The Greatest Traitor

by Ian Mortimer

  As the delays continued, the news from Ireland was not good. Confident that the English were unable to stage a meaningful attack on Scotland, and that Ireland was the real frontier, Robert Bruce had gone to help his brother secure his kingdom against Roger’s invasion. Robert Bruce landed in January, and straightaway set about a campaign to take the Scots into the central and southern parts of Ireland in one great effort to raise the tribes and the unfaithful Anglo-Irish lords against the English. With the hero of Scotland at their head, the Scots again marched south. On 16 February they were at Slane, in Meath, from where they marched straight through Roger’s lands towards Dublin.25 The Earl of Ulster ambushed them near his manor of Ratoath, but was defeated and forced to flee to Dublin, where the citizens arrested him on 21 February, and locked him up in the mistaken belief that he was a Scottish sympathiser.26 Left with no other defence, the Dubliners made desperate preparations for a siege of their city. On 23 February they burnt the northern suburbs and built a new defensive wall along the quay.

  Roger was now a month late, and still not much nearer to setting out. In March the brothers Bruce marched around Dublin and went into Kildare, desperately trying to rouse the native Irish and the Anglo-Irish into rebellion. In each village where they were not welcomed they killed the inhabitants, plundered the settlement and burnt the houses. But their rapacity was soon to come to a halt. At the end of the month the army reached the Shannon, at Castleconnell, near Limerick, and there they heard that Roger had landed with a large army at Youghal, on the southeast coast, on 7 April.

  Roger had with him only six hundred and fifty men in the royal army, together with perhaps a hundred or so of his own men, and a few hundred supplied by the knights and lords with lands in Ireland. Even so, the Irish and Anglo-Irish considered this a fine display. Annalists stated that his army was fifteen thousand men strong; it was probably no more than a tenth of this number on landing, and no more than five thousand after gathering the local Irish levies and the army which was with the Justiciar, Edmund Butler, at Cork. But it was enough. Great joy spread through Ireland that the continual depradations of the Scots, the plundering and looting, had come to an end. Dublin, which had held out for so long, was ecstatic. The Scots, seeing that they had signally failed to win the hearts of the Irish, and knowing they were in no condition to fight a fresh army, retreated at speed and by night through Kildare and Trim.

  Roger knew he did not have to fight the Scots straightaway. Nor, for that matter, would he have been able to do so. To follow them would mean his army having to live off the same land through which the Scots had already passed: a land of corpses, burnt-out cottages, plundered towns, despoiled fields and wide-eyed starving men, women and children, suffering from the extreme famine. Instead, by letting the Scots go, he was able to use the famine as a weapon. Since Bruce had failed to take the important castles in the south of Ireland, his army had no choice but to live off plunder. They had few places outside Ulster where they could build up reserves, or replenish their resources. However brave, the Scots were suffering from fatigue, malnutrition and disillusionment. They were, in effect, already beaten.

  With the Scots on the run, Roger’s responsibility was to secure the law of the land and to effect the king’s law. Although the king had given him extensive powers with which to govern, he clearly wished to orchestrate events from a distance. On 23 April he sent instructions to Roger to inquire into the reasons for the incarceration of the Earl of Ulster.27 Roger was to call together the king’s council to discuss whether it would be ‘to the king’s honour and profit’ if the earl were sent to the king in England or were detained longer in Dublin Castle. In another letter, dated 22 April, the king ordered Roger not to grant pardons for murder and other felonies ‘unless the matters had been considered by him and such of the king’s council of those parts as he shall think fit to govern, notwithstanding the fact that the king lately gave him power to receive felons and outlaws’.28 A third letter, dated 27 April, asked him not to harass the people of Dublin for their arrest of Richard de Burgh, Gilbert de Burgh, Hubert de Burgh and Henry le Clerk. And so it went on. At the end of May he was again requested to inquire into the circumstances of the Earl of Ulster. The king’s involvement in Roger’s government in Ireland hints either at a lack of complete confidence or a growing lack of respect on the part of the king, as if Roger was liable to pursue his own course of justice. Clearly Edward realised that in Roger he had a competent and loyal subject, but an independently-minded one as well.

