Edward II: The Unconventional King (34 page)

Edward spent Easter and his fortieth birthday, 25 April, at his favourite residence of Langley. A Household Ordinance issued in June 1323 stated that Edward should make an offering of five shillings before the Cross every Good Friday and that the coins should subsequently be made into ‘cramp-rings’, thought to be a cure against muscle cramps and epilepsy. He was also to make an offering of three shillings to the thorn of the Crown of Thorns, if he had the relic with him.
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Piers Gaveston was still on Edward’s mind, and in June 1324 he sent his confessor to Langley Priory to keep the twelfth anniversary of Gaveston’s death. He also sent Brother Robert Asessour to Langley in January 1325 with the large sum of five pounds for each friar, so they would remember his friend in their prayers.
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In early June 1324, Edward sent the experienced diplomat the earl of Pembroke – the ambassador he should probably have sent in the first place – to Paris to negotiate the Gascony problems and the question of homage. Unfortunately, Pembroke died before he reached the city, on 23 June, when he collapsed suddenly after dining and died unshriven in his servants’ arms.
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The
Brut
has a scurrilous story of Pembroke being murdered while sitting on the privy, which the writer thought was God’s vengeance, as Pembroke had been one of the men to condemn ‘Saint Thomas of Lancaster’ to death.
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Edward had forced Pembroke to swear on the Gospels in June 1322 that he would always be obedient and faithful to him, because ‘the king was aggrieved against him for certain reasons … and could not assure himself of the earl’, most probably because Pembroke had persuaded Edward to consent to the Despensers’ exile in August 1321.
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The childless Pembroke left as his heirs his nephew John Hastings and his nieces Joan and Elizabeth Comyn, whose father was murdered by Robert Bruce in 1306 and whose brother John was killed at Bannockburn. Edward’s undoubted affection for Pembroke, at least before 1322, did not prevent him allowing Hugh Despenser to harass the dowager countess and Pembroke’s heirs over his debts, lands and goods.
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At war with France and with his French lands confiscated, Edward ordered all French subjects in England to be arrested and their goods seized. The French complained that this seizure would be worth more than the revenues of Gascony.
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Charles of Valois took his army into the Agenais (the modern department of Lot-et-Garonne) in early August, and demanded the surrender of its capital, Agen, from the earl of Kent, now Edward’s lieutenant in Gascony. Kent had already angered the residents by abducting a young girl and enforcing heavy levies of money.
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Naively, he allowed himself to be boxed in at the castle of La Réole, and Valois, half-brother of the late Queen Marguerite and thus Kent’s own uncle, besieged him there for five weeks. Valois had always followed an anti-English line, and played an important role in the plot of 1294 which deprived Edward I of Gascony for almost a decade; a chronicler wrote that ‘he persecuted the English with an inveterate hatred’, although this didn’t prevent him desiring a marriage alliance between his children and Edward II’s.
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Hugh Despenser told Kent that the only reason for the late arrival of ships carrying money for his aid was that ‘a strong wind was against them, which we cannot turn by our own command’, a statement clearly intended humorously but which also demonstrates Despenser’s arrogance, with its implication that he controlled everything except the weather.
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On 22 September 1324, Kent signed a six-month truce with Valois.
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Edward’s response to his half-brother’s truce six days later was once more to order the arrest of all French people in England, and also citizens of any Gascon towns which had surrendered to the French.
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Although the constable of Bordeaux had written in a panic on 1 September that the whole of Gascony was on the verge of falling, it did not: the French won the Agenais and part of the Gironde, Agen fell on 15 August, but Bordeaux and Bayonne, the most important cities, remained in English hands, as did numerous other towns.
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Edward wrote again to Jaime II of Aragon in September 1324 claiming untruthfully that he had not been summoned to pay homage to Charles IV, and grumbled about Charles’s ‘severity and malevolence’. He asked Jaime to send men to aid him against Charles, and sent the same letter to Alfonso XI of Castile and the regents Juan el Tuerto and his mother Maria Diaz de Haro.
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The following day, Edward appointed four men, including the earl of Kent, to negotiate a marriage between his son Edward and one of Jaime II’s daughters.
