Edward II: The Unconventional King (19 page)

That spring, Edward received the sad news that his thirty-three-year-old sister Elizabeth, countess of Hereford, had died in childbirth on 5 May, and that her daughter Isabel, her tenth child, had also died. Elizabeth was only twenty months Edward’s senior, and they had been close in childhood.
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Edward got on well with his sisters, as he had with his stepmother Marguerite before she opposed Piers Gaveston, and there is no reason to think that he did not like women or enjoy their company. In 1305, when his father banished him from his presence, drastically reduced his income and took away most of his household, Edward’s sisters came to his rescue. Joan of Acre – mother of the de Clare siblings, and twelve years Edward’s senior – invited him to stay with her and lent him her seal so that he could continue to order goods, and Mary also invited him to stay. Elizabeth had previously been married to Count John I of Holland, but he died childless in November 1299, at the age of only fifteen. Edward spent most of the rest of Elizabeth’s life chasing up the dower to which she was entitled, including the town of Dordrecht, from John’s cousin and successor John II and John II’s son William III, counts of Hainault and Holland.
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Of Edward’s eleven or more sisters, only two, Margaret and Mary, remained alive. Margaret, the widowed duchess of Brabant, was nine years older than Edward and forty-one in 1316. She is the most obscure of his sisters who survived into adulthood, and seems never to have visited England after 1308, when she attended her brother’s coronation. The other sister, Mary, five years Edward’s senior, was a nun with no vocation. She had a private room, a luxurious bed, servants and hunting dogs at Amesbury Priory, Edward paid her gambling debts and sent her expensive gifts, and she often visited his court. Sometime in 1316, he spent over twenty-six pounds on fifteen pieces of tapestry for Mary to take back to Amesbury after one of her many visits to him, and the two were clearly deeply fond of each other.
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Edward’s only other remaining siblings were his two young half-brothers. The elder, Thomas, earl of Norfolk, was fifteen in early 1316, and would grow up to be a man whose achievements fell some way short of modest. Edmund was only fourteen months younger than his brother, but more than seventeen years younger than Edward. He still had no title, but Edward granted him lands, castles and manors for his sustenance.
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On 17 May 1316, Edward asked his brother-in-law Louis X of France and Navarre to strive to continue their friendly relationship. He sent another letter in the same vein to Louis’s wife Clemence of Hungary, whom his clerk wrongly addressed as ‘Queen Elizabeth’.
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Louis died less than three weeks later on 5 June at the age of only twenty-six, supposedly from drinking chilled wine after a vigorous game of
jeu
de paume
, an early form of tennis. He had married Clemence on 19 August 1315, five days after the death, in decidedly suspicious circumstances, of his adulterous first wife Marguerite of Burgundy. Louis left Clemence pregnant, and she gave birth on 15 November 1316 to a son who became king of France as soon as he took his first breath: John I, the Posthumous. The baby king died only five days later, and Queen Isabella’s second brother the count of Poitiers succeeded as Philip V. Philip and Edward seem to have been on reasonably good terms, on a personal level at least, if not as kings: in 1316, the French king sent his brother-in-law bunches of new grapes, and a year later, a box of rose sugar.
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Edward gave a generous gift of twenty marks on 7 August 1316 to the messenger who brought him the news that Philip’s wife Joan of Burgundy had borne a son, Louis, on 24 June.
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The boy lived for little more than six months, and Philip was, like his brothers, destined to die with no surviving son.

Edward spent most of June and July 1316 at Westminster, and on 23 July, he and a very pregnant Isabella travelled to Eltham Palace in Kent, which he had granted her in 1311. Three days later, he left her there and headed north, for a campaign against the Scots which he later cancelled. On his way from Kent to York, Edward touched and blessed 135 people suffering from scrofula, or the ‘king’s evil’, and in the period between mid-August and the end of November performed the same service for another seventy-nine.
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Edward blessed fewer people with scrofula than his father had; Edward I touched almost 1,000 sick in 1299/1300, for example.
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Edward II did, however, once give eighty pence to a Maud of Newark, who had come to court seeking a cure from him.
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He arrived in York on 16 August, accompanied by his niece Margaret Gaveston, and stayed in the convent of the Franciscans (Greyfriars, or Friars Minor) near the River Ouse. He stayed there for five weeks and gave the Franciscans ten pounds for the expenses of himself and his household, a sum which only covered a fraction of them.
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Sometime in August he met his cousin the earl of Lancaster in York, and the two men had a furious row, probably because of Edward’s ongoing and ever-increasing reluctance to accept the Ordinances of 1311, to which Lancaster was dedicated.
