She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (37 page)

His army included contingents led by the earl of Gloucester, who had fought in the abortive campaign led by Edward and
Gaveston in 1311; by the earl of Pembroke, Edward’s steadfast ally ever since his promise of safeguard to Gaveston had been so brutally overridden; and by the earl of Hereford, Edward’s brother-in-law, who had followed Lancaster and Warwick in engineering Gaveston’s execution but had taken a lead in the search for a settlement, and appeared now to have made his peace with the king. Not present in Edward’s company as he moved north in May 1314 were the three other earls responsible for Gaveston’s death: Lancaster, Warwick and Arundel.

These were men who, in other circumstances, would have stood to gain immeasurably from an English triumph in Scotland. Now, however, they knew that victory for Edward north of the border would free his hand to deal with those who had crossed him in England. Meanwhile, an army commanded by Edward seemed a dangerous place to be for men who had every reason to believe that he wanted them dead. The king’s forces were huge in number as they marched for Berwick, but, given the absence of these lords from their ranks, the scars of the recent conflict were clear upon them.

Isabella, meanwhile, was immersing herself in her new public role as her husband’s adviser and representative. At the end of February 1314, she accompanied the earl of Gloucester on an embassy to her father in Paris to discuss the affairs of Gascony. The eighteen-year-old queen did not suffer any false modesty in her sense of her own majesty; in England she maintained a household of almost two hundred servants, and spent money as freely as her extravagant husband. Her entourage and equipment for this, her first return to her French home without Edward, were so extensive that a fleet of twenty-seven ships and thirteen barges was requisitioned to transport the expedition across the Channel. All told, Isabella spent eight weeks in France, leaving costly gifts at holy shrines along her route and hunting with her team of fifteen greyhounds, as well as applying herself to the serious business of assisting Gloucester in his negotiations through her personal intercession with her father.

This embassy meant that she was also present to witness the eruption of a humiliating scandal by which the French court was overwhelmed that spring. Her three sisters-in-law – Marguerite, daughter of the duke of Burgundy, and Jeanne and Blanche, both descended from a collateral branch of the Burgundian house – had been dangerously indiscreet in dallying with some handsome young knights in their father-in-law’s service. The chastity of royal wives was a matter not only of honour and obedience but of dynastic security, and any shadow of suspicion cast on the royal succession was likely to provoke a violent and terrible reckoning. And so it proved: Marguerite and Blanche were convicted of adultery, and Jeanne found guilty of having concealed their liaisons. All three were imprisoned, Marguerite and Blanche in subterranean cells within the forbidding Norman fortress of Château Gaillard, their heads shaved as a mark of their transgression, while their supposed lovers died in excruciating agony, publicly tortured to death for their crimes.

Rumour had it that Isabella had suspected her brothers’ wives, and borne witness against them. Whether or not that was so, her poised hauteur certainly marked a stark contrast between her own seriousness of purpose and the recklessness that had precipitated these foolish young women into such appalling suffering.

And, as if to emphasise the gravity of Isabella’s royal duties, she had no sooner returned to London than she was preparing to set out once again, this time following the king and his army to Berwick. Travelling sometimes on horseback, sometimes in a covered wooden carriage filled with silk cushions and drawn by three black chargers, she reached Berwick’s great walls on 14 June, ready to witness from close at hand her husband’s inevitable triumph.

Robert Bruce had long avoided meeting an English army in pitched battle. Guerrilla warfare played much more to the Scots’ strengths – their intimate knowledge of the terrain over which they moved, and the speed with which they could strike – than the prospect of a set-piece confrontation involving English divisions of well-equipped cavalry and skilled archers that the Scots simply
could not match. But in the summer of 1313 Bruce’s brother, who was then leading a siege of the strategically vital stronghold of Stirling, had accepted the terms of a truce by which the castle’s English garrison agreed to surrender if English troops failed to arrive within three leagues (nine miles or so) of Stirling by the next midsummer’s day, 24 June 1314. While Edward remained mired in conflict with his own lords, that proffer had seemed a good bet, and any English army unlikely to be more than a mirage – until in February 1314, with an uneasy peace agreed at home, the king suddenly announced his determination to take up the challenge.