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In February 1325, Jaime declared that the marriage alliance between his family and Edward’s was ‘not agreeable … in the manner and form under which it was proposed’. Edward explained that he was eager to make ‘an alliance of love’ with Aragon, and sent two more envoys to negotiate any union ‘as shall seem suitable and opportune’.
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He was forced in October 1325 to apologise to Pedro Lopez de Luna, archbishop of Zaragoza, for his envoys’ failure to present themselves or communicate their business to him, declaring himself annoyed by their error.
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Even before Jaime II rejected the marriage of Edward of Windsor, Edward began negotiating for his son to marry Alfonso XI of Castile’s sister Leonor, who was probably born in 1307 and was thus a few years older than young Edward (born in 1312), and had been abandoned on her wedding day in 1319 by Jaime II’s son.
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Thirteen-year-old Alfonso XI himself was betrothed to Edward’s elder daughter, six-year-old Eleanor of Woodstock, and Edward declared himself prepared to pay £15,000 as Eleanor’s dowry.
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Edward’s long and eager letters to the regents about the marriages go beyond mere diplomatic courtesy, and suggest that he, half-Castilian himself, was delighted at the thought of two of his children marrying into Castile. Carried away with enthusiasm for his young cousin and future son-in-law Alfonso XI, Edward wrote that he ‘rejoices greatly that providence has illuminated abundantly the boldness of Alfonsus’s youth by gifts of virtues and natural and gracious good qualities, as widely diffused fame has made known and is as now spread to the ends of the world’.
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Jaime II did consent to a betrothal between Edward’s younger daughter Joan of the Tower and his grandson the future Pedro IV, who was born in September 1319 and was two years Joan’s senior.
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Because Edward had heard that Jaime ‘is old and decrepit and it is not certain that he is not dead’ – in fact, Jaime lived until November 1327 – he corresponded instead with Jaime’s son Alfonso, Pedro’s father, though his letters to Aragon betray none of the ‘rejoicing’ of his letters to Castile. King Afonso IV of Portugal was also keen for a marriage alliance between his family and Edward’s, and wrote to the king proposing his daughter Maria, born in February 1313, as a bride for Edward’s son. Edward wrote to Afonso and Queen Beatriz, both of whom were his close relatives, explaining that his son was to be married elsewhere, but as he desired friendship between the countries, he was willing to arrange another marriage between their children.
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In the end, because of Edward II’s deposition, none of his planned marriage alliances went ahead.

Edward’s diplomatic efforts in fact did him little good as regards his war with France. Jaime II and his parents had endured a long struggle with Charles of Valois and his great-uncle Charles of Anjou over control of Sicily, and Jaime had no desire to go to war with France on England’s behalf, though he did declare himself willing to act as an intermediary between the two sides.
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Castile proved more amenable to Edward’s requests for military aid than Aragon, and Juan el Tuerto informed Edward in early 1325 that he was willing to raise 1,000 knights and 10,000 footmen and squires for a year, or longer if Edward required, if the king of England paid their expenses.
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Hugh Despenser, keen for Edward not to leave England to lead an army into Gascony in the belief that his life would be in danger in the king’s absence, was hoping that Castilian and Aragonese soldiers would fight a war on England’s behalf.
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Ralph Basset, steward of Gascony, advised Despenser to have the English treasury searched for ancient documents pertaining to Castile, because he had heard from ‘some old people’ that the kings of Castile had often claimed homage for the part of Gascony as far north as the River Dordogne. Alfonso X had incited a rebellion in Gascony in 1253 with a view to invading and taking over the duchy, though he renounced his claims to it the following year when his half-sister Leonor or Eleanor married the future Edward I. Presumably Basset was hoping that, seventy years after the wedding of Edward II’s parents, Castile would decide to fight France for a share of the duchy, an unrealistic proposition to which Despenser did not even bother to respond in his next letter to Basset.
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Charles IV of France, unhappy with Edward’s search for allies in Spain, said that Edward was acting ‘against the crown of France’ and deemed it a ‘crime of treason’.
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Walter Reynolds, archbishop of Canterbury, believed in autumn 1324 that Roger Mortimer and the other English exiles were ready to attempt an invasion of England with armed men from Hainault, France and Germany, while Hugh Despenser thought that the exiles would soon lead an invasion force into Norfolk and Suffolk, with the aid of the count of Hainault and the king of Bohemia.
