ONE

Childhood

OF ALL THE stages in the life of a resourceful and imaginative individual, childhood is the most important and the most difficult to understand. We need to think about a boy’s physical well-being as he developed, as well as his education, social situation and religious outlook. We have to consider his associations with relatives, companions and mentors. With regard to medieval characters, prophecies, feuds and spiritual cults dominated families for generations, and cannot be passed over simply because of their lack of relevance in the modern world. We must understand the strict definitions of hierarchy, and the fighting and leadership skills which noble heirs were expected to display. With regard to royalty, we must also think of the huge weight of public expectation on a young prince. With a growing boy of any class, we must pay a thought to what he simply liked to do, what he found fun. Thus it is fair to say that it is a major failing of all the previous biographies of Edward III that his childhood has either been completely ignored, or covered by a chapter describing his father’s shortcomings as a monarch.

It is easy to see why this has happened: there is very little information available on Edward III’s early life except his father’s rule. However, there is no doubt that Edward’s relationship with his father was much more important and complicated than merely seeing at first hand how his father’s antagonism of the most important nobles led to civil war. What about his personal feelings towards his father? What about the bonds of trust, rivalry, humour, friendship, mutual support, love and (eventually) gratitude which a son often feels for his father and a father often feels for his son? And what about his relationships with other people, for instance his mother? Existing studies say almost nothing of personal relevance between his birth and baptism in November 1312, and his creation as duke of Aquitaine in September 1325. Practically the only personal facts regularly mentioned about him in this period are his creation as earl of Chester, his first being summoned to parliament at the age of seven, and the supposed appointment of Richard Bury as his tutor. With such a shortage of material, it is not surprising that writers have concentrated on the political turmoil of his father’s reign, with the overt or implied understanding that young Edward saw his father make a mess of ruling his realm and vowed to try to do better.

We too can try to do better. For a start we may take a very different view on his relationship with his father, about whom we know much more than Dr Mackinnon, who in 1900 began his biography of Edward III with the line ‘A more complete ninny than Edward II has seldom occupied a throne.’ Edward II’s failings as a king did not arise from stupidity or a desire to be obtuse and overbearing towards his subjects. He was undoubtedly one of the most pious kings of medieval England, deeply conscious of his indebtedness to God for his great status, and a sincere believer in the power of the intervention of the saints. He was a man who loved to be generous, and to be seen to be generous. At the same time he could be cruel, and he did not have much of a capacity for forgiveness, or even toleration. He was capable of huge affection, but preferred genuine closeness to the formal bonds of diplomatic and military friendship. He had a keen sense of humour and a rare ability to express it. In 1305 he wrote to his uncle, Louis d’Evreux, sending him ‘a big trotting palfrey which can hardly carry its own weight, and some of our bandy-legged harriers from Wales, who can well catch a hare if they find it asleep, and some of our running dogs, which go at a gentle pace: for well we know that you take delight in lazy dogs’.¹ As a young man Edward II’s closest companion – and most would say the true love of his life – was the dashing Piers Gaveston, a Gascon knight’s son, three years older, who was outrageously witty, unashamedly rude, clever, physically strong, and brilliant enough with a lance to humiliate the proud heirs of England’s most important families in the joust, the sport they rated above all others. In the words of a well-informed contemporary, Edward ‘adopted Gaveston as a brother’ and ‘cherished him as a son’.² Gaveston in return gave Edward the confidence to be his unconventional self.³ Above all else, Edward II wished to establish himself as an individual, not a model prince, and in so doing he embarked on a personal rebellion against authority which lasted for much of the rest of his reign.⁴

Gaveston was murdered in June 1312 by the earls of Lancaster, Warwick and Hereford, and the country was plunged into turmoil. Many feared the king’s wrath: it seemed that the bloodiest of civil wars was about to break out. The king summoned the earls responsible to London to account for themselves, and they responded with armed force. Lancaster came with a thousand horsemen and fifteen hundred foot soldiers; Warwick with troops from the forest of Arden, and Hereford with a crowd of Welsh ‘woodland wild men’.⁵ Their troops encamped between St Albans and Ware, within marching distance of the city. Edward, at Blackfriars, urged the citizens of London to defend their gates and walls. He summoned parliament to Westminster to discuss the crisis, and the earls of Pembroke and Surrey urged him to make war on those who had authorised the killing. A papal envoy, Cardinal Arnaud Nouvel, arrived at the end of August, and negotiated directly with the rebel earls at St Albans. He persuaded them to meet the king. But when the earls finally arrived in the city, they came heavily armed. The earl of Gloucester, the king’s nephew, then took up the duty of chief negotiator. He achieved little, for the king refused to accept that his most cherished friend was a traitor, and the earls refused to acknowledge that their killing amounted to murder. When Edward left London for Windsor, the recriminations and threats of violence still rattled between the upper ranks of the English nobility. Civil war seemed the most probable outcome.

In such a political atmosphere, on Monday 13 November 1312, Edward III was born at Windsor. The country’s relief was described by the contemporary author of the Life of Edward the Second:

Amid this uproar, with various rumours flying hither and thither, while one man foretold peace, his neighbour war, there was born to the king a handsome and long looked-for son. He was christened Edward, his father’s name . . . This long wished-for birth was timely for us, because by God’s will it had two fortunate consequences. It much lessened the grief which had afflicted the king on Piers [Gaveston’s] death, and it provided a known heir to the throne.⁶

All across England there was celebration. A monk of St Albans recorded that ‘by this birth all England was made joyful . . . and his father was made happy again, for it tempered that sadness he had felt since the death of Piers’.⁷ The monk went on: ‘On that day his love of the boy began and the memory of Piers began to diminish.’⁸ Edward, it would seem, had redeemed the situation. By his very birth he had pulled the country back from the abyss.

These references to Gaveston and the baby being held in comparable affection are interesting, for they echo those chronicles which refer to Edward II loving his friend as a brother or a son. This was certainly close endearment: no one ever accused Edward II of being a cruel father, or uncaring towards his sisters and half-brothers. He had a particular fondness for female family members – especially his stepmother, Queen Margaret – and maintained his old nurse, Alice Leygrave, for many years. His efforts to bring his friends into the royal family by marrying them to his female relatives – Piers Gaveston is the prime, though not the sole, example – further underline how important family ties were to Edward. The royal family was clearly at the heart of his view of his kingdom and the rest of God’s Creation. This explains why his son’s birth was of such political – as well as personal – significance to him. The king and many of his subjects would have strongly associated the birth of an heir with God’s will, and thus it was a blessing, a gift to the kingdom ordained by God. Edward had received divine confirmation that his line would continue. Most important of all, the whole country – including the rebel earls – had to acknowledge this blessing. There had to be some fear in the earls’ camps that God was favouring the king and, by implication, not his enemies.

