Edward II: The Unconventional King (26 page)

On 12 January, Edward ordered the arrest, for a third time, of Robert Lewer, a valet of his household and formerly keeper of Odiham Castle in Hampshire, for ‘trespasses, contempts and disobediences’. He had sent sergeants-at-arms to seize Lewer the previous summer, but Lewer resisted arrest and threatened to kill and dismember the men, in Edward’s presence if need be.
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Lewer grew up at court and acted as the king’s water-bearer, responsible for drying his clothes and preparing his bath, though he was also a highly capable soldier. He ‘was always ready for plunder and killing’, which included murdering the husband of his mistress.
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Edward was severely out of patience with him by 1321, describing him as ‘so vile a person’.
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The nature of Lewer’s crimes is unknown, but he might have been angry that he had been replaced as constable of Odiham Castle by Hugh Despenser in February 1320, and his later actions demonstrate that he detested the Despensers and their influence.
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Despenser, for his part, abused his position as constable of Odiham by removing the keeper of the park from his job, because he had once raised the hue and cry against Despenser’s mother Isabel Beauchamp for taking five deer from the park without a licence.
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Isabel died in May 1306; evidently, Despenser had a long memory.

Edward had returned to Westminster by 17 January 1321, and spent the next three weeks there. He attended a mass on 8 February at the church of Stratford, London, in memory of the late countess of Pembroke.
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That afternoon, he rode to Havering-atte-Bower in Essex, a royal manor, where the following day he attended the wedding of one of his great-nieces: Hugh Despenser’s eldest daughter Isabel, who married Richard, son and heir of Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel. Isabel was eight, Richard seven.
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Edward paid for a piece of Lucca cloth to make a veil for spreading over the heads of the child-couple during their nuptial mass, and gave two pounds in pennies to be thrown over them at the chapel door.
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The king left Westminster on 1 March with Hugh Despenser, and travelled slowly towards Gloucester. While at Fulmer in Buckinghamshire, he asked the Dominicans of Florence to pray for the good estate of himself, his family and his realm.
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He took his mind off his troubles by attending to marital business, and wrote to King Jaime II of Aragon regarding the marriage of his eight-year-old son Edward of Windsor.
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Jaime – to whose elder brother Alfonso III Edward’s sister Eleanor had been betrothed from 1282 until Alfonso’s sudden death in 1291 – had proposed his youngest daughter Violante, who was ten or eleven in March 1321, as a bride for the future king of England.
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Edward also wrote to the pope asking him to grant a dispensation for the marriage of his widowed cousin the earl of Pembroke to another of his cousins, Marie, daughter of the count of St Pol.
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On 28 March, Edward ordered the Marchers to come to him at Gloucester, but they failed to attend, which marks their transition from truculence to open hostility and defiance.
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The
Vita
says that the Marchers asked Edward to send Despenser away from him and have him come to trial to answer their complaints against him, ‘otherwise they would no longer have him as king, but would utterly renounce their homage and fealty and whatever oath they had sworn to him’.
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They also asked Edward to commit Despenser to the custody of the earl of Lancaster, and declared that they would guarantee to bring him safely to parliament to answer their complaints against him. With the example of Piers Gaveston, whose safety had been guaranteed by the earls of Pembroke and Surrey yet was killed by the earls of Warwick and Lancaster, still in his mind, Edward declared himself ‘not without great wonder’ at this demand, and responded ‘it would be unfitting and dishonest to remove Hugh from the king’s company’.
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Both Edward and Despenser drastically underestimated the Marchers’ discontent and willingness to use force and violence. Despenser, suffering one of his usual bouts of over-confidence, told the sheriff of Glamorgan ‘do not doubt that neither he [Hugh Audley] nor any of his allies have the power to hurt any of us’.
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An overly optimistic Edward wrote on 10 April to his friend William Aune, constable of Tickhill Castle and formerly of Piers Gaveston’s household, ‘Know that all things go peaceably and well at our wish, God be thanked’.
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The king left Gloucester on 16 April, spending Easter Sunday, 19 April, at Bristol and his thirty-seventh birthday at Queen Isabella’s Wiltshire castle of Devizes, where he gave ten shillings each to two minstrels the earl of Arundel had sent to him for their performance in his chamber.
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Edward arrived at Westminster on 7 May and was probably reunited here with Isabella, now seven months pregnant, though the
Vita
says that Edward ‘returned to London with his own Hugh always at his side’, which can hardly have pleased the queen.
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Edward’s commands fell on deaf ears. The Despenser War began on 4 May, when the Marchers, wearing a special tunic of green with the right quarter in yellow with white bends, attacked Despenser’s castle at Newport, which fell three days later.
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On the day the attacks began, Edward, oblivious, informed William Aune that ‘we have nothing but good news before us’.
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He also responded to a letter from some of his officials in Gascony, authorising the sale of a house in Condom known as the ‘Earl’s Hall’ (
aula
comitis
) on the grounds that it had become a ‘brothel of worthless women’, and gave a pound to the earl of Richmond’s violist Merlin for performing for him.
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Meanwhile, the Marchers rode through Glamorgan and besieged Cardiff, Swansea, Caerphilly and Despenser’s six other Welsh castles, which also fell within a few days, and his towns.
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They and their men tried to burn down the castles, and he later claimed a loss of £14,000 on twenty-three manors.
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Innocents suffered from the general theft and pillaging; the prior and convent of Brecon informed Edward that ‘they are greatly impoverished by the trouble there has been in the region’, and the poor people of Swansea also petitioned the king for help.
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Their rage and greed not yet sated, the Marchers and their followers then went on a rampage through the English lands of Hugh Despenser the Elder, sixty-seven manors in seventeen counties. Despenser later claimed losses of £38,000.
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The author of the
Vita
, despite his strong dislike of the Despensers, thought the Marchers had gone too far: ‘Why did they destroy their manors, for what reason did they extort ransoms from their retinues? Though formerly their cause had been just, they now turned right into wrong.’
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The Marchers themselves might have felt that their cause was a noble one. Given their violent and destructive behaviour, it is hard to agree. Claiming to be acting in Edward II’s best interest and within the law, they killed and plundered his subjects and caused them untold distress. The Despensers may well have deserved such treatment, but their tenants did not, and although Edward’s imprudent behaviour pushed the Marchers into rebellion, they put themselves equally in the wrong by inflicting misery on innocents. The bishop of Worcester, Thomas Cobham, informed the pope that the Marchers were capturing castles and committing homicides, and admitted that he had no idea why. He even said that only one of the marauding barons knew the real reason for the attacks, though what he meant by this is uncertain.
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The letter of Cobham, who as a bishop was better-informed than most, probably demonstrates that few people understood the Marchers’ aims, and it is doubtful that many cared; the loss of their anachronistic privileges was of little interest to anyone besides the Marchers themselves.