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This invasion never came about – the English exiles had no chance of striking at Edward as early as 1324 – but it may have been the threat of it which prompted Despenser to withdraw almost £2,500 from his Italian bankers between 31 October and 3 December, paid to him in ‘florins of Florence’.
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This suggests that Despenser was considering fleeing abroad, though when the invasion finally arrived, two years later, he stayed with Edward. The atmosphere of fevered suspicion in England at this time is nicely illustrated by two panicked letters to Despenser in September 1324, telling him that a fleet of foreign vessels with a hundred armed men aboard each ship had been seen in Falmouth and mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the night. This turned out to be a group of Genoese merchants making their annual trip to the Netherlands, with armed men to guard their valuable cargo.
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On 18 September 1324, Edward took Queen Isabella’s county of Cornwall into his own hands, supposedly because it lay on the coast ‘in the more remote parts of the realm’ and might be invaded by the French. The king also seized all of Isabella’s other lands and castles, though he failed to explain how inland counties such as Wiltshire and Oxfordshire might be vulnerable to a French invasion.
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Edward assigned Isabella instead an income from the Exchequer, said by several fourteenth-century chroniclers to be merely a pound a day, a gross underestimate: in fact she was granted 3,920 marks, or £2,613, six shillings and eight pence, annually, a little over seven pounds a day, considerably lower than her pre-September 1324 income of £4,500 but hardly a ‘fraction’ of it, as sometimes stated.
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Sophia Menache points out that it is doubtful if Isabella ‘suffered a substantial economic setback’ in 1324, though the queen was, understandably, outraged at the loss of her lands.
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She and her household could certainly live on the amount: the earl of Lancaster had in 1314 reduced Edward’s expenses to ten pounds a day for a household more than twice the size of the queen’s, and Edward’s father, during one of their quarrels in 1305, allowed him only £155 a month or just over five pounds a day for his household costs.
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Edward had taken his stepmother Queen Marguerite’s lands and castles into his own hands in late 1317, so the move was not unprecedented, yet Edward soon restored Marguerite’s lands to her, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that his seizure of Isabella’s estates was intended punitively.
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Precisely what Edward’s motives in punishing his wife were is uncertain, though the queen herself blamed Hugh Despenser and his ally Walter Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter and treasurer of England. Isabella’s French attendants, excepting her chaplain, were not exempt from the arrest of Charles IV’s subjects – although Edward did permit other French people to remain in England – and were either imprisoned or forced to return to their homeland.
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Charles IV was justifiably furious at the treatment of his subjects.
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Supposedly Isabella managed to smuggle a letter to her brother complaining that she held no higher position at court than that of a servant and that Edward was a ‘gripple miser’, i.e. mean to her but generous to another, although this was only recorded at the end of the fourteenth century by the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, who had no access to Isabella’s correspondence.

At an indeterminate date before 6 February 1325, Edward set up a household for his and Isabella’s daughters, six-year-old Eleanor and three-year-old Joan, under the care of Isabel Hastings and her husband Ralph Monthermer. This has often been misunderstood in the last few years to mean that Edward was further punishing his queen by cruelly removing her children from her. The girls remained in Isabel Hastings’ care until 19 February 1326, and the following day Edward appointed Joan Jermy, sister of his half-brother the earl of Norfolk’s wife Alice Hales, to be in charge of the girls’ household.
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Isabel Hastings was Hugh Despenser’s sister, but evidently a trustworthy, maternal type: when Edward’s niece Elizabeth attended his funeral years later, she left her two young daughters in Isabel’s care, despite her understandable hatred of Isabel’s brother, who had treated her appallingly.
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Isabel’s husband Ralph Monthermer was the widower of Edward’s sister Joan of Acre, whom he had married in early 1297 when the future king was twelve, and thus had a claim to being the uncle of the royal daughters. Also at an uncertain date, Edward and Isabella’s second son John of Eltham (born 1316) was placed in the care of Edward’s niece Eleanor Despenser, though this is only known from an undated membrane of Eleanor’s expenses for looking after him and an entry in Edward’s chamber account of June 1326 stating that the two had travelled to Kenilworth together.
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Eleanor’s care of John might have lasted only a few weeks, and there is no evidence at all that it began in September 1324, as is almost inevitably stated nowadays.