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On 7 August 1316, the cardinals at Avignon finally chose a new pope, after a delay of more than two years: Jacques Duèse, cardinal-bishop of Porto and a Gascon as Clement V had also been, who chose the name John XXII. Edward sent John gifts worth £1,604, including a cope ‘embroidered and studded with large white pearls’, several golden ewers, thirteen golden salt cellars, numerous golden dishes and bowls, a golden basin and a golden chalice. He also paid £300 for an incense boat, a ewer and a ‘gold buckle set with diverse pearls and other precious stones’ to be sent in Queen Isabella’s name, and 100 marks for another cope embroidered by Roesia, wife of London merchant John de Bureford, also sent in the queen’s name.
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The gifts were intended, at least in part, as a bribe to encourage the new pope to treat Edward favourably in his disputes with Scotland. Around this time, Edward demonstrated his great generosity by giving a gift of £500 to Isabella’s former nurse Theophania de Saint Pierre, lady of Brignancourt.
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Isabella, now twenty or twenty-one, gave birth to their second son on 15 August 1316, thus ensuring that Edward now had the proverbial heir and spare. It was fairly conventional at the time for a second son to be named after his maternal grandfather, Philip in this case, but the name John was chosen, probably in honour of John XXII.
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Edward gave £100 to Isabella’s steward who rode the 230 miles from Eltham to York to bring him the happy news, and
Trokelowe
comments on his joy at the birth of his son.
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He had heard the news by 24 August, on which date he asked the Dominicans of York to say prayers for himself, Isabella, their son Edward of Windsor, ‘and John of Eltham our youngest son, especially on account of John’.
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Edward had a piece of Turkey cloth and a piece of cloth of gold delivered to Eltham to cover the font in the chapel during John’s baptism, and ordered Isabella’s tailor to make her a robe from five pieces of white velvet for her churching ceremony.

At the end of July, Isabella sent her messenger Godyn Hautayn with letters to the bishop of Norwich and her uncle the earl of Lancaster, asking them to stand sponsor to her soon-to-be-born child, but Lancaster failed to show up for the ceremony, a gross insult.
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This is probably because the already tense relationship between Edward and Lancaster had deteriorated still further, and the
Flores
claims that Edward armed himself against his cousin.
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Whether that is true or not, Edward was concerned enough about Lancaster’s hostility to summon Isabella to him in York with all speed, fearing for her safety. The queen travelled very fast: on 22 September she was at Buntingford in Hertfordshire, 175 miles from York, and must have been reunited with Edward soon after the 27th, as on that date, the king paid her messenger a pound for informing him of the queen’s imminent arrival.
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It is possible that Edward took a malicious pleasure in the fact that he now had two healthy sons, while his overweening cousin Lancaster, in his late thirties, had no legitimate children and was not likely to have any. He and his wife Alice de Lacy detested each other and lived apart, while Lancaster ‘defouled a great multitude of women and of noble wenches’ and fathered at least two illegitimate sons.
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The king and queen spent most of October and November 1316 in and around York, and the king’s minstrel ‘King’ Robert came to him for help, evidently because he was ill: Edward gave him a gift of seventy shillings, and another one of forty shillings a few months later, to cover his expenses.
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On 1 November, the king gave five pounds to a violist named Robert Daverouns, sent to him by his second cousin Philip, king of Albania, prince of Achaea and Taranto, despot of Epirus and titular emperor of Constantinople.
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Edward also made some significant appointments: his friend William Montacute became steward of his household, replacing John Cromwell.
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Roger Mortimer became lieutenant of Ireland, the position formerly held by Piers Gaveston, while his uncle Roger Mortimer of Chirk was reappointed justiciar of North Wales.
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And the earl of Arundel, who had drawn closer to Edward since Gaveston’s death – although he hadn’t fought at Bannockburn – became captain of the king’s forces between the River Trent and the Scottish town of Roxburgh.
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Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, was almost exactly a year younger than the king, and half-Italian through his mother Alesia, daughter of Tomasso I, marquis of Saluzzo. His great-grandmother Beatrice of Savoy had been queen of Sicily, and his uncle Filippo was governor of Sardinia. He had married Alice, sister of John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, in 1306, having initially rejected her two years before.
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John Langton, bishop of Chichester, finally excommunicated the earl of Surrey in 1316 for abandoning his wife and keeping a mistress, which the bishop of Norwich had tried to do in 1313 before Edward II stepped in to prevent him. Grateful to Surrey for his support, Edward asked the bishop to defer the sentence, though he added piously, ‘The king hopes that the earl will obey the orders of the Church.’