The Marchers took the king’s sergeant-at-arms Guy Almavini prisoner, and stole the treasure Edward had stored at Neath Castle.
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Around the same time, they committed far more serious acts of lawlessness: they captured John Iweyn, Despenser’s constable of Neath, with his servant Philip le Keu, beheaded them at Swansea, and stole their goods.
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The Marchers also killed at least sixteen other men, and wounded and imprisoned many others.
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Roger Mortimer went to Clun and took over the castle there, which belonged to the earl of Arundel, the king and Despenser’s ally. An indignant Arundel sent a letter on 4 June 1321 to ‘the good and wise men of Shrewsbury’ regarding a sum of money which he had asked them to guard and which he, probably not unreasonably, suspected Mortimer of wanting to steal. He begged them that ‘you should keep safely for our use the money which you have received in our lord’s [Edward’s] town, for we do not under any circumstances intend that our cousin of Mortimer, who is so close to us in blood, should do us such a great injury, which we have in no way merited’.
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Arundel had a long-running feud with his kinsmen the Mortimers, and even before the outbreak of the Despenser War, they were assailing his lordships in North Wales.
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Edward was evidently debating sending Despenser abroad for his own safety, as between 30 May and 12 June 1321, he granted safe-conducts to Despenser to go overseas, supposedly ‘on the king’s business’.
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The steward of Gascony, Amaury de Craon, sent two envoys to England sometime in May with questions he required Edward to answer, but although the envoys spent three weeks with Edward, they reported that neither he, Despenser nor the earl of Pembroke had time to talk to them.
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Edward has been criticised for this, on the grounds that he cared about nothing but his favourite’s lands, but this is hardly fair; thousands of men were committing horrific acts of violence and plunder over a large part of his kingdom, killing, wounding and robbing his subjects, and no doubt he judged that any questions the steward of Gascony might have would have to wait.
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Edward did find time on 21 May to give ten pounds to the messenger who brought him news of the birth of his latest great-nephew, the future Count Henri IV of Bar, son of Edward’s nephew Edouard and Marie of Burgundy. Three days later, he purchased six pairs of boots ‘with tassels of silk and drops of silver-gilt’, which cost five shillings a pair, from Robert le Fermor, bootmaker of Fleet Street, and spent over twenty pounds to celebrate Ascension on 28 May.
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He was, however, unable to attend the translation of St Thomas Cantilupe at Hereford Cathedral on 14 June, as he had wished.

