The Greatest Traitor

by Ian Mortimer

  Edward could do nothing. He offered to accept all the Ordinances except the twentieth, but he underestimated the gravity with which the Lords Ordainers viewed the situation. He delayed as long as he could, squirming under the attack on his authority. Eventually, in October, he agreed to all the Ordinances, and prepared to say goodbye to his beloved once more. The following month, Gaveston embarked on a ship at a London quayside, and sailed down the Thames and away from England.

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  The Lords Ordainers had observed that Gascony, Scotland and Ireland might be lost because of inefficient government, but they conspicuously did not mention Wales. There Lord Mortimer of Chirk was governing the principality with efficient ruthlessness. He had demonstrated this quality in his youth, and even now at the age of fifty-six he was just as uncompromising. By the beginning of 1312 he had successfully exercised the office of Justiciar for four years. When Edward had secured the Welsh royal castles by granting them out to his loyal retainers, Lord Mortimer of Chirk received the constableships of Blaenllyfni and Dinas, in addition to those already in his keeping, which included several of the most strategic Welsh castles. Numerous small grants came his way with regularity over the subsequent years. In effect he ruled Wales as a surrogate prince.

  Like Roger in Ireland, Lord Mortimer of Chirk avoided being drawn into the worsening situation surrounding Gaveston. While the rest of the country was nervously preparing for a conflict over the king’s favourite, the elder Mortimer prepared for an attack on Griffin de la Pole, the repercussions of which were to prove far-reaching. Three years earlier the heir to the lordship of Welshpool had died while a royal ward.38 Lord Mortimer of Chirk, as Justiciar of Wales, had been ordered to take custody of the lordship, which he had done. An inquiry had found that the rightful heir was the dead heir’s sister Hawise, who was married to John de Charlton, the King’s Chamberlain, and a friend of Roger and Gaveston. The lordship was accordingly delivered to John de Charlton. But Griffin de la Pole, the brother of the late lord and Hawise’s uncle, had complained, insisting that according to Welsh custom the inheritance was rightfully his. To further his claim, he sought a commission of inquiry to determine whether the lordship was held according to Welsh or English law. Edward had prohibited this from being held, hoping that the question would end there. It did not. Griffin de la Pole attacked John de Charlton in early 1312, besieging him and his wife in Welshpool Castle.

  If Griffin de la Pole had been acting completely independently, the matter would have been over quickly and soon forgotten. But he had sought and obtained the support of the Earl of Lancaster, who, as the king’s cousin, had decided his role was to lead the opposition to Edward’s personal style of government and, in particular, his acts of favouritism. There is little doubt that Edward had not been fair in his appointment and suppression of the inquiry. As for the Earl of Lancaster, to take de la Pole under his wing only contributed further to his status. Now that he had inherited a fifth earldom – that of Lincoln, after the death of Henry de Lacy in 1311 – he lurked like a fat black spider at the centre of his huge web of estates in the north, pulling together the threads of feudal obligation, and international and national political disaffection. So great was his power, and so extensive his influence, that one did not go to war with an ally of his without good reason.

  For Lord Mortimer of Chirk, the reason for war was simple: the king ordered him to break up the siege of Welshpool Castle by force.39 He raised an army, encamped near Welshpool, and waited. He offered de la Pole recourse to the law courts, but the man refused. The king wrote, offering to recompense de la Pole, sending the Steward of the Royal Household, John de Cromwell, to pacify him.40 But still de la Pole held out. It took several weeks to persuade him that the Earl of Lancaster was not going to ride to his rescue, and that his cause was best fought diplomatically. In the mean time de la Pole had found another supporter in the Earl of Arundel, a cousin of the Mortimers. Arundel gave shelter to de la Pole’s men as they ransacked the countryside. This was a personal betrayal, as well as treason. Lord Mortimer of Chirk eventually broke the siege, rescued John de Charlton and his wife, restored order, and arrested de la Pole. But in the eyes of the Earl of Lancaster, who was an impetuous and spoilt man, with little sense of duty and a commensurate inability to appreciate others’ dutifulness, he had sworn enmity. Early the following year, when Lord Mortimer of Chirk was appointed to sit on the commission to investigate the debacle, the Earl of Lancaster objected to his presence. An estrangement between the two men resulted, which would ultimately lead to the destruction of both of them. In the meantime it meant the breakdown of trust between the Earl of Lancaster and Roger too, for the two Mortimers invariably acted as one in political matters.