Edward, in his joy at hearing this news, granted the man who bore it, John Launge, and his wife, Joan (one of the queen’s attendants), the extraordinary sum of eighty pounds yearly for life.⁹ This was more than many knights received, and it is perhaps not surprising that the sheriffs of London proved very reluctant to pay it.¹⁰ But such a huge gift to the bearer of the news was money well-spent. Although it was probably motivated by paternal pride, it had propaganda value too. It helped draw attention to the fact that the king now had a son. Even better publicity was the timely presence of the papal legate, Cardinal Nouvel. Edward jumped at the opportunity to have his son and heir baptised by an emissary of the pope. Accordingly, on Thursday 16 November 1312, Cardinal Nouvel christened young Edward of Windsor in St Edward’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. For good measure, Edward asked the other peace envoys in the country – Count Louis d’Evreux, the queen’s uncle, and the bishop of Poitiers – to be the boy’s godfathers. To these he added five more godfathers: John Droxford (bishop of Bath and Wells), Walter Reynolds (bishop of Worcester), John of Brittany (earl of Richmond), Aymer de Valence (earl of Pembroke) and one Hugh Despenser. The last-mentioned was the father of the man of the same name who, nine years later, finally plunged the country into civil war.

Edward’s birth was symbolic for other, secular reasons. England in the early fourteenth century was a country in which the future and the past were interwoven with the present in a series of potent and developing stories. Great families knew their history – none more so than the royal family – and they believed that, to a certain extent, they knew their futures too, through prophecy. This was not personal fortune-telling but public prophecy, which soon was circulated as rumour and eventually captured in literary works. In the widely-circulated ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings’, probably first written down in its earliest form at about the time of Edward’s birth, the six kings following King John were characterised by beasts.¹¹ Henry III was portrayed as a lamb, Edward I as a dragon, Edward II as a goat and Edward III as a boar ‘who will come out of Windsor’. Although a boar might not strike the modern reader as an animal of great significance, it had huge resonance in the fourteenth century. ‘The boar who came out of Cornwall’ was none other thanKing Arthur himself.¹² Moreover, ‘the boar who will come out of Windsor’ was prophesied to have the head and heart of a lion. He would wear ‘three crowns’ – an oblique reference to the three crowns of the Holy Roman Empire, one iron, one silver and one gold – and be buried at Cologne amongst the tombs of the Three Kings, the Magi, who were then understood to be the first Christian kings.¹³ To many contemporaries, the future was clear: Edward II would lose his kingdom. He would die overseas.¹⁴After his death, his successor, Edward of Windsor, would win fame as a warrior-king, become Holy Roman Emperor, and win battles across Europe, regaining the lands which his ancestors had lost. The people of England could have some faith that their newborn prince would grow up not just to be a king but a lion-hearted and victorious one.

The large number of copies of this prophecy allow us to be reasonably confident that Edward knew it. A revision updated in about 1327 was incorporated into the most popular chronicle of the day, the Brut, written in the mid-1330s, of which Queen Isabella owned a copy at her death.¹⁵ Later in his life Edward specifically renounced any intention of being buried at the shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne, suggesting he knew this was widely expected of him. When personally visiting the shrine in 1338, he gave a large amount of money to be spent on upkeep of the building, so that part of the prophecy was familiar to him by then. But whether he believed all of it, totally, is another question. While certainty in such matters is not possible, it is probable that he recognised that true prophetic writing could contain kernels of truth. When declaring that he wished to be buried in Westminster rather than Cologne, he did not merely pass an idle remark: he swore a solemn oath, so he seems to have taken the original prophecy seriously. And there is good evidence that royal prophecies were taken seriously by Edward’s father, for Edward II had faith in one prophetic story in particular: the oil of St Thomas.

The story of the oil of St Thomas stated that when Thomas Becket had been in exile, the Virgin Mary had appeared to him in a dream. She had announced to him that the fifth king after his time (Edward II) would be a benevolent man who would fight for God’s church, and reconquer the Holy Land. To assist this king and his successors the Virgin entrusted Becket with an ampulla of sacred oil, and directed him to give it to a monk of St Cyprian’s monastery. The monk hid it in the church of St George at Poitiers, with a sheet of metal inscribed with the prophecy itself. After an attempt to steal it had failed, it had come into the possession of the duke of Brabant, Edward II’s brother-in-law, who had brought it to the king’s coronation in 1308. It was not used, however. Ten years later, Edward II claimed that he believed the reason his reign was so unsuccessful was because he, the fifth king after Becket’s time, had failed to be anointed with the oil. And in so doing he had failed not only his kingdom, himself and his successors but also St Thomas and the Virgin Mary. So anxious was he for some respite from his failure that he wrote to the recently elected Pope John XXII asking whether he would send a cardinal to anoint him with the oil. The pope refused the services of a cardinal, but said that if the king truly believed the story it would not be sinful for him to be anointed. That Edward II raised such a matter privately with the pope suggests his interest in this prophecy was not merely political, but spiritual too. He believed it.¹⁶

We do not know how deeply Edward III shared his father’s view of this or any other prophecy. It may just be coincidence but the three most important divine figures in Edward III’s life – the Virgin Mary, St Thomas of Canterbury and St George – all appear in this story. But in an age when most people believed in destiny, Edward would have understood that it was widely held that he would become a military conqueror abroad and a champion of the church, a man whose leadership had been awaited for centuries. It was an utterly traditional role for a king, very similar to that of his grandfather, the majestic and fearsome Edward I; but it was also wrapped in romance and religious mysticism, and thus embodied all the virtues of fourteenth-century kingship.

If there was a fly in the prophetic ointment, it was the day of the birth. 13 November was St Brice’s Day, and St Brice was not the sort of saint by whom one would choose to be governed. He was a pupil of the fifth-century saint, St Martin of Tours, and used to tease his master with sarcastic comments, not always stopping short of insult: calling him half-witted, for instance. St Martin responded by praying that Brice would succeed him as bishop of Tours, and prophesying that he would be treated very badly during his episcopacy. So it happened: Bishop Brice was charged at the age of thirty-three with fathering his washerwoman’s child. On commanding the baby to speak in the name of Christ to reveal whether he was the father or not, the people accused him of witchcraft and threw him out of the city. Only after spending seven years in exile at the papal palace in Rome did Brice achieve sufficient composure and sanctity to return to Tours and rule as a more saintly bishop for the rest of his life.¹⁷ Thus it may have been with some trepidation that each chronicler recorded the feast day of St Brice in connection with their new prince’s birth. After all, Edward II had been born on St Mark’s Day, and that was hardly any more propitious, being widely regarded as a day of doom.¹⁸ The author of theLife of Edward the Second ended his eulogy on the young prince’s birth with the hope that he would ‘combine in his person the virtues that characterised in turn his forebears. May he follow the industry of King Henry the second, the well-known valour of King Richard, may he reach the age of King Henry [the third], revive the wisdom of King Edward [the first] and remind us of the physical strength and comeliness of his father.’¹⁹

