Edward II: The Unconventional King (18 page)

Edward spent most of 1315 with Queen Isabella, and from 10 to 12 June, they went to Canterbury on pilgrimage; both of them revered St Thomas Becket. On the 14th, Edward gave a pound to sailors named Thomas Springet, William Kempe and Edmund of Greenwich ‘for their labour in taking a whale, lately caught near London Bridge’.
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The
Scalacronica
says that Edward ‘tarried in the south, where he amused himself with ships, among mariners, and in other irregular occupation unworthy of his station’.
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That August, Edward proclaimed that the magnates of the realm should limit the number of courses served at their tables, on account of the ‘excessive and abundant portions of food’ they ate while many of their countrymen starved. The proclamation also limited the number of minstrels permitted to go to the houses of great lords to three or four a day, and they were not to go to the houses of ‘smaller people’ at all – ‘unless requested to do so’, it added helpfully.
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Edward’s enormous household of a few hundred people necessitated lavish expenditure on food, and the accounts for his ninth regnal year, 8 July 1315 to 7 July 1316, show that he spent £887 on food and £1,160 on wine.
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In the autumn of 1315, Edward went on holiday to the Fens with ‘a great concourse of common people’, despite the awful weather that year (it rained from May until October).
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Centuries ahead of his time in recognising the pleasures of taking holidays by water, he spent a congenial month from mid-September to mid-October rowing and swimming at King’s Lynn in Norfolk and at Fen Ditton and Impington near Cambridge, though he fell into the water and nearly drowned ‘while rowing about on various lakes’ one day, and his companions had to haul him out. Perhaps this was cosmic revenge for the occasion in February 1303 when eighteen-year-old Edward had to pay his fool Robert Bussard four shillings’ compensation for playing a trick on him while they were swimming in the Thames at Windsor, and hurting him.
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Edward was a great fan of water: Archbishop Walter Reynolds once returned to him a belt he had lost in the Thames, which probably means he was again swimming in the river.
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While in the Fens, on 6 October 1315, Edward made a quick trip to Walsingham without his household to visit the shrine of Our Lady there.
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The author of the
Flores
, Edward’s most vicious critic, sneered at the king’s holiday, saying sarcastically that Edward went to the Fens to ‘refresh his soul with many waters’, a perfectly normal thing to do in later centuries but very strange to the fourteenth-century mind. No less a person than the pope condemned the king’s amusements as ‘childish frivolities’ a few months later, and most of Edward’s contemporaries must have found the concept of the king of England willingly spending time with a group of lowborn people profoundly shocking, a violation of the natural order.
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In its haste to ridicule Edward, the
Flores
got the date of his holiday wrong and placed it at Christmas and New Year, but it is evident from Edward’s itinerary that he was in the Fens in autumn, not December and January.
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Winters of the era were often harsh: the
French Chronicle of London
says that in 1308/09 people walked across the frozen Thames from London to Southwark, and the city annalist vividly describes the Great Frost of the following year: ‘There was such cold and such masses and piles of ice on the Thames and everywhere else that the poor were overcome by excessive cold,’ adding that the river froze so solidly bonfires could be lit on it.
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According to the
Flores
, the summer of 1305 saw burning heat, drought and a subsequent epidemic of smallpox, which afflicted young and old, rich and poor. This unusually hot summer was followed by an extremely cold winter, with snow and ice lying on the ground from 15 December 1305 to 27 January 1306 and again from 13 February to 13 April, and the winters of 1312/13, 1313/14, 1316/17 and 1321/22 were also bitterly cold, with much snow and frost.
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After his holiday, Edward spent most of the next few months at the royal hunting lodge at Clipstone in Nottinghamshire with Queen Isabella, and probably sometime in November they conceived their second son John of Eltham, who was born on 15 August 1316. As with their elder son Edward of Windsor, there is no doubt that they were together at the right time to conceive John, and no reason at all to think that anyone other than Edward II was John’s father. While at Clipstone, Edward paid twenty marks to the London goldsmith Roger Frowyk for making a gold crown for him, with forty marks still owing, and gave thirty-five shillings to seventy Dominicans for ‘performing divine service at the anniversary of the lady the queen, mother of the present lord the king’.
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28 November 1315 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Eleanor of Castile, the mother Edward had barely known. Edward’s parents were much on his mind in the early winter of 1315: he gave five pounds to a Nicholas Percy for compiling a book about the life and times of his father Edward I for him.
