The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  When the tears for Gaveston stopped, the rain started. Between 1314 and 1317 northern Europe suffered grim weather, as perishingly hard winters were followed by exceptionally wet summers. It rained hard and unceasingly between May and October 1315, creating flash floods that swept away villages, destroyed arable land – in some cases for ever – and created massive lakes in low-lying parts of Yorkshire and Nottingham. Everywhere the downpour ruined the crops in the ground, plunging England into a state of appalling famine that lasted for two years. People starved in the countryside. Whole villages sank into beggary, as crop yields plummeted by over 80 per cent. People ate anything they could find: bird droppings, pets, damp and rotten corn, and on occasion, human flesh. Mob violence broke out over the scraps of food or the tiny yields of what few plants could grow in the water-logged ground.

  Meanwhile, disease spread among sheep and cattle, destroying England’s wool revenue and meat supplies, and putting pressure on the military garrisoned near Scotland. Food shortages and sodden living conditions made life on the military frontier hungry and insanitary.

  Against this unpromising background, England’s magnates tried hard to establish a lasting political settlement. Following the humiliation of Bannockburn, the initiative rested with the earl of Lancaster and his allies. Parliament met shortly after Gaveston’s funeral, and in an attempt to stabilize royal finance and address some of the corruption that was seen to be endemic in central and local government the barons reimposed the Ordinances, purged a number of royal ministers, replaced all the sheriffs in England, ordered the resumption of royal grants and put pressure on Edward to hear petitions of grievance and complaint from the country at large. The elder Despenser and Archbishop Reynolds were removed from their posts in government, in an attempt to keep the king away from his worst influences. In other areas Lancaster and Warwick appeared to be willing to cooperate with loyalist magnates such as Pembroke and with ministers of the king’s household.

  Cooperation was crucial, because various matters of state and foreign policy had to be addressed. In France King Philip IV died, and was succeeded by his son Louis X. A new French king required renewed diplomatic embassies to secure the status of Gascony. The Scots, emboldened by their success at Bannockburn and the deaths of several eminent lords of northern England, including the earl of Warwick, who died in August 1315, began to raid deep into English territory. Meanwhile Robert Bruce’s brother Edward opened a new front in the war with Scotland when he led an invasion force to Ireland in May 1315.

  The threats to the borders were magnified by the impact of the weather and the national famine, which prevented the English from putting an army in the field for any length of time. This in turn put intense pressure on Edward, and in a parliament that met at Lincoln at the beginning of 1316, Lancaster was appointed as head of the king’s council, with a mandate to enforce the Ordinances and reform the royal administration.

  Unfortunately Lancaster proved just as uninterested in or incapable of government as his cousin. Certainly the enforcement of the Ordinances, and the principle that the king should be checked and sanctioned by the collective will of the barons, was the lens through which he viewed all government. But it was also, for Lancaster, an end in itself. Despite his bloody-minded insistence on republishing and reconfirming the Ordinances, he had very little time either for Westminster or the business of ruling. He preferred to hold his own court in the north, posturing but doing very little in the way of practical governance.

  The Ordinances called for the repeal of royal grants and insisted on future patronage being confirmed by parliament. Lancaster’s dogmatic insistence on this was a constant reminder of the rift of 1312, and a factor in his growing isolation from the rest of the English earls, several of whom remained deeply angry at the summary fashion in which Gaveston had been murdered.

  As a result, Lancaster’s quasi-regency lasted for just a few months, and from April 1316 he retreated to his lands in the north, basing himself at Pontefract castle. In his absence during 1316 and 1317, Edward’s new group of favourites grew in prominence and power. Division was entrenched. Given the size of Lancaster’s retinue and landholdings, he could not fail to be the dominant force in English politics, and his massive landed power in the north made him a critical figure in the Scottish wars. Yet he was unwilling to participate on any level beyond insisting that the king obey the Ordinances that he so detested.