The king’s instinct was to shower those whom he loved with presents, and so he immediately ordered that the baby be raised to the front rank of the peerage. This was extraordinary. Edward II himself had been sixteen, almost seventeen years old, before he was created earl of Chester; his father had been nearly fifteen. Now his son would bear that title. At the age of twelve days, Edward of Windsor was created an earl.²⁰ No sooner had this been done than the king set about spending money on preparations for his first family Christmas, ordering almost £1,250 to be spent on cloth for his and the queen’s retainers and those of the young heir.²¹ After Christmas the baby was provided with his own household, to maintain him in his position as earl of Chester. By 26 January 1313 – aged just ten weeks – Edward was nominally in charge of dozens of greater and lesser servants.

A large household required maintenance. So the king was able to indulge his demonstration of largesse further by granting his son a number of lucrative incomes. The counties of Flintshire and Cheshire were made over to him along with his title. At the age of eight months he was granted the lordship of the Isle of Wight.²² At the age of four he was granted a substantial income from the Exchequer, amounting to the rent of the manor of Petworth and the lands of the young heir, Henry Percy.²³ At the age of five he was granted an additional one thousand marks per year (£666 13s 8d) out of the tin revenues of Cornwall.²⁴ Edward was very well-provided for, not the richest earl in the kingdom – that was his father’s embittered cousin, Thomas, earl of Lancaster – but by no means the poorest.

With all these grants came responsibilities. As the earl of Chester, Edward of Windsor was responsible for the administration of justice in all his lands and across many manors held by others. It is, of course, very unlikely that as a baby he heard any of the king’s writs addressed to him, but nevertheless he would have had impressed upon him from the earliest age the fact that he had duties towards others. Rents coming in from his manors in the north were collected by his chamberlain and paid out to his officers and into his own ‘wardrobe’ or treasury. His officers were responsible for raising men from Cheshire for the king’s service. When the king needed to raise men from North Wales for the suppression of the rebel Llywelyn Bren in the spring of 1316, it was the three-year-old earl of Chester to whom the writ was directed. Similarly, arrangements to allow foodstuffs to be purchased and conveyed away from Chester, or to arrest outlaws travelling in the region, had to be made with his justiciar.²⁵ The king’s reasons for making his son an earl at such a young age were various, and the propaganda element of the outrageousness of the appointment cannot be ignored; but the end result was an education. In later life Edward III would not have been able to remember a time when he was not responsible for the administration of justice, the accrual of revenue from land, and decisions which changed people’s lives.

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The king might have been the most powerful figure in Edward’s life with regard to inheritance and status, but he was not the only important person. Edward’s mother, Queen Isabella – Isabella the Fair – was every bit as royal as her husband, the only daughter of King Philip of France, who doted on her. She was sixteen years of age at the time of the birth, twelve years younger than the king, and renowned for her beauty and intelligence. She was also connected to most of the royal houses of Europe, due to the geographical position of France and the status of her ancestors. Through her mother, Jeanne, who enjoyed the mouth-watering title of Countess Palatine of Champagne and Brie (as well as that of Queen of Navarre), she was connected to Iberian royalty. Through her grandmother she was related to the dukes of Brabant. Through her cousin, Jeanne, daughter of Charles, count of Valois, she was related to William, count of Hainault, Holland and Zeeland, the lord of Friesland. And so on. She was enmeshed in a complex series of dynastic relationships even more extensive than those of her husband. Edward II’s only living close relative in a European royal house was his nephew, the young duke of Brabant. His mother, Eleanor of Castile had died more than twenty years earlier, when he had been only six, and his Spanish cousins were not close. The difference lay in geographical position, and the difficulties of directly exercising royal links. Despite two centuries of taking continental brides, England remained on the periphery of the continental dynastic network. France, respected as the greatest kingdom in Christendom, was at the very centre. Thus for Edward of Windsor, his mother represented rich dynasties and royal links far beyond the shores of Britain. It was perhaps in recognition of this that Isabella’s uncle, Louis d’Evreux, requested that Isabella call her first-born son Louis, not Edward. Not surprisingly, the English nobles at the baptism refused.²⁶

Dynastic links are easy to account for, but they are not as important for understanding a child’s development as parental character. Although Edward II’s personality has been reappraised many times in the last hundred years, Isabella’s has generally been neglected.²⁷ Most people still remember her as the ‘She-wolf of France’. This name was originally the duke of York’s insult to Margaret of Anjou in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part Three (Act One, Scene Four), but it came to be applied to Isabella in the eighteenth century due to the widespread belief that she had been party to her husband’s murder. Even though scholarship has moved on considerably, popular reputations of villainy never die. This is both a pity and a problem. Edward’s mother was not a she-wolf but a dutiful and highly religious woman who, in later years, when she had been spurned by her husband and had fallen into the arms of a dominating lover, still felt she ought to return to her rightful spouse.²⁸ When the king lay in prison, scorned by the nation, and bereft of his throne, she still sent presents to him.²⁹ Edward II’s respect for her intelligence and negotiating skills may be seen in his approval of the treaty which she negotiated on his behalf in order to try to secure peace with France in 1325. Nor was this the only time that Edward placed great faith in her skills. She also took part in domestic peace negotiations in 1313, 1318 and 1321.³⁰ She was a woman of conscience: when she found that two of her sisters-in-law were guilty of adultery with two French knights, she had no hesitation in reporting them to her father.³¹ It is not difficult to find instances of her clemency: although she detested Hugh Despenser the younger with a passion, she pleaded for the life of Hugh’s father, the earl of Winchester, when he was facing execution. She was known to be moved by pity: in October 1312, while pregnant with Edward, she gave food and clothes to a young Scottish orphan she met; later she paid for him to be sent to London to be educated.³² She equalled even her husband’s piety in her pilgrimages, her devotion to English shrines, and her enthusiastic collecting of relics. She also collected books, especially chivalric tales, and had more than thirty volumes in her library when she died.³³ Bookish and pious, it is not surprising that she had little aptitude for war. An attempt to lead an attack on Leeds Castle in 1321 ended in disaster and the deaths of nine members of her household. Similarly, she never played a leading role in political confrontation except when at the side of her lover, Sir Roger Mortimer. But during the invasion of 1326 she acted as a brilliant and powerful figurehead. Her greatest failing was her ability to spend money – vast amounts of money – with apparently no qualms about the acquisitiveness demonstrated in obtaining such sums. From relatively restrained beginnings at the time of Edward’s birth (although sixty men were employed to keep and repair her clothes),³⁴ her spending in the years 1326–30 amounted to about a quarter of the royal purse. However, if her most notable characteristics were duty, piety, loyalty to those she loved, passion, clemency, trustworthiness, intelligence and conscience, and if her greatest sin was profligacy, she was about as far from the all-devouring ‘she-wolf’ myth of the eighteenth century as a woman could possibly be.