  For the time being, however, Roger remained in Ireland. In April and May 1312 he was in Dublin. A distant kinsman, Robert de Verdon, had started a rebellion in Louth during Lent, and, as the younger brother of the heir to the de Verdon half of Meath, it had swept up a number of Mortimer and de Verdon followers in its fury.41 They rode over the baronies of Ferrard and Ardee, and so desecrated that of Louth that John Wogan, the Justiciar, was forced to take it into his own hands. Wogan then collected an army to put down the revolt, and, having sent men to Ardee to defend that barony, he marched to Drogheda. There the people asked that they might themselves defend their lands with an army commanded by another two of the de Verdon brothers, Miles and Nicholas. Rather than remain loyal to their elder brother, who was in England, they simply joined Robert. Under the guise of King Edward’s banner, the de Verdons together attacked the force at Ardee and defeated them. As the local lord and the brother-in-law of Theobald, Roger was bound to intervene, even before this last outrage became known. After Wogan had raised a second army, and had again been ‘miserably defeated’ by the de Verdons, Roger took control of the situation, and forced them to surrender and to appear in court in return for their lives.42 At the end of May 1312 he handed over forty of the ringleaders to the Justiciar to be imprisoned.

  By the end of the summer of 1312, Roger had fully come of age. He was twenty-five years old, had witnessed political decision-making at the heart of government, and had spent the previous two years coming to terms with the brutal circumstances of Ireland. He had tackled armies composed of Irishmen and Englishmen, and rabbles of Anglo-Irish rioters. He had observed the inability of some administrators to deal with insurrection, and he had also seen the enormous prizes which could be won by those who remained loyal to King Edward. He had a well-connected and devoted wife, and a growing number of children. He was in a position to return to England and take a role at the front rank of English politics.

  But then occurred one of those deaths which rocked society to its foundations. Gaveston, the Earl of Cornwall, had returned from exile in early 1312, and aroused such hostility that he was forced to give himself up to the Earl of Pembroke. The earl had sworn an oath to surrender his lands and titles to protect the man’s life. But the Earls of Lancaster, Arundel and Warwick did not care what the Earl of Pembroke had sworn or stood to lose. In June they kidnapped the king’s brother-in-arms while he was in the earl’s protection.

  And they killed him.

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  FOUR

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  Bannockburn and Kells

  GAVESTON’S MURDER TORE the country in two. Even those who had been most opposed to the man were horrified. The three earls had killed the king’s dearest friend. Bloody retribution seemed inevitable. Those responsible stood to lose their lands, their titles and their lives.

  The Earl of Lancaster made no attempt to shift the blame from himself. From the moment Gaveston had arrived back in England Lancaster had hounded the king and his brother-in-arms. Gaveston had joined the king at York in February, where they remained until Margaret de Clare, Gaveston’s wife and Edward’s niece, gave birth to a daughter, Joan. In March, with the baronage and earls convinced now that war was certain, Thomas of Lancaster had openly assumed the leadership of the opposi
tion to Gaveston, and gave the Earls of Pembroke and Surrey the task of leading an army to capture him. Gaveston knew the risk he was taking by remaining in the country, not least because he had been excommunicated by the Archbishop of Canterbury on his return. But he decided nevertheless to stay in England. He chose to remain with Edward despite all the dangers. Edward, joyful that his beloved would not leave him, joined him at Newcastle at the end of March.

  Edward and Gaveston may have thought that the opposition they would face would be unorganised, slow to muster and reluctant to start a civil war. Despite many harsh words, no one had yet actually taken up arms against them. But this time things were different. The Earl of Lancaster – the man whom Gaveston had mocked with the title of ‘the Fiddler’ – now used his authority to gather his own feudal army. He marched north, hiding his army by day and moving by night in order to escape notice. On 4 May he approached Newcastle. Edward and Gaveston were taken wholly by surprise and had to flee suddenly by ship to Scarborough Castle. In so doing they left everything behind: jewels, money, horses, soldiers and arms. Lancaster took the lot.