  In Ireland, Roger was like a snarling dog suddenly unleashed. He ignored the king’s commands and set himself as his first military objective the challenge which had been in his mind for the last fourteen months: revenge upon the de Lacys. They had deserted him at Kells, and, being a soldier, he was not a man to forgive men who failed in battle. After his defeat they had led Edward Bruce through Leinster, consorting with the Scots every step of the way. When Roger had been appointed King’s Lieutenant in November 1316, he had ordered the Justiciar to prosecute them. But they made a show of loyalty and persuaded several of their countrymen to swear that they had only acted on Roger’s orders. Roger was furious: his claims against them were being thrown back at him. And yet, as he understood the sequence of events, the de Lacys had responded to Bruce’s initial letter to the Irish before the invasion with a promise of military aid if the Scots assisted them in ousting Roger. They had then ‘turned their shields’ on him at Kells, and they had led the Scots through Leinster. Any subsequent pretence of constant loyalty was an insult. An even greater insult was that, as soon as the court case was decided in their favour, they acted again as guides for the Scots, leading them from Slane through Meath, around Dublin, and assisting in looting and burning on the way to Kildare.

  As a show of justifying his attack on the de Lacys, Roger called together the king’s council of Ireland at Kilkenny in early May and there proclaimed his war against his rebellious vassals. Revenge was uppermost in his mind. On 11 May he was at Naas, seemingly on his way towards Dublin, but he avoided the city and headed straight for his own lands in Meath. On 22 May he and his army were at Trim Castle, making final preparations for the assault on the de Lacy brothers and their adherents. As a last gesture of conciliation he sent one of his most faithful knights, Sir Hugh de Croft, to the de Lacys. Sir Hugh, who had served in Roger’s household in both England and Ireland, carried letters bearing the royal seal, which ordered the brothers to come and submit to the King’s Lieutenant. Not only did they not obey, they killed Sir Hugh.

  It was a shocking act, without the slightest justification. If it was done to impress the Scots, it was too little too late: they were not moved to come to the aid of the de Lacys, whose squabbles with Roger did not interest them. Robert Bruce had left Ireland with Thomas Randolph on 22 May, and Edward Bruce was not strong enough to leave Ulster. If the murder was meant to impress the other lords of Meath, it was a demonstration which failed. The lords of Meath were in no position to take up arms against their liege lord, with a royal army at his command, in favour of two disgruntled murderous local lords and their equally murderous but starving and distant Scots allies. Roger was in the ascendancy.

  No chronicler recorded the battle which ensued on 3–4 June 1317 in any detail, and most of what is known comes from a court case in 1334.29 It is not even known exactly where it took place. It seems Roger managed to surprise Walter de Lacy and his army, as Walter alone of his clan faced Roger on the first day. Roger came at Walter’s army with the banners of the king unfurled, signifying that he came for war. Overwhelmed by a better equipped, more experienced and far larger army, it was not long before Walter’s men were in flight, or dead, Walter’s standard-bearer being among the corpses trampled into the ground. The following day, Walter again mustered his men and joined with the rest of the de Lacy clan in an attempted surprise attack on Roger’s army. With him were Hugh de Lacy, his brother, Robert de Lacy, Almaric and Simon de Lacy (brothers), John de Lacy (illegitima
te son of Hugh), John de Lacy (illegitimate son of Walter), Walter de Say, Walter le Blount, John de Kemerdyn and many others. The de Lacys mustered behind Hugh’s banner, which was ranged against that of the king. They attacked, but their attack soon turned into flight. Meath was once more securely under Roger’s control.

  Like Bruce in Scotland, Roger had a sense of urgency. There was no time for celebration; there was still much to do to subdue the rest of the land. At the end of June he summoned the Irish Parliament to Dublin to attend to royal business, and agreed the terms under which the people of Dublin would set free the Earl of Ulster. On 2 July John de Athy, faithfully sailing off the coast of Ireland, met the feared Thomas Dun in battle, and defeated him. Thomas Dun and forty of his men were captured, and Dun’s head was hacked off and sent to Roger in Dublin. In mid-July, in an ever-increasing position of power, Roger summoned the king’s council to approve his judgement of the de Lacy brothers. On 20 July he declared them felons and outlaws, guilty of breaking their vows of allegiance to him and the Crown, and enemies of the king. He confiscated all their goods, chattels and lands, and banished them from Ireland. His authority had never been so great.

