15

Invasion, Abdication and Imprisonment

Isabella and Mortimer’s invasion force left Dordrecht on 21 or 22 September 1326, ninety-five ships containing perhaps 700 mercenaries and the queen’s allies including Edward of Windsor, the king’s half-brother the earl of Kent, his former steward John Cromwell, and Contrariants who had fled the country in 1322. In total the force consisted of perhaps 1,000–1,500 men.¹ They landed on 24 September at Orwell in Suffolk, on or near the lands of Edward’s other half-brother the earl of Norfolk, who immediately went to join them, despite having been appointed to defend the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Hertfordshire against the invaders. The bishops of Hereford, Lincoln, Ely and probably Norwich also joined the queen.² On the day the fleet arrived, Edward II, as yet unaware of the situation and as keen on buying himself fish as ever, went to the postern gate of the Tower of London and paid a passing fisherman three shillings for two salmon, while one of his servants paid nine pence for a pair of buckskin gloves for him. News of the landing reached him on 27 September.³

Edward could hardly, in his worst nightmares, have guessed how astonishingly quickly the force would progress through his realm and how little support he had; his and Hugh Despenser’s ruthless rule and greed for the last few years ensured that most of his influential subjects, and even many of his own household, abandoned him. The destruction of his fleet in Normandy some weeks before and the alacrity with which the earl of Norfolk joined the rebels ensured that the small invading force, which could easily have been destroyed on arrival, progressed with little or no opposition. Isabella and her allies headed west in triumph and, perhaps, amazement at the lack of resistance or hostility; most of Edward’s men either fled from them or joined them. Five days after the landing, they arrived at Bury St Edmunds, where Isabella helped herself to – or ‘caused to be taken for his [her son’s] affairs’ as she euphemistically glossed the theft – £800 which Edward II’s ally Hervey Staunton, chief justice of the court of Common Pleas, had stored at the abbey, to pay her soldiers. Staunton died a year later without recovering the money.⁴ On 9 October Isabella placed a reward of £2,000 on the head of Hugh Despenser as a response to the king’s declaring on 28 September that Roger Mortimer and others ‘have brought with them alien strangers for the purpose of taking the royal power from the king’, and offering a ransom of £1,000 on Mortimer’s head.⁵

At Wallingford on 15 October, a proclamation was read out in the name of the queen, the duke of Aquitaine and the earl of Kent, in which Hugh Despenser was accused of damaging the realm and Church, sending great men to their deaths and much else. Edward II himself incurred no criticism and was never, at this time or later, said to be a tyrant, but presented instead as the victim of an evil counsellor, whom Isabella and her allies had come to destroy in order to end the oppressions suffered by the people of England.⁶ Shortly afterwards, the bishop of Hereford, Adam Orleton, publicly accused Edward of being a sodomite, and preached a sermon from Genesis: ‘I shall put enmity between you and the woman, and thy seed and hers, and she shall bruise your head’. Orleton was to claim in 1334 that he had been referring to Hugh Despenser, not Edward II.⁷ Ian Mortimer points out that Edward had become ‘the target of political lies and anti-royalist propaganda’.⁸ Isabella, daughter of the master propagandist Philip IV, well knew the benefits of public relations, far better than Edward did. With Edward’s son, the future king, in their party, few men were willing to fight against them, especially as they marched under the royal banner. The defection of his half-brother Norfolk must have been a bitter blow to Edward; an even worse one was soon to come when his cousin Henry of Lancaster declared for the rebels, joined Isabella at Dunstable, and seized money and goods belonging to Hugh Despenser the Elder, earl of Winchester.⁹ Henry brought the northern lords with him, including his son-in-law Thomas Wake and Henry Percy, and with the loss of the influential Lancaster, Edward’s cause was doomed. The earl of Arundel remained loyal, and apparently so did Arundel’s brother-in-law the earl of Surrey, but the grand coalition of the queen, the Contrariants, Lancaster, at least three or four bishops, the northern lords and the king’s half-brothers was unassailable. Edward heard the bad news of Henry of Lancaster’s defection on 10 October and seized his lands, sending his teenage great-nephew, Hugh Despenser’s eldest son Hugh (known as Huchon or Hughelyn), to take possession of them.¹⁰

