Edward II: The Unconventional King (17 page)

To please his sister Elizabeth, Edward arranged for the release of all his Scottish prisoners in exchange for his brother-in-law Hereford. The Scottish prisoners in England included Robert Bruce’s wife Elizabeth de Burgh, his sisters Mary and Christina, his daughter Marjorie, and the bishops of Glasgow and St Andrews.
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Another Scot in England was Bruce’s young nephew Donald, earl of Mar, imprisoned as a child at Bristol Castle in 1306 but a member of Edward’s household since around 1309, who received fifteen pence a day in wages for serving his uncle’s enemy.
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Mar set off to return to Scotland, the homeland he hadn’t seen for eight years, got as far north as Newcastle, changed his mind, and went back to Edward.
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For many years, Mar was to be a close friend and supporter of the king.

In December 1314, Edward assigned dower to the earl of Gloucester’s widow Maud, the customary third of his nephew’s lands.
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Maud was claiming to be pregnant, which must have delighted Edward, as the enormous de Clare revenues would pour annually into his own coffers until the child turned twenty-one. People considerably less delighted at Maud’s pregnancy were Gloucester’s three sisters – Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth – and Eleanor’s husband Hugh Despenser, as if Gloucester had died childless, the sisters would have divided his lands between them. It would later become apparent, however, that the pregnancy was not all it would seem.

Philip IV of France died in a hunting accident on 29 November 1314. Edward had heard of his father-in-law’s death by 15 December, when he ordered the archbishops of Canterbury and York, all the bishops and twenty-eight abbots to ‘celebrate exequies’ for him.
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Philip was only forty-six in 1314, and had three sons aged between twenty and twenty-five. No one could have guessed that within fourteen years all of them would be dead with no male heirs, and that the great Capetian dynasty would come to an end and the throne of France pass to Philip IV’s nephew Philip de Valois. Queen Isabella’s eldest brother the king of Navarre, known as
le Hutin
, the Stubborn or Quarrelsome, succeeded as Louis X, which meant that Edward owed homage to the new king for his French lands. As Louis reigned for little more than eighteen months, though, he managed to avoid the unpleasant duty of kneeling to his brother-in-law.

