Edward II: The Unconventional King (20 page)

Edward II spent the whole of February and March and part of April 1317 at his palace of Clarendon near Salisbury in Wiltshire, where he presided over a meeting of his great council. Possibly, the Clarendon meeting was the location where Edward and some of his courtiers planned to abduct Alice de Lacy, as her husband Thomas of Lancaster would later claim. Alice, when staying at her manor of Canford in Dorset in early May 1317, was snatched by Richard Martin, a household knight of the earl of Surrey, who took her to Surrey’s castle of Reigate in Sussex.
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Presumably Surrey, who was otherwise engaged with Maud Nerford, had no romantic inclinations towards the countess, although precisely what his motives were in abducting Alice remain unknown. It is possible that the powerful Lancaster had been instrumental in Surrey’s failure to annul his marriage and in persuading the bishop of Chichester to excommunicate him, and that Surrey, whom the
Flores
calls ‘one of the worst sycophants’, saw a chance for revenge. If so, antagonising the powerful Lancaster was foolish in the extreme. The
Flores
writes that the abduction came about as the result of ‘the violent boiling anger of the king’, and that Edward convened a malicious assembly to cook up a deceitful plot against Lancaster, jealous of his great wisdom and integrity.
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The
Vita
, better informed and considerably less hysterical than the
Flores
, reports without comment Lancaster’s belief that Edward’s friends plotted the abduction.
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In April 1317, Edward turned his attention to the vital question of his sons’ future marriages, and received permission from John XXII to marry his children, now aged four and a half and eight months, to relatives in the fourth degree of consanguinity – that is, people with whom they shared a set of great-great-grandparents. The licence also applied to any future children he might have.
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That month Edward finally bowed to the inevitable, stopped pretending that the dowager countess of Gloucester was pregnant nearly three years after her husband’s death, and ordered the partition of the earl of Gloucester’s lands among his three sisters.
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The two widowed sisters, Margaret and Elizabeth, would become great landowners, and it was important for Edward to marry them to men he trusted, as their husbands would wield an enormous amount of influence. He saw a chance to promote his friends Roger Damory and Hugh Audley even further. Damory was now the supreme influence at the English court, rich and powerful thanks to Edward’s favour.
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The grants to him which had begun in late 1315 continued unabated throughout 1317, and his influence over Edward is obvious in the grants and favours issued at his request. Edward gave Damory many splendid presents, including a silver-gilt chalice ‘with the cross engraved in the foot and six enamelled knots in the centre’, an altar ‘of black stone ornamented in the circumference with silver and gilded’, an ivory image of the Virgin and Child, and a magnificent cross of ivory and cedar ‘painted with four images standing on each side … and round the base six images of ivory, painted, standing in tabernacles’.
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Hugh Audley was also in favour, though not nearly to the same extent as Damory. In June 1315, Edward ordered the chancellor to complete some of Audley’s business as soon as possible, so that Audley ‘can return to us as quickly as we have instructed him to do’.
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Audley swore an oath sometime in 1317 that he would ‘aid him [Edward] in all things throughout his whole life, and in no wise depart from him come what might, on pain of forfeiture of all his lands’, an oath he broke in 1321 after he and Damory became the king’s enemies.
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Audley owned war horses called Grisel le Kyng and Ferant de Roma; Grisel’s name implies that the horse had been a gift to Audley from Edward.
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And finally, William Montacute was also a significant man at court by 1317: as Edward’s steward, he held an important position close to the king, and commanded the royal cavalry.
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Edward’s niece, Joan of Acre’s third daughter Elizabeth de Burgh (née de Clare), gave birth to her daughter Isabella Verdon, probably named after the queen, at Amesbury Priory on or shortly before 21 March 1317. This was eight months after the death of Elizabeth’s second husband Theobald Verdon, who had abducted her from Bristol Castle in early 1316 and forcibly married her. Edward sent a silver-gilt cup with stand and cover worth a pound and ten shillings as a christening gift for his latest great-niece.