As early as 28 September, the day after he learned of the force’s arrival, Edward must have realised how little support he had, and offered all felons in prison a pardon, excepting the murderers of Roger Belers and any adherents of Roger Mortimer, if they would join him.¹¹ On this day, he ordered men in four counties to raise hundreds of footmen to ‘repel the invaders’ and take them alive or dead. The order was repeated to his Welsh allies Rhys ap Gruffydd and Gruffydd Llwyd, while Sir Robert Wateville was ordered to raise footmen in six counties and ‘do what harm he can to [the rebels] except to the queen, the king’s son and the earl of Kent’.¹² Edward surely remembered the Marchers trapping him in London in 1321 and realised the impossibility of holding a city hostile to him, and so he left his capital on 2 October, leaving his beloved niece Eleanor Despenser – the last time he or Hugh Despenser would see her – in charge of the Tower. His ten-year-old younger son John of Eltham also remained there. The king and the two Hugh Despensers travelled west, carrying at least £29,000 from the treasury with them, towards South Wales, where Despenser held the majority of his lands and where Edward was popular and hoped to be able to raise support. The king left some personal items with Simon Swanland, future mayor of London and a draper who provided cloth for the royal household, which included two ‘good and beautiful’ Bibles; a cloth-of-gold cloak edged with white pearls and silver; three velvet garments with green stripes and matching hat; a green coverlet with three matching tapestries; a cushion cover of vermilion sendal (a fine, light silk); and three ‘gilded acorn branches’.¹³ The king also left behind a silver ship for alms and a number of silver cups, plates, pots and saucers at the Tower.¹⁴ Edward wrote from Acton on 3 October that he had heard his wife was writing to all the cities and commonalties of the realm, and ordered them not to open the letters but to arrest the bearer and send him to the king. No one was to favour ‘the king’s wife or his son Edward or anyone in their company so long as they behave as they do now’, and all others in their company were to be treated as his enemies.¹⁵ Even at this desperate stage, Edward refused to name Isabella, their son or his brother Kent as his enemies, though he pointedly referred to Isabella as ‘the king’s wife’, not as queen (his chamber account of this period, however, continues to call her ‘my lady the queen’). Isabella, meanwhile, was ransacking the manor of Baldock in Hertfordshire, apparently for no other reason than it belonged to the brother of the detested Robert Baldock, chancellor of England and ally of Despenser.¹⁶

London exploded into anarchy and chaos. The city tended to be politically volatile and anti-royalist, or rather anti-authority; Mortimer and Isabella would find out for themselves two years later that the affections of the Londoners were fickle, but for the moment, the city stood firmly on their side. The mayor Hamo de Chigwell had been one of the men who sentenced Roger Mortimer to death in 1322, so had every reason to feel trepidation at Mortimer’s return, and indeed he was replaced as mayor by Mortimer’s adherent Richard de Béthune soon afterwards and saved his life only by swearing to support Isabella.¹⁷ Eleanor Despenser soon had little choice but to surrender the Tower to the mob, who appointed John of Eltham as nominal guardian of the city. An emergency convocation of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of London, Rochester, Winchester, Exeter and Worcester held at Lambeth on 13 and 14 October decided to send two envoys to the queen. The following day, tragedy struck when Walter Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter, former treasurer of England, founder of Exeter College at Oxford in 1314 and ally of Edward II, was pursued by an angry crowd and beheaded with a bread knife in Cheapside while trying to reach sanctuary inside St Paul’s.¹⁸ Two of his squires were killed with him, and his head was sent to the queen, who had been so furious with him for ‘dishonouring’ her a few months previously. A merchant named John Marshal, a close ally of Hugh Despenser, was also dragged out of his house and beheaded, and Bernard or Arnold of Spain, a wine merchant, likewise, at a place called ‘Nomanneslond’.¹⁹ The bishop of London Stephen Gravesend was lucky to avoid the same fate, and Edward’s remaining allies in London thought it prudent to leave the city: Geoffrey Scrope, chief justice of King’s Bench, escaped across the Thames on a horse belonging to Archbishop Reynolds, Reynolds commandeered the horses of the bishop of Rochester Hamo Hethe, and Hethe himself was forced to flee on foot.²⁰

Edward II and the Despensers travelled west, followed at some distance by the invaders. It is interesting to note that the annals of Newenham Abbey written shortly afterwards remarked that rex et maritus eius, ‘the king and his husband’, fled to Wales; evidently some contemporaries believed that Edward’s relationship with his chamberlain was sexual or romantic.²¹ Edward was aware of his wife’s movements: he gave two shillings to a man who brought him news of Isabella when she was near Cambridge, and later gave a pound to a valet sent to Gloucester to spy on her arrival.²² The king and his chamberlain spent 9–12 October in Gloucester, and by the middle of the month were at the great castle of Chepstow. Despenser the Elder, meanwhile, went to Bristol. Edward’s bad temper and anxiety are apparent from an entry in his chamber account of 12 October, when four of his valets were refused their wages because ‘the king has long had ill-will towards them’.²³ This was unfair and not the fault of his valets, who had done nothing wrong; twenty-four of them loyally remained with him until at least 31 October, the last day the chamber journal was kept.

