Edward II: The Unconventional King (23 page)

The appearance of the impostor might have encouraged Edward to pursue a topic he had been thinking about for some time, and he wrote to the pope asking for permission to be re-anointed with the holy oil of St Thomas Becket. His sister and brother-in-law the duke and duchess of Brabant had brought the oil to his coronation in 1308, but Edward decided not to use it.
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Dwelling now on the many misfortunes that had befallen himself and his realm since his accession and preferring not to accept his own culpability, he decided that his failure to be anointed with the oil, which was connected with a miraculous vision that the fifth king after the time of St Thomas Becket – Edward – would be a good man and a champion of the Church, was to blame. A friar named Nicholas de Wisbech, formerly the confessor of Edward’s sister Duchess Margaret, persuaded the king to take up the matter with the pope, so that the miraculous properties of the oil might end his political troubles. The pope cautiously agreed, declaring that it would be ‘no superstition or sin’ for Edward to have himself re-anointed, but refused to send a cardinal and advised him to conduct the ceremony privately to avoid scandal.
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Edward eventually came to his senses and sent an astonishingly candid letter to John XXII condemning his own weakness and ‘dove-like simplicity’ in believing the friar’s blandishments.
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Since April 1318, a group of barons and prelates had been negotiating with the earl of Lancaster, and trying to persuade Edward and his unruly cousin to overcome their hostility to each other. In June, they came to a preliminary agreement: Edward would uphold the hated Ordinances, govern by the counsel of his magnates, and conciliate Lancaster, who was threatened with sanctions if he continued to hold armed assemblies. The Bridlington chronicler wondered at this agreement, declaring that bits were fastened on the king’s teeth and that those who merited execution were given absolution instead, which, he thought, fostered hatred.
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Lancaster’s violence and lawlessness were thus condoned, as he was too powerful for the king to ignore and his co-operation with Edward was essential if England was ever to find peace. Lancaster eventually consented to meet the king on 7 August 1318, and the two men exchanged the kiss of peace. Edward gave his cousin a fine palfrey horse ‘in recognition of his great love’ of Lancaster.
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A formal agreement, the Treaty of Leake, was signed in the town of Leake near Loughborough two days later.
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Part of the agreement was for Roger Damory, Hugh Audley and William Montacute to be sent away from court. Surprisingly, Edward agreed. He would never have consented to Piers Gaveston’s removal from court, at least not without being threatened and digging his heels in for months on end, and his actions here suggest that he had grown tired of his friends and was not willing to fight for them. On 20 October, Bartholomew Badlesmere replaced William Montacute in the key role of Edward’s household steward, while Montacute himself was appointed steward of Gascony a month later, replacing Antonio di Pessagno.
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Although this was an honour, Montacute must have known that he was deliberately being sent far away from Edward to limit his influence over the king. And although Roger Damory’s friendship with Edward was certainly not over, without constant access to the king’s presence, his influence over him would henceforth be severely limited. And more good news came in the autumn of 1318. On 14 October, Roger Mortimer’s ally John de Bermingham defeated and killed Edward Bruce, high king of Ireland, at the Battle of Faughart (also called the Battle of Dundalk), one of the very few military successes of Edward’s reign. Bermingham sent Bruce’s head to Edward for inspection; one hopes that Edward’s friend Donald of Mar, who was Bruce’s nephew, didn’t have to see it. In gratitude, the king granted the earldom of Louth to Bermingham.
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Hugh Despenser, the new lord of Glamorgan, committed a shocking act sometime in 1318: he removed Llywelyn Bren, the Welsh rebel, who in 1316 had attacked Caerphilly Castle (which now belonged to Despenser), from the Tower of London, and had him grotesquely executed in Cardiff. Despenser’s murder of Bren – for such it was, as he had no authority to commit such a dreadful act – attracted little censure or condemnation at the time, but was used against him three years later, and came back to haunt him in 1326. Edward did not punish Despenser, which is perhaps explicable by the fact that Despenser had already begun his rise in the king’s affections. The parliament of October 1318 confirmed him as Edward’s chamberlain, and he thus became the man who controlled access to the king both in person and in writing, a very influential position which Despenser exploited to the hilt. About thirty in 1318, Despenser was very well connected. His elder half-sister Maud Chaworth married the earl of Lancaster’s brother Henry, the earl of Norfolk who died in 1306 was his step-grandfather and the earl of Warwick who died in 1315 his uncle, and the earl of Ulster his mother’s first cousin. Despenser married Edward II’s thirteen-year-old niece Eleanor de Clare on 26 May 1306 in the presence of her grandfather Edward I, who paid Hugh Despenser the Elder £2,000 for his son’s marriage and gave Eleanor £29 to buy herself jewels.
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Although the Despensers were reasonably wealthy and owned close to seventy manors in the Midlands and south-east of England, Despenser would not inherit an earldom and was thus hardly a brilliant match for the king of England’s eldest granddaughter. The marriage seems to have been successful on a personal level, however, and the couple had at least ten children together during their twenty-year marriage.