  For the rest of 1317 Roger continued to sweep across southern Ireland, participating in a series of small-scale battles all ending with Irish and Anglo-Irish lords surrendering to his authority. From Dublin he set out for Drogheda, a town which had prevailed upon King Edward to grant it protection. In another one of his interfering commands, on 10 June Edward had ordered Roger not to allow men to be housed in the town, nor to take provisions from it. Roger carefully obeyed this command and was even considerate enough of the king’s order to kill a number of Ulstermen as they came to attack the Drogheda region and to steal cattle. Those who were not killed were led to Dublin Castle.30 Roger’s next target was Lord O’Farrell of Annaly. Roger destroyed all his people’s houses, and forced O’Farrell to sue for peace and to surrender hostages. Pausing briefly back at Dublin to accuse and sentence further supporters of the de Lacy family, and to arrest the Bishop of Ferns for complicity in the Scottish campaign,31 he started out again. On 11 September he marched against the Irish of Imail, ‘where more Irish were killed than English’ at Okinselagh.32 His next confrontation was with the O’Byrne clan, whose chief was forced to surrender and locked up in Dublin Castle. By the end of October, Roger had pacified any and all of those Irish and Anglo-Irish lords who had considered siding with the Scots. Although Edward Bruce still held Ulster, his claim to rule Ireland was now an absurdity.

  In his tour of duty Roger did suffer some setbacks. The first of these stemmed from the king’s desire to try to control Ireland through Roger, rather than leaving him to govern the country independently. On 7 July Roger appointed his clerk, Nicholas de Balscot, to the chancellorship of Dublin Cathedral. In England, however, the king decided to appoint James d’Ardingel of Florence to the post. Finding that he had clashed with Roger, the king annulled Roger’s appointment in favour of his own. This clash may have been connected to the second problem Roger faced at the end of 1317: the influence of his rival Hugh Despenser over Edward. While Roger had found preferment in Ireland, Despenser had found equal success at court. As husband of the eldest of the three heiresses of the Earl of Gloucester, Despenser was allowed to claim the largest third of the inheritance, the county of Glamorgan, in November. This was bad enough news for Roger, but what happened next was truly awful. Despenser celebrated his triumph by removing Llywelyn Bren from the Tower of London without any authority. He had him taken to Cardiff, and there, at the castle, had him executed in the most barbaric manner. The lord of Senghennydd, whom Roger and the Earl of Hereford had both sworn to protect, was drawn behind two horses to a gallows beside the Black Tower where he was hanged. As he was dying, the executioner cut out his heart and intestines with a knife and threw them into a nearby fire. His limbs were hacked off and distributed throughout Glamorgan. The man to whom the king had promised mercy was no more.33

  Whatever Roger’s immediate reaction to the news of Llywelyn’s murder, there was nothing he could do about it in Ireland. The disadvantage of his Irish authority was that he was trapped across the sea; returning to the mainland without the king’s permission would have jeopardised his standing at court. He could do nothing but wait, and concentrate on governing.

  Roger’s position as King’s Lieutenant allows us to reconstruct a putative itinerary for him far more detailed than anything to date. Although the contents of the Irish Public Record Office were largely destroyed in 1922, calendars of the rolls of letters granted under the king’s seal by Roger and the Justiciar, Edmund Butler, were published in 1828. In addition the accounts for his administration survive and have recently been published.34 Thus we know that shortly after his victory at Okinselagh Roger returned to Trim and then to Dublin, where he remained throughout October. In November he took the government to Cork, where he remained for the rest of the year, spending the sum of £316 14s on curbing the rebellion in Cork and Desmond. In January he moved to Clonmel, and the accounts mention him fighting in ‘Waterford, Leinster and elsewhere in Ireland’. In effect what Roger was doing was to use the Justiciar as his deputy while he himself went off to fight battles. Royal grants were made at Thomastown on 28 January and 2 February, presumably under the Justiciar’s authority, but Roger himself was already back in Dublin by this time, dusting himself down from battle to grant a manor to Hugh de Turpington.35 He was acting in a way which was remarkably free from the responsibilities of government, more like a conquering king than the head of a bureaucracy.