In the face of such overwhelming opposition, few men were willing to fight for the king, not even the household knights who had served him so faithfully during the Marcher campaign of 1321/22. Even long-term Despenser adherents such as John Inge, Ingelram Berenger and Despenser’s brothers-in-law Ralph Camoys and John St Amand are conspicuous by their absence in 1326. The fact that Edward II lost the support of all those who mattered most is beyond question, but he was not quite as friendless as is often assumed. Roger Mortimer and Isabella paid 158 men in three ships for pursuing the Gascon lord Arnaud Caillau along the coast of Devon and Cornwall between 8 and 20 December 1326.²⁴ Caillau served Edward faithfully and had long been in favour with the king, who made him a household knight in March 1313 and keeper of the island of Oléron, and raised him to other positions in Gascony. The timing of Caillau’s pursuit strongly suggests that he had been with Edward until shortly before his capture in mid-November, and the fact that Mortimer and Isabella sent 158 men after him implies they were very keen to catch him. Edward’s devoted friend Donald, earl of Mar, Robert Bruce’s nephew, remained with the king until at least late October, when he returned to his homeland after an absence of twenty years and tried to persuade Bruce to invade England and help Edward. Nor was this the end of Mar’s involvement in Edward’s affairs: he spent much of 1327 attempting to free him and restore him to the throne, and joined the earl of Kent’s conspiracy to free the supposedly long-dead Edward in 1330. On 12 October 1326, Edward II ordered Malcolm Musard to raise footmen in Worcestershire. Musard was a knight and notorious gang leader who supported Edward in 1321/22, but subsequently turned against the king: Edward ordered his arrest in December 1323 for adhering to the Contrariants, and he was imprisoned in the Tower by June 1324.²⁵ Musard acknowledged a debt of £100 to Isabella – not Edward – on 6 August 1326, six weeks before the invasion, ‘to save his life and to have his lands again’ and was pardoned the following day for his adherence of 1322.²⁶ Given that Edward had imprisoned him for over two years, it would hardly be surprising to find that Musard joined the queen. He didn’t: Isabella seized his lands and goods in May 1327 on the grounds that he had supported Despenser the Elder against herself and her son, and Musard was in prison at Worcester by 8 November that year.²⁷ He also joined the earl of Kent’s conspiracy to free Edward in 1330.²⁸

John de Toucestre was a member of Edward’s household whom the king sent to Reading Abbey in November 1325 to receive ‘sustenance for life’ on his retirement.²⁹ Evidently, however, he left his abbey to fight for Edward after the invasion, as he was ordered on 10 October 1326 ‘to select all men at arms wherever he goes and to lead them to the king’. Toucestre, like Musard and Mar, joined Kent’s conspiracy in 1330. A John Beauchamp of Somerset claimed in 1327 that Toucestre and Richard Brown of Halford led men of Shepperton to Bristol to fight against Isabella and her son, supposedly against their will.³⁰ Another of the king and Despenser’s supporters was Adam of Sodbury, abbot of Glastonbury, indicted before the sheriff of Somerset shortly before 1 December 1326 – within days of Hugh Despenser’s execution – for concealing treasure belonging to Despenser and his ally Robert Baldock in his abbey.³¹ Abbot Adam was accused in 1327 of committing crimes in the company of men known to be plotting to free Edward from captivity. John Giffard of Essex claimed that his manor had been attacked by Roger Wodeham and more than fifty armed men, who said that Giffard was an enemy of Edward and Despenser and belonged to the queen’s faction, and stole some of Giffard’s horses to ride against Isabella. Wodeham was a valet of Edward II’s chamber and constable of Hadleigh Castle in Essex, and the petition says that he and his dozens of armed men went to South Wales with Edward and Despenser, and remained with them until they sailed from Chepstow on 20 October. Presumably after Edward’s capture, they returned to Essex and, according to Giffard, tried to kill him and his men for their adherence to Isabella.³² The speed and success of the invasion took the king’s supporters by surprise, and most of his loyal Welsh allies failed to meet up with him in Wales. Edward II was popular there, but Despenser was hated for his tyranny and his 1318 execution of Llywelyn Bren. If Edward had sent Despenser away from him, he would no doubt have had far more success in attracting support; but then, if he had been willing to send Despenser away from him, he wouldn’t have been in this position in the first place.

On 20 October at Chepstow, Edward replaced Hugh Despenser’s sister Aline Burnell as custodian of Conwy Castle with Sir William Erkalewe, presumably because he felt he needed an experienced military man in charge of such an important stronghold. He sent men named Roger and Richard Flete ‘to diverse parts of the realm on his affairs’ the same day, to what end is unclear.³³ Also on that day, the king, Despenser, Despenser’s confessor Richard Bliton and the chancellor of England Robert Baldock – and possibly the earl of Arundel – set sail from Chepstow, probably heading for Lundy Island (which had been in Despenser’s possession since 1321) in the Bristol Channel and ultimately, probably Ireland, where Edward may have hoped to find allies and perhaps even raise an army to launch a counter-invasion.³⁴ The Lanercost chronicler expressed his alarm that if Edward had reached Ireland he might have sailed from there to Scotland and attacked England with the help of the Irish and Scots.³⁵ Despite Bliton praying to Saint Anne ‘that she would send us a good wind’, however, the boat went nowhere, and on 25 October they were forced to put in at Cardiff.³⁶ Jean Froissart, unreliable as ever, claims that the weight of their sins kept them at sea for eleven days.³⁷ The king’s attempted flight by sea meant that his enemies could claim he had abandoned his kingdom, and so they appointed his son Edward of Windsor as regent in his place on 26 October.³⁸ The memorandum on the Close Roll names the bishops and magnates then at Bristol with the queen. As well as those mentioned above, they included the archbishop of Dublin; Henry Beaumont, whom Edward had imprisoned earlier that year; William la Zouche of Ashby, who had fought for the king at Boroughbridge in 1322; and perhaps most painfully for Edward, Robert Wateville, to whom he had shown considerable kindness and generosity in 1325/26.³⁹

