by Dan Jones
Shipwreck. The same analogy had been used by chroniclers more than 180 years previously when England was torn apart between a pair of cousins in a civil war that lasted for the best part of two decades. Then it had been King Stephen whose authority was challenged by his cousin, the Empress Matilda. Now it was King Edward who risked losing his authority and perhaps his whole kingdom to rebels represented by his cousin Thomas earl of Lancaster.
The younger Despenser’s exile lasted a matter of weeks. At the beginning of October he was recalled to England, meeting the king on the south coast, between Portsmouth and Southampton. Edward simultaneously struck his first blow of the civil war by besieging his former ally Bartholomew Badlesmere’s castle at Leeds in Kent. The king took personal command of the siege, and Edward was therefore directly responsible for executing a number of Badlesmere’s men and sending his wife and children to the Tower of London.
Edward was not without allies. Despite the Despensers’ unpopularity, there were those who feared the consequences of making war on the king more than trying to accommodate him. Among the earls he was supported by his two young half-brothers, Thomas Brotherton, earl of Norfolk, and Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent, as well as the earls of Pembroke, Richmond, Arundel and Surrey. Edward also held the command of an elite fighting force of household knights.
The opposition – whose members became known as the contrariants – split along complex lines. They were led by Marchers – Hereford, the two Roger Mortimers, Badlesmere and the former favourites Damory and Audley – and acted with the limited support of the earl of Lancaster, who held off joining the war until January 1322.
Despite their lack of total unity, the war began well for the contrariants, when they captured the border towns of Gloucester, Bridgnorth and Worcester in the autumn and winter of 1321. But in early 1322 they were struck a damaging blow: the two Roger Mortimers, who were suffering defections from their armies and attacks from Welsh lords loyal to Edward, surrendered to the king and were sent to the Tower of London. This defection began a process of collapse among the Marcher coalition: in February Maurice de Berkeley and Hugh Audley the elder also surrendered. Edward confiscated Berkeley castle from Sir Maurice – a decision that would return to haunt him.
Edward, for all his political stupidity, could be a crafty tactician. As he continued to prise numbers from his opponents, he pushed the Marchers deeper and deeper into a state of panic. Suddenly the opposition to Edward was scrambling. The earl of Hereford, Hugh Audley the younger and Roger Damory joined forces with the earl of Lancaster in late January 1322; but by that stage the military initiative lay with the Crown.
Edward began attacking Lancaster’s castles in February and successfully took a number of them, including the fortress at Kenilworth that had played an important role during the thirteenth-century wars against Simon de Montfort. Throughout the campaign, Lancaster leaked vital and close supporters. At least ten of his retainers changed sides during the civil war, either unwilling to fight against their king, or else fearful of their fate should Lancaster be defeated.
Although the Marches and the north of England inclined against him, Edward drew valuable support throughout 1321 and 1322 from the native lords of Wales, particularly from Rhys ap Gruffudd and Gruffudd Llwyd. The Welsh lords faced more regular threats from the English Marcher barons than they did from the king, and they saw their opportunity in allying with Edward’s cause to win valuable territorial gains from their baronial neighbours.
Along with the military campaign, Edward was also able to launch a brilliant propaganda offensive. In February 1322 treasonable correspondence came to light, proving that Lancaster had been negotiating with the Scots to form an alliance against the English king. The earl’s moral case now collapsed, along with his military defences. Edward had the incriminating letters published all across the country. Orders were sent to the archbishops, bishops and sheriffs, instructing them to read in public the letters that showed Lancaster’s treason as he lobbied the Scots to invade England in order to further a personal quarrel with the king. It was a fatal blow. Ten days after the letters were published, Edward and the earls loyal to him declared Lancaster a traitor to the realm, and ordered the earls of Kent and Surrey to capture Pontefract castle.
As the contrariants’ war crumbled around them, inside Pontefract castle panic broke out. There was a furious debate among the barons as to whether they should stay and hope to withstand a siege, or attempt to escape north towards Scotland. Lancaster himself agreed to abandon his stronghold only when the Marcher lord Roger Clifford threatened him with a sword.
