The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

  On October 14, Isabella arrived, and London welcomed her. Boisterously. Rioters took over the city’s streets, looting the royal treasury along with dozens of homes and businesses of Edward’s few remaining loyalists. As reward for aiding in Mortimer’s escape, Richard de Bettoyne and John de Gisors, were made, respectively, Constable of the Tower and Mayor of London. Isabella’s men released the most prominent prisoners from their cells in the Tower of London, including Mortimer’s sons. Her supporters were less merciful with Walter Stapledon, who had carried the story of Isabella’s infidelity back to the king. A mob beat him to death on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and then beheaded him with a bread knife. Two days later, the head of the former bishop of Exeter was presented to the queen at Gloucester, where she and Mortimer had stopped for a brief respite before resuming their pursuit of the king and the Despensers.

  Sometime between October 16 and 21, Edward crossed the River Wye to Chepstow, in Wales. His escort had melted away; only a dozen archers remained. The king of England had become a hunted fugitive, abandoned by his wife, his son, and all but three of his earls. His support in England was virtually gone, and in Wales nearly so.* Hugh the Elder, the newly made earl of Winchester, recrossed the Wye and headed south, where he had his last card left to play: Edward and Isabella’s daughters, the princesses Eleanor and Joan, who had been given into his family’s care by the king. The elder Despenser attempted to trade the princesses for his own safety—a desperate measure, with no chance of success. In Bristol, as in London, city sentiment turned to the invader. On October 26, he surrendered to the queen.

  Edward and Hugh the Younger, meanwhile, left Chepstow and took ship for Ireland, but, abandoned even by the winds, were forced into Cardiff Harbor. On the twenty-seventh, Isabella learned that the king had left England, which gave her precisely the pretext she needed to form a new government. She formed a council composed of the nobles and bishops who had accompanied her on her headlong pursuit of the king and the Despensers, and announced that her son, in his father’s absence, was the Keeper of the Realm.

  On the same day that Edward, Duke of Aquitaine, was made Keeper of the Realm (with his mother as regent de jure, Mortimer de facto), the earls of Leicester, Norfolk, and Kent sentenced Hugh le Despenser the Elder, Duke of Winchester, to death as a traitor—the first of England’s highest nobles to receive such a sentence since the earl of Lancaster four years before. And, unlike Lancaster, whom Edward had, mercifully, ordered beheaded, the earl of Winchester was awarded the traitor’s death: “drawn for treason, hanged for robbery, beheaded for misdeeds against the Church . . . and because your deeds have dishonoured the order of chivalry, the court awards that you be hanged in a surcoat quartered with your arms, and that your arms be destroyed forever.”

  Destruction of the Despenser coat of arms would be lacking in practical force as long as Hugh the Younger was still flying it, and at the end of October, he was doing precisely that, at Caerphilly Castle, where he and King Edward had taken refuge. Caerphilly was by far the most formidable castle in Wales, and one of the strongest in Europe—it sprawled over nearly three acres: two concentric parallelograms surrounded by two artificial lakes, honeycombed with murder holes, with tunnels and paths for quick reinforcement, defended by towers more than thirty feet high with walls twelve feet thick—and one that was well supplied for a siege, with its own wells and granaries. Moreover, the king had the £29,000 in gold he had taken from London, enough to put a well-armed mercenary army in the field. After all, John of Hainaut’s Dutch and German soldiers weren’t going to stay in England forever, and as long as the king was behind Caerphilly’s walls, he was next to invulnerable, and certainly able to negotiate for the best terms imaginable.

  Which is why it still defies belief that, on either the second or third of November, Edward and Hugh the Younger left Caerphilly, heading for the westernmost part of Wales, leaving £13,000 behind. In the first week of November, the king arrived at the Abbey of Neath, and sent the abbot to Isabella to open negotiations for his surrender. Her response was to send a party headed by the earl of Leicester and a Welshman named Rhys ap Howel with orders to capture him. Belatedly realizing their mistake in leaving Caerphilly, the king’s party galloped east, but six days later, in a torrential rainstorm, Edward, Hugh the Younger, the erstwhile chancellor Robert Baldock, and six other men—all that were left of the king’s loyalists—were taken, in the open country near Llantrisant on the River Ely, in the most southerly part of Wales. It was a poetic end to the journey that had begun thirty-seven years before, when Edward, the very first prince of Wales, had been born in the province’s northernmost castle, at Caernarfon.