Shortly before he sailed from Chepstow, on 18 October, the king paid a messenger for bringing him letters from Hugh Despenser the Elder, earl of Winchester.⁴⁰ The earl had been left to defend Bristol, and the queen arrived there also on 18 October. The city fell on the 26th, and on the 27th Winchester was given a mock trial in front of William Trussell, a judge who had fled from England after Boroughbridge, in the presence of Roger Mortimer, the earls of Norfolk, Kent and Lancaster (as Henry of Lancaster, earl of Leicester, was now styled), Thomas Wake and the queen. Winchester, who was sixty-five – not ninety, as stated by Froissart – was given a mock trial deliberately arranged as a parody of Thomas of Lancaster’s in 1322, for which the Despensers alone were blamed.⁴¹ The earl of Kent, watching the trial, had also been one of the men who sentenced Lancaster to death, though the hypocrisy of this went unremarked. Because Lancaster had been executed in 1322 without the right to defend himself, Winchester was also denied the right to speak. Lancaster had been forbidden the right to speak because he had forbidden Piers Gaveston the right to speak in 1312. To no one’s surprise, least of all Winchester’s, no doubt, he was sentenced to death and hanged immediately on the public gallows in his armour, in front of a jeering crowd. His body was cut down and fed to dogs, and his head carried to the town of Winchester on a spear to be displayed in public there.⁴² The Bridlington chronicler alone mourned his death, lamenting, ‘O sorrow!’ and describing Despenser as a great and powerful man.⁴³ Edward II at Neath in South Wales had heard the news by 5 November, and one assumes that he mourned sincerely for the nobleman who had remained loyal to him from the very beginning of his reign, and who had perhaps been a father figure to him.⁴⁴ A chronicle written at Bury St Edmunds Abbey – over 200 miles from Bristol – claims that Isabella pleaded for the earl’s life to be spared but Roger Mortimer and Henry of Lancaster overruled her, which seems unlikely. The Flemish chronicler Jean le Bel, an eyewitness to Despenser’s execution, does not mention that Isabella did this, and neither does any other source. Precisely how Isabella’s social inferiors would have dared to overrule her wishes in public is not clear. She had sworn that she would destroy the Despensers, and her subsequent actions against Hugh Despenser the Younger’s children hardly demonstrate that she was overflowing with forgiveness towards the family.

On the day of the earl of Winchester’s death, Edward and Hugh Despenser arrived at the latter’s stronghold of Caerphilly. They stayed there until 2 November then left, for reasons which are hard to explain, given that the castle could, and did, withstand a siege for many months. The numerous possessions Edward took with him, which must have required many carts to transport all the way from London, were later found and inventoried at Caerphilly. They included a red retiring-robe with saffron stripes and embroidered with bears; a black cap lined with red velvet and decorated with butterflies made of pearls; a white cap lined with green velvet and decorated with gold trefoils; eight cushions of purple velvet and red samite (a heavy silk); a counterpane and mattress of red sendal lined with green sendal; a canopy and curtains of red sendal to surround his bed; two silk curtains with gold stripes; and a sword, girdle and scabbard enamelled with the arms of Castile. Edward also took more practical items, including crossbows and numerous pieces of armour, and a great deal of plate, including three brass pots marked with the letter E, 279 silver saucers marked with a leopard, and other random items such as a chain for his greyhounds, a plectrum for a lyre, four small pennons embroidered with Edward’s arms to decorate trumpets, and items for his chapel, including a bag of incense. £14,000 in cash was found in twenty-seven barrels.⁴⁵ Edward left Hugh Despenser’s knight John Felton in charge of Caerphilly Castle and made him swear on the Gospels not to deliver it to Isabella or to his son, an oath Felton kept; he and the dozens of other men within, who included Despenser’s teenage son Huchon, refused to surrender to the castle’s besiegers until the following March when Mortimer and Isabella finally agreed not to execute Huchon.⁴⁶