Of the other people who were important to the infant Edward, one must first mention his nurse, Margaret. She was from Daventry in Northamptonshire, and in 1312 was the wife of Stephen Chandler.³⁵ To her Edward remained devoted for the rest of her life. So attached to her did he become that she was still in his household, maintained on the payroll along with his clerks, after he became king. Later, in his twenties, he made every effort to look after her when she encountered legal difficulties.³⁶ This is not surprising as she was the one person who had always been with him, from birth to adolescence. It was in her care that he remained when, at the end of January 1313, his mother made preparations to return to London. Margaret, who would have been breast-feeding the two-month-old Edward in place of his mother, took the baby from Windsor to Bray on 26 January. The next day they arrived at Bisham, in Berkshire, which was to be Edward’s home for the next year.³⁷ The building they lived in was almost certainly the manor house which had belonged to the Knights Templar until the dissolution of the Order in 1312. His father visited him on 13 February, and stayed for dinner, and again visited on 4 August, on which occasion he granted him the Isle of Wight.³⁸ His mother visited for four days in early May, and the kindly Queen Margaret (his father’s stepmother and his mother’s aunt) visited in June. His nurse Margaret also took him to see his mother and father at court. The account for his household expenses at this time records that he was taken to spend twenty-seven days with the royal family in the spring and early summer of 1313.³⁹

Edward spent the first years of his life in his nurse’s company, receiving gifts and occasional visits from his parents, surrounded by servants and household officials whose roles he would not have fully understood. In April 1314, he was moved from Bisham to Ludgershall in East Wiltshire, an old castle in need of repair, as shown by the order to mend the shingle roofs of the prince’s dwellings.⁴⁰ It was expected that Edward would stay there for some time, and this still seems to have been the plan at the end of May, when the king’s butler was ordered to provide an extra thirty tuns of wine for the prince’s household over and above that already delivered, suggesting a very large contingent of men-at-arms protecting the young boy.⁴¹ But in June the king decided to locate his son and heir at Wallingford Castle, previously the chief residence of Piers Gaveston.⁴² Perhaps the king, knowing he would be riding north to face the Scots near Stirling – in the battle which came to be known as Bannockburn – wished to make sure his son was secure in case of a disaster. By July the prince and his nurse had taken up residence.⁴³ It was fitting that he should have come to live in Gaveston’s castle: the prince had become the king’s symbol of independence, just as Gaveston had once been. Edward conferred gifts and titles on his son in the same way he had given them to Gaveston. The difference was that his son was royal, whereas Gaveston had been born a commoner, not even of baronial rank, and gifts to the heir to the throne were beyond criticism.

The next group of people who might have influenced Edward in these early years – at least the next group whom we can identify – are the officers who administered his household. The most important of these would have been his steward, Sir Robert Mauley, who served him from before July 1314 until at least June 1320. ⁴⁴ In his official capacity, Mauley would have controlled the men of the household in all their duties, overseeing his own staff and those in the specialist departments of the buttery, scullery, pantry, saucery, the hall, marshalcy and the prince’s private chamber. He would moreover have been particularly conspicuous, standing with his staff of office in the hall at mealtimes while the servants took their places at the tables below the dais where the young Edward sat. Next in importance to the steward was the treasurer, or keeper of the wardrobe, who was responsible for Edward’s income and expenses. From the beginning until 1316 at least, and possibly until early 1318, this office was held by Hugh of Leominster, a royal clerk who had served as receiver and chamberlain in North Wales in the time of Edward’s grandfather, Edward I, and had been in royal service ever since.⁴⁵ He would have been able to tell the young prince about his grandfather’s conquest of Wales. Perhaps there were other men in the household who could regale the boy with stories of his ancestors’ achievements. We can only wonder what Edward might have heard from men such as Grimbald de la Batude, a foreigner who had served both Edward I and Edward II before entering Edward’s household.⁴⁶

On 15 August 1316 Prince John, Edward’s brother, was born at Eltham. Once again the St Albans chronicler recorded how happy the king was, but this time it is noticeable that there was nowhere near as much effusion of joy. There was no expensive income awarded to the man who brought him the news. There were no comparisons with Gaveston. There was no need. Although far from peaceful, with a serious rebellion in Wales due to the harsh climate of the previous two summers, a rebellion in Bristol, and the Scots’ invasion of Ireland, the king was not personally under pressure. His principal enemy, his cousin the earl of Lancaster, had withdrawn to sulk in his vast estates in the north of the country, and for once King Edward had a relatively free hand. He wrote to the prior of his favourite order of friars, the Dominicans, on 24 August requesting that they pray for the king, the queen, Edward of Windsor and John of Eltham, ‘especially on account of John’.⁴⁷ No doubt four-year-old Edward was summoned to Eltham to see his baby brother. His justiciar in Chester, Sir Hugh Audley the elder, was ordered to pay the queen the rents from the manor of Macclesfield, to cover John’s expenses. When their younger sister, Eleanor of Woodstock, was born on 8 June 1318 it was proposed that all three royal children should live together.

By then, significant changes had taken place in Edward’s household. Shortly before April 1318, the king appointed Sir Richard Damory to be Edward’s guardian, or, to be precise, ‘keeper of the body of my lord Sir Edward, earl of Chester, and surveyor of his household and his lands and all his business’.⁴⁸ Damory requested that, since one of his roles was to enquire into the negligence of Edward’s bailiffs at Chester, he needed legal assistance. He requested probably the most notable lawyer of the time, Geoffrey le Scrope, or, if Geoffrey could not attend, then John Stonor, another famous royal legal adviser. Damory was given the services of both men.⁴⁹ Damory also asked for – and got – the services of Nicholas Hugate to be Edward’s treasurer and keeper of his wardrobe.⁵⁰Suddenly, a man had come along who had reorganised Edward’s household and set about identifying and correcting the abuses which, it turned out, were being perpetrated across Edward’s estates.