The end came at Boroughbridge, in Yorkshire. As Lancaster and his allies attempted to make their way to Northumberland, they were intercepted by Sir Andrew Harclay, the warden of Carlisle castle. Harclay had an army of 4,000 men, and they routed the Lancastrian force. The earl of Hereford was run through with a spear during the fighting; the other nobles including Lancaster evaded capture for a matter of days, but were rounded up as each attempted to flee, disguised as beggars.
On 21 March Lancaster was transferred from prison in York back to Pontefract castle, which stood miserably captured by royal forces. He was greeted as he arrived by the king, who sneered at and insulted him. Then, according to rumours that reached the author of The Life of Edward II, Lancaster was imprisoned in a tower he had had built in anticipation of one day capturing Edward.
The following morning Lancaster was brought from his cell and charged before a panel of justices that comprised Edward, the two Despensers, the loyal earls and one professional judge. ‘[He was] charged one by one with his crimes, and for each charge a particular penalty was awarded,’ wrote the author. Lancaster was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and beheaded. In recognition of his royal blood, the hanging and drawing were suspended – but so was Lancaster’s right to reply to the charges levelled against him. ‘This is a powerful court, and very great in authority, where no answer is heard nor mitigations admitted,’ spluttered the earl, as his fate was sealed. Without any delay, he was led from his own castle and beheaded. It took the axeman two or three blows to sever the head from the body of the greatest nobleman to have been executed in England since the Norman invasion.
To some there was a righteous symmetry about the awful fate of Earl Thomas. ‘The earl of Lancaster had cut off Piers Gaveston’s head, and now by the king’s command the earl of Lancaster has lost his head,’ wrote the author of The Life of Edward II. ‘Thus perhaps not unjustly, the earl received like for like, for as it is written in Holy Scripture, “for with the measure that you shall mete withal it shall be measured to you again.”’
But this was not symmetry. Rather, it was a grotesque escalation of the murderous politics of a dysfunctional reign. More barons and earls died violent deaths under the kingship of the sixth Plantagenet than in the five reigns that preceded his. Lancaster had defied his cousin on countless occasions. He had murdered the king’s favourite, made war upon him and connived with his enemies. But he was still a royal earl. His condemnation and summary execution did not so much right the wrong of Gaveston’s death as worsen the crisis of violence and political anarchy that had begun with it. The civil war may have been over, but it was still fair to say that England, and Plantagenet kingship, was shipwrecked.
The King’s Tyranny
The parliament summoned to York in May 1322 was advertised as an opportunity for a ‘colloquium’ and ‘tractatum’ – a chance for the king to discuss and treat with his country. Summonses were sent far and wide. The Cinque Ports were granted parliamentary representation for the first time in recognition of the fact that they had harboured the Despensers during their exile, while the Principality of Wales was similarly rewarded for assisting in the fight against the Marcher lords. Yet despite this new inclusiveness and the language of consultation and peacemaking, Edward used the parliament for one clear end: to reward and rehabilitate the Despensers and formalize the destruction of the late Thomas earl of Lancaster’s whol
e programme of reform.
Parliament met against a background of blood. Edward’s revenge on the contrariants was near-merciless. The gibbet in York, visible to everyone who attended parliament, held the bloated corpses of John de Mowbray, Roger Clifford and Jocelin d’Eyville – all lords of considerable renown and wealth, who had been hanged in chains the day after Lancaster died. On 14 April, Bartholomew Badlesmere, the moderate baron who had been a prominent peacemaker earlier in Edward’s reign, was viciously executed in Canterbury. He was dragged through the streets, hanged and beheaded, and his head placed on the Burgate.
More executions followed. Twenty other men were killed for their part in the rebellion against Edward’s rule. The horror of Edward’s revenge shocked the country. Gibbets were erected in London, Windsor, Bristol, Cardiff and Swansea. The bodies of executed men swung in chains, bloating and decaying, for more than two years. Everyone who entered a major town between 1322 and 1324 might have shuddered at the sight of once great men butchered and hung up like hogs. It was not surprising that Roger of Wendover, the author of the Flores Historiarum chronicle, wrote that the king ‘hated all the magnates with such mad fury that he plotted the complete and permanent overthrow of all the great men of the realm’.