Edward’s chamber journal was kept for the last time on 31 October, either because his clerks had abandoned him or because they had given up in despair.⁴⁷ The final entry records wages to five carpenters and twenty-four chamber valets, including two women, Joan Traghs and Anneis de May, for the twenty days since 12 October.⁴⁸ Some of the king’s chamber staff were among the garrison of Caerphilly Castle pardoned on 20 March 1327 for holding it against the queen, which implies that they remained there when Edward left on 2 November, perhaps at his command.⁴⁹ Also on 31 October, Edward took the fealty of his nephew John de Bohun, eldest son of the earl of Hereford killed at Boroughbridge in 1322, and allowed him his lands, although John would not come of age (twenty-one) until 23 November 1327.⁵⁰ John’s brother Edward, about fourteen, was also with the ‘baffled king’ as he ‘wandered houseless around Wales’, as Lanercost put it.⁵¹ Desperately, Edward sent out orders for 400 footmen to be brought to Cardiff, ordered men to keep the ports along the South Wales coast safe against his enemies and even offered felons a pardon if they would come to Caerphilly Castle and defend it, but no one was listening anymore.⁵²

Edward, Despenser and their remaining followers spent the period from 2 to 10 November at Margam Abbey and Neath. On the 10th, Edward appointed envoys to negotiate with Isabella: his nephew Edward de Bohun; the abbot of Neath; Rhys ap Gruffydd; and the royal squires Oliver de Bordeaux and John Harsik.⁵³ Isabella, who held the upper hand and had no reason to negotiate, showed no interest, and indeed it is not certain if the envoys ever went. What Edward was hoping to achieve by leaving Caerphilly for Neath is unclear; by now he probably had no plans at all and was merely, hopelessly waiting for the inevitable. He had with him his Great Seal, £6,000 and some of the chancery rolls, which were later found at Neath and Swansea by Henry of Lancaster and taken to Isabella.⁵⁴

Edward’s movements for the next few days are uncertain. He seems to have left Neath on 11 November and attempted to make his way back to the castle of Caerphilly, perhaps because he knew he was being pursued by a group of men sent by Isabella and Mortimer: Henry of Lancaster, William la Zouche, who would marry Despenser’s widow Eleanor in 1329, and two sons of the Welsh nobleman Llywelyn Bren, hideously executed by Despenser in 1318.⁵⁵ On 16 November, the king and Despenser were captured near Llantrisant, in a place later known as the Vale of Treachery, with a small handful of followers. They were the chancellor Robert Baldock, the king’s controller Robert Holden, a sergeant-at-arms called Simon of Reading, knights named Thomas Wyther and John Bek, a valet named John le Blount and a clerk named John Smale.⁵⁶ The Annales Paulini, dramatically, say they were captured in the middle of a terrific storm, and the author of the Anonimalle reveals his ignorance of Welsh geography by declaring that Edward was taken near Snowdon.⁵⁷

Although Edward II remained king of England in name for another nine weeks, his influence ended at that moment. And so his reign staggered to an ignominious end with him wandering around Wales with a handful of followers. As the king, however, he was still treated with respect and deference, and his cousin Lancaster took him to his castle of Kenilworth (recently restored to him), via his castle at Monmouth. On 20 November, Edward was forced to give up his Great Seal to Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford. The memorandum on the Close Roll claims, implausibly, that Edward deliberated for a while then announced that ‘it pleased him to send his great seal to his consort and his son’, and thus it was carried to the queen and the duke of Aquitaine, who had turned fourteen on 13 November.⁵⁸

On 16 November, Edward II saw Hugh Despenser for the last time, both of them knowing that the powerful chamberlain was going to his death. How Edward felt is a matter for speculation. Did he regret his dependence on Despenser, which had brought him to this? Did he blame Isabella for what he saw as her faithless betrayal, and refuse to acknowledge his own culpability? Whether he was upset, or furious, or denying reality, or vowing revenge, is unknown, and in a sense, it hardly matters. Events were now out of his control. Although most of the men who remained with the king were released, Robert Baldock the chancellor, who as a cleric could not be executed, was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. He was handed over to the not so tender mercies of Adam Orleton, who imprisoned him in his London house, which some months later was broken into by a mob. They dragged Baldock to the notorious Newgate prison, where the unfortunate man died soon afterwards in torment.⁵⁹ Simon of Reading was sentenced to death and hanged on a vague accusation of insulting the queen – not in fact a capital offence – and without a trial.⁶⁰ The reasons for this are mysterious; although Reading has been described in modern times as a close personal friend of Hugh Despenser, his knight or his marshal, he was merely a sergeant-at-arms in Edward II’s household.⁶¹