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

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

On 6 December 1318, the four leading members of Edward II’s household – his steward, chamberlain, treasurer and controller of the wardrobe – formulated an ordinance for the king’s household.
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The earliest surviving English Household Ordinance dates from 1279, and the 1318 one is the second-oldest still extant. Edward’s household was divided into two main sections: the chamber, led by the chamberlain, and the hall, managed by the steward, men always of noble or knightly rank. Edward had a household of around 450 to 550 people, yet this was not the largest in the country; Thomas of Lancaster’s contained a staggering 700 members.
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Queen Isabella had her own household, of close to 200 people, and Edward paid all the costs. As he travelled through the country, finding and paying for provisions for so many people could prove burdensome. During the Great Famine in 1315, a brave cleric told Edward’s confessor that ‘the inhabitants used to rejoice to see the face of the king when he came, but now, because the king’s approach injures the people, his departure gives them much pleasure and as he goes off they pray that he may never return’.
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Edward had in August 1312 declared himself unable, owing to the ‘arduous business’ which followed Gaveston’s death, to pay for his household provisions in Kent, which included 1,000 sheep, 500 oxen, 300 swine, 1,000 quarters of wheat and 2,000 quarters of oats.
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There was an astonishing degree of hierarchy and specialisation: in the hall, for example, Edward had a knight chief usher, two sergeant ushers, two knights marshal and two sergeants marshal. He had a personal bodyguard of twenty-four archers on foot, thirty sergeants-at-arms ‘who will daily ride armed before the king’s person’, and, to provide his personal service, squires, valets or grooms and pages of the chamber. One of Edward’s chamber valets was William Warde, who received a regular sum of money from the exchequer for, mysteriously, ‘keeping a certain secret of the king in the palace of Westminster’.
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Other chamber valets were Simon Hod, Robin Dyer and Wat Cowherd, who were not, as a modern writer has imagined, lowborn men whom the king had brought to court and with whom he was ‘being promiscuous’. The ‘substantial payments’ they received supposedly as ‘hush money’ were simply the men’s wages, which the king’s staff were paid twice monthly.
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The king’s accounts of the 1320s reveal he had several dozen squires, more than thirty valets, about half a dozen pages, a steward, knights, clerks and an usher of the chamber. The valets in 1326 included two women named Anneis and Joan, wives of Roger de May and Robin Traghs who were also chamber valets, and the women received the same wages of three pence per day as the men, with presumably the same responsibilities. Edward seems to have been fond of Joan Traghs in particular: he once gave her five shillings to buy clothes and a gift of ten shillings after she gave birth to her daughter, most unusually hired her as a valet of his chamber (all great households of the Middle Ages consisted almost exclusively of men), and continued to pay her wages for forty-four days when she was away from court, ill.
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The frequent use of nicknames in Edward’s extant accounts hints at affection and camaraderie among the royal household staff. The name Thomas is often given as Thomelyn; Richard as Hick or Richardyn; Hugh as Huchon; Roger as Hogge; Robert as Robin or Hobbe; Gilbert as Gibbe or Gibon; Nicholas as Colle; Simon as Syme; Edmund (then spelt Edmon or Esmon) as Monde; Walter as Watte; William as Wille; John as Janin, Janekyn or Jack; Isabella as Sibille or Ibote; Joan as Jonete. One of Edward’s chamber valets was called Grete Hobbe, or in modern English Big Rob, and he also had servants called Litel Colle and Litel Wille Fisher.

Edward had two personal cooks and five valets to help them, and also had a ‘server and keeper of the foods for his mouth’, a squire who carved his meat and another who served him from his cup. The king used splendid knives for eating, which had silver enamelled or ebony handles, cost about twelve shillings each and had to be frequently replaced.
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His musical needs were taken care of: there would be performers to ‘make their minstrelsy before the king at all times that will please him’. The largest department was the marshalsea or stables, and Edward had, among many other servants, a man who ‘will lead to the king the horse which he will mount; and he will receive the king when he dismounts’. The Ordinance was keen to keep ‘undesirables’ away from court. Prostitutes, if caught there three times, would be imprisoned for forty days. Edward’s marshals were ordered to search the court weekly to find any people who hadn’t sworn an oath of loyalty to the king; such people were to be ‘taken and punished’. Members of the household were given the king’s permission to visit their homes on occasion – wives and families were not allowed to live at court or even to follow behind – and received sums of money between five and a hundred shillings, depending on rank, for their travel expenses.

Rank and status dominated everything, including what kind of material people wore and what they ate. All food and drink including a gallon of ale per day was provided for free, though nobody below the rank of squire was entitled to eat roast meat but had to make to do with the boiled kind. Higher-ranking servants also received candles or a torch for their chamber and a pitcher of wine. The servants received clothing or livery as part of their wages, usually given out twice a year at Christmas and Pentecost, and the lower ranks also received four shillings and eight pence annually for shoes. The livery was usually colour co-ordinated, and the overall effect must have been colourful and vibrant. From 8 July 1315 to 7 July 1316, Edward spent £627 on clothes for his household. He received two tunics for himself in April 1316, comprising six ells of scarlet (expensive woollen cloth) with two ells of yellow cloth for sewing leopards, his heraldic arms, on them, and more scarlet for making bags.
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He also received sixteen ells of green medley (dyed in the wool cloth) to make two sleeved tunics and two tabards. Green cloth lined with miniver was also given to the queen, their son Edward of Windsor, the king’s sister Elizabeth and his nieces Eleanor and Margaret.
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In November 1322, Edward purchased twelve ells of black and vermilion medley, at sixteen pence per ell, to make doublets (
courtepies
) for the squires of his chamber.
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He paid twenty-one pounds to the London draper Simon Swanland in December 1325 for medley cloth for his carpenters and forty marks for forty cloths to make elbow-length cloaks for his chamber valets. Two pages received blue cloth at a cost of six shillings in April 1326 for tunics ‘in the style of Gascony’.
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Thomas of Lancaster, at Christmas 1313, gave azure cloth to the knights of his household, medley to his clerks and
mi-parti
(cloth divided vertically in two colours) to his squires, and the following summer gave the knights yellow cloth, the clerks red medley and the squires striped cloth.
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