘coursing dogs’ to Charles.¹⁰⁹

On 1 August 1323, the feast of St Peter in Chains, the king’s most dangerous enemy Roger Mortimer escaped from the Tower of London, having fed his guards sedatives in their wine, and made his way to the Continent. Five days after the escape, Stephen Segrave, constable of the Tower, was still seriously ill from the sedatives.¹¹⁰ Edward, at Kirkham in Yorkshire, heard the news on 6 August, and ordered all the sheriffs and keepers of the peace in England and the bailiffs of fifteen ports to pursue Mortimer with hue and cry and take him dead or alive.¹¹¹ Assuming that he had fled to Wales, Edward ordered the loyal Welshmen Rhys ap Gruffydd and Gruffydd Llwyd to search for him there, though an inquisition taken at Portsmouth as early as 10 August established that Mortimer had taken a ship to the Continent.¹¹² On 26 August, Edward told his brother the earl of Kent that he thought Mortimer was intending to travel to Ireland, and, afraid that Mortimer’s escape was only the first of many Contrariants breaking prison, also told the constables of no fewer than eighty castles to guard their charges safely – which demonstrates what a large number of men were still in prison, despite the many who had been released on payment of a fine.¹¹³ Edward’s insecurity and paranoia are painfully apparent in 1323; eighteen months after his victory over the Contrariants, his reign was descending into a nightmare of fear and unrest. For this, he had no one to blame but himself.

Several chronicles claim that Edward had been intending to execute Mortimer, who was therefore compelled to escape before the sentence was carried out, while others do not mention an impending execution.¹¹⁴ The Flores’ account of the event owes far more to the story of St Peter’s escape from Herod’s prison than to reality, being almost a direct quotation from various verses of Acts of the Apostles.¹¹⁵ Whether Edward really was about to put Mortimer to death, or if this was merely a rumour that found its way into several chronicles or an invention to explain his dramatic escape, is not clear; the Brut, implausibly, has Mortimer fleeing the day before his planned execution. Adam Murimuth, who came to know Mortimer well after 1326, says only that he escaped and fled to France and does not mention an impending execution.¹¹⁶ Nor is there anything in any official record to confirm that Edward was planning his death.

Historians have wondered whether Queen Isabella had anything to do with Mortimer’s escape, but the first people to suggest that she did – indeed, the first people to suggest that she had any kind of relationship with Mortimer before late 1325 – were the dramatists Christopher Marlowe and Michael Drayton in the 1590s.¹¹⁷ Isabella was not in or near the Tower at the time that Mortimer escaped, as sometimes stated; she was probably with Edward in Yorkshire. There is no evidence that as early as 1323 Isabella had any interest in acting against her husband, nor that she had ever had any personal contact with Mortimer. Chronicler Geoffrey le Baker decades later invented a conspiracy whereby two bishops (Orleton of Hereford and Burghersh of Lincoln), Isabella, Roger Mortimer and Charles IV of France conceived a cunning plan to bring about Edward’s downfall years before it in fact happened, Mortimer’s escape being the first step in this deep conspiracy. Although this story has often been repeated as fact, it owes far more to Baker’s overheated imagination and many years’ hindsight than to anything resembling reality. Mortimer was an intelligent, resourceful and courageous man, and it is far more probable that he planned his escape himself, working on the sympathy of his guards, including Gerald Alspaye, who fled with him. Sympathetic Londoners – Edward II was extremely unpopular in his capital – procured the sedatives for him.¹¹⁸ Mortimer later made his way to Charles IV’s court. Although it has been postulated that Charles would never have welcomed Mortimer without Isabella’s recommendation, this is not the case: Mortimer was a nobleman, an experienced and able soldier and administrator and still only thirty-six, and such men were welcome anywhere. Besides, Mortimer was not alone at the French court. Other English exiles, men who had fled after Boroughbridge, among them John Maltravers and William Trussell, accompanied him there. So if Isabella asked her brother to welcome Mortimer, presumably she must also have asked him to receive the other exiles, which seems improbable.