In Hereford on the day after the king’s capture, Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, was executed. Arundel, now forty-one and present at Piers Gaveston’s death in 1312, had come over to the king and the Despensers’ cause when they were strong. Now he must have realised that he had backed the wrong horse, but to his credit, he remained loyal, a rare example of a former enemy of Edward II who changed sides and stayed at the king’s side. Arundel was captured by John Charlton, Edward’s chamberlain until replaced by Hugh Despenser in 1318, whom Edward had pardoned for allegiance to the Contrariants in 1322. According to Adam Murimuth, Roger Mortimer hated his cousin – Arundel’s grandmother was the elder sister of Mortimer’s father – with a ‘perfect hatred’, and Arundel’s death had far more to do with a private vendetta than with any kind of justice.⁶² The two had been on opposing sides in 1321/22, were long-term rivals for land and influence in Wales, and of course Arundel had been a staunch adherent of the king and Despenser and married his son and heir to Despenser’s daughter. These felonies sufficed to condemn him, and he was beheaded by a ‘worthless wretch’ who needed twenty-two strokes of the axe to sever the unfortunate earl’s head, perhaps because a blunt blade had been ordered. Lanercost says he ‘was condemned to death in secret, as it were’, and there is no evidence that he had a trial.⁶³ Two other men, John Daniel and Robert de Micheldever, were beheaded with him, also without a trial.⁶⁴ Daniel was the keeper of two of Mortimer’s manors and of one belonging to Mortimer’s mother, and had been appointed in March 1326 to search for men who had supported Mortimer as a Contrariant. Micheldever was a squire of Edward II’s chamber.⁶⁵ It is unclear what either man had done to merit execution, and not only were they not given a trial, they were not even accused of any crime. The goods Arundel had stored at the cathedral church of Chichester were delivered to Isabella and Edward of Windsor four days after his death, and included £524 in six canvas sacks, a silver salt cellar ‘enamelled all over’, a silver-gilt enamelled cup with matching basin, and seven partly broken cups.⁶⁶

Hugh Despenser, Robert Baldock and Simon of Reading were taken from Llantrisant to Hereford and subjected to every indignity possible. Despenser was tied to a mean horse, in the same way as Thomas of Lancaster had been in 1322, his coat of arms was reversed, and a ‘chaplet of sharp nettles’ was set on his head. Through all the villages they passed, the populace came out to shriek their joy at the downfall of the hated royal favourite, to blow trumpets and bang drums, and to throw things at him. Biblical verses were written or carved onto Despenser’s arms, shoulders and chest, including ‘Why do you boast in evil?’ from Psalm 52. Four years almost to the day later, the same verse would be read out to Roger Mortimer as he went to his own execution.⁶⁷ There was much discussion as to where Despenser would be put on trial and executed, Isabella favouring London. Despenser, however, refused all food and drink so that ‘he was almost dead from fasting’, and so it was decided to judge him in Hereford on 24 November so he would not die by his own will and cheat the queen of her revenge.

Before he died, Despenser was given a mock trial during which William Trussell, who had also presided over his father’s trial, read out a long list of charges against him in French.⁶⁸ Some of them are true or partly true, some are perfectly ludicrous, and most of them pile all the blame for Edward II’s failed reign on Despenser’s head. The king’s enemies did not yet dare blame Edward himself, at least not publicly, for his manifold failings, and Despenser was a useful scapegoat.⁶⁹ He was accused of sole responsibility, with his father, for Thomas of Lancaster’s death, the earl of Kent’s attendance at Lancaster’s execution and at those of the Despensers still escaping the notice of chroniclers; murdering, executing and imprisoning many magnates; piracy (correctly); leaving the queen in peril at Tynemouth in 1322; destroying the privileges of Holy Church, robbing prelates and plundering the Church ‘as a false Christian’; forcing the king to ride against the Contrariants in 1322; trying to bribe people at the French court to kill the queen; and most curiously of all, of breaking the limbs of one Lady Baret until she was ‘forever more driven mad and lost’. Another charge was that he ‘procured discord’ between Edward and Isabella, more evidence of the queen’s anger that Despenser had come between herself and her husband.

The verdict was never in doubt: Sir Hugh Despenser, lord of Glamorgan, then probably in his late thirties, was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Trussell ended the sentence by declaring, ‘Withdraw, you traitor, tyrant, renegade; go to take your own justice, traitor, evil man, criminal!’ Despenser was tied to a hurdle and dragged by four horses through the streets to the castle, his own, where a gallows fifty feet high had been especially erected. A noose was thrown around his neck and he was hauled up and partially strangled, then lowered onto a ladder, where according to Froissart, his penis and testicles were cut off, ‘because he was a heretic and a sodomite, even, it was said, with the king, and this was why the king had driven away the queen’, though this was not part of his sentence. His heart and intestines were cut out and thrown onto a fire, ‘because he was a false-hearted traitor’. Merciful death came at last when he was beheaded. Simon of Reading, the obscure sergeant-at-arms, was hanged below him. Despenser’s head was taken to London and, to great jubilation, placed on London Bridge, and the four quarters of his body were sent to Carlisle, York, Bristol and Dover to be displayed in public.⁷⁰ Shortly after Roger Mortimer’s own execution in November 1330, Edward III granted permission for ‘the friends of Hugh’ to gather and bury his remains wherever they wished, which they duly did at Tewkesbury Abbey, where his tomb still exists.⁷¹