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While at Clipstone, Edward sent his friend Sir William Montacute, with three other knights and thirty-six squires, to Barnard Castle in County Durham to rescue Maud, widow of Robert Clifford killed at Bannockburn. The unfortunate lady had been abducted by John le Ireys (‘the Irishman’), and shortly afterwards married Sir Robert Welle, one of her rescuers.
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It was probably in late 1315 that Roger Damory, the impecunious knight who fought bravely at Bannockburn, began to gain a firmer hold on the king’s affections. A series of grants to Damory, beginning in early December 1315 and continuing until 1317, track Edward’s growing feelings for him.
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It is possible to exaggerate the significance of this; the grants were by no means excessive, and in this part of his reign, Edward was for once using his powers of patronage sensibly and fairly. However, it would become clear a little later that Damory, a mere household knight, had gained far greater influence over the king than his rank and position warranted, and that once more, Edward was allowing his personal feelings to dictate his policy. And two other men grew close to Edward around this time, or perhaps the following year. One was Hugh Audley, who had joined Edward as a household knight at the time that Piers Gaveston went into his third exile, and who was a close relative of Roger Mortimer. The other was William Montacute, from an old noble family, whose father Simon had been an associate of Edward I. Whether these three men were Edward’s friends or something more cannot be known, but whatever the nature of their relationships with the king, the men described by the
Flores
as ‘worse than Piers’ had begun their rise to power and influence, and would in time do their best to wreck any chances of peace between the king and the earl of Lancaster and to disrupt the fragile stability of the middle years of Edward II’s reign.
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Parliament opened at Lincoln on 27 January 1316, and Edward announced through his spokesman William Inge that he wished proceedings to pass as speedily as possible, to ease the burden placed on the city by the presence of so many people demanding food. Unfortunately, his cousin the earl of Lancaster thwarted his wish, arriving in Lincoln on 10 February and finally deigning to attend parliament on the 12th, more than two weeks late. To Edward’s great annoyance, Lancaster was appointed his chief counsellor, finally gaining an official position despite having dominated the government for well over a year.
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However, he thereafter took little part in government, preferring to stay at his favourite residence of Pontefract, where Edward and his council were forced to communicate and negotiate with him as though he were an independent potentate, or another king.
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During the parliament, the king’s nephew-in-law Hugh Despenser gave more proof of his recklessness and his potential for violence by attacking a baron named John Ros in Lincoln Cathedral. Angry that Ros had tried to arrest Ingelram Berenger, one of his father’s knights, Despenser repeatedly punched him in the face until he drew blood, and ‘inflicted other outrages on him’, forcing Ros to draw his sword in self-defence. Despenser claimed, with amusing implausibility, that he had merely stretched out his hand to defend himself and accidentally hit Ros in the face with his fist, after Ros ‘heap[ed] outrageous insults on the same Hugh [and] taunted him with insolent words’, and rushed at him with a knife. Despenser was fined the massive sum of £10,000, which he never paid, and Edward pardoned him for the assault four years later.
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Despenser, desperate for his wife Eleanor’s share of her brother the earl of Gloucester’s inheritance, once more raised the subject of the dowager countess’s supposed pregnancy. He had been claiming for a few months – correctly, of course – that it was impossible for Maud de Clare to be pregnant by her husband, who had died at Bannockburn in June 1314. Two royal justices told Despenser that the Countess Maud ‘at the due time according to the course of nature, felt a living boy … and that although the time for the birth of that child, which nature allows to be delayed and obstructed for various reasons, is still delayed, this ought not to prejudice the aforesaid pregnancy’. The justices reprimanded Despenser and Eleanor for failing to apply to Chancery for a writ to have the countess’s belly inspected, and as they had not observed due process, their negligence would redound to their own shame and prejudice. This took place a full twenty months after Gloucester’s death; the legal system at its finest.

The king must have been delighted to learn that Queen Isabella was expecting another child, and on 22 February asked the dean and chapter of the church of St Mary in Lincoln to ‘celebrate divine service daily for the good estate of the king and Queen Isabella and Edward their first-born son’.
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The reference to ‘their first-born son’ probably indicates that Edward knew of Isabella’s pregnancy by then. On 27 March, he gave twenty pounds to John Fleg, horse dealer of London, for a bay horse ‘to carry the litter of the lady the queen’ during her pregnancy.