Edward and Isabella were at Langley on 6 December 1314, the feast day of St Nicholas, and the king gave two pounds to Robert Tyeis, who officiated as boy-bishop in his chapel. The royal couple spent the festive season at Windsor, where Edward played at ‘tables’ on Christmas Eve with members of his entourage.
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He was a great fan of ‘cross and pile’, the fourteenth-century equivalent of heads and tails, and frequently borrowed money from his servants to play it, returning five shillings to his barber Henry on one occasion and eight pence to his usher Peter Bernard ‘which he lent to the lord king and which he lost at cross and pile’ on another.
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Edward was at a low ebb, personally and politically, in late 1314, and his thoughts turned to his lost love, Piers Gaveston. On 27 December, he gave the chancellor and scholars of Oxford University twenty pounds to pray for Gaveston’s soul, and a week later finally buried his friend, two and a half years after his death, at the Dominican priory he had founded at Langley in 1308.
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Since June 1312, Edward had paid two custodians to watch over the body, and they lived very well at his expense; for a mere twenty-eight days in December 1314, he paid them fifteen pounds.
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Edward had already demonstrated his concern for Gaveston’s remains, spending, for example, £144 and fifteen shillings between 8 July 1312 and 7 July 1313, the sixth year of his reign. This included payment for 5,000 lbs of wax for candles to burn around the embalmed body.
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Gaveston’s excommunication must have been lifted in order for him to be buried in consecrated ground, though when that occurred is uncertain; perhaps the visit of his elder brother Arnaud-Guilhem de Marsan to Avignon in the autumn of 1312 marks the occasion.
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This means that Edward had, rather morbidly, kept Gaveston’s body above ground for over two years when he could have had it buried, perhaps because he couldn’t bear the thought of this final farewell to his friend, or because he had sworn ‘first to avenge Piers, and then consign his body to the grave’.
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Edward’s weak position in late 1314 and early 1315, however, persuaded him to postpone his revenge for a time. He had not forgotten. It would just have to wait for a while. The funeral was a deeply emotional occasion for Edward, and he spent the vast sum of £300 on three cloths of gold to dress Gaveston’s body, also paying £15 for food and £64 for twenty-three tuns of wine, around 22,000 litres.
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Edward was deeply concerned with the well-being of Gaveston’s soul and bodily remains: at the time of the funeral, he ordered a hundred Dominican friars to say Masses for Gaveston and his ancestors; between October 1315 and October 1316 he ordered every Augustinian house in England and Ireland to celebrate a daily mass for Gaveston’s soul; in 1319 he paid for a Turkish cloth to be placed over the tomb, which was replaced later by gold cloth; in 1324 he sent his confessor to Langley to mark the anniversary of Gaveston’s death, and in 1325 he sent a man there with 100 shillings to give to each friar, so they would remember Piers Gaveston. In 1326, the last year of his reign, he made provision for numerous clerks at numerous houses to pray for the soul of his lost love.
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Edward did not forget those he loved. Sadly, Gaveston’s tomb was lost at the Dissolution, though the tomb of Edward’s grandson Edmund, duke of York, buried in the same priory in 1402, still survives. The earl of Hereford attended Gaveston’s funeral, rather bravely considering he had been one of the men who condemned him to death, and so did Queen Isabella, the earl of Pembroke, Hugh Despenser the Elder and his son Hugh Despenser, Henry Beaumont, Bartholomew Badlesmere, the mayor of London, the archbishop of Canterbury, four bishops, fourteen abbots, fifty knights, large numbers of Dominican friars, and William Inge, the royal justice alleged, somewhat improbably, to have passed judgement on Gaveston.
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Another attendee was Edward’s fourteen-year-old half-brother Thomas of Brotherton, displaced as heir to the throne by Edward of Windsor, but created earl of Norfolk a month after his nephew’s birth.
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As though the burial of Piers Gaveston had drawn a line under his past, another man, Roger Damory, came to Edward’s attention. Damory, a knight of Oxfordshire, had previously been a member of the earl of Gloucester’s retinue, and fought bravely at Bannockburn, which was perhaps the first time Edward noticed him. The
Vita
calls Damory a ‘poor and needy knight’, which seems accurate; he was a younger son with little chance of inheriting his father’s lands.
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In early 1315, Edward ordered Damory to stay at court with him, though it would take some time for the knight to really work his way into the king’s affections.
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On 20 April 1315, Edward invited the archbishop of Canterbury and most of the nobility to a great banquet at Westminster Hall, which was damaged by a fire shortly afterwards.
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This would be the last great feast anyone would enjoy for quite some time. Northern Europe suffered bizarre weather in the mid-1310s, and it rained heavily and constantly for much of the period from 1314 to 1316. In the flooding caused by this torrential rain, crops rotted away and livestock drowned in the waterlogged fields, and the tragic result was the Great Famine, which is estimated to have killed at least five per cent, and perhaps more, of the population of England. The rest of northern Europe suffered a similar death toll. The
Vita
, unaware that it was a pan-European disaster, knew exactly where to apportion blame: on the English themselves, who ‘excel other nations in three qualities, in pride, in craft, and in perjury … All this comes from the wickedness of the inhabitants’. He also blamed the fact that Saturn had been in the ascendant for three years, but now that Jupiter was about to succeed, the rain would cease and the fields be filled with abundance.
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In March and April 1315, Edward did his best to mitigate his subjects’ misery by ordering the price of basic foodstuffs to be regulated. According to the
Anonimalle