  Edward for his part did little to appease his cousin. Headed by the two Hugh Despensers, the new favourites included three more barons: Hugh Audley the younger, Roger Damory and William Montagu. Three of these men – Despenser the younger, Audley and Damory – had been awarded large fortunes through marriage to the sisters of the young earl of Gloucester who had been killed on the second day of Bannockburn. They were loaded with royal grants and patronage, much of it in Wales and the Marches. All five became extremely rich in defiance of the Ordinances, which demanded that the king take back past royal grants and have all new ones confirmed in parliament.

  Furthermore, even those moderate barons, like Pembroke and Hereford, who did not fawn on the king’s person but supported him out of loyal principle, were placed on lucrative contracts to serve the king in peace and war. Rather than relying on the natural obligation of barons and lords to serve their king out of mutual self-interest, Edward was now effectively paying men royal salaries to bind them to the Crown. He was making kingship a private, rather than a public enterprise, creating a culture of ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ and pushing his hostile cousin even deeper into opposition.

  Crisis deepened throughout 1317. By the summer, when Edward took a sizeable army north against the Scots, he found Lancaster gathering his own forces around a rain-lashed Pontefract. There was a deeply uneasy tension, as it seemed the north was about to erupt into violence. Under the cloud of impending anarchy, and with the king’s authority implicitly undermined by Lancaster (and vice versa), disorder began to escalate. In September Louis Beaumont, bishop-elect of Durham, and two visiting cardinals were held up and robbed by a household knight, Sir Gilbert Middleton, on their way from Darlington to the bishop’s consecration. This event caused severe embarrassment to both sides. Once Edward had left the north, Lancaster’s retainers attacked castles belonging to the king’s favourites.

  This was a situation in which the only possible outcome seemed to be civil war. As public authority evaporated, moderate barons like Pembroke and Badlesmere began to take desperate action to cling to peace. They offered private contracts to Edward’s favourites: Roger Damory signed one such contract in which Pembroke and Badlesmere promised to defend them from all men (in effect, from Lancaster) in exchange for the Damory undertaking not to pester the king for grants of land or anything else that might be prejudicial to the Crown. This was desperation. Royal authority could no longer be said to exist, and it was only thanks to the mediations of the English bishops, moderate royal counsellors like Pembroke, Hereford and Badlesmere and envoys sent from the pope that war did not break out in 1317.

  As hostilities between Lancaster and Edward continued, some bizarre occurrences touched the king. When Edward was at Oxford, early in 1318, a man called John Powderham appeared at court. He was a tanner from Exeter, but when he appeared before the king he claimed that he was in fact Edward I’s son, and that the kingdom of England belonged to him ‘by right of blood’.

  He was accusing the king of being a changeling, placed in the royal crib at birth, and offered to fight him in single combat for the Crown. Powderham said that he was the real king of England, and Edward an impostor. The man was clearly deranged, but his story stuck. According to the various chronicle reports of his confrontation with Edward, the king was both amused by the oddness of the claim and then extremely angry, as rumours of Powderham’s claims began to spread throughout England. Such was the misery of war, flooding, famine and political disarray that the tale of scandal and mistaken identity found an audience entirely willing to believe it. Implicit perhap
s was the notion that a king who was so inept could not possibly be of true royal blood.

  Powderham himself did not last long. Edward thought briefly of keeping him as an amusing fool, but the danger was too great. Powderham’s parents were summoned for interrogation, and he was tried and hanged at Northampton on 23 July. (During his trial, he claimed that his pet cat had become possessed by the Devil and incited him to his crimes. The cat was also hanged.) But was it possible that Edward was unduly tortured by thoughts of his own legitimacy? At around the same time as Powderham’s story was travelling the country, Edward was under the spell of a fraudulent Dominican friar, Nicholas of Wisbech. Nicholas claimed to own a vial of holy oil that had been given to Archbishop Thomas Becket during his exile in France. Edward began to believe that if he were reanointed as king with this oil, not only would his political troubles pass, but he would also be endowed with the virtue and power to reclaim the Holy Land from the heathen. Eager for a miraculous recovery, he made urgent requests to the pope – who had relocated the papacy from Rome to Avignon in 1309 – to be allowed a ceremony of reanointing.