Of the most prominent contrariants, the two Roger Mortimers, the Marcher lords who had been involved in the initial attacks on Despenser property, were both sentenced to death, but had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. Maurice de Berkeley and both Hugh Audley the younger and the elder – once loyal lords who had been driven away from the king by hatred of the Despensers – were also imprisoned rather than executed. The Tower of London heaved with well-born prisoners, while contrariants’ families were deprived of their lands and property or imprisoned in castles across England and Wales.
In such an atmosphere it was unsurprising that the May 1322 parliament tore up almost everything that Lancaster and his allies had attempted to impose on the king since 1311. The Ordinances were repealed, save six so-called ‘Good Clauses’ that were reissued in the Statute of York. The legal processes that had been started against the Despensers prior to the civil war were halted, and a process by which Lancaster’s extensive lands were taken into royal hands was begun. Various other items of parliamentary business, concerning trade regulation and legal procedures, were discussed and referred to the royal council, but it was clear to all who gathered at York that these were matters incidental to the king’s revenge on his enemies.
During the rest of the year Edward handed out the spoils of the civil war. There was a limited programme by which those contrariants who survived the bloodletting could buy back their estates at extortionate prices. But in the main Edward distributed the confiscated possessions to his followers. Andrew Harclay, for his part in capturing Lancaster, was raised to a new earldom of Carlisle. The loyal earls of Pembroke and Surrey were all given manors and lands that had either been confiscated from them by Lancaster in 1318–19 or else were taken from Lancaster’s own estates. The earl of Arundel was given lands confiscated from Roger Mortimer of Chirk, as well as the latter’s title of justice of Wales. The king’s half-brother Edmund earl of Kent gained castles in the Midlands and Wales, and Edward’s younger son John of Eltham, although only six years old in August 1322, was given the Lancastrian castle of Tutbury.
Most heavily rewarded, unsurprisingly, were the Despensers. The 61-year-old Hugh the elder was raised to the earldom of Winchester with five separate grants of land to support his new rank, including the valuable lordship of Denbigh, in north Wales, which had been stripped from Lancaster. Hugh the younger, meanwhile, received virtually all the lands (albeit not the title) of the earldom of Gloucester. He was restored to all the estates in Wales – Glamorgan, Cantref Mawr and Gower – that had been raided and taken from him in the civil war, and over the next two years these western landholdings were linked up by the award of lordships in Usk, Is Cennen, Brecon, Chepstow and Pembroke. He was de facto lord of south Wales, vastly wealthy, with an income of perhaps £5,000 a year, and now the trustee of almost unfettered royal power in the west. After 1322, the two Despensers and Edward controlled between them perhaps three-quarters of Wales.
If the Despensers prospered, so too did the king. Tens of thousands of pounds of revenue from confiscated lands and fines paid by disgraced nobles now flowed directly into his chamber. The York parliament granted him taxation amounting to more than £40,000 for a war with the Scots, but a botched invasion in August and September 1322 in which Queen Isabella was almost captured was swiftly aborted in favour of a thirteen-year truce. More than half of the money raised for defending the northern border went unspent, and the coin was sent in large barrels for safekeeping in the Tower of London. More followed from a clerical tax, also supposed to fund a Scottish war. The king took a close personal interest in collecting money, and his coffers filled accordingly. The author of the Brut chronicle reckoned Edward to be the richest king since William the Conqueror.
Emboldened by the security of his riches, Edward now became a tyrant. It seemed to the country that he governed in alliance with the Despensers – the chronicler Thomas de la More wrote afterwards that under Edward and the Despensers, England had three kings at once. The younger Despenser dominated the highest reaches of the state, sending covering letters with documents sealed by the king, involving himself deeply in affairs of state and spreading a network of retainers and followers throughout county government.