The precious goods Despenser kept in the Tower of London, which included almost thirty gold cups with matching ewers, were transferred into Isabella’s possession on 6 December.⁷² On 1 January 1327, Isabella ordered Despenser’s middle three daughters Joan, Eleanor and Margaret, aged roughly ten, seven and four, to be sent to three separate convents and forced to take the veil as nuns. Evidently the queen believed this matter to be extremely pressing, as the girls were to be ‘admitted and veiled without delay’.⁷³Despenser’s eldest daughter Isabel, about fourteen, escaped the order as she was already married to the earl of Arundel’s son, as did his youngest daughter Elizabeth, a baby or possibly still in utero. Edward II had sent three of Roger Mortimer’s daughters to convents in 1324, but they were not forced to take binding, lifelong vows as nuns. It has been suggested that Isabella’s motive was to prevent anyone claiming the Despenser lands through the girls via marriage, which is most unlikely, as the lands were forfeit to the Crown and the de Clare inheritance belonged to their mother. Besides, as the girls had four brothers, their chances of inheriting their parents’ lands were remote.⁷⁴ More plausibly, the order is further evidence of Isabella’s virulent hatred of Despenser and her fierce desire for revenge on him, which, his execution notwithstanding, still remained, and thus she lashed out at some of his children. The girls’ mother, Despenser’s widow Eleanor, was detained at the Tower of London – according to a Hainault chronicler, in case she might be pregnant by her uncle the king – and their eldest brother Hugh or Huchon was imprisoned until 1331.

Edward II’s reaction to hearing of his beloved chamberlain’s terrible death is not recorded, and indeed it is not even clear where he was on 24 November, as he had been given into the custody of Henry of Lancaster, and Lancaster attended Despenser’s execution.⁷⁵ One hopes that Edward wasn’t forced to watch it. Two months later, when a deputation from parliament visited Edward at Kenilworth, William Trussell was their main spokesperson and officially renounced the kingdom’s allegiance to Edward. Perhaps the man who pronounced the death sentence on Despenser was sent deliberately in order to inflict maximum emotional pain on Edward, as surely there must have been other men who could have gone instead. If this was the plan, however, it backfired: Trussell ‘knelt before our lord the king and cried him mercy, begging him to pardon his trespasses against him, and he [Edward] pardoned him and gave him the sign of peace in front of them all’.⁷⁶

Edward reached Kenilworth Castle by 5 December, and spent a very lonely and cheerless Christmas there, as the Flores points out.⁷⁷ He must have been deeply distraught at his sudden, shocking downfall, the betrayal of his wife and son, the deaths of Hugh Despenser and the others, the knowledge that few people had been willing to support him against the invaders, the awareness that he had so completely failed as a king and a leader. We can only imagine what thoughts went through his head at this time. Meanwhile, Isabella, Roger Mortimer and their allies spent Christmas at Wallingford. Edward of Windsor was of course also present, and his brother John of Eltham was brought there by a group of Londoners.⁷⁸

Unsurprisingly, discussions about Edward II’s fate dominated proceedings, though even at this late date it was unclear what should happen to the king. Many people, not least the pope, were also uneasy about the queen’s failure to return to her husband.⁷⁹ But Isabella’s rebellion, invasion and participation in the execution of the Despensers made it impossible that she and Edward could simply resume their marital relationship as if nothing had happened. Neither would Roger Mortimer have permitted her to; he had come far too close to power to allow Isabella to return to Edward, and his ambition required him to stay in her favour. And so Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford, claimed that Edward carried a knife within his hose to kill Isabella, and if he had no other weapon he would crush her with his teeth; and therefore, the queen could never again live with her husband.⁸⁰ Edward indignantly refuted the allegation that he meant his wife any harm when he heard about it, and there is no other evidence that Edward was or wished to be violent towards his wife. Nor is there any reason to suppose that Isabella, despite her rebellion, wished Edward any physical harm, and it is unknown whether at Christmas 1326 she spoke in favour of his deposition or was, even now, reluctant to take this enormous step.⁸¹Perhaps, like her brother-in-law the earl of Kent, she had sought the destruction of the Despensers but not of her husband. The overwhelming success of the invasion must have taken everyone by surprise, even those who took part, and it may be that Isabella – and perhaps even some of her allies – had not anticipated or desired the king’s humiliation. She sent Edward letters and gifts in 1327, and in April told a council meeting that she was ready and willing to visit him (they forbade it).⁸² Whatever the queen’s opinion, she must, like her allies, have come to the conclusion that allowing Edward to remain on the throne was impossible, whether they had originally planned this or not. And so finally the council decided that he should be deposed in favour of his son, not executed, but allowed to live in comfortable custody for the rest of his life.