By midsummer’s eve, 23 June, the English army was advancing rapidly on Stirling, and Bruce could no longer evade the confrontation he had feared. He drew up his infantry on the north side of the Bannock Burn, a stream flowing through marshy ground into the Forth river a couple of miles from Stirling Castle, while Edward’s troops halted to the south of it. The English forces outnumbered Bruce’s by a factor of two or three to one. They were better equipped, more experienced and more highly trained than the Scots footsoldiers. But, by the time battle was joined in earnest on the following day, they were also exhausted by their forced march, struggling with the seeping mud and uncertain footholds of the boggy landscape, and undermined by indecisive and divided leadership.

The earls of Hereford and Gloucester, it emerged on the morning of 24 June, were locked in bitter argument over their rival claims on the honour of leading the attack. In the heat of the moment Gloucester dashed forward against the Scots line to prove his mettle with a sudden assault. It took only an instant for the young earl to be thrown from his warhorse and hacked to death where he fell in the blood-churned mud. Hemmed in by the terrain and paralysed by consternation and confusion, the English ranks collapsed under the sudden onslaught of the Scots into a scrambling, bloody mêlée.

As Edward watched in horror, his inevitable triumph turned into an inexorable rout. Panic overwhelmed his despairing troops
as the king fled, surrounded by a bodyguard of knights led by the earl of Pembroke, first to Stirling Castle and then, when he was refused entry to a fortress that the laws of war now ceded to the Scots, eastward to Dunbar, the coast and safety. Behind him he left men and horses spitted on pikes, speared with arrows and dismembered by sword blows, while others suffocated in the mire or drowned in the crimson-stained waters of the Forth. When Robert Bruce left the field, he did so as the unquestioned king of an independent Scotland. For Edward, defeat was total, and catastrophic.

By the time he rejoined his wife at Berwick, the consequences of this annihilation were only beginning to become apparent. The earl of Gloucester was dead and the earl of Hereford a prisoner, taken by the victorious Scots along with the keeper of Edward’s privy seal, his clerks, his archive and the seal itself. Within weeks, the Scots were cutting a swathe through northern England, their raids destroying lives and homes throughout Northumberland, Cumbria and Durham and deep into Yorkshire and Lancashire, while Robert Bruce made preparations to despatch his brother to invade English-ruled Ireland. And, if God’s judgement on Edward’s kingship were not already clear, in the aftermath of military disaster the heavens opened: torrential rains and a brutal winter destroyed crops in the ground, and Edward’s people began to starve.

Victory for Edward would have meant a chance to free himself from the shackles of the ordinances and to revenge himself upon the earls who had killed his beloved Gaveston. Defeat, in a realm harried from without and decomposing from within, meant the exact opposite. When the king finally laid Gaveston’s embalmed body to rest, on 2 January 1315 at Edward’s favourite manor of Langley in Hertfordshire, he did so in the bitter knowledge that power effectively lay in the hands of Gaveston’s executioner, Thomas of Lancaster, the great earl without whom northern England could not now be defended against the depredations of the Scots. And Lancaster, it was clear, would insist with every ounce of his
strength on keeping the king shackled, since it was the ordinances that vindicated the killing of Gaveston.

Isabella, at not quite twenty, found herself facing the most thankless of tasks: to function as a queen within a profoundly dysfunctional kingdom. The king and his greatest magnate were locked into a mortal enmity that made the normal workings of royal government all but impossible. Isabella might give birth to more royal heirs – as she did to a son, John, in the summer of 1316, and a daughter, Eleanor, two years later. And she might use her symbolic role as intercessor in an attempt to secure the restoration of her husband’s power through an accommodation with her uncle of Lancaster. She was, as she had not been during Gaveston’s lifetime, the king’s companion and his trusted confidante, a loyal spouse and a shrewd political tactician. But, in practice, there was little she or anyone else could do to ameliorate the intractable divisions that now crippled English politics.