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He also paid the Lucca banking firm the Ballardi almost four pounds for pieces of silk and gold tissue, and flame-coloured silk, to make cushions for Isabella’s carriage so that she and her ladies could travel in greater comfort.
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The news of their child was a glimmer of happiness in an otherwise depressing world. The terrible famine still gripped England, and even in a hand-to-mouth economy where food shortages were common, nothing as bad as this had ever been seen before: ‘Such a mortality of men in England and Scotland through famine and pestilence as had not been heard of in our time,’ says
Lanercost
.
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The unsuccessful regulations concerning the price of foodstuffs were abolished at Lincoln.

And more bad news came from South Wales. The earl of Gloucester had been lord of Glamorgan, and after his death, royal administrators ruled the lordship on Edward’s behalf. One of them, Payn Turberville, was hated for his arrogance and tyranny. The famine raged as hard in South Wales as anywhere else, and the inhabitants, starving, beaten and extorted of money by Turberville, suffered terribly. Llywelyn Bren, lord of Senghenydd and Meisgyn, decided he had had enough. The earl of Gloucester had thought highly of Llywelyn and granted him high office, but Payn Turberville removed his authority and treated him with contempt, which led a furious Llywelyn to tell a room full of his supporters that ‘the day will come when I will put an end to the insolence of Payn and give him as good as he gives me’. Turberville promptly denounced him to Edward for sedition, and the king summoned Llywelyn to court to explain himself. Llywelyn went cautiously, not sure of the reception he would get from the unpredictable Edward, intending to gloss over his insults to Turberville if he possibly could and, more importantly, to inform the king of his Welsh subjects’ suffering. His worst fears came true: Edward refused to meet him, and promised that if Bren had truly uttered such things against a royal official, he would be hanged. He ordered Bren to appear at the Lincoln parliament to defend his actions.
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Bren had no intention of going to Lincoln when it would probably result in his swinging at the end of a rope. He took the only other option open to him and prepared for war, and on 26 January 1316 attacked the great stronghold of Caerphilly, which had been built by the earl of Gloucester’s father in the 1270s. The news took a few days to travel the more than 200 miles from Caerphilly to Lincoln, and when Edward finally heard on 7 February, he immediately sent men to capture Bren and nip his rebellion in the bud, exclaiming, ‘Go quickly, and pursue this traitor, lest from delay worse befall us and all Wales rise against us.’
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Bren was quickly overcome by the force sent by the king and submitted to the earl of Hereford, who sent him to Edward. Hereford, impressed with Bren’s bearing and courage, asked the king to show him leniency, and Edward, perhaps regretting his earlier outburst, sent Bren, his wife, his five sons, his adopted son, and five others ‘under safe custody at the king’s expense’ to the Tower. They were granted three pence a day for their maintenance (Bren and his wife) or two pence (the others).
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By June 1317, only Bren and two of his sons are mentioned as prisoners in the Tower, the others presumably having been released.
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The campaign against Llywelyn Bren was of short duration, but expensive; William Montacute alone took 150 men-at-arms and 2,000 footmen, at Edward’s expense, and the royal treasury was still in a parlous state.
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Trouble also broke out in North Wales, where Edward’s chamberlain John Charlton and his wife Hawise Gadarn had a long-running feud with her uncle Gruffydd de la Pole over the lordship of Powys. In March 1316, Edward told Chancery, ‘If this riot be not hastily quenched much greater evil may come in other parts of Wales,’ and sent his steward John Cromwell to settle the row.
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The last thing he wanted was a widespread uprising in the land of his birth, which, fortunately, never happened. On 24 April, the day before his thirty-second birthday, Edward asked the Dominicans of Toulouse to pray for him, perhaps in the belief that he and his realm needed all the intervention he could get.
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It was fairly common for Edward to request the prayers of Dominicans in other countries for himself and his family: a year later, he asked the chapter of Pamplona to say prayers ‘for the good estate’ of himself, Queen Isabella and their children, and in later years, made the same request of the Dominicans of Marseilles, Paris, Rouen, Citeaux, Florence, Venice, Barcelona and Vienna.
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Edward also gave twenty pounds to the Dominicans of Pamplona to pay for three days’ entertainment, one day for himself, one for Isabella, and one for their son Edward.
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The conflict with Scotland dragged on in the summer of 1316; the Scots invaded England as far south as Richmond in Yorkshire and the Furness peninsula in Lancashire, which they burnt and plundered.
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