A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Patronage, the choice of who to promote and who to keep out, has always been one of the most jealously guarded of royal powers, least susceptible to limitation. It had been the attempts by the rebels of 1215 to force King John into recognizing the authority of a committee of twenty-five barons in the final clauses of Magna Carta, and by the barons of the 1260s to control appointments to household offices at court, that had proved, from the King’s perspective, amongst the most objectionable clauses in earlier ‘reforming’ legislation. As late as the 1840s, one of the very last constitutional crises for the English monarchy turned on just this issue of appointment to household offices at the court of the young Queen Victoria, and it could be argued that the most recent such crisis, came in the Abdication of 1936, itself provoked by outcry against a particularly feckless King and his choice of royal favourite. A direct line can be traced between the sharp-tongued and all-too heterosexual Wallace Simpson and the sexually ambiguous though no less sharp-tongued Piers Gaveston.

  Arrest and Murder of Piers Gaveston

  If a king could not choose his own friends and bedfellows from his own court, then he risked becoming a mere cypher of his enemies. Just as Edward II was determined that Piers Gaveston remain, so his enemies were determined that Piers must go, by violent means if necessary. With the approval of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the earls of Pembroke and Surrey were appointed early in 1312 to pursue and arrest Piers. In May, at Scarborough, Piers surrendered to his pursuers who took him south. At Deddington in Oxfordshire, the party was ambushed by the Earl of Warwick. Piers was carried off to Warwick itself and there executed, on Blacklow Hill, with the approval of the earls of Lancaster, Hereford and Arundel. The effect was to create an undying enmity between the King and his critics, in particular between Edward and his cousin, Thomas of Lancaster.

  Thomas was himself the beneficiary of one of the great achievements of royal government in the 1260s and 70s. To supply a portion for his younger brother, Thomas of Lancaster’s father, Edward I had ensured the transfer not only of the estates in Lancashire and the north once held by King Stephen, but the honour and earldom of Leicester confiscated from the heirs of Simon de Montfort, and the earldom of Derby whose holder, Robert Ferrers, a rebel of the 1260s, was in effect cheated of his inheritance, confronted with impossible terms for the payment of a ransom. The result was an assembly of lands greater than any other honour in England, with estates in most of the English counties and an income with which to recruit a substantial body of followers. From the death of Piers Gaveston until the deposition of King Richard II in 1399, Thomas of Lancaster and his successors as earls and dukes of Lancaster were inevitably to play a significant role in English history.

  Battle of Bannockburn

  In the immediate aftermath of Gaveston’s execution, the infighting at court was obscured by events in Scotland. Ever since the coronation of Robert Bruce in 1306, English armies had struggled to impose terms on the Scots. Early in 1314, news arrived at the English court of the fall of both Roxburgh and Edinburgh castles. Unless relieved by midsummer, the English constable of Stirling was also pledged to surrender to the Scots. To forestall this, Edward advanced into Scotland with the greatest English army mustered since his accession, albeit an army from which the earls of Lancaster and Warwick were signally absent. At Bannockburn, near Stirling, on 24 June, in an even more catastrophic rerun of the Battle of Stirling Bridge fought twenty years before, Edward’s cavalry was cut to pieces by the Scots spearmen. The Earl of Gloucester, accused by the King of cowardice on the day before the battle, was killed leading a courageous but entirely futile charge. The Earl of Hereford was taken prisoner. Edward himself had a horse killed beneath him before being led to safety.

  Bannockburn was one of the most crushing defeats in English history. It secured Robert Bruce his throne in Scotland and ushered in a period during which the Scots overran or taxed large parts of northern England, perhaps as much as one-fifth of the English realm. Amidst the recriminations that followed, Edward was forced to reissue the Ordinances and to allow Thomas of Lancaster a new supervisory role at the centre of English government. More catastrophically still, Bannockburn was followed by pillage, poor harvests and extended periods of famine in the English countryside, a great famine from 1315 to 1317 (with rumours of cannibalism), exceptionally poor harvests in 1320 and 1321, and outbreaks of cattle and sheep murrain in 1319 and 1321: perhaps the worst agrarian crisis in English history since the Viking invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries. Teeth recovered from plague pits or other burial sites of the 1340s often reveal patterns of decay and deformity (in technical terms ‘hypoplasia’, tell-tale ridges in the enamel of developing teeth) which suggest severe malnutrition for at least a generation before the arrival of plague in 1348. Scurvy and rickets, caused by deficiency in vitamins C and D, and iron-based anaemia, revealed through a characteristic honeycomb pattern in the bone of the eye-socket, occur in a remarkable proportion of such medieval skeletal remains. In other words, it was the children of the famines of Edward II’s reign who grew up, already malnourished and lacking resistance, to become the adult victims of the great pestilence, twenty years later.