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He was determined to marry Roger Damory to Elizabeth and bring him into the royal family, as he had done with Piers Gaveston, and sent his chamberlain John Charlton to Elizabeth with a letter to this effect even before Theobald Verdon’s funeral in September 1316. Using flattery in a transparent attempt to persuade her to do his bidding, he described her as his favourite niece, which was a lie; he rarely showed her any kindness or support, in stark contrast to her older sisters Eleanor and Margaret and their cousin Joan of Bar.
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In February or March 1317, when Elizabeth was heavily pregnant, Edward travelled the 10 miles from Clarendon to Amesbury, taking Damory with him, to put more pressure on her to marry his friend.
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Damory was far beneath Elizabeth by birth and status; she was a king’s granddaughter and would have become countess of Ulster if her first husband John de Burgh had lived longer, while he was merely the younger son of an obscure knight. However, she agreed to marry him. Realistically, she had little choice.

Edward also arranged the marriage of another niece to another friend, and on 28 April 1317 at Windsor Castle, attended the wedding of Piers Gaveston’s widow Margaret to Hugh Audley. On the same day, William Montacute’s eldest son John married Joan Verdon, stepdaughter of Margaret’s sister Elizabeth de Burgh and one of the four co-heiresses of her father Theobald; another advantageous marriage arranged by the king for one of his friends. Audley and Margaret’s wedding was a lavish affair, and Edward gave three pounds in coins to be thrown over the heads of the bride and groom – generous though this was, it was less than half the amount he had provided for the same purpose at Margaret’s wedding to Piers Gaveston. He also gave half a mark (eight shillings and six pence) in oblations, distributed in his presence in the chapel in Windsor park.
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Roger Damory married Elizabeth around the same time; Edward stayed at Windsor from 23 April to 16 May 1317, and presumably attended the wedding there. The date is not recorded but the couple had married by 3 May.
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Edward took the homage of Hugh Despenser, Hugh Audley and Roger Damory for the lands they would now control in right of their wives, although it would take another six months before the lands were partitioned.
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While at Windsor, Edward paid half a mark to his goldsmith Walter de Spalding ‘for making a silver image, weighing ten marks, for the use of the lord king’.
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Perhaps to postpone married life with Damory, Elizabeth – who continued to use her first husband’s name, de Burgh, throughout both her subsequent marriages – went on pilgrimage to Canterbury with her aunt Mary the nun and their young cousin Isabella, one of the six daughters of the earl of Lancaster’s brother Henry and also a nun at Amesbury Priory. Edward paid all their expenses.
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William Montacute’s newly married son John died that summer, still in his teens, and his widow Joan Verdon married again in February 1318 – a wife for the second time at fourteen and a half.
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John Montacute was buried in the cathedral church at Lincoln on 14 August 1317, his funeral conducted with unusual ceremony: Edward paid forty clerks to pray for his soul, and thirteen widows to watch over his body. He arrived at Lincoln three days after the funeral, and gave generous alms at the Masses celebrated in the cathedral for the repose of John’s soul.
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Perhaps he felt sorrow that John had died while still a teenager and just married, or perhaps this is proof of his affection for John’s father William. John’s younger brother, also William, later became the closest friend and confidant of Edward’s son Edward III, who made him earl of Salisbury.

It was probably Hugh Audley and Roger Damory’s marriages to the most eligible women in England that prompted one of Edward’s household knights to stage a theatrical protest against the king’s promotion of new favourites in May 1317. As Edward dined at Westminster Hall at Pentecost, a woman entered, dressed as a stage-player – which must have pleased Edward, who loved actors – and riding a magnificently caparisoned horse. She rode around the hall, then turned to Edward on the dais, placed a letter in front of him, and rode out. Edward, amused, began to read the letter, but soon stopped, horrified; it was an indictment of the favouritism he showed his friends.
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Although Edward released the woman and, impressed with the integrity of his household knight who had written the letter, gave him ‘abundant gifts’, he failed to take the sage advice. In 1317 and 1318, the pernicious influence of Edward’s favourites grew ever stronger, and unknown to anyone, the worst of them all, the man who would one day bring about the king’s downfall, waited in the wings for his opportunity.