Lancaster was an increasingly isolated figure, more estranged than ever from his peers not only by his uncompromising instincts and his lack of political finesse but also by the unpredictable hand of fate. The earl of Warwick, Lancaster’s closest ally and the man with whom he shared ultimate responsibility for Gaveston’s death, had sought a prominent role in the direction of Edward’s government after the defeat that came to be known as ‘Bannockburn’ after the stream across which it was fought. In August 1315, however, Warwick died at the age of just forty-three, leaving a baby son – named Thomas, after Lancaster himself – as his heir. Some lords positioned themselves much more closely to the king: the earl of Pembroke remained unwavering in his loyal service to Edward, and the earl of Hereford (newly retrieved from Scottish custody in exchange for Robert Bruce’s wife, who had been captured by the English in 1306) continued his campaign to efface all memories of his presence at Blacklow Hill through his steadfast support of the king. Others were more wary of Edward, including the earl of Arundel who, with Warwick and Lancaster, had refused to fight at Bannockburn. But all, like the rest of the king’s subjects, were
caught in no-man’s-land, trying as best they could to protect their own interests in a country debilitated not only by flood, famine and the raiding Scots, but by the pernicious stalemate between Lancaster and the king.

As always, the author of the
Vita Edwardi Secundi
was an acute observer of this political paralysis.

Political division was mirrored in physical distance: Lancaster increasingly kept himself apart from the dangers that lurked in the dark corners of his cousin’s court by retreating to his northern strongholds, and sought instead to control Edward from afar, at first through the ordinances, and then, after a treaty concluded at Leake in Nottinghamshire in 1318, through a standing council appointed to govern with the king.

But the inefficacy of these measures, in attempting to build flimsy bridges across chasms of profound mistrust, was obvious in the growing disorder that was engulfing public life. The earl of Surrey had been struggling for years to escape his loveless and childless marriage to Jeanne of Bar, one of the king’s nieces, in order to marry his mistress, the mother of his two sons. Thomas of Lancaster had been among the nobles who supported the Church in rejecting Surrey’s plans in 1314, and in 1317 – with the king’s tacit but obvious support – Surrey retaliated by abducting Lancaster’s wife, Alice Lacy. Their marriage had been no more happy or productive than Surrey’s, and it seems likely that she colluded in her own kidnapping. But the result of this public humiliation was yet more violence, in the form of a private war between Lancaster and Surrey that raged unchecked across the already disordered countryside of Yorkshire and north Wales.

More trouble, meanwhile, was stirred up by the fate of the earldom
of Gloucester after the death of its young lord amid the carnage at Bannockburn. Once it became clear that his widow was not pregnant and that there would be no heir of his body to inherit his title, the earl’s rich estates were shared between his three sisters, Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth, whose husbands were precipitated to a startling new eminence by these sudden territorial gains. Margaret, who had once been the unhappy wife of Piers Gaveston, was married in April 1317 to Hugh Audley, and Elizabeth in the same month to Roger Damory – neither man born into the first ranks of the nobility, but both trusted members of Edward’s innermost household coterie. Eleanor, the eldest sister, was already married, but her husband too fitted this (for Edward) pleasing mould: Hugh Despenser the younger – who had entered Edward’s household when both men were in their teens – was the son and namesake of a courtier and confidant of the king whose loyalty had not faltered during the years of Gaveston’s dominance.

Now Audley, Damory and Despenser rose ‘in the king’s shadow’, one chronicler remarked bitterly. For Edward, these loyalists within his household offered him the promise of an alternative power base, the prospect of side-stepping (and one day, perhaps, destroying) the lords who had constrained his own authority and killed the man he loved beyond all others. For Audley, Damory and Despenser, meanwhile, the king’s favour presented the chance to enrich and empower themselves to heights of which before they could only have dreamed. This time, it seemed, there would be no second Gaveston: no all-encompassing personal devotion, no exclusive intimacy. But, while his desperate country suffered and starved, Edward spent money like water on men who cared only to advance themselves – and, as he did so, added fuel to the flames of his conflict with the earl of Lancaster.