  For the time being Edward and Gaveston were safe. But then Edward made a fatal mistake: he left Gaveston in Scarborough Castle while he went south to raise an army. The Earl of Lancaster quickly moved to place his forces between the king and the favourite, thereby separating Gaveston from all hope of aid. On 19 May, Gaveston, fearing the Earl of Lancaster would kill him, agreed to submit to Henry Percy and the Earls of Pembroke and Surrey. The Earl of Pembroke took responsibility for escorting Gaveston back to London. But at Deddington in Oxfordshire, Gaveston was kidnapped by the Earl of Warwick and taken to Warwick Castle. For the next nine days he was held there until the Earl of Lancaster arrived. Lancaster’s advice as to what to do next was the cold-hearted sentence Gaveston so feared: ‘While he lives there will be no safe place in the realm of England.’1 On 19 June Gaveston was taken to Blacklow Hill, land belonging to the Earl of Lancaster, and two Welshmen killed him. One ran him through the body with a sword, then the other hacked off his head as he lay dying on the grass.

  The country went into shock. Every lord and knight throughout the realm readied for war. The Earl of Pembroke was beside himself, having sworn an oath to protect Gaveston’s life on penalty of forfeiting his lands and titles. In the days between Gaveston’s capture and murder Pembroke desperately tried to raise an army to free him, even appealing to the University of Oxford, who, besides not being known for their military strength, were not remotely concerned with Gaveston’s wellbeing or the earl’s plight. The country was not prepared to fight to save Gaveston, who had done nothing to make himself popular with the common people.

  Edward’s own reaction to the murder was utter rage, which very quickly became cold fury.2 On hearing of Gaveston’s death he remarked, ‘By God’s soul, he acted as a fool. If he had taken my advice he never would have fallen into the hands of the earls. This is what I always told him not to do. For I guessed that what has now happened would occur.’3 But his remonstrance of his dead friend masked a depth of grief which would never leave him, and which was compounded by his sense of betrayal at the hands of his cousin, Lancaster, who was now far beyond forgiveness. His mind became focused on the destruction of the earls who had acted against him, and, given strength through grief, he thought and acted more clearly. With Gaveston dead, there was nothing more for the vast majority of the rebels to gain from opposing him. He stopped the earls marching on London by forewarning the city, shutting the gates against all comers, and defending its hinterland. The rebel earls, unable to seize the initiative, lingered at Ware, in Hertfordshire, their position growing weaker by the day. Edward meanwhile received help from all quarters. The Pope sent an embassy, as did the King of France, and lords and bishops came to his assistance to give him counsel and, if necessary, force of arms.

  We do not know exactly when Roger returned from Ireland, and it could have been as late as January 1313; but there is every reason to suppose that he was brought back by news of Gaveston’s death. Not only was he a loyal lord, he was also experienced in battle. If the king himself did not summon him back, no doubt his kinsman, the Earl of Pembroke, did. By mid-July Lord Pembroke was advising the king to declare war on the rebel earls, a policy which necessitated the return from Ireland of as many loyal men as were available. Also, since the Earl of Lancaster had set himself against Lord Mortimer of Chirk, Roger and his uncle needed to be in England to defend their estates from the armies of the rebel earls and their allies.

  War did not break out immediately. Edward was in no hurry, for the longer he waited, the stronger he became. The earls too were reluctant to declare war on the king, an act for which they would undoubtedly lose their lives if defeated. While the earls demanded that they be pardoned for the death of Gaveston, on account of his illegal return from exile, the king made agreements and alliances with others. In November his position was greatly strengthened by the birth of a son and heir, Edward. This removed Thomas of Lancaster even further from the succession, and provoked an outbreak of patriotism in the country. The best that the earls could do was to negotiate, and hope that the king’s resolve would weaken.