Edward was still ordering numerous bailiffs to search for Mortimer in September, and by 1 October, had finally learned where he was: in Picardy, with his kinsmen the Fiennes brothers.¹¹⁹ As early as mid-November 1323, Mortimer incited ‘aliens to enter the kingdom and to murder the king’s counsellors’, meaning the Despensers, Mortimer’s detested cousin the earl of Arundel and Despenser’s protégé Robert Baldock, whom Edward appointed chancellor of England in August 1323.¹²⁰ Although Mortimer was the most important Contrariant to break prison, he was not the only one: Hugh Audley escaped from Nottingham, Thomas Berkeley from the Tower of London, Robert Walkfare and two others from Corfe, Henry Leyburne from Devizes and Robert Holland from Northampton, all in the last year or so of Edward’s reign.¹²¹

Edward made a renewed onslaught against Roger Mortimer’s family and supporters in March and April 1324, and ordered a commission to find people who had adhered to him in 1322.¹²² This was no doubt inspired at least in part by his frustration at being unable to recapture his enemy, though as Mortimer had sent assassins to kill Edward’s friends, it is hardly surprising that the king would retaliate, and Mortimer fled the country in the full knowledge that he was leaving his family to Edward’s not-so-tender mercies. His wife Joan and her servants were moved from Southampton to Skipton-in-Craven, and three of their eight daughters – Margaret Berkeley, Joan and Isabella – were sent to live at separate convents and granted the small amounts of fifteen pence (Margaret) or twelve pence (Joan and Isabella) per week for their sustenance.¹²³ Three of Mortimer’s four sons remained under Edward’s control, though Geoffrey was reunited with his father on the Continent.¹²⁴ Edward also began proceedings against Mortimer’s ally Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford, whom he had publicly reprimanded for aiding the Marchers in 1322. It is odd that he waited two years to prosecute Orleton for this if he genuinely believed the charge to be true, and it probably represents Edward’s frustration and anger at Mortimer’s escape rather than anything else. The vindictiveness with which Edward pursued Orleton is astonishing: he confiscated the bishop’s lands, and even allowed his goods to be thrown into the street to be ransacked and looted by passers-by.¹²⁵ This, of course, ensured that Orleton would join the king’s enemies in 1326, and was also one of the factors which gradually lost Edward the support of the archbishop of Canterbury, who had long been one of his most loyal allies. As for Orleton, he had lost favour with Roger Mortimer within months of Edward’s deposition and was probably not nearly as committed to the Marcher as Edward believed, and the king would have been far more sensible to court the intelligent and able bishop as an ally. But then, common sense was hardly one of Edward’s defining features. He also foolishly alienated his cousin Henry of Lancaster, who had taken no part in the 1322 rebellion of his brother Thomas, with whom he had a cool relationship.¹²⁶ Edward claimed that Henry had abetted Orleton, and, angered by Henry’s adoption of his brother’s coat of arms and a cross he had erected in Leicester in Thomas’s memory, accused him of treason.¹²⁷ As with Orleton, this ensured that in 1326 Henry would also join the king’s enemies, taking the enormous Lancastrian faction with him. Edward did allow Henry to assume the earldom of Leicester in April 1324, but retained most of the Lancastrian inheritance himself, including the great castle of Kenilworth.¹²⁸

Edward visited Liverpool for the only time in his reign in late October 1323, paying a ferryman two shillings to take himself and part of his household across the Mersey, and in early November spent a night at Vale Royal, a Cistercian abbey in Cheshire his father had founded in 1270.¹²⁹ That he was furious and deeply concerned about Roger Mortimer’s escape is apparent from the strenuous efforts he made to capture him and his actions against Mortimer’s supporters, but neither Edward nor anyone else could have predicted that it would set off a chain of events which would ultimately result in his deposition, and he soon had more pressing problems to deal with.

Not entirely surprisingly, these problems arose in his French duchy of Gascony. One of Edward’s exasperated officials wrote in 1314 that ‘the Gascon business is like a mighty sea, full of shipwrecks, and has no port of safety’, and Edward I had gone to war with the French over the duchy in 1294.¹³⁰ The accession of Charles IV of France in January 1322 meant that Edward now owed homage for Gascony and Ponthieu to the last of Queen Isabella’s short-lived brothers. Charles politely waited until Edward had destroyed the Contrariants and until England was quiet, and sent Edward amicable letters in July 1323 asking him to present himself at Amiens between Candlemas (2 February) and Easter (15 April) 1324. Edward, predictably, made excuses, claiming that England was still in a state of turmoil and he could not possibly leave.¹³¹ Charles had probably expected this, but a particularly unfortunate piece of timing soon turned the situation dangerous, and a sergeant-at-arms, a wooden stake and the lord of Montpezat were about to inadvertently start a war between England and France.