  In true conqueror style, on 19 February Roger held a great feast at Dublin Castle at which he exercised his right as the king’s representative to create new knights. One of those he dubbed was John de Bermingham, a ferociously loyal Anglo-Irish soldier and a commander of considerable ability, as later events would show. Another was Roger’s faithful retainer Hugh de Turpington. A third is described in the St Mary’s chronicle as ‘Lord John Mortimer’.36 This seems to have been his fourth son, who must have been a very young esquire in his father’s service, perhaps between seven and ten years old. In conferring the honour on his son Roger was able to demonstrate his family’s high status as well as his own authority.

  In early March Roger undertook a last campaign to Drogheda, where he remained for four weeks. He held discussions with the king’s council over the partition of estates and the awards of lands to the Irish, and plans were made for the final push towards Ulster. All resistance in Ireland had been crushed; Roger was master of all southern Ireland, but still Edward Bruce held out in the north. If he were to complete the reconquest and kill Bruce, a very great victory would be his, and most probably the dignity of an earldom too.

  It was not to be. At the end of April Roger learnt that he was being summoned back to England. He returned to Dublin and set about winding up his activities. He appointed William FitzJohn, Archbishop of Cashel, to govern in his place, and then set about exacting a final shard of revenge upon the de Lacys. It seems that John de Lacy, the son of either Walter or Hugh, had been caught and imprisoned in Dublin. He was now taken to Trim for an audience with Roger. Unlike others, such as Miles de Verdon, who had begged forgiveness for their treachery, the de Lacys had thrown all hope of reconciliation back at Roger by killing Sir Hugh de Croft. Roger sentenced John de Lacy to be starved to death in Trim Castle, which his family had so desperately coveted.37

  On 5 May Roger relinquished his command and prepared to sail for Wales. He must have left with a heavy heart, for he was passing up his opportunity of completing a glorious reconquest of Ireland from the Scots. When Sir John de Bermingham led the royal army north five months later to fight Edward Bruce, he was in effect Roger’s surrogate. In his army were some of Roger’s closest retainers: men like Sir Hugh de Turpington, Richard Tuit and John de Cusack. And his enemies amongst the Scots included men like Walter and Hugh de Lacy. It was Roger’s campaign, a war which in many ways was of his creation, but he was n
ot there to fight it.

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  SIX

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  The King’s Kinsman

  THE ROGER MORTIMER who left Ireland in May 1318 was a different man from the Roger Mortimer who had left in December 1315. In 1315 he had been defeated, another losing commander in the sorry tale of Ireland under Edward Bruce. But in 1318 he had proved himself one of the most efficient leaders in the king’s service. He was a more confident man too. In 1318 he left £1,000 of unpaid bills arising from his household’s living expenses, which he expected the Irish Exchequer to pay. The reason for his confidence in this particular instance was that the Deputy Treasurer in charge of the Exchequer was his own man, Nicholas de Balscot.

  Roger was not the only one to have changed. Relations between the king and the Earl of Lancaster were at a particularly low point. The rise of Hugh Despenser and three new favourites, namely William de Montagu, Roger Damory and Hugh Audley, had created a great antagonism between the king and Lancaster.1 Damory was the king’s latest infatuation, and had received the hand in marriage of one of the three heiresses of the earldom of Gloucester. Audley, a second favourite, had received the hand in marriage of the last unmarried Gloucester heiress, the third heiress being married already to Hugh Despenser. These men were described by some chroniclers as being ‘worse than Gaveston’ in their effect on the king. But they were given the largest portion of the Gloucester inheritance, and constituted a real threat to Lancaster’s influence and power. Accordingly Lancaster had tried to make a political point of their presence at court, accusing Edward of disobeying the Ordinances and demanding that they all be banished. Edward had refused, and relations between the king and his overmighty cousin had broken down completely, to the point where Edward started mustering an army at York in case hostilities should break out during the parliament to be held there in October.