  Roger played no part in the negotiations which began in September 1312. Indeed it is difficult to determine what exactly he was doing at this period. The only piece of evidence so far to have come to light is a reference to a payment to Roger of £100 ordered on 2 April 1313 at Westminster, ‘for his expenses in Gascony’.4 There are a number of possible explanations for this. One is his undertaking some personal service for the king. He could have been returning something or someone of Gaveston’s household to Gascony. However, Gascony at this time suddenly flared up in a conflict between Amanieu d’Albret and the English seneschal, John de Ferrers, and it is more likely that Roger was sent to deal with this. De Ferrers had abused his position in 1312 to attack d’Albret with an army of four thousand men. D’Albret had appealed to King Philip, and the king had judged in his favour, sentencing King Edward to pay a large sum in compensation. De Ferrers died, possibly as a result of poison, in September 1312. A third possibility is that Roger acted on behalf of his kinsman, the Earl of Pembroke, in some business connected with the Count of Foix in Gascony, which the king had asked Pembroke to attend to in January 1313.5 In considering these three possibilities, it is worth bearing in mind that Amanieu d’Albret was a relative of Roger’s wife, Joan, and the man appointed to replace de Ferrers as Seneschal of Gascony, Amaury de Craon, was also a relative of Joan.6 Whatever the reason, it is clear that Roger was wholly loyal at this time, and actively so, being trusted with overseas royal business.

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  If there was one single measure of how the government of the country weakened during the first six years of Edward’s reign, it was his policy failure in Scotland. No doubt he associated war in Scotland with his father, the ‘Hammer of the Scots’, and there was probably a personal element in his reluctance to continue his father’s campaigns there. But each year Robert Bruce had made incursions into English territory, and Edward had done little to stop him. Bruce, who had learnt his hard craft of resistance against Edward I, one of the most formidable practitioners of the art of war, now showed how well he had learnt from his years of opposition. He did not have the numbers to defeat the English in open battle, so he and his men harried them, and terrorised the garrisons, and laid waste all they could in the hope that Edward would decide Scotland was simply too great a problem and withdraw. Such a strategy was unchivalrous, perhaps, but effective. And its effectiveness was increased by Edward’s reluctance to launch a Scottish campaign. Indeed, during Gaveston’s lifetime, he only organised Scottish campaigns in order to deflect attention from his political problems in England.

  Bruce knew that the key to controlling Scotland was to control the castles. The Scottish forces could ransack manors held by men loyal to the English king, but, unless they held the castles, theirs would only be a temporary grip on the land. Thus, one by one,
Bruce attacked the English garrisons. Castle after castle fell to the Scottish grappling irons. Had this happened in Edward I’s time, efforts would have been made to retake them, but in his son’s reign fallen castles were not recaptured. Edward II saw the taking of a castle as a symbolic act, largely undertaken to improve his political position in England. He understood little of the strategy necessary to maintain control of an unquiet country, and cared for it even less.

  By 1312 more than the symbolic recapturing of a few castles was required. Robert Bruce and his brother Edward had systematically attacked English fortifications with a will and an audacity which had won them the love as well as the loyalty of their fellow men. After Dundee fell in spring 1312, Perth was the only fortress left in English hands north of the Forth. In the summer of that year Edward Bruce attacked the minor strongholds of Forfar, Dalswinton and Caerlaverock, with some success. In the winter Robert Bruce himself commanded an extremely audacious attack on Berwick, the castle nearest to England. He was thwarted, but his method of attack was new, effective and ingeniously simple. Rather than attach ropes to grappling irons to scale the castle walls, the Scots attached rope ladders. These had the advantage over wooden ladders in that they could be carried by one man for long distances on horseback, and were better than mere ropes for they permitted a far swifter ascent, and allowed the assailants to use their weapons more freely. They also allowed far swifter escape: at Berwick Bruce would have surprised the garrison but for a dog which heard the rattle of the grappling irons and barked, so that the garrison awoke and the alarm was raised. On that occasion the Scots fled, leaving their rope ladders dangling from the walls.

  While Edward II was ranting against the earls for the murder of Gaveston, Bruce moved straight on to his next attack. From Berwick on the English border he took his men to the most northern point of English control: the great castle at Perth. He laid siege to the castle openly, but during the nights of the siege his men discovered the shallowest point in the town moat. After a few days they withdrew. To the garrison it appeared that the Scots had decided against attacking the castle, and they relaxed their guard. But a week later, on the particularly dark night of 8 January 1313, Bruce returned with his men and their rope ladders. That night Bruce himself slipped into the dark, icy water up to his neck, and waded forward. A few moments later, he pulled himself out of the water and rapidly climbed his ladder. Once inside, with the advantage of surprise, his men quickly overcame resistance.