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Surrey, now thirty, had several children with his mistress Maud Nerford, and decided to try to annul his unhappy marriage to Edward’s niece Joan of Bar in order to marry Maud instead and make their children his heirs. Maud began legal action against Joan, who was cited while in Queen Isabella’s presence in the lower chapel of Westminster Palace.
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Edward did his best to steer the difficult course between loyalty to his niece and loyalty to a steadfast, politically useful ally. In August 1316, he allowed Surrey to surrender his lands to him, and granted them back with reversion to John and Thomas, two of his sons with Maud – meaning that he accepted Surrey’s illegitimate children as the earl’s heirs.
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On the other hand, Edward paid all Joan’s legal costs, and appointed his clerk Aymon de Juvenzano ‘to prosecute in the Arches at London, and elsewhere in England’ on his niece’s behalf from July to November 1316. In November Joan left to go abroad, probably to stay with her brother Edouard, count of Bar in eastern France, and Edward gave her more than £166 to pay for the trip, having also paid her living expenses at the Tower of London for some years.
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In late December 1316, Edward sent an embassy to Pope John XXII, including Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke. In Pembroke’s absence, Edward offered personally to act as his attorney, a very unusual act and proof of his great affection for and trust in his cousin – although, given the king’s general ineptitude, probably something of a mixed blessing for the earl.
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Edward excused himself shortly before Christmas from attending his brother-in-law Philip V’s coronation, to be held on 9 January 1317, in an attempt to avoid having to pay homage for his French lands in Gascony and Ponthieu.
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This was to no avail: on 12 January, Philip invited Edward to present himself at Amiens for the purpose, though Edward managed to put off this annoying duty for several more years.
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He spent Christmas Day 1316 at Nottingham with Queen Isabella, though whether their sons Edward and John were with them is uncertain. Edward of Windsor, the four-year-old earl of Chester, lived at the centre of a great household at Wallingford Castle – which, significantly, had formerly belonged to Piers Gaveston – while little John was cared for by his nurse Matilda Pyrie, in his brother’s household.
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The court spent New Year 1317 at Clipstone, and a knight named William de la Beche played ‘King of the Bean’ – the person lucky enough to find the bean the cooks had added to the food, which gave him the right to preside over the seasonal festivities. Edward gave Beche ‘a silver-gilt chased basin, with ewer to match’, worth seven pounds, thirteen shillings and ten pence, on the Feast of the Circumcision, 1 January 1317.
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He also gave six shillings and eight pence to John, son of Alan of Scrooby, who officiated as boy-bishop in his chapel on St Nicholas’s Day, 6 December, and ten shillings to the unnamed child who acted as boy-bishop in his presence at St Mary’s Church in Nottingham on 28 December, the Feast of the Holy Innocents.
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On 1 January 1317, Pope John XXII confirmed a two-year truce between Edward and Robert Bruce, calling Edward ‘our dearest son in Christ, Edward, illustrious king of England’, and Bruce ‘our beloved son, the noble man, Robert de Bruce, holding himself king of Scotland’. On 17 March, John exhorted Edward to make peace with Bruce, and appointed two cardinals to travel to England and negotiate between the two kings.
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However, the pope soon changed his tune, possibly because the embassy led by the earl of Pembroke had talked him round to Edward’s point of view: eleven days later, he excommunicated Robert and Edward Bruce, and all those who were hostile to Edward II or invaded his kingdom. This time, John addressed Robert Bruce by his former title of earl of Carrick, and said he was ‘unjustly pretending to occupy the throne of Scotland’.
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In January, Edward appointed his cousin James of Spain as one of the Chamberlains of the Exchequer of the Receipt.
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James was said to be illegitimate and was the nephew of Eleanor of Castile, presumably the son of one of her many brothers, although which one is uncertain.
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Edward’s Castilian uncles included Sancho, elected archbishop of Toledo at the age of eighteen; Felipe, who became archbishop of Seville also at eighteen and who gave up his ecclesiastical career to marry the Norwegian woman betrothed to one of his brothers; and the colourful Enrique, who was at various times a mercenary in North Africa, a senator of Rome and the regent of Castile, who spent thirty years in a Naples gaol and four in England at Henry III’s expense after he rebelled against his brother Alfonso X and was exiled from Castile. Alfonso X himself was known as
el Sabio
or the Wise, and was a well-known writer, musician, lawmaker and astrologer; the Alphonsus crater of the moon is named after him. Alfonso knighted Edward II’s father the future Edward I in 1254, when Edward was fifteen, just before he married Alfonso’s half-sister Leonor.