Damory was more than just a bureaucratic reformer. He was the elder brother of Roger Damory, whom the king liked so much that in 1317 he gave him the hand in marriage of his own niece, Elizabeth, one of the three sisters and coheiresses of the late earl of Gloucester. This brought Roger Damory into the royal family, and at the same time enhanced Sir Richard’s standing with the king. Sir Richard had begun his career in the household of the earl of Hereford, the king’s brother-in-law, in whose service he had worked assiduously.⁵¹ After leaving Hereford’s service, he had entered royal employment, acting as sheriff of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire from 1308 to 1310, and as constable of Oxford Castle from 1311. He also seems to have been associated with the Despenser family.⁵² He may be characterised as a man of wide experience, an ‘old soldier’, probably in his forties, with a dependable track record of responsible command, and with very good connections with the Marcher lords – such as the earl of Hereford – and the royal family. Under Damory’s watchful eye, Edward would have had a wooden sword pressed into his hand with the intention that he should learn how to use it, and take his first steps along the long road to becoming a military leader.

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Edward’s household arrangements never remained static for long. In late 1318 his two-year-old brother, John, and baby sister, Eleanor, came to live with him.⁵³ The children remained together for nearly two years. But on 5 June 1320 Sir Richard Damory, Robert Mauley and Nicholas Hugate were ordered to return High Peak to Queen Isabella for the sustenance of John and Eleanor. The implication is that they went to live with her. Edward, however, did not return to his mother but to his father. Extraordinarily, on 5 August 1320, although not yet eight years of age, the king summoned him, ‘our dearest son’, to attend parliament. His political life had begun.

On the face of it, we might wonder what his father expected of him at such a tender age. The boy could hardly be expected to swing opinions in his father’s favour through eloquent debate at the age of eight. Edward II himself had not been summoned until he was eighteen. But the king did not expect his son to employ eloquent arguments, or to say anything at all. He merely wanted him there, to be a symbol.⁵⁴ Edward of Windsor was not only his father’s heir but a statement of his father’s royalty and the family’s right to rule. The king’s message to parliament was clear. If parliament recognised this boy’s right to attend and be heard, despite being very young and – through no fault of his own – unwise, then it must also recognise the king’s right to attend and rule, however unwise the peers thought him. Edward of Windsor’s presence in parliament that October was his father’s very powerful demonstration of royal legitimacy. To challenge either of them was to challenge the very institution of monarchy.

There were probably several reasons for the timing of the summons. The least important was that Edward was now of an age at which – had he been the son of a nobleman – he would have been sent to serve in another lord’s household. As the king’s son, the royal household was the only one suitable, for only there could he learn the basic procedures of kingship. Living at his father’s court, it may have been considered fitting that, as an earl, he should attend parliament. A more important reason for the timing was that the king was heading for another confrontation with the barons, and he anticipated very serious trouble indeed.

Edward could have had no idea of the cataclysm which was about to erupt within his small but rapidly expanding world. At the beginning of 1320 he had been living in the care of Sir Richard Damory, no doubt meeting Damory’s brother Roger, who was now married to one of his (Edward’s) cousins. He would have regularly met his justiciar’s son, Sir Hugh Audley the younger, who had married another of his cousins. He would have been familiar with Lord Mauley, his steward’s brother. He would have met and heard a great deal about the earl of Hereford, who was married to his aunt. Hereford had been reconciled to Edward II after the Gaveston debacle, and had remained loyal ever since. The prince would have been aware of his more distant kinsmen too, like Sir Roger Mortimer, Lord Mortimer of Wigmore, who had re-established English rule in Ireland after the Scots’ invasion. Edward’s treasurer, Hugh of Leominster – coming from a Mortimer region – might well have been one of the several clerks promoted into royal service through connections with that family. Edward’s justiciar – Sir Hugh Audley the elder – was Mortimer’s brother-in-law. What the eight-year-old Edward would have had difficulty grasping was that now, in the autumn of 1320, these men were all gathering to make war on his father, the king. Edward may or may not have been aware of earlier crises, but he could not have failed to hear about this one. This rebellion was being spearheaded by his father’s relations and men who had, until now, been his father’s loyal supporters.

The cause of the problem was Hugh Despenser, a man to whom the king had entrusted much of his government: too much, perhaps. Despenser’s ability to tempt the king to give him whatever he wanted was infuriating for men like the earl of Hereford, Roger Mortimer and Roger Damory. Damory was Despenser’s brother-in-law, but Despenser was not touched by family loyalty. Their wives might be sisters but Despenser saw them only as nieces of the king, and thus ways to land and authority, and in particular a way to achieve the earldom of Gloucester. The same problems arose with the other brother-in-law and coheir of the Gloucester inheritance, Hugh Audley the younger. To Despenser, the lords Damory and Audley were not brothers-in-law but rivals.

The rivalry did not stop at Despenser’s kin. In 1265 the grandfather of Roger Mortimer had killed Despenser’s grandfather in battle, at Evesham, and it was no secret that Despenser wanted revenge. It was said that he had sworn to destroy Roger Mortimer and his uncle, Lord Mortimer of Chirk.⁵⁵ When Roger Mortimer and his uncle sought to buy the lordship of Gower, Despenser took action to secure it for himself. Another Marcher lord, John Mowbray, attempted to buy it and consequently fell out with him. Despenser persuaded the king to confiscate it on the basis that it had been obtained illegally, which it had not, merely being transferred in the way that Marcher lands were usually passed on. This united the Marcher lords behind Mowbray and against Despenser. Lord Clifford was another rival, as his mother held several valuable estates which Despenser coveted. Most of all, Despenser had an implacable enemy in Earl Thomas of Lancaster, Edward II’s cousin, and when Lancaster spoke nearly all of the north of England listened. This was no local squabble brewing: this was a full-scale civil war between the northern and the Marcher lords, supported by many south-western knights, against the loyalists in the south and east.

This is the reason why it is important to know who was close to the prince in 1320–21. As the baronial revolt – the ‘Despenser War’ – developed, he would not have been shielded from the news. Nor would he have seen things only through his father’s eyes. His guardian, Richard Damory, was torn between supporting the king on the one side, and his brother Roger and his former lord, the earl of Hereford, on the other. Lord Mauley initially sided with the rebels too. When war finally broke out, the king imprisoned Sir Richard Damory in Banbury Castle.⁵⁶ This explains why the eight-year-old Edward was summoned to parliament in the autumn of 1320, and why he probably remained at court thereafter. There was a real danger he would get caught up in the Despenser War, or at least become subject to the influence of the king’s enemies.

