Edward II: The Unconventional King (15 page)

In the autumn of 1313, Edward finally came to terms with the earls of Lancaster, Hereford and Warwick, who continued stubbornly to maintain that they had merely acted against ‘a public enemy of the land’ and that Edward should be grateful to them for killing his beloved Gaveston.
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On 16 October, the king officially pardoned the men and more than 350 of their adherents.
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Gaveston’s embalmed body still lay unburied with the Dominicans at Oxford; Edward could not bear to put him under the ground. Edward told the earls of Lancaster, Warwick and Hereford to ‘lay aside all suspicion, and…to come to his presence, and freely obtain the goodwill that they had so often sought’.
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Whatever he was feeling, he again kept control of his emotions as he watched them kneel to him, raised them and kissed them one by one, and absolved them.
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The Sempringham annalist says that the earl of Arundel, whom Edward had not felt the need to pardon for his role in Gaveston’s death, joined Lancaster, Hereford and Warwick in ‘profess[ing] obedience and humiliation to King Edward in the great hall of Westminster.’
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To mark their reconciliation, Edward invited the earls to a banquet, and the following day, they reciprocated.
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Edward had finally learned to conceal his passionate emotions in public, and behaved with all the appearance of friendliness and forgiveness. But later events were to show that Edward had not forgiven. If Lancaster and the others believed that they had done their country a favour by putting the charismatic and aggravating royal favourite to death, they could not have been more wrong. All they had done was ensure that the rift between Edward II and many of his magnates would never be healed, and that Edward’s all-consuming need to avenge his friend’s death would lead, a few years later, to an explosion of political violence and bloodshed unprecedented in English history.

The few months after Edward’s public reconciliation with the earls saw England more or less at peace, or at least, as peaceful as it possibly could be in Edward II’s reign. Robert Winchelsey, archbishop of Canterbury and one of Edward’s most recalcitrant enemies, had died on 11 May 1313, and on 1 October, Pope Clement V appointed Edward’s friend and ally Walter Reynolds to the position, thanks in large part to Edward’s bribes.
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Reynolds did not impress his contemporaries:
Lanercost
calls him ‘unworthy of any degree of dignity’ because of his lack of learning and ‘his mode of life,’ the
Flores
says he was practically illiterate and indulged in ‘immoderate filthiness of lust’, and the
Vita
describes him as ‘a mere clerk and was scarcely literate, but he excelled in theatrical presentations, and through this obtained the king’s favour’.
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Edward loved plays and enjoyed the company of actors, then considered respectively the work of the devil and the lowest of the low, though whether even he would have had Reynolds promoted solely on the grounds of his theatrical skills is debatable. More importantly, Reynolds had been a friend of Piers Gaveston, and in 1309, Edward described him to the pope as ‘not only useful, but indispensable’ and said that Reynolds ‘has come to enjoy our confidence ahead of others’.
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The king and queen attended Reynolds’ enthronement at Canterbury on 17 February 1314 and remained in the city for a week, enjoying a splendid feast with the new archbishop. They then crossed the Thames Estuary to spend a few days at the royal residence of Hadleigh Castle near Southend.
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In late February Edward and Isabella separated, and the queen made her way to Sandwich, from where she sailed to France. Edward had asked her to present petitions concerning Gascony to Philip IV, who was far more likely to grant them to his daughter than to his son-in-law, and ordered his Italian money-lender Antonio di Pessagno to give Isabella nearly £5,000 for her expenses.
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She departed for her homeland on the last day of February with a retinue of over seventy people, including her damsel Alice Leygrave, Edward’s childhood nurse. Isabella was richer than she had been a few months earlier: probably in gratitude for bearing him a son, Edward gave her lands, manors and castles in Kent, Oxfordshire, Derbyshire and Northamptonshire in 1313 and 1314.