No one was safe from the vengeance of the king and the Despensers when matters did not go their way. Cruelty was rife. When the Scottish invasion failed, casual vengeance was taken upon a man who had only months previously found himself high in royal favour: when Andrew Harclay, the newly ennobled earl of Carlisle, was discovered to have opened independent negotiations with Robert the Bruce in early 1323, he was hanged, drawn and quartered as a common traitor. The hero of Boroughbridge was dead within a month of his greatest act of loyalty.
All the king’s enemies were vulnerable. The earl of Pembroke, who had been conspicuously loyal between his roles in Gaveston’s death and the attacks on the Despensers of 1321, was forced to swear an oath of allegiance to the king, guaranteed by his life, his lands and his goods. He was broken politically and would die in 1324. Meanwhile, Lancaster’s young widow, Alice de Lacy, had been imprisoned in York castle along with her mother following the earl’s death. The Despensers threatened both women with burning if they did not surrender their estates in exchange for empty honorific titles and a small cash pension. Hundreds of others were affected in this way. Meanwhile Hugh Despenser the younger built himself a hall of regal magnificence at Caerphilly castle, spending vast sums using master craftsmen and the finest materials. Despenser revelled in his position as the king’s most trusted adviser and recipient of the most generous royal patronage, and his hand appeared everywhere in government.
Under the influence of the Despensers, and in particular Hugh the younger, the period between 1322 and 1326 was characterized by grotesque cruelty. ‘The king’s harshness has indeed increased so much today that no one, however great or wise, dares to cross the king’s will,’ wrote the author of The Life of Edward II. ‘Parliaments, consultations and councils decide nothing … For the nobles of the realm, terrified by threats and the penalties inflicted on others, let the king’s will have free rein. Thus today will conquers reason. For whatever pleases the king, though lacking in reason, has force of law.’
Edward had defeated his enemies and enriched the Crown. But he had not done anything to strengthen his rule. Indeed, by wielding his office solely in his own and his favourites’ interest he was simply making his overlordship worthless to all those men who could not gain access to his justice or protection from his law. For all the magnificence that accrued to him in victory, he was fatally undermining his own reign.
Mortimer, Isabella and Prince Edward
On the night of 1 August 1323 the Tower of London came silently to life. The Tower was full of
Edward’s political prisoners, and chief among them were two men from the Marches: Roger Mortimer of Chirk, by now in his mid-sixties, and his nephew, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, who was twenty-six. These one-time contrariants had been imprisoned since surrendering to the Crown in the midst of the civil war. They had both been tried and condemned to death. Both had thus far escaped execution of their sentence. But with an unpredictable king in the grip of the two Despensers, who bore the whole Mortimer dynasty a grudge, they could not hope to live for much longer.
Their time in the Tower had been ruinous. The Mortimers had been helpless as their lands in Wales and the Marches were parcelled up and awarded to their enemies. But they were determined not to suffer indefinitely. During the months of their imprisonment they crafted a plan for one of them to escape. As darkness fell on the night of 1 August, the deputy constable of the Tower, Gerard d’Alspaye, slipped a sleeping draught into the drinks of the constable and the Mortimers’ guards. Then he hurried to Roger Mortimer of Wigmore’s cell, unlocked the door and led the knight through the castle kitchens and on to the Tower’s southern wall.
Once at the top of the wall, the two men unfurled a rope ladder. It rolled quietly down against the sheer stone towards the river Thames, directly below them, where several co-conspirators were waiting in a boat. Mortimer and d’Alspaye slid down the ladder, climbed into their escape vessel, rowed across to the south bank of the river and escaped on horseback to the south coast of England. Mortimer put to sea at Porchester and within days had evaded recapture and taken refuge in France.
It was a brilliantly realized escape, which threw Edward’s court into a state of paranoia. An inveterate opponent of the king had fled from what was supposed to be the greatest fortress in the capital. Rumours reached the royal household that this was part of a wider conspiracy to seize royal castles, and even to send assassins to murder Edward and the Despensers. From the autumn of 1323 onwards, spies across the Continent began to send reports back of plots and invasion attempts involving Mortimer. A devastating chain of events had begun.