The
Brut
says, ‘When the king saw that the barons would not cease of their cruelty, the king was sore afraid lest they would destroy him and his realm.’
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This may not be a gross exaggeration; the Despenser War, although short in duration, was terrifically violent, and as reports came to Edward of yet another manor attacked in yet another county, it must have seemed that his kingdom was descending into total anarchy. The earl of Lancaster remained in the north while his allies marched towards London. The Marchers seized victuals from local inhabitants and pillaged the countryside – not only Despenser manors – all the way from Yorkshire to London. John, Lord Mowbray and the knights Stephen Baret, Jocelyn Deyville and Bogo de Bayouse, for example, stole livestock, goods and chattels from the townspeople of Laughton-en-le-Morthen in Yorkshire, and even robbed the church.
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Adherents of Roger Mortimer destroyed the houses of John Bloxham in Oxfordshire, stole his goods and assaulted his servants, while the monastery of St Albans, according to its chroniclers, was only saved from the general pillaging because one of the Marcher leaders (unnamed) fell ill at Aylesbury.
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The Marchers had little choice but to turn to pillage and theft to feed their men, as for the most part, the inhabitants of the places they passed through had no wish to help them.

Edward sent his steward Bartholomew Badlesmere to an assembly of the earl of Lancaster and the Marchers at Sherburn, presumably as a spy. Badlesmere switched sides and joined the Marchers.
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This proved to be an astonishingly unwise move on his part as the earl of Lancaster loathed him, for unknown reasons. He may have gambled that as Lancaster was prepared to ally himself with Roger Damory, whom he had once accused of trying to kill him, he would forgive Badlesmere also for whatever wrongs he thought Badlesmere had done him. If so, he miscalculated. On 28 July 1321, Edward II created his half-brother Edmund of Woodstock earl of Kent, a few days before Edmund’s twentieth birthday, and ‘girt his said brother with a sword as earl of the said county’.
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This was most likely designed to limit Badlesmere’s influence in Kent, where he owned great estates; he had hoped to become earl of Kent himself.
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Edward authorised the foundation of several houses for teaching logic and theology at Cambridge University on 5 July, at the request of his clerk Roger Northburgh, shortly to become bishop of Coventry and Lichfield on the death of Walter Langton.
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Queen Isabella gave birth on the same day to their youngest child, named Joan (Johane, as it was spelt at the time) after Isabella’s mother Queen Joan I of Navarre and perhaps after Edward’s late sister Joan of Acre. Robert Staunton was granted a respite of eighty pounds on a debt of £180 he owed to the Exchequer for the simple expedient of travelling a couple of miles across London to inform the king.
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Edward arrived at the Tower on 8 July and stayed with Isabella and his daughter for six days, and little Joan of the Tower soon joined the household of her older siblings, under the care of Matilda Pyrie or Perie, formerly the nurse of her brother John of Eltham.
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On 26 July, Edward asked the Dominicans of Pontefract to pray for himself, Isabella and their children.
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