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On 15 March 1314, the night before Isabella arrived in Paris, her father had Jacques de Molay, grand master of the Knights Templar, burned alive on an island in the Seine. He is said, probably apocryphally, to have screamed out a curse from his pyre, challenging Philip and Pope Clement V, who had helped the French king suppress the Templars, to meet him before God’s tribunal within a year. Both of them were dead before the end of 1314. It is possible that while she was in France, Isabella discovered that Marguerite and Blanche of Burgundy, respectively the wives of her brothers Louis and Charles, had been conducting extramarital affairs with the d’Aulnay brothers, Philip and Gautier, and informed her father.
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If Isabella did break this scandal, as a few fourteenth-century chroniclers claim she did, her motives were almost certainly not vindictive. She was the daughter of two sovereigns and had been raised with a sacred sense of royalty, and therefore, would have been profoundly disturbed at the notion that her sisters-in-law might foist a child not of the royal bloodline on to the French throne. Her actions here also prove the ludicrousness of the suggestion that she would have taken a lover in 1312 and presented his child as Edward’s.

Edward II, meanwhile, spent the end of March and beginning of April 1314 at St Albans Abbey, which was close to his childhood residence of Langley and must have been a place he knew well. He made an offering of a gold cross decorated with precious stones and containing relics of St Alban, and the St Albans chronicler comments approvingly on his munificence to the abbey; earlier that year, he had given them a gift of £100 and a loan of £300, and in 1325 pardoned all their debts to him.
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On learning that his father had intended to rebuild the choir, Edward gave the monks a hundred marks and quantities of timber for the purpose, ordering that no expense should be spared in honouring God and St Alban, the first British martyr, who had died almost exactly a millennium earlier. Edward moved on the 70 miles to Ely near Cambridge, where he celebrated Easter Sunday, 7 April, at the cathedral. St Albans Abbey possessed the remains of St Alban, but Ely Cathedral owned a reliquary which they also described as ‘St Alban’s’. A curious Edward ordered the monks to open the reliquary, telling John Ketton, bishop of Ely, ‘You know that my brothers of St Albans believe that they possess the body of the martyr, while the monks in this place claim to have the same body. By God’s soul, I wish to see in which place I should chiefly pay reverence to the holy remains of the saint’ (‘by God’s soul’ was Edward’s favourite oath). Edward raised the lid of the reliquary himself, and discovered that it was full of rough cloth, spattered with blood that appeared fresh, as if spilt only the day before. All the spectators fell to their knees at this miracle, including Edward, presumably, although he alone had the nerve to close the lid. He gave the monks of Ely many gifts and went away happy that the famous saint was venerated in two places, telling them, ‘Rejoice in the gift of God, rejoice in the sanctity and merits of so great a martyr; for if, as you say, God does many miracles here by reason of his garment, you may believe that at St Albans he does more, by reason of the most holy body that rests there.’
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Pope Clement V died on 20 April 1314, five weeks after Jacques de Molay cursed him from the flames; perhaps Philip IV quaked in his boots at the news. More than two years would pass before the cardinals elected Clement’s successor, and Edward wrote to them in December 1314, asking them to lose no time in choosing a new pope.
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Five days after Clement’s death, Edward spent his thirtieth birthday travelling from Torksey, north-west of Lincoln, to Hull. Isabella arrived back at Dover a few days later, where she received a gift of a porcupine, and immediately set off north to join Edward.
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Not entirely unexpectedly, Edward’s long-suffering subjects did not have much longer to enjoy the fragile peace currently reigning in England, and the Scottish question soon raised its ugly head again. Although Robert Bruce had failed to capture Berwick-on-Tweed in 1312 while Edward was preoccupied with Piers Gaveston, he enjoyed numerous successes elsewhere. In 1313 and 1314, he and his lieutenants conducted a series of increasingly daring raids on Scottish castles still in English hands, including Perth, Edinburgh and Dumfries, and razed them to the ground.
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Roxburgh fell to James Douglas in February 1314, despite the brave efforts of the Gascon custodian Guillemin de Fenes, who died during the attack.
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The
Scalacronica
says that Edinburgh fell because of the treachery of the custodian Piers Lubaud, also a Gascon and apparently a cousin of Piers Gaveston, who subsequently joined Bruce’s service. The
Vita
calls Lubaud ‘perjurer and traitor’.
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The news that so many vital Scottish castles were lost distressed Edward, who ‘could scarcely restrain his tears’.