, Edward passed these regulations with the advice of his privy council and without the consent of the magnates, and the chronicler rather unreasonably calls Edward’s council ‘feeble’ and the regulations ‘foolish’, claiming that the king and his advisors were trying to ‘deceive the common people’.
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Among the foodstuffs regulated were: ‘fat sheep’, which should cost no more than twenty pence if unshorn and fourteen pence if shorn; a maximum of sixteen shillings for an ox not fed with corn, or twenty-four shillings if fed with corn and fattened; twelve shillings for a live fat cow; one and a half pence for a fat chicken; one pence for twenty-four eggs. The price regulations could not, however, be maintained for long; Edward’s attempts to improve the situation resulted only in traders refusing to sell what few goods they had at an artificially low price.
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Anonimalle
and
Lanercost
state that a quarter of wheat cost forty shillings or more, six or eight times the normal price, and
Anonimalle
that ‘two little onions’ cost a penny, a few hours’ wages for most people.
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Such bread as was available could not satisfy hunger, as the grain was soaked from the endless rain and had to be dried in ovens before it was cooked, and contained minimal nutrients.
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When Edward stayed at St Albans Abbey from 10 to 12 August 1315, even he had difficulties buying bread for himself and his household.
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Still, the king was in a far better position than the majority of his subjects: in Northumbria, already weakened and despoiled by Scottish raids, ‘dogs and horses and other unclean things were eaten’, and
Trokelowe
says that horse meat was precious and that ‘fat dogs’ were stolen.
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And for others, imminent starvation drove them to far worse horrors than eating pets. Rumours of cannibalism were rife, and
Trokelowe
even claims, one hopes with great exaggeration, that some people resorted to eating children.
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After the famine came a ‘severe pestilence’ which claimed many more victims. Dead bodies were so numerous they could hardly be buried.
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Although most people were too concerned with their own suffering to pay much notice, more bad news reached England. Robert Bruce’s brother Edward invaded Ireland in late May 1315, and in May 1316 was crowned high king of Ireland at Dundalk, having taken control of almost the entire country except Dublin and a few castles.
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The kings of England had been lords of Ireland for a century and a half: a papal bull issued in 1155 by Adrian IV, the only English pope in history, had authorised Edward’s great-great-grandfather Henry II to take possession of the country, and granted him and his descendants the right to the title ‘lord of Ireland’. In 1185, Henry II sent his teenage son, Edward’s great-grandfather John, to govern the parts of the country under English control. Fortunately for Edward II in 1315, Roger Mortimer had returned to Ireland, where he spent much of his career, after the debacle of Bannockburn, and the king therefore had an ally in the country he could trust. Unfortunately, even Roger Mortimer’s undoubted military ability was not sufficient to avoid a catastrophic defeat at the hands of Edward Bruce at the Battle of Kells in December 1315, and almost his entire army was annihilated.
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Practically the only bright spot in the wet, hungry, desperate summer of 1315 was one of Robert Bruce’s rare failures: he laid siege to the town of Carlisle for ten days, but failed to take it, thanks to the stout defence of Andrew Harclay, sheriff of Cumberland. The Scots ‘marched off in confusion to their own country’ on 1 August.
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And in January 1316, Bruce failed in his second attempt to seize the important port of Berwick-on-Tweed. He and a large force launched a simultaneous attack by land and sea at night, by moonlight, but failed to capture the port, and James Douglas, Edward’s pursuer after Bannockburn, barely escaped capture.
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In the summer of 1315, Maud de Clare, dowager countess of Gloucester, was still claiming to be pregnant, despite the length of time that had passed since her husband fell at Bannockburn. Hugh Despenser (the Younger), understandably, did not believe in the pregnancy. As the husband of the earl of Gloucester’s eldest sister Eleanor, Despenser was in line for a big handout of lands, and he wanted them badly. The young man – he was about twenty-seven – gave warning of his hot-headed and impetuous behaviour when he seized Tonbridge Castle in Kent, which had belonged to the earl of Gloucester, in May 1315. Precisely what he was hoping to achieve by this is not clear, but he had to give it back, though he avoided a fine over the strange episode.
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Five years in the future, Edward would become utterly infatuated with Hugh Despenser and fall over himself to give him any lands he wanted, once again bringing his country to civil war over his passion for a favourite. Although
Lanercost
claims that Despenser became ‘the king of England’s right eye’ soon after the death of Piers Gaveston, Edward’s behaviour here, by refusing to partition the de Clare lands, proves conclusively that Despenser was not yet in his favour.

Hugh Despenser’s maternal uncle Guy Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, died on 12 August 1315 at the age of about forty-three, leaving his eighteen-month-old son, named Thomas after the earl of Lancaster, as his heir. Many decades later, the chronicler Thomas Walsingham reported a rumour that friends of Edward II poisoned Warwick in revenge for Piers Gaveston’s death.
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This is most unlikely to be true, though doubtless Edward didn’t mourn much for him. Warwick’s death left the earl of Lancaster politically isolated, and it became ever clearer to all that he had no more aptitude than Edward at ruling the country. In fact, the situation was becoming dire. Lancaster and Edward found it extremely difficult to work together, but Lancaster had no means of deposing the king, and Edward was not yet strong enough to overthrow his cousin. They and their respective households spitefully did their best to thwart each other, and their rivalry left England, in effect, ungoverned at a time when natural disaster called out for strong leadership.
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