If young Edward was confused by the rapid development of the situation in the autumn of 1320, he would have been appalled by the eventual outcome. In 1321, after persuading the king to order the banishment of both of the Despensers, the rebel lords were all pardoned for any action they had taken against the favourites. But no sooner was this done than the king raised an army to seek a bloody revenge on those who had forced his hand. In January 1322 Roger Mortimer and his uncle pragmatically surrendered to the king at Shrewsbury; and shortly afterwards the two lords Audley did likewise. But the rest refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing, and retreated to the north, to stand alongside the earl of Lancaster. On 11 March the king declared that everyone who opposed him was a traitor. Five days later, at Boroughbridge, the long-expected battle took place, and Sir Andrew Harclay, acting for the king, was victorious. But young Edward would not have heard the news with any joy. Roger Damory was dead, mortally injured in the battle. The earl of Hereford was dead, killed with a spear thrust up from underneath the bridge into his anus. Most shocking of all was his father’s action against the earl of Lancaster. It was utterly inglorious, horrifying even. Edward II ordered his own cousin – a member of the royal family – to be beheaded. He ordered Lord Clifford and Lord Mowbray to be hanged at York. He ordered Sir Henry Willington and Sir Henry Montfort to be hanged at Bristol, Lord Giffard and Sir Roger Elmbridge to be hanged at Gloucester. And so on. All around the country, at the king’s order, lords and knights were hanged singly or in pairs in the towns nearest to their lands. Sir Henry le Tyeys, who had been sheriff of Oxfordshire after Richard Damory, and who had then been Edward’s constable in the Isle of Wight was hanged in London.⁵⁷ And the king ordered their bodies to remain hanging, never to be cut down, but to remain decaying in chains. It was two years before their dessicated and bird-picked remains were finally removed for Christian burial.

We do not know whether Edward was present to see his cousin the earl of Lancaster beheaded, or whether he saw any of those whom he knew on the gallows, but we may be certain that he knew what had happened, and that his father was responsible. His own vassals had been ordered to assemble to take part in the conflict, and, two days before the battle, he himself was summoned to attend the parliament which took place in the wake of the executions.⁵⁸ There his father asserted his new authority. He ordered all legal proceedings against the Despensers to be quashed. He ordered his niece, the wife of Hugh Audley the younger, to remain a prisoner at Sempringham.⁵⁹ Wives of rebels were to be arrested, as well as their husbands, all their lands forfeit. The sons of Roger Mortimer and the late earl of Hereford were locked up in Windsor Castle.⁶⁰ The king’s opponents were all dead or imprisoned. One pro-Lancastrian author now described the king fearfully as ‘like a lion’.⁶¹ His new-found confidence suggested that he himself believed a new era had dawned. With Despenser to advise him he felt confident enough to order a new campaign in Scotland to reclaim the kingdom he had lost through years of neglect. Perhaps he had in mind his part of the Prophecy of the Six Kings – that the ‘goat’ (Edward II) would fight with his relation, the ‘bear’, and would lose much of his land but then he would ‘regain what he had lost, and more’.⁶² He might have interpreted Lancaster as being the bear, and Scotland as the lands he had lost. If so, he was deluding himself. Perhaps he also deluded his son, but even if he did it is unlikely that the young prince ever forgot that his father began – and ruthlessly terminated – a controversy over a favourite which resulted in the deaths or imprisonment of many of the men whom he had met and looked up to in his childhood.

*

The battle of Boroughbridge totally changed the political scene in England. The king and his favourite were dramatically in the ascendant. Edward himself would have noted the political change reflected in the personnel around him. His officers were replaced with pro-Despenser clerks. Nicholas Hugate was replaced by a one-time Despenser servant, William Cusance, a Burgundian.⁶³ It is likely that Edward’s new steward, John Claroun, another Burgundian, attained his post through his connections with Cusance and Despenser.⁶⁴ Despenser’s men officiated on behalf of the prince, and probably oversaw his education. Edward did not dislike these new men – Cusance, for instance, remained in royal service for many years and was later directly appointed to important positions by Edward himself – but nonetheless, Despenser’s influence and the widespread resentment it caused cannot have escaped Edward’s attention. And this would have been accentuated by one person more than any other: Edward’s mother.

Queen Isabella loathed Hugh Despenser. After the Scottish campaign of September 1322, which was an utter disaster and almost cost Isabella her life, she blamed Hugh Despenser personally.⁶⁵ When four years later, she got the chance to speak her mind publicly, she accused him of abandoning her, and putting her life in peril. She also accused him of ‘often dishonouring her and damaging her noble state, of cruelty towards her’ and of ‘ousting her from her lands’ and hindering her relationship with her husband.⁶⁶ Eleanor Despenser – Despenser’s wife – had more influence over the king than Isabella herself, even to the point where the queen needed Eleanor’s help to get the king’s approval for her requests. This suggests that something a little more unusual than mere estrangement was going on, possibly involving an incestuous relationship between Edward II and his niece and an attempt by Despenser to have sex with Isabella.⁶⁷ But whatever the nature of Isabella’s hatred for Despenser, it was sharp and never lessened in intensity.

Edward, though young, was having to grow up fast. He was certainly at the Tower on 17 February 1323, when he dined with his mother. That day Isabella was probably in communication with the king’s prisoner in the Tower, Roger Mortimer.⁶⁸ Isabella spent much of 1323 and 1324 in London, and almost certainly saw a great deal of Edward and her other children, including the youngest, Joan (born in 1321). But these were not happy times for her. As Despenser’s authority grew, hers waned. After the escape of Roger Mortimer from the Tower and his reception ‘with great honour’ in France in August 1323, the king barely acknowledged her. In September 1324 he removed her children John and Eleanor from her, and put them in the care of Eleanor Despenser. He confiscated Isabella’s income. In November he left her just eight marks per day (£56s 8d) for food and drink for herself and all her staff. The French people in her household were arrested – a particularly vindictive move in view of Isabella being French – and she was forbidden to do anything to help them. Even the Launge family, who had been so ostentatiously rewarded by the king for telling him of the birth of his heir, were thrown into prison, their endowment still almost entirely unpaid.⁶⁹ If Isabella had any solace in the dark days of late 1324, it was the occasional company of her eldest son, Edward, now twelve years of age.

As the Launge arrests suggest, Edward’s value as a symbol of his father’s royal legitimacy was no longer important. The king had defeated those lords who demanded that his government be constitutional. Edward nevertheless remained high in his father’s estimations. He was ordered to attend a colloquium at Ripon to dicuss the war in Scotland, and was summoned to join the army in the summer campaign of 1323.⁷⁰ But the main reason we may be certain that Edward remained very much in his father’s mind is not regular orders such as these, which were sent to all the earls, but for the very particular role which the king next envisaged his son performing: that of a royal marriage partner, the surety for an international alliance.

