Edward II: The Unconventional King (31 page)

For the second time in eight years, the king was forced to flee from a Scottish force, and this occasion was far more humiliating than in 1314. Leaving the field after Bannockburn was really the only sensible thing Edward could have done, and he had at least fought courageously in the battle. In 1322, by contrast, he was over a hundred miles inside the borders of his own kingdom, and did not even face Bruce on the battlefield – though given that most of his army had been disbanded and he was attended by a small retinue, this was most probably not cowardice but pragmatism; he simply could not allow the numerically far superior Scottish force to capture him. Still, this flight was a deep humiliation, and the
French
Chronicle of London
says that Edward ‘returned to England in shame’ and subsequently ‘much oppressed his people with misery and hardship’.
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Scalacronica
says that after the debacle, Edward ‘kept himself quiet, undertaking nothing of honour or prowess, but only acting on the advice of Hugh le Despenser so as to become rich’.
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Having spent the first fifteen years of his reign short of money thanks to the enormous debts left to him by his father and his own extravagance, Edward showed himself from 1322 onwards to be almost pathologically obsessed with increasing and holding on to his wealth, and the
Flores
also comments on his ‘insatiable avarice’.
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At the time of the battle, Queen Isabella was staying at Tynemouth, about ninety miles to the north of her husband’s position. She later accused Hugh Despenser of ‘falsely and treacherously counselling the king to leave my lady the queen in peril of her person’ at Tynemouth.
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Edward’s concern for his wife is in fact apparent in the number of letters he rushed off at this time. Unable to ride all the way to Tynemouth and fetch her himself, he did the next best thing: he ordered men he trusted to help her. He commanded the constable of Norham Castle to take Isabella under his protection; should Scottish troops approach Tynemouth, he was to enlist the assistance of the constables of all the castles in the north-east.
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Edward also ordered the earls of Richmond and Atholl and his steward Richard Damory (Roger’s brother) to raise troops, who included some of Hugh Despenser’s men, and go to her aid. Isabella, who loathed Despenser, refused to accept the presence of his soldiers, even though they would be commanded not by Despenser himself but by three men she had no reason to distrust, one of whom (Richmond) was her kinsman. Edward then sent Isabella’s countryman Henri, lord of Sully and butler of France, visiting England, to Tynemouth with his troops to protect her. Unfortunately Sully was caught up in the chaos, and the Scots captured him at Byland – though Bruce treated him as a honoured guest.
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With hindsight, Edward’s decision to send Isabella to Tynemouth seems absurd, but she had safely accompanied him on campaign in 1310 and 1314, staying much farther north than Tynemouth, and it probably never occurred to him that she would be in danger.

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

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

Edward lost two people in the autumn of 1322: the brutal Robert Lewer, whom he had once pardoned for threatening to dismember his servants and who subsequently played an important role in the campaign of 1321/22, was ordered to be arrested on 20 September.
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Lewer stole goods belonging to Hugh Despenser the Elder, earl of Winchester, then went to manors which had belonged to the executed Contrariants Henry Tyes and Warin Lisle and ostentatiously handed them out as alms. Lewer seems here to have been acting against the Despensers, rather than Edward himself. Edward ordered all his sheriffs to pursue and take Lewer dead or alive.
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Lewer’s rebellion, if it may be dignified by the name, soon petered out, and Edward gave two pounds on 19 December to a messenger who brought him news of his capture.
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Lewer was subjected to the terrible, but usual, punishment for those who refused to plead:
peine forte et
dure
, lying on the floor in thin clothes pressed with a great weight of iron.
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Flores
says he died on 26 December 1322.
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And sadly for the king, his illegitimate son Adam died on the Scottish campaign, perhaps of the dysentery which decimated the English army. Edward’s reaction to this loss is unfortunately unrecorded, though he had his son buried at Tynemouth Priory on 30 September, with a silk cloth with gold thread placed over his body.
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The identity of Adam’s mother or what became of her is also unknown, but we may surmise that as Edward acknowledged Adam as his son, he must have had a fairly serious relationship with her. Adam is very obscure and no reference to him before 1322 has yet been found, but a letter of that summer which is almost certainly talking about him says that ‘all good qualities and honour are increasing in him’.
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After his flight from Rievaulx, Edward spent late October and early November in York, where he gave a pound to the earl of Louth’s minstrel Sourelius for performing before him, and two pounds to a monk of Rievaulx to buy a habit.
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The king probably saw the sky ‘of a colour like blood’ on 31 October from terce to vespers, or 9 a.m. to sunset, as recorded by the Sempringham annalist and the
Brut
.
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On the way back to York, Edward stayed at Thorne near Doncaster, where he gave two shillings each to ten fishermen ‘who fished in the king’s presence and took great pike, great eels and a large quantity of other fish’. A John Waltham gave him two salmon.
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It is hard to think of another medieval king of England who would willingly have stood by a river in damp chilly November to watch people fishing, and the king’s chamber account sheds more light on Edward’s enjoyment of ‘low’ pursuits and fondness for the company of the lowborn: for example, he went to the forge at Temple Hirst to chat to his blacksmith, John Cole.
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The account also records a payment of two pounds to the Carmelite friar Walter Mordon, ‘whose Mass the king often heard in the chapel’ at Temple Hirst.
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Edward decided to spend the winter in the north, and on 27 December, once more ordered a muster of his army at York on 2 February 1323, a campaign destined never to take place.
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Edward spent Christmas at York, and ate porpoise, sturgeon, swans, peacocks, herons, pigeons, venison and wild boar, among much else.
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He paid two women for singing for him in the garden of the Franciscans on 26 December, presumably a mild day.
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Whether Isabella was with her husband is not clear, though Edward’s niece Elizabeth was present, and he threatened her that she would hold no lands from him if she refused to agree to Despenser’s demands to exchange her rich lordship of Usk. It is difficult to reconcile the two images of the ever-contradictory king here: the amiable, easy-going man chatting with fishermen and blacksmiths, and the harsh, angry man hurling threats at his own niece.