  While Isabella was careful to have her husband imprisoned in comfortable apartments in Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, the queen had no reason to ease the final journey of the remaining Despenser. She ordered that Hugh the Younger be tied to a horse and be forced to stumble along behind on foot, preceded by heralds playing cymbals so that everyone along the route back to England would have sufficient warning to line the road where they could curse him and pelt him with clods of dirt and rotten fruit. If her intent was to humiliate her “Pharisee,” she overachieved: Despenser announced that he would starve himself to death. After only a week into his hunger strike, Isabella grew anxious and decided to have him tried at Hereford, only sixteen miles or so from the Welsh border. On November 24, the man who had been only two months before the second most powerful man in the kingdom was accused of a long list of charges, including the execution of the earl of Lancaster; of advising the king to abandon the queen at Tynemouth; of stealing the queen’s dower; and of persuading the king to invade Scotland and then failing to secure a victory. At his trial, Hugh the Younger was forced to wear a tunic with the legend quid gloriaris in malicia qui potens in iniquiate? (from Psalm 52: Why do you glory in malice, you who are mighty in iniquity?).

  The Chronicle of Jean Froissart, the court poet and official historian of Philippa of Hainaut (later the consort of Isabella and Edward’s son), is one of the great documents of medieval history, written only thirty or so years after the trial of Hugh le Despenser the Younger. It leaves little to the imagination:

  When he had been tied up, his member and his testicles were cut off, because he was a heretic and a sodomite, even, it was said, with the King, and this was why the King had driven away the Queen on his suggestion. When his private parts had been cut off they were thrown into the fire to burn, and afterwards his heart was torn from his body and thrown into the fire, because he was a false-hearted traitor, who by his treasonable advice and promptings had led the King to bring shame and misfortune upon his kingdom and to behead the greatest lords of England, by whom the kingdom ought to have been upheld and defended; and besides that, he had so worked upon the King that he, who should have been their consort and sire, had refused to see the Queen and his eldest son, at the hazard of their lives.

  After Sir Hugh Despenser had been cut up in the way described, his head was struck off and sent to the city of London. His body was divided into four quarters, which were sent to the four principal cities of England after London.

  Isabella had her vengeance, but she did not have the throne. Her son had assumed royal powers during the absence of the king, but once Edward II arrived in Kenilworth Castle, that particular legal argument had no weight. Instead, on November 20, Isabella sent Adam Orleton, the bishop of Hereford, to demand that the king give up the Great Seal of England and abdicate voluntarily.* Edward surrendered to the first but refused the second—irrelevantly, since Isabella then used the Great Seal to summon a parliament to meet at Westminster on January 7, 1327. Its purpose was to depose a king.

  The January parliament was more a mass demonstration than a calm legislative assembly. Mobs rushed Westminster Hall. Bishops preached in churches and on the streets. Lords and commons gave speeches. Walter Reynolds, the archbishop of Canterbury, gave a sermon on the text vox populi vox dei
. Sometime around January 15 the Articles of Deposition were finally read. They included charges that the king had been an incompetent administrator, a failed general, a persecutor of the clergy, and had “shown himself incorrigible, through his cruelty and weakness, and beyond all hope of amendment.”

  A problem, however: young Edward, the duke of Aquitaine, though hailed by Parliament as England’s new king, flatly refused to accept the crown unless granted to him by his father. After three days of fruitless attempts to persuade him otherwise, on January 20 another deputation visited the king at Kenilworth, again demanding abdication. This time, they threatened Edward not only with losing his own crown but with the deposition of his son, strongly implying that Roger Mortimer would be England’s next king. With this threat, the king finally surrendered. At his actual abdication ceremony, the king, dressed in mourning black, actually fainted; when he was dragged to his feet, he saw Sir Thomas Blount, the steward of the household, break his staff of office as a formal renunciation of his duties, since the king’s household had now been disbanded. On February 1, 1327, Edward Plantagenet, the duke of Aquitaine, age fourteen, was crowned King Edward III of England. Edward II, no longer king of England, was now to be called “The Lord Edward, sometime King of England.”