The first attempt to find Edward a partner had been made, secretly, in 1318. Various acts of piracy between the men of William, Count of Hainault, and England had encouraged King Edward to look to his kinsman to establish a marriage bond and, with it, peace. He presumed he could rely on his queen to maintain relations with France, so Hainault and Spain were the obvious directions in which to look to advance English interests. On 7 December 1318 he wrote letters authorising Count William to pay heed to the message borne by an embassy of the bishop of Exeter, the earl of Hereford, and the lawyer, John Walwayn. They returned early the following year with a favourable response; so Edward sent them back in 1319 to enquire further. Despite a propitious start, in which the bishop reported that one particular daughter, Margaret, was of fair features suitable to be married to the prince, the matter did not progress.⁷¹ At the end of March 1321, the king wrote a frustrated letter to Count William, asking what his intentions were. The king went on to say that he wished to have an answer quickly as he had been solicited by the king of Aragon, amongst others, for the marriage of Edward.⁷² Although Count William did obtain a dispensation for the marriage, further acts of piracy disinclined the king to continue with the negotiations, and Edward remained unwed.

Edward II had not been bluffing. King James of Aragon had indeed been in contact about the possible match, and there were others interested as well. In 1323 Charles de Valois, uncle to Queen Isabella, proposed that his daughter should marry young Edward.⁷³The king preferred the idea of an alliance with Aragon, and in 1324 sent an embassy (including his brother, Edmund, and the archbishop of Dublin) with the power to conclude a marriage treaty and dowry.⁷⁴ Nothing had come of it by January 1325, when the king received letters from Castile requesting that he consider a double marriage with that kingdom. Edward would marry Eleanor, daughter of King Alfonso, and Alfonso would marry Edward’s sister Eleanor (then aged seven). In February yet another embassy was sent abroad to discuss the marriage.⁷⁵ Edward’s household, newly established at the Savoy Palace in London, waited to see to which great power would yield him a royal bride.

*

As the rift between the king and queen deepened, Edward tried to remain close to each of his parents. But it was his father who remained able to affect his life most directly, as the gift of the Savoy Palace and the marriage negotiations show. It was also the king who arranged his education. We cannot be certain, but it seems likely that in July 1324 this took the form of the appointment of Richard Bury.

Although Bury has often been said to have been Edward’s tutor, no record of his appointment has ever been found. One highly respected writer has even gone so far as to say that it is a ‘widespread fiction’, on the grounds that he was ‘illiterate’ and more particularly, between 1316 and 1324, he was in Edward’s service at Chester.⁷⁶ The former of these two objections is ridiculous as Bury had been educated at Oxford and was a royal clerk, and thus very far from ‘illiterate’. But the latter objection is valid. While there is no doubt that someone taught Edward how to read and write in both French and Latin,⁷⁷ it was almost certainly not Bury. Edward was surrounded by royal clerks, and there may have been several who taught him to read and write. What is more important is the question of who influenced his thinking, and who expanded his intellectual horizons. With regard to this question, it is noticeable that Bury’s appointment as Edward’s chamberlain at Chester came to an end just before 18 July 1324, when he was described as ‘lately’ the chamberlain.⁷⁸ After this date, although he remained a royal clerk, he seems to have occupied no identifiable position until February 1326 (after which he was regularly appointed by Edward to important positions). The king gave the Savoy Palace to Edward on 14 July 1324. ⁷⁹ It seems that this may mark the occasion of Bury leaving his post as chamberlain of Chester and becoming Edward’s tutor in London.

This would be a tentative assumption, based only on the legend and a coincidence of dates, if it were not for two other facts. Unusually for a royal clerk, Bury was (and is) famous for his very extensive library, and because of this may well have attracted the attention of Edward’s mother, Queen Isabella, who was herself a great lover of books.⁸⁰ The second fact is the very great trust Edward placed in Bury in later years, suggesting a relationship stronger than that of a distant chamberlain and his lord. When Edward was empowered to appoint a constable of Bordeaux in 1325, Bury was the man selected. While it seems sensible to presume that Bury met the prince on at least an occasional basis prior to July 1324 – perhaps when delivering sums of money from Chester to Edward’s treasurer in the south – it seems equally sensible to presume that he saw him more regularly after that date. Edward clearly had a very high regard for the man, and it seems foolish to ignore the probability that this high regard was due to Bury impressing him with his trustworthiness and apparent learning.

The word ‘apparent’ is used here advisedly. Bury’s contemporary, Adam Murimuth, who knew him, described him as a mediocre man of letters who dressed modestly and died like a pauper but who, ‘wishing to be considered a great scholar’, acquired a huge number of books, so many ‘that five great carts were not sufficient to carry them’.⁸¹ Bury’s biographer, William Chambre, claimed he had so many books in his chamber that one could not stand up without treading on them. As Murimuth suggests, large numbers of books are not in themselves a sign of scholarship. In addition, Bury seems only to have written one original text, the Philobiblon (‘the Love of Books’), and that is a very personal and unusual book indeed. We must therefore ask the question, how scholarly was Bury?

The answer to this question lies in the Philobiblon itself. It is an enthusiastic rant about the virtues of books: ‘In books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace.’ Its subject is not scholarship, or a survey of literature, but a justification of the acquisition and possession of books through the knowledge potentially to be gained from them. This is totally in line with what one would expect of a man of great ambition, to whom knowledge was important but whose service did not permit him to spend time in scholarly contemplation. It is likely that Bury’s acquisitiveness with regard to books sprang from a thirst for influence, and possession of knowledge – albeit in book form – was one means of gaining this influence. Indeed, one suspects that Bury relished the potential of knowledge more than knowledge itself.

If Bury became Edward’s tutor, or one of his tutors, in July 1324, our next question has to be what he might have taught his royal charge. We could answer this in two ways. We could elaborate on the formal education of the time, and we might presume that Bury stuck to the curriculum. Edward would have probably found this tedious, as he was inclined to activity and adventure more than study. The alternative is to look at the Philobiblon to see whether Bury might have supplied Edward with an education in line with his royal background. This second approach is interesting, especially when one considers that Bury was later held in very high esteem by his pupil. For instance, we may picture Bury in his late thirties telling the twelve-year-old prince about ‘Alexander, the conqueror of the earth, and Julius [Caesar], the invader of Rome and of the world, who, the first in war and arts, assumed universal empire under his single rule’.⁸² War and arts! Edward could not have failed to be struck by Bury’s exuberance, for the man was as passionate about his princely responsibilities as he was about books. As he himself put it: ‘The history of the Greeks as well as Romans shows that there were no famous princes among them who were devoid of literature.’ In a similar passage which seems to be referring to Bury’s own pedagogical position: ‘We read that Philip thanked the Gods devoutly for having granted that Alexander should be born in the time of Aristotle, so that educated under his instruction he might be worthy to rule his father’s empire.’ Bury very probably saw himself as an Aristotle to a young Alexander, especially given the conquests which the young man was prophesied to achieve. No wonder, then, that the authors Bury cited included a host of classical writers, with Aristotle at their head.⁸³ Of all the authors he mentioned, Bury commented on very few in detail, and criticised none of them in any depth, and we may suspect he impressed the prince by pretending familiarity with great thinkers of the past and knowing a little of each of their achievements. Nevertheless, the impact on young Edward of hearing just the names and a smattering of their backgrounds would have been sufficient to catch his imagination. He would have grown up as familiar with Achilles, Caesar and Alexander as King Arthur and characters in the Bible. Bury might not have been a scholar, but he had enthusiasm, and that is a powerful educational tool. If his conversation was as enthusiastic and wide-ranging as the Philobiblon suggests, he would have greatly encouraged the imagination of the young prince.