The trouble began in the small Gascon village of St-Sardos. Philip V had in 1318 granted permission for a bastide, a fortified town, to be built there, and on 15 October 1323 a French sergeant-at-arms drove a stake bearing the royal arms of France into the ground, to claim the land. This was a direct provocation to Edward, who could hardly be expected to tolerate a French fortress in the middle of his duchy. Raymond-Bernard, lord of nearby Montpezat, took matters into his own hands and hanged the sergeant-at-arms from the stake he had just erected, and burned the village to the ground. News of this offence reached Charles IV on 1 November, but Edward himself did not learn of the event until three weeks later, just after his messengers had departed to proffer his excuses for delaying homage – most unfortunate timing. Ralph Basset, Edward’s new steward of Gascony, and Raymond-Bernard made matters worse by refusing to appear before Charles IV at the Paris parlement of February 1324 to explain their actions.

Charles wrote to Edward acknowledging his brother-in-law’s problems with Scotland and his other ‘great business’. Addressing Edward as ‘fair brother’ and talking of ‘the love which we have for you’, he told him that he did not hold him responsible for the St-Sardos outrage and that he was willing to postpone the ceremony of homage until 1 July 1324.¹³² Edward, however, was angry with Charles, believing that he had welcomed Roger Mortimer and other Contrariants at his court, and wrote to him in November asking him to banish them from France. Edward’s envoys told him on 13 December 1323, ‘As for Mortimer and the other rebels, forbidden to stay within the power of the king of France, they are received and favoured on the power of the count of Boulogne.’¹³³Edward believed in October 1324 that the exiles had found refuge with Count William of Hainault, and asked him to arrest them and send them to him.¹³⁴ Relations between Edward and the count of Hainault had cooled considerably since their marriage negotiations of the late 1310s, and William followed a pro-French line, his wife Joan being the daughter of Charles IV’s uncle Charles, count of Valois. In 1323 and 1324, men of Hainault attacked several English ships, and Edward ordered that all Hainault ships be seized in retaliation.¹³⁵ William wrote curtly to Edward in January 1324 to say that many of his own subjects had been robbed in England, and ‘he has often written to the king for restitution, but the king has done nothing. If the king will act he will act’.¹³⁶

Edward and Isabella spent Christmas 1323 at Kenilworth, where the king gave a pound each to two minstrels of the bishop of Ely who performed for them. He also gave half a mark each to three of his watchmen to buy themselves ‘winter tunics for their night vigils’.¹³⁷ The couple travelled west and spent six days in mid-January 1324 as guests of Hugh Despenser at his Worcestershire castle of Hanley, where the king gave a bonus of two pounds to twelve carpenters for building a new perimeter wall, drawbridge and hall, described as the ‘finest in the land’.¹³⁸ Edward made a quick visit to Despenser’s nearby manor of Tewkesbury, where he placed a bright green and gold cloth on the tomb of his nephew the earl of Gloucester in the abbey.¹³⁹ He also spent a few days in the town of Gloucester, where, although he couldn’t have known it, he would one day be buried.

During the February/March 1324 parliament at Westminster, a group of prelates – not the queen, as sometimes stated – petitioned Edward to allow the bodies of the Contrariants executed in 1322 decent burial, and he duly ordered the sheriffs of London, Middlesex, Kent, Gloucestershire, Yorkshire and Buckinghamshire to take the bodies down and bury them.¹⁴⁰ In the spring of 1324, Edward sent two envoys to France to try to settle the St-Sardos affair and to postpone his homage: his brother Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent, and Alexander Bicknor, archbishop of Dublin. These were hardly the wisest choices. Although Kent was Charles IV’s first cousin and a staunch ally of Edward, he was still only twenty-two and inexperienced, while Archbishop Bicknor loathed Hugh Despenser and could, therefore, hardly have been expected to do his best on Edward’s behalf. Edward sent more envoys to Charles IV in June, doing his utmost to make an awkward situation even worse by failing to travel to Amiens to pay homage and ordering the envoys ‘to make excuses and defence’ for his non-appearance.¹⁴¹ They found Charles IV at Annet-sur-Marne on 5 July, four days after Edward should have paid homage, in the process of marrying his third wife Jeanne, fourteen-year-old daughter of Count Louis of Evreux and thus Charles’s first cousin; her sister Marie was married to Edward’s nephew John III, duke of Brabant.¹⁴² Charles brusquely told the envoys that because he had ‘found no man’ for Gascony or Ponthieu on the appointed date, he had taken them into his hands before their arrival. Charles sent his uncle Valois into Gascony with an army in early August, and suddenly Edward II was at war with France.¹⁴³