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He could hardly have been surprised, however, given that he had done nothing to defend the castles or made any effort whatsoever to exert dominance over Bruce, except for the feeble campaign of 1310/11, either because he didn’t know how or because he simply didn’t care. Although he refused to accept the fact, any chance he might have had to take up his claim to overlordship of Scotland had by now disappeared, and the
Scalacronica
says, ‘The king of England undertook scarcely anything against Scotland, and thus lost as much by indolence as his father had conquered.’
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And Edward had far more than the loss of Scottish castles to worry about: beginning in the late summer of 1311, as soon as Edward departed from Berwick after his unsuccessful campaign, Bruce and his adherents made frequent incursions into the north of England, where they burnt and plundered towns and villages and carried off goods, crops and livestock, unless the inhabitants agreed to pay them tribute to protect themselves. Bruce raised a great deal of money in this way, as much as £20,000.
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These border raids would continue for much of Edward’s reign. This was not entirely Edward’s fault; he did make some attempts to strengthen the defence of the north.
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However, his inability to protect his subjects from Scottish raids hardly helped to revise their low opinion of him.

In June 1313, however, came a challenge that even Edward could not ignore. Edward Bruce was besieging Stirling Castle, the most vital stronghold of them all: the castle controlled the crossing over the River Forth and thus access to the northern Lowlands and Highlands. Stirling was virtually impregnable, and the only hope Bruce had of capturing the stronghold was to starve it into submission. This would take a very long time, which didn’t impress Bruce much. Neither, however, did it impress the castle’s constable Philip Mowbray, Scottish but loyal to Edward II, who was staring months of discomfort and hunger in the face. Mowbray suggested a compromise, and proposed that if Bruce called off the siege, the constable would surrender the castle to him – on condition that an English army did not appear within three miles of Stirling to relieve the fortress within a year and a day.
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And so Edward II marched into Scotland in June 1314, to relieve Stirling – or Strivelyn, as it was then called – and, he hoped, to face Robert Bruce in battle and finally defeat him. He took probably the greatest army that had ever been seen in England, consisting of English knights and footmen, Irish soldiers, Welsh archers, Bruce’s Scottish enemies, and knights from all over Europe, comprising 15,000 to 20,000 men. Edward took with him a vast baggage train of 216 carts, with jewellery, napery, costly plate, and ecclesiastical vestments for celebrating the victory. His nobles followed his example, and took along luxurious pavilions, silver eating vessels and selections of fine wines; the personal possessions of the earl of Hereford alone required an entire ship.
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Lanercost
says that Edward marched with great pomp and elaborate state, purveying goods from monasteries as he passed, and that he ‘did and said things to the prejudice and injury of the saints’, whatever that means.
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Edward passed the time hunting, gambling and listening to music, having taken a trumpeter, fiddlers, bagpipers and other musicians with him.
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He also took a travelling wine cellar.
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Queen Isabella, who accompanied him as far north as Berwick, took a wooden altar which could be packed up and carried by a sumpter-horse.
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Before Edward left England, he ordered the mayor of London to issue a proclamation forbidding ‘rumpuses with large footballs’ in public fields, an early reference to the enormously popular sport of later centuries. An entry in Edward’s wardrobe account of 1299/1300 shows that he played a game called ‘creog’, perhaps an early reference to another sport, cricket.
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On his way to Bannockburn, the king patched up his quarrel with Richard Kellaw, bishop of Durham, whom he held as his enemy because the bishop had not supported himself and Gaveston in 1308, after Kellaw gave him gifts of 1,000 marks and a magnificent war horse.
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Despite Edward’s lack of military ability and experience, he seems to have believed that all he needed to do was show up, and he would win. This was, to put it mildly, a huge miscalculation, and the subsequent Battle of Bannockburn has gone down in history as arguably the greatest English military defeat of all time. Overconfidence was the biggest problem, both for Edward and the men around him, and the later chronicler Geoffrey le Baker points out that never before had a noble army been swollen with such arrogance.
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A Latin song written shortly after the battle describes the English knights as ‘too showy and pompous’.
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