  Under that title, and while in the custody of the new earl of Lancaster (brother to the king’s former nemesis), the king put his poetic gifts to use, writing

  In winter woe befell me

  By cruel Fortune thwarted

  My life now lies a ruin

  Full oft have I experienced,

  There’s none so fair, so wise,

  So courteous nor so highly famed,

  But, if Fortune cease to favor,

  Will be a fool proclaimed

  When not writing poetry, Edward spent most of the next year composing letters entreating his wife to join him in his captivity. She always responded with feigned reluctance, claiming that she would gladly see him but Parliament forbade it.

  Even if she had wanted to visit her husband, she had more pressing matters requiring her attention. In June 1327, James Douglas and the earl of Moray led another raid—an invasion, really—of England, intended to take advantage of the unsettled situation in England by, yet again, burning harvests, stealing cattle, and destroying farms. By all accounts, their intent was to force the hand of the new regents, Isabella and Mortimer, and bring them to the table where Scottish independence might finally be negotiated. With the approval of Mortimer, the new king raised an army and marched north to meet the Scottish hobelars, but the third Edward had no better luck bringing Scots to battle than either of the first two. The closest he came was at the River Wear in County Durham, where King Edward found himself on the opposite bank from James Douglas. The fourteen-year-old king did what fourteen-year-olds do, kingly or not: he dared the Black Douglas to a “fair fight.” That is, either the Scots or the English would offer the other side free passage across the river, after which they could engage in combat on honorable terms. Douglas was unmoved by the offer. The old campaigner wasn’t especially sporting when it came to war; this was, after all, the author of the “Douglas’s Larder” massacre, whose best-remembered terror tactic was to remove either the right eye or right hand of any captured archer, aware that, as the proverb has it, “every English archer carries 24 Scottish lives in his belt.” Moreover, he had already noticed that the English outnumbered his force by roughly two to one. While Douglas pretended to consider the challenge, his troops stole away through a supposedly impassable swamp by tying bunches of twigs to their feet and those of their horses. By the time the English had noticed that the only Scots remaining on the north side of the Wear were two heralds, who approached the English battle line and politely asked what they were all suited up for, Douglas and Moray had already slipped back over the border, and home.

  King Robert, the earl of Moray, and James Douglas continued to ravage Northumberland through the fall of 1327, with little practical resistance from either Edward III or either of his regents, who were occupied with other matters—specifically, what to do about the “Lord Edward, sometime King of England.”

  The sometime King Edward wasn’t completely without supporters. Two brothers with long and checkered pasts—Thomas and Stephen Dunheved, the first a onetime pirate and murderer, the other a Dominican friar, both of them loyal courtiers of Edward—attempted to engineer his escape on three separate occasions, nearly succeeding at least twice. Even worse, when they weren’t planning jailbreaks, they traveled throughout England, “not only secretly but even openly, stirring up the people of the south and north to rise for the deposed and imprisoned king.” Though they were eventually captured—Stephen was briefly imprisoned at Newgate, from which he almost immediately escaped; Thomas died at Pontrefact—they were a reminder of the dangers of leaving even a widely unpopular monarch alive.

  The death of Edward II remains a mystery to this day. Nothing is truly known about its particulars, up to and including its precise date; the only certainty is that the official announcement of the death of the former king was issued on September 21, 1327. If there is a historical consensus about anything, it is that the final act was ordered by Mortimer after the Dunheveds’ last failed rescue. As to the method of the king’s execution, there is even less agreement. In 1342, Ranulf Higden, a monk of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Werburgh, Chester, wrote, in his Polychronicon (a history of the world) “[Edward] was ignominiously slain with a red-hot spit thrust into the anus,” which was considered an appropriate punishment for the king’s sodomy, and also the sort of death blow that left no obvious marks on the corpse. Shortly thereafter, the red-hot poker passed into popular legend—popular enough to make it one of the best-remembered things about Edward II, even though it’s almost certainly not true.