  Even allowing for the superstitious mindset of medieval society, these were weird and wonderful events, which emphasized Edward’s brittle political position and his gullibility. In fact, a civil war was averted not through the divine intervention of the holy St Thomas, but through long and tiring political negotiation with the very real earl of Lancaster. Matters were resolved in August 1318 with the agreement of a formal peace between the king and his cousin: the Treaty of the Leake established a permanent royal council of sixteen (eight bishops, four earls and four barons – Lancaster was not a member) and Edward once more agreed to observe the Ordinances of 1311.

  But this was as fragile a peace as any made before it, based as it was on principles that could satisfy neither side. Within four years it had failed, and failed for the last time. Between 1317 and 1321 England slid, unstoppably, into civil war.

  Civil War

  In May 1321, huge bands of armed men marched and rode through south Wales and the Anglo-Welsh borders. They seized goods, plundered manor houses, broke down the fences of game preserves and slaughtered the animals that ran within them. They murdered or kidnapped servants and guards who tried to stop them. They bore fire and terror before them. They stole weapons and victuals, and destroyed valuable charters and legal documents. They made off with mares and stallions, cattle and oxen, sheep, swine, wagons, carts, and ploughs. They broke into houses and smashed or stole valuable items – legal records later lamented the loss of a nutwood chessboard with crystal pieces, ivory ornaments, gold religious artefacts and rich tapestries and clothes. They caused damage amounting to tens of thousands of pounds.

  As they marched and rode they flew the king’s banner of arms, protesting their loyalty to the Crown. But these were not Edward’s men. They were soldiers loyal to the Marcher barons of the Welsh borders: the earl of Hereford, Roger Mortimer of Chirk, his nephew Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, Hugh Damory, Hugh Audley, Roger Damory and many others. Many of these men were former royal allies, but now they did all they could to destroy the power and possessions of Hugh Despenser the elder and Hugh Despenser the younger, the two closest royal favourites, who like Gaveston before them were hated almost beyond reason.

  War, which had been averted for so long by the tireless efforts of England’s moderate barons and churchmen, had finally broken out. Edward, once again under the influence of unscrupulous men, had alienated two vastly powerful elements of his country – the northern lords around the earl of Lancaster, and the Marcher lords of the west. In doing so he had brought down upon himself the worst possible situation for England: anarchy, misrule and total breakdown in royal government.

  The most disappointing aspect of the civil war was that, before it broke out, Edward had shown some convincing signs of a capacity for strong kingship. Peace had been made with Lancaster in August 1318, and it was followed in October by a superb victory in the war with Scotland. Forces under the loyalist earl of Louth had defeated and killed Robert Bruce’s brother Edward in Ireland, at the battle of Faughart. This was the most significant military victory of Edward’s reign. It removed at a stroke the Bruce effort to throw the Plantagenets out of Ireland and revive a Scottish High Kingship of Ireland. It suggested that there was hope in the Scottish wars at large.

  Then, in 1320, Edward visited France to do homage to the new French king Philip V for Ponthieu and Aquitaine. When it was suggested by the French that Edward do personal fealty to his brother-in-law – a move that would have implied a far more subservient relationship between the French and English kings than mere homage – Edward stood defiant and gave a vigorous impromptu speech defending the rights of his Crown. He told Philip and his councillors that homage between the kings was done ‘according to the forms of the peace treaties made between our ancestors, after the manner in which they did it … no one can reasonably ask us to do otherwise; and we certainly do not intend to do so’. The uncharacteristic speech, and Edward’s visible anger, stunned the French delegation into silence.