  The Despensers

  Meanwhile, having been deprived of one favourite, Piers Gaveston, Edward II merely turned to others, and in particular to the two men, Hugh Despenser the elder and Hugh his son, whose rise at court began shortly after Bannockburn. Once again there were probably unfounded rumours here of a sexual infatuation, but above all a pattern of over-lavish patronage and dependence which speaks of a King unable to keep either his emotions or his public actions under proper restraint. Most of the English earls had hated Piers Gaveston. Pretty much everybody hated the Despensers. The irony is that, although fiercely loyal both to Edward II and to his father, the Despensers were descended, as son and grandson, from another Hugh Despenser, baronial justiciar during the 1260s, who had died as a rebel fighting alongside Simon de Montfort at Evesham. From traitors to royal favourites over three generations, the Despensers were held in check only by the power still exercised by Thomas of Lancaster.

  In 1321, in an attempted repeat of the coup against Gaveston, Thomas and a group of northern magnates entered into a pact with the Earl of Hereford and other barons from the Welsh Marches, intended to force the Despensers into exile. Within a year, the King was openly at war with his barons. In March 1322, outflanking the army of Thomas of Lancaster and the Earl of Hereford, Edward forced the earls to flee. They had got only so far as Boroughbridge in Yorkshire when they were intercepted by the King’s captain, Andrew Harclay. The Earl of Hereford was killed in the fight that followed. Thomas of Lancaster was taken prisoner, tried before the King at Pontefract and beheaded as a traitor. At least a hundred of his baronial and knightly followers lost either their lands or their lives. Harclay, who had been created Earl of Carlisle in the immediate aftermath of Boroughbridge, was himself executed, drawn and quartered within less than a year, following allegations of defeatism and treason in his dealings with the Scots. Mistrust and the fear of conspiracy were (and remain) contagious commodities.

  King Edward, with the Despensers at his side and with the hated Ordinances of 1311 now officially revoked, embarked on a policy of terror and extortion unprecedented since the reign of King John. Like John, Edward became immensely rich, amassing a fortune of at least £60,000 to set against the debts of nearly £200,000 that his father had bequeathed. Also like John, he became the object of dark rumours, not only of sexual deviancy but of sorcery and plots, leading to the arrest of twenty-eight conspirators in Coventry, accused of employing a necromancer, John of Nottingham, to make wax images and cast spells so as to harm Edward, the Despensers and the prior of Coventry, one of the principal local landholders. This, the first public accusation to combine witchcraft with treason, was an ill omen of many such accusations still to come, not least against those in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries accused of ‘maleficium’ against the Tudor and Stuart kings. An attem
pt by Edward to follow up his success against the rebels of 1322, with a campaign in Scotland, ended in failure with his army forced southwards by starvation and disease. Even so, in Scotland, and from 1323 in France, Edward now had the resources, thanks in large part to the confiscations made after 1322, to wage war on a scale unseen since Bannockburn.

  In the longer term, none of this was of any account. Thomas of Lancaster had been a self-seeking and uninspiring politician. Despite his great wealth, his finances, like those of the King, were permanently overstretched so that, like the other earls, he found it difficult to operate outside the court, whilst his pursuit of royal patronage brought even him, the richest baron in England, into competition with Edward II’s low-born favourites. His had been a futile career. He was nonetheless the grandson of a king. His death, by many regarded as a martyrdom, was followed by a popular outcry for his recognition as a saint. In much the same way, the monks of Evesham, after Simon de Montfort’s death in 1265, had encouraged the veneration of Montfort and his relics as a focus of miracles and political opposition to the crown.

  Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer

  The rise of the Despensers and the King’s inability to curb either their greed or their cruelty led to the defection even of Edward’s queen, Isabella of France, who in 1325 ensured that neither herself nor her twelve-year-old son, the future Edward III, returned from France to which they had been sent as mediators with the French King. In France, Isabella entered into a liaison with her fellow exile, Roger Mortimer, a leading baron from the Welsh Marches who now became the Queen’s lover and the principal focus of opposition to the Despenser regime.

  In September 1326, in league with Mortimer and the Count of Hainault, whose daughter had hastily been married to the future Edward III, Isabella took ship from Holland to Orwell in Suffolk, leading the first but by no means the last invasion of England to have been mounted from the Low Countries. Like a much more famous invasion, by William and Mary of Orange in 1688, this was one in theory led by a woman, resulting almost immediately in the collapse of a hated royal authority, the flight and the arrest of the King. In November, Edward II and the younger Despenser were captured at Llantrisant, between Neath and Caerphilly, the irony here being that it was the Welsh, conquered by Edward’s father only forty years before, who proved Edward’s staunchest supporters in adversity. For the third time in less than fifty years, a ruling Prince of Wales was taken captive in the principality and handed over to English enemies.

  The Despensers, father and son, were executed. The King was held prisoner at Kenilworth whilst desperate measures were taken to arrange a succession. Once again, the problem lay in bridling a sovereign above whom stood no authority save for God. As the rebellions of the thirteenth century had clearly demonstrated, short of killing the King, there was little that an opposition could do to prevent him from revoking whatever promises he might be induced to make under compulsion. As a result, in the first weeks of 1327, in a Parliament carefully managed by Isabella and her supporters, Edward II was declared a tyrant, incapable of rule, governed by others rather than by his own will. Even his favourite pastimes, swimming and digging, were now held against him as activities unbefitting a king. On 20 January, the bishop of Hereford met the King in person and demanded that he abdicate. With great reluctance, Edward agreed. In a series of premeditated and theatrical gestures, William Trussell, acting in the name of Parliament, formally renounced his homage to Edward. The steward of the royal household broke his ceremonial staff of office. Edward III officially acceded to the throne on 25 January and on 1 February was crowned in Westminster Abbey.

  Death of Edward II

  None of this theatre was sufficient to calm the violence that was now becoming an ingrained part of English high politics. Edward II remained in captivity, first at Kenilworth, later at Berkeley Castle on the Bristol Channel, from where various attempts were made to rescue him. In September 1327, as it was later announced, Edward died at Berkeley, either as a result of illness or, so it was rumoured, killed in a botched rescue attempt. In all probability he was suffocated by his gaolers; the later claim that the murder was committed secretly, using a red hot poker to burn out his entrails, appears only in accounts written twenty or so years later. Even more extravagant rumours, that Edward had survived as a wandering hermit in Italy or southern France, seem to derive from romance and the tradition of the disguised and undying king; similar stories, equally groundless, had been told of King Harold after 1066. In 1327, Edward II became the first English King since Stephen to have been deposed, and the first since Harold to have been, in all probability, killed in his rivals’ scramble for power. Having killed a king’s nephew at Viterbo in 1271 (with the murder of Henry of Almain), and a king’s grandson in 1322 (with the execution of Thomas of Lancaster), English politics had now encompassed the murder of the King himself. Edward II’s fate was all the more horrific for having been arranged by his own wife, Isabella of France. Nor did the killing end here.

  Edward III

  Isabella and her lover, Roger Mortimer, now attempted to employ the fifteen-year-old Edward III as a pawn in their own schemes. In March 1330, they arranged the execution of Edward II’s half-brother, Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent (son of Edward I and grandson of a king of France), accused of plotting to restore the late Edward II to the throne. Shortly afterwards, in November 1330, only a week after his eighteenth birthday, Edward III, attended by a small band of friends, entered Nottingham castle via an underground passage and arrested Roger Mortimer. Once again, Parliament was used as a stage for the condemnation of treachery. Mortimer, the Queen’s lover, was executed. Queen Isabella was deprived of rule, spending the remainder of her long life in comfortable but enforced retirement. By the time of her death in 1358 she had, either in remorse or hypocrisy, endowed a chantry at Eltham in Kent for the soul of her late husband, Edward II. She was buried in London in her wedding mantle, with Edward II’s embalmed heart placed over her breast. Meanwhile, a pattern of bloodshed and murder had been established, up to and including the person of the King, unparalleled in English history at least since the blood feuds of tenth- and eleventh-century Northumbria.