The parliament during which Edward II was deposed began in London on 7 January 1327, though as Edward did not summon it, its legality was highly questionable. Whether Edward was deposed in this parliament or by this parliament is a question which has been frequently debated and need not concern us much here.⁸³ It is almost impossible to know what really happened in January 1327 and how Edward reacted to losing his throne, as we only know the official story which was allowed to come out, as with his handing over his Great Seal supposedly with pleasure some weeks before. The official version of events was that he piously and obediently, albeit with sighs and tears, consented to abdicate his throne to his son. What his real attitude was, we will never know. Early in January, Adam Orleton and others are said to have travelled to Kenilworth to persuade Edward to attend the parliament, but he ‘cursed them contemptuously, declaring that he would not come among his enemies’.⁸⁴ One might question whether Edward really was asked to come to London or whether this story was a cover for the reality that Edward’s enemies did not want him to appear before parliament and give him a chance to create sympathy for himself, and perhaps even, at this late stage, save his throne. No English king had ever been deposed and therefore it was entirely unclear how it should be done, and Roger Mortimer, the two bishops Adam Orleton and John Stratford and their allies were groping around in the dark. Ann Lyon has described the parliament of January 1327 as ‘an attempt by what was a relatively small group of enemies of Edward II, most of its leaders motivated by personal grudges against him, to give an aura of legality to acts which were unprecedented and therefore illegal’.⁸⁵ Claire Valente points out that ‘the new regime was also careful to conceal all evidence of opposition’ to the deposition and that all but one chronicler, Rochester, associated with Bishop Hamo Hethe, ‘recorded nothing but smooth sailing, one sign of a successful cover-up’.⁸⁶Rochester is the only chronicle which records that William Melton, archbishop of York, and the bishops of Rochester, London and Carlisle openly spoke out for Edward and did not consent to his removal. Matters did not go as smoothly as the king’s enemies had hoped: Adam Orleton made a speech on 12 January and asked whether the assembly would prefer to have Edward II as king or his son, and evidently the response was not nearly as enthusiastic as Orleton and others would have liked, which perturbed them.⁸⁷

When parliament gathered again on the 13th, Thomas Wake was planted in the crowd to shout approval at appropriate moments during speeches by his cousin Mortimer, the bishops of Hereford and Winchester (Orleton and Stratford) and the archbishop of Canterbury (Walter Reynolds, formerly a friend of Edward), declaring that Edward had broken his coronation oath and should no longer be their king.⁸⁸ Swept up in the fervour of the moment and in the stage-managed piece of grand theatre it undoubtedly was, the gathering consented that Edward would be removed and his son crowned in his place, and a deputation of twenty-four men was sent to Kenilworth to inform Edward of the decision. They included William Trussell, Edward’s nephew-in-law the earl of Surrey, who had switched sides to Isabella at some point, perhaps on hearing of the slow and bloody death of his brother-in-law Arundel, and the royal justice Geoffrey Scrope, also a former close ally of Edward.⁸⁹

Many chronicles describe Edward’s reaction to hearing the news, and they all depict it the same way. A penitent half-fainting Edward, in tears, reacts with patience and humble subservience, agrees that as things cannot be otherwise he is content that his son will succeed him, and blesses his son, who he hopes will find greater favour with the people than he has.⁹⁰ The Pipewell chronicle says that Edward begged his subjects’ forgiveness on his knees, and Flores that he lamented his failings but could not be other than he was, though Adam Murimuth says that Edward’s agreement was reported to parliament ‘more fully than it was done’, that is, his weeping and begging for forgiveness were exaggerated.⁹¹

According to the chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker decades later, but no one else, Edward was threatened that if he did not consent, his sons Edward and John would be passed over and the throne given to someone of non-royal birth, which has long been assumed to be a reference to Roger Mortimer (though Baker does not say this). This is an extremely unlikely story, and Mortimer, or anyone other than Edward of Windsor, would never have been accepted as king by the magnates and prelates or indeed by Isabella.⁹² The official proclamation of the transfer of power declared that Edward had of his own free will decided that the governance of the realm should devolve to his son, and that this had been accepted by his magnates, prelates and the community of the realm. In short, it was presented not as Edward being made to accept his deposition, but his kingdom accepting his wish to abdicate.⁹³ Trussell formally withdrew the kingdom’s allegiance from Edward, his steward Thomas le Blount ceremonially broke his staff of office, and Edward II’s reign was over. His son’s reign as Edward III, king of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Aquitaine, count of Ponthieu and earl of Chester, officially began on 25 January 1327, and the fourteen-year-old was crowned at Westminster on 2 February by Archbishop Reynolds. The other archbishop, Melton of York, refused to attend out of loyalty to Edward II, though evidently he became reconciled to the young king, as he performed the marriage ceremony of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault a year later. Melton’s involvement in the former king’s life was certainly not yet over, however.

Edward II was now merely Sir Edward of Caernarfon, and it was agreed that he would be housed in comfort for the rest of his days and treated with honour and respect as the king’s father. Presumably he was informed about the Articles of the Deposition, a list of six charges intended to justify his removal: they included the statements that he had allowed himself to be governed by others who gave him bad counsel, that he had given himself up to improper pastimes and neglected the business of his kingdom, that he had left his kingdom and his people as lost, and because of his cruelty and his defects, he was incorrigible without hope of amendment.⁹⁴ It seems unlikely, given Edward’s personality, that he really did react with such contrite acquiescence to the demands that he abdicate his throne, and far more likely that he spat utter rage at his subjects who had dared to behave in such a manner, and that he vowed revenge. Although this would not happen, the twists and turns of Edward II’s extraordinary life continued beyond his deposition.