  Moreover, these successes came against a background of seemingly genuine attention to kingship on Edward’s part. Queen Isabella had produced a second son, John of Eltham, in 1316, and another daughter, Eleanor of Woodstock, in 1318. Edward was attending to the succession. He was also said to be rising early, paying heed to parliamentary business and showing clemency in judicial matters. Nevertheless, his rule had slipped eventually into the pattern of domination by favourites. And this time the favourites were not frivolous and arrogant playmates like Piers Gaveston. They were conniving, grasping enemies of the realm.

  The rise of the Despensers had been steady between 1317 and 1321. They had gradually been accruing power in the Marches, through the younger Hugh’s marriage to an heiress to the earldom of Gloucester. Despenser built a power base that comprised important Welsh lands and castles in the lordship of Glamorgan, which included Cardiff, Llantrisant and Caerphilly. It was the most important of the Gloucester lands and it gave him an undue sway over territory that overlapped with other Marcher barons’ spheres of influence, among them other members of what had been Edward’s inner circle, particularly Audley and Damory. The Despensers – and foremost Hugh the younger – used their proximity to the king to ride roughshod over other lords’ landed rights, swooping on territory in the Marches and consolidating his already substantial holdings there. This did not merely rile those who found themselves without recourse to royal justice against the Despensers. It offended the Marcher lords in general, who saw the traditional laws of the March overridden by a king blatantly favouring one man’s private interest over the traditional balance of power in the region.

  Moreover, the familiar pattern of personal domination over the king, which had been the hallmark of the Gaveston years, was now repeated. The Despensers began playing gatekeeper to the king, controlling access to him by the rest of the barons. The chronicler Adam Murimuth wrote that no one could talk to Edward without Despenser listening in and replying freely on his behalf. Those who crossed them were liable to be deprived of land or possessions, or else thrown into prison.

  In late 1320, the dowager countess of Gloucester died and Edward granted the younger Despenser her lordship of Gower, which was ruled from Swansea. In 1320 Gower was contested between Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, the earl of Hereford and another Marcher lord, John de Mowbray. Edward moved to seize it into royal hands and granted it out to Despenser. This was an award that was viewed with the utmost hostility by a large band of the Marcher lords including Hereford, Audley, Damory and Roger Clifford. It also upset the two Roger Mortimers – of Chirk and Wigmore – with whom lasting enmity already existed. (Edward I’s ally, an earlier Roger Mortimer, had helped trap and kill an earlier Hugh Despenser at the battle of Evesham.) Yet when they complained to the king, he rejected their complaints outright, and Despenser accused them of treason. In early 1321 the Marcher lords took matters into their own hands and
began the invasion of the Despenser estates. War had begun.

  Between the violent anger of the Marcher lords and the general simmering hostility of Lancaster, who in 1321 was building a coalition of northern lords against the king, it was clear that once again Edward had succeeded in uniting the greater part of England’s political community against his rule. Even moderate barons like Bartholomew Badlesmere and (briefly) the earl of Pembroke inclined to the opposition’s side. In August 1321 a parliament at Westminster drew up a list of accusations against both Despensers and demanded their exile from England by the end of the month. This was ordered on the authority of the earls and barons of the realm with the assent of parliament – an authority that the opposition barons claimed overrode a king’s resistance. Queen Isabella, who had given birth to the couple’s fourth child (a girl named Joanna) at the beginning of July 1321, begged Edward on her knees to give way for the sake of the realm. He did so, and the Despensers were sent away. But Edward did not capitulate happily. As he agreed to his wife’s plea, he swore vehemently that within six months he ‘would make such an amend that the whole world would hear of it and tremble’.

  It was with an ominous reference to an ancient part of Plantagenet family history that Archbishop Reynolds of Canterbury summoned an emergency council to meet at St Paul’s, in London, on 1 December 1321. In the summons he sent to his fellow prelates he stressed the urgency of the cause. The realm, which had once rejoiced in the beauty of peace, he wrote, was now in danger of shipwreck through civil war.