Bury would not have been the only man trying to affect Edward’s thinking. Alongside a ‘professional’ tutor there would have been a whole host of clerks and knights trying to instill in Edward a particular view of the world, or a certain understanding of his future responsibilities as a king.⁸⁴ Walter Milemete and William Pagula are two names which are particularly prominent in this respect. Both men wrote advisory works dedicated to Edward, to school him in the art of good kingship. William Pagula’s advice, The Mirror of Edward III, which survives in two versions and probably was read to Edward, urged him to pay attention to the well-being of his subjects in a way particularly relevant for the civil-war-torn England of the 1320s. Walter Milemete’s On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings survives today in a single, lavishly illustrated manuscript which was almost certainly intended as a presentation copy for Edward himself. If Edward had it read to him – or read it himself – he would have had an outline for ideal kingship. Walter exhorted Edward ‘to know, understand and read the Scriptures and writings in French and Latin; and above all else to have the knowledge to write documents’.⁸⁵ He included chapters on not revealing ‘the counsels and secret plans of the king’, and advised Edward to remove from his presence ‘everyone who is covetous, avaricious or jealous’. Justice was given a prominent place among the virtues of the king, followed by prudence, temperance, courage and magnanimity. Mercy required a whole chapter to itself, as did the conduct of the king in war (which Walter drew almost entirely from the classical writer Vegetius). But above all else, Walter of Milemete and William Pagula were at pains to stress the importance of peace among the magnates. International war could be a good and honourable thing, but civil war was nothing short of disaster. Edward had probably learned that for himself in 1322. He would never be allowed to forget it.

*

Medieval history is peppered with minor, almost unknown wars, whose unknown dead are not even commemorated by a recollection of the cause in which they fought, let alone a monument. Few today are familiar with the Despenser War mentioned above; not many more are familiar with the War of Saint-Sardos, which was the cause of the most important event to occur in the life of the young Edward of Windsor.

The War of Saint-Sardos grew out of a long-standing controversy over the rights of the abbot of Sarlat in the French diocese of Agen, held by the English king as part of the duchy of Aquitaine. The Benedictine monastery of Saint-Sardos, established by the abbot of Sarlat, was locally understood to be subject to the same laws as Sarlat itself: subject to French authority, not English. There was a great deal of friction over this matter, however, so that when the monks of Saint-Sardos sought and received French permission for a fortified town to be established on their land, the local Gascon lords took umbrage. One in particular, Raymond Bernard, burned down the existing buildings on the site and hanged the French royal official from the flagpole which he had just dutifully erected. The French were naturally outraged, and blamed the steward of Gascony for not taking action against Raymond Bernard. After a short while King Charles of France also blamed Edward II for not ordering his steward to inquire into the matter. This raised another problem, for Edward II had still not done homage to Charles for his lands in Gascony. In fact, just before hearing of the outrage, he had offered a series of rather weak excuses as to why he could not do so at the present time. Charles offered a brief postponement, but in the summer of 1324 Edward’s negotiators – the earl of Kent and the archbishop of Dublin – refused to surrender Raymond Bernard’s castle of Montpezat, as they had previously agreed. Charles understandably felt angry, confiscated the duchy, and sent his uncle Charles de Valois to recapture the region from the earl of Kent, whom Edward had ordered to defend it. The English lost several important towns before falling back on La Réole and suing for peace.⁸⁶

In January 1325 King Charles offered Edward II a way out of his predicament. He suggested that Queen Isabella be sent to negotiate with him on behalf of the English. Edward, seeing little other option, agreed, and let his wife return to her homeland to negotiate on his behalf. Despite the antagonisms she had suffered, she did as well as she could, but the English were in a very weak position. When terms were finalised on 31 May 1325, Charles demanded that the king of England should do homage to him for the duchy of Aquitaine, including Gascony. If the king was not prepared to leave the country, there was no alternative but to invest his eldest son with all the French possessions of the English Crown, and to send him instead.

For the king this was a huge problem. If he sent his son, he risked losing control of the valuable revenues of Gascony. Worse, he risked losing control of the boy himself. If the heir to the throne were to fall into his mother’s hands, she might prevent him from returning to England, holding him hostage until her income was restored, or even betrothing him to a foreign ruler of her own choosing. Suddenly, for the king, the royal symbolism of his son and heir, which had once been such an asset, seemed a liability, for there was no undermining his son’s royal status. On the other hand, if King Edward went to France in person, he would have to leave behind Hugh Despenser, who was exiled from France. This was too similar to the circumstances in which he had lost Gaveston: through becoming separated from him. If Despenser were to lose the king’s protection, he stood no chance of survival. There were too many lords in England who sought revenge for the kin they had seen hanged and left to rot after the battle of Boroughbridge.

Edward resolved that he would go himself. It was politically far too dangerous to allow his son to leave his control. Mortimer was still loose, and a small band of discontents was roaming the Continent with him, waiting for their opportunity. Although he did initially appoint the twelve-year-old Edward ‘guardian of the realm and king’s lieutenant’ during his absence beyond the seas, he changed his mind almost immediately.⁸⁷ At the eleventh hour Hugh Despenser and his father persuaded him that it would be better if his son should go. In all probability they managed this by hitting on a solution to his dilemma. The real danger lay in allowing the prince to fall into the hands of his mother. So why not demand her return at the same time? If she could be forced back to England, then the French king could be relied upon to protect his own nephew from falling into Mortimer’s hands. And by adopting this strategy, the king did not need to risk Hugh Despenser being captured and murdered in his absence.

On 2 September 1325 Edward – two months short of his thirteenth birthday – was given the counties of Ponthieu and Montreuil. He then made the journey to Dover with his father where, on the 10th, he received the duchy of Aquitaine, and ‘all the lands the king holds in the realm of France’. Edward’s treasurer, William Cusance, was confirmed in charge of all his English lands. Edward himself was placed in the guardianship of the fearless and uncompomising bishop of Exeter, Walter Stapeldon, and Sir Henry Beaumont. Two days later Edward sailed away from England, away from his father and Hugh Despenser, and towards a stranger destiny than had been prophesied for any English king.