  Kings who failed to heed political opposition henceforth went in fear not merely of correction but their lives. Parliament, devised as a showcase of royal clemency and conciliation, had been transformed, in a crisis, into the chief mouthpiece of criticism directed against the crown. The popular French belief, widely circulating after 1400, that ‘the English kill their kings’ had already been proved true. Even so, king killing remained a secretive affair. The King himself was God’s anointed. Even his authority to abdicate, let alone the authority of barons or Parliament to depose him, remained uncertain. Not for a further 320 years, until 1649 and the trial of Charles I, did Parliament dare to put a king openly on trial. In the meantime, what is perhaps most remarkable about the aftermath of all the killings that resulted from Edward II’s misrule, at Boroughbridge in 1322, at Berkeley in 1327 and at Nottingham in 1330, is that the new King, Edward III, managed, albeit without altering the underlying impulses of society, to curb the violence between crown and aristocracy, between Englishmen and their rulers. It was almost as if the bloodshed had been forgotten.

  Increasing Bureaucracy

  The reasons for this lull can in part be sought with Edward himself, determined to avoid the character faults of his father. Edward’s personality, however, remains shadowy and uncertain. For all of the vast heaps of parchment piled up by the great offices of the crown, still stored in the Public Record Office at Kew, the wellsprings of power become more rather than less difficult to fathom the greater the quantity of our evidence. By the 1330s, each single term of the Exchequer or the chief law courts produced a vast slab of parchment sheets, closely written, containing hundreds of thousands of words, only a tiny number of which have ever been or are ever likely to be published. Somewhere amidst this routine, in the anonymity of the chancery and Exchequer’s scribes who now v
ied with one another to adopt identical handwriting and standard bureaucratic language, the leaves and branches of the modern state had already begun to sprout. Yet the very wealth of the detail here tends to render our view of policy that much more opaque.

  We know the names of the King’s hawks (under Edward I ‘Clynton’, ‘Strathbogie’, ‘Droxford’, suggesting that these at least were gifts from particular courtiers). Under Edward III we have the crazy logic of horse lists, recording the condition of horses in the royal stables, and the colour and value of particular war horses lost on campaign, now to be repaid from royal funds. By the fifteenth century, besides an officially appointed ‘Keeper of the King’s Swans’, we even have illustrated rolls of swan marks, paintings that show the ownership symbols notched into the beaks of swans belonging to the King, his dukes, earls and bishops. In the meantime, our insight into the human processes of politics, into the formulation of policy and the interaction between King, councillors and Parliament tends to recede. The lists of earls and bishops witnessing the King’s charters, previously our most important glimpse into the attendance and ranking of courtiers, tend to decline into mere formality, even as early as 1300. The burning question of who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out’ at the royal court is rendered difficult or impossible to probe.

  The rolls and the petitions of Parliament survive in considerable quantity from the 1280s onwards, but we learn from them virtually nothing about debates nor about how or by whom Parliament was controlled, nor indeed about such basic matters, before the 1320s, as whether the Lords and the Commons met together or as two distinct chambers. For any single year in the 1250s, the careful historian could hope to read all of the evidences generated by royal government, for the most part using printed editions. The whole process might take a day or two of careful research. By Edward III’s reign, the task has become virtually impossible. Too much remains unpublished. Too many details cloud the overall picture. The wood cannot be seen for the sheer number of its individual trees. The historian risks producing a mere chronicle of departmental or bureaucratic initiatives rather than a portrait of political society or of royal government in the round. The history of the reign of Edward III becomes a history in two parts: one part chivalry and derring-do reconstructed from the exaggerated reports of chroniclers, the other part generating all of the excitement of a history of income tax, reassembled from the dullest and driest of archival materials.