The queen was in London by 12 January 1323, with Hugh Despenser’s wife Eleanor, and spent the next few weeks in residence at the Tower. Isabella wrote a letter to the treasurer on 17 February, from the Tower, asking him to ensure that her ‘dear and beloved cousin’ Joan Mortimer, wife of Roger Mortimer and held under house arrest with eight attendants, received promptly the money allocated for her sustenance. This has sometimes been seen as evidence of the queen’s collusion with Joan’s husband Roger, with whom the queen began a relationship in about late 1325. Although it is possible that Mortimer smuggled a message from his cell to Isabella asking for her help, it is more likely that the queen was simply motivated by concern for a noblewoman who was her distant cousin. Eleanor Despenser also wrote a letter on Joan’s behalf, on the same date and also from the Tower; it is safe to say that she was not colluding with Mortimer.
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Eleanor Despenser had grown very close to her uncle Edward, who in 1323 gave her a huge gift of one hundred pounds for her illness after childbirth and paid all her expenses during her stay at the royal manor of Cowick. The king owned a ship named
La Alianore la Despensere
after his niece.
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Although Edward had always been extremely fond of Eleanor, in the last year or two of his reign there is abundant evidence that they had become extremely familiar: there are numerous entries in his chamber account relating to privy dining, visits and many gifts including caged larks and goldfinches, jewels, horses, clothes and large sums of money. So close were they, in fact, that a Hainault chronicle even stated that they were having an affair.
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Michael Prestwich suggests that the chronicler may have heard the story from Isabella’s entourage when the queen was in Hainault in 1326.
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The
Flores
wrote of Edward’s ‘infamy and illicit bed, full of sin’ and said that he was ‘condemned by God and men’ and had ‘removed from his side his noble consort and her sweet conjugal embraces’.
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Whether Edward’s ‘illicit bed’ meant sexual relations with men, an incestuous affair with his niece, both, something else entirely, or was merely an invention of a man who detested the king in order to discredit him, is unclear. Edward lavished gifts on those he loved, most notably his male favourites and his son Edward of Windsor, and by that token he certainly loved Eleanor. No English chronicler even hinted at an incestuous relationship between the two, however, except perhaps the much later writer Henry Knighton, who made the rather cryptic comment that when Isabella was abroad in 1325/26, Eleanor was treated as though she were queen.
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There is no evidence for the twenty-first-century suggestion that Hugh Despenser had sex with Isabella or raped her, a theory based solely on Isabella’s statement in 1326 that Despenser had ‘dishonoured’ her, which means his success in drastically limiting her influence over her husband and even her ability to communicate with him, his reduction of her income, and other issues she raised against him which distressed her.
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If Isabella really had accused Despenser of such a serious and shocking crime, it is odd that no one mentioned it – neither chroniclers, the pope nor Isabella’s brother the king of France ever hinted at a sexual assault, nor was it one of the charges against Despenser at his trial when Isabella accused him of many other things. Despenser harried widows and others in his overwhelming desire to possess ever more lands, certainly deeply unpleasant behaviour, but there are no grounds for accusing him of sexual violence, and no reason to suppose that he had any carnal interest in Isabella.

While the queen was at the Tower in early 1323, Edward remained in Yorkshire, where he gave two pounds to four clerks for playing interludes before himself and Hugh Despenser in the great hall at Cowick, and spent three shillings playing dice.
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The royal favourite now controlled a huge area of South Wales, and after the earl of Pembroke’s death in 1324 would gain even more. Edward received a ‘private message’ from Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent, on 13 January.
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Edward seems to have been very fond of the younger of his half-brothers, whom he trusted and sent on various important missions abroad. By contrast, his other half-brother Thomas of Brotherton, earl of Norfolk, rarely appears in Edward’s accounts, and the king showed him little favour.
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The end of 1322 was mostly peaceful, but inevitably, this was not to last. Andrew Harclay, earl of Carlisle, growing tired of Edward’s endless failures in Scotland and his inability to protect the north of England, met Robert Bruce at Lochmaben on 3 January 1323.
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They agreed that England would recognise Bruce as king, that Edward would be granted the marriage of Bruce’s son and heir – Bruce in fact had no son until March 1324 – and that Bruce would pay England 40,000 marks of silver over ten years.
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On 8 January, Edward declared that truces with the Scots must not be made without his consent and ordered Harclay to come to him immediately.
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It is probable that Harclay’s rival Sir Anthony Lucy had prior knowledge of the meeting and informed the king, as Edward gave Lucy’s messenger a pound on 2 January for bringing his letters to him; for only five days to pass between the Lochmaben meeting and Edward’s response to it, 3 to 8 January, otherwise seems impossibly fast.
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Harclay failed to obey Edward’s summons, and the king, ‘exceedingly put out (and no wonder!)’ ordered his arrest on 1 February.
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Lanercost
gives a colourful account: Anthony Lucy and a group of knights and men-at-arms hid their weapons under their clothes to disguise their hostile intent, and arrested Harclay while he was dictating letters in the great hall of Carlisle Castle.
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Edward sent the earl of Kent, the chief justice of the King’s Bench and others to ‘degrade’ Harclay. This involved tearing the golden spurs of knighthood from his boots and removing his belt of earldom, and, according to the
Brut
, breaking his sword over his head.
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Lucy told him, ‘Now art thou no knight, but a knave.’
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