  Edward II earned some part of his place in any catalog of the worst monarchs in English history; he possessed a deadly combination of kingly arrogance and ineptitude, and his virtues, such as they were, were singularly useless for a fourteenth-century king. He had an unerring talent for finding the most destructive and ambitious men in England, and promoting them to the realm’s highest positions. Moreover, he was a less-skilled wartime leader than either his father or his son, which exaggerated his weaknesses even more than they deserved.* And needless to say, kings who are deposed by their wives tend to suffer in historical memory. Four hundred years after Edward’s death, Thomas Gray—the first poet to name Isabella the “She-Wolf of France”—did his best, in his poem entitled “The Curse Upon Edward,” to redeem the king’s reputation. It’s not much of a poem, but Gray got one thing right: the enduring image of Edward’s reign:

  Fell Thirst and Famine scowl

  A baleful smile upon their baffled guest.

  Heard ye the din of battle bray,

  Lance to lance, and horse to horse?

  Long years of havoc urge their destined course.

  Edward II may not have been the worst king in England’s history, but he has a very good claim to being the unluckiest. He had no triumphs, however fleeting, to balance either his cuckoldry by Isabella or his defeats by Robert Bruce. Most especially, nothing he could have done could have mitigated, even slightly, the seven years of rain, cold, and pestilences both animal and human that comprised the Great Famine. For a king’s reputation to survive the horrors of the first two decades of the fourteenth century in northern Europe—“long years of havoc,” indeed—it would have to be that of someone who could legitimately be called larger than life. As the last piece of Edward’s almost supernaturally bad fortune, his greatest adversary really was.

  • • •

  In October 1327, Robert Bruce’s queen, Elizabeth de Burgh, died. She had been his wife for twenty-five years, though they probably spent fewer of them living together than apart, so frequently was Robert on campaign. Elizabeth had missed, by five months, the denouement to more than thirty years of almost con
stant warfare that began with the death of Alexander III in 1296. In February 1328, Edward III of England, holding parliament at York, finally issued a true treaty of peace and recognition; one that

  will and concede for us and all our heirs and successors . . . that the kingdom of Scotland shall remain forever separate from the kingdom of England, in its entirety, free and in peace, without any kind of subjection, servitude, claim or demand, with its rightful boundaries as they were held and preserved in the times of Alexander of good memory . . . to the magnificent prince, the lord Robert, by God’s grace illustrious king of Scots, our ally and very dear friend, and to his heirs and successors.

  The document that finally recognized the independence of Scotland, which had been negotiated by James Douglas, was signed by March 17, 1328, by King Robert as the Treaty of Edinburgh, and ratified as the Treaty of Northampton by the English parliament on May 1; evidently the old adversaries still felt obliged to disagree about its name. The treaty also included a payment of £20,000 in war indemnities from Scotland to England; King Edward’s promise to intercede with the pope to get the interdict on Scotland lifted; and the promise of a marriage between Robert and Elizabeth’s only surviving son, David, then three years old, and Princess Joan of England, sister to Edward III. The wedding feast held to celebrate the joining of four-year-old David to seven-year-old Joan a year later required, among other items, 4,360 pounds of almonds, 600 pounds of rice, 180 pounds of pepper, and 55 pounds of mace—a concrete reminder that the Great Famine was truly over.

  Two years before the wedding, Robert Bruce had completed the construction of a manor—notably, not a fortified castle—in the village of Cardross, where the River Leven flows into the Firth of Clyde. There he lived comfortably, though not lavishly, hunting, keeping falcons, and, in an unconscious replay of the plebeian interests of his lifelong rival, Edward II, sailing and even shipbuilding. On June 7, 1329, he died there, after a long illness generally thought to be leprosy.