The year 1317 saw a further deterioration in the already dreadful relations between Edward II and the earl of Lancaster, and the king foolishly allowed his friends Roger Damory, Hugh Audley and William Montacute to encourage him in his hatred and distrust of his cousin. At a council meeting at Clarendon in early 1317, they openly attacked him, calling him a traitor.
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Lancaster sent messengers to the king, claiming that ‘he fears [their] deadly stratagems’ and complaining that ‘they have already carried off the earl’s wife to his disgrace and shame’.
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Lancaster asked Edward to expel the earl of Surrey, Damory, Audley and Montacute from court, and demanded ‘such satisfaction as he can get for the wrong done to him’.
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He wrote to Edward to complain that his companions were ‘not suitable to stay beside you or in your service … but you have held them dearer than they ever were before … every day you give them of your substance, so that little or nothing remains to you’.
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Pope John XXII was also concerned about his extravagance and ability to pick the wrong friends, and wrote to the king frequently in 1317 and 1318 suggesting that he reduce his household expenses, hear divine offices with attention and reverence, and ‘remove those friends whose youth and imprudence injure the affairs of the realm’.
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Edward, as usual, ignored this sound advice, and responded to Lancaster, abruptly and impatiently, ‘I will avenge the despite done to the earl when I can; I refuse to expel my household; for the abduction of his wife let him seek a remedy in law only.’
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Damory, Audley and Montacute had no intention of allowing Lancaster to diminish their vast influence over Edward, and selfishly counselled the king to remain hostile to his cousin. The
Flores
calls them ‘men who stir up discord and many problems for the kingdom … supporting his [Edward’s] arrogance and lawless designs’.
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The three men may have had more sinister motives for their plots and schemes against Lancaster: if they managed to engineer his downfall on the grounds of treason, his lands would be forfeit to the Crown, and it is possible that they hoped to persuade Edward to share them out among themselves.
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Lancaster therefore had good reason to fear the royal favourites and to distrust the king, and in the summer and autumn of 1317, civil war threatened to break out.
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Edward asked his household and friends for advice about his hated cousin: ‘You see how the earl of Lancaster has not come to parliament. You see how he scorns to obey our commands. How does it seem to you?’ Some, no doubt Damory, Audley and Montacute among them, replied, ‘Let the king pursue and take his despiser, and when he is taken put him in prison or exile him.’ Other, wiser heads disagreed.
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Edward, who had not forgotten his vow to avenge Gaveston’s death on Lancaster, was inclined to agree with those who urged him to pursue the earl. Still, in the interests of trying to preserve the fragile peace, he summoned a council meeting to Westminster for 15 April 1317, inviting Lancaster and his confidant, Robert Holland. However, the two men failed to turn up, and Edward himself arrived three days late. He did send envoys to Lancaster, but to no avail.
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Edward or his advisers made another attempt to meet and come to terms with Lancaster, and he and members of Edward’s council were summoned to a meeting to begin at Nottingham in July 1317. Roger Damory, Hugh Audley and William Montacute were not invited, but attended anyway. Edward arrived at Nottingham on 16 July and stayed there for three weeks, but once again, Lancaster failed to turn up. Edward sent him a letter remonstrating with him for holding private assemblies and for employing an unusual number of armed retainers, ‘whence the people are considerably frightened’.
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Lancaster refused to meet Edward unless Damory, Audley, Montacute and the earl of Surrey left court, and Edward refused once again to send them away. It seemed that the two men would never be reconciled. Lancaster spent most of his time at his favourite residence of Pontefract and was by now almost completely isolated politically, but far too powerful for Edward to ignore, thanks to his vast wealth and his five earldoms; ‘By the size of his patrimony you may assess his influence,’ comments the
Vita
.
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Most of the magnates were, in 1317 and 1318, co-operating loyally with Edward, and Lancaster was very much a political outsider, followed only by some of the northern barons. For all Edward’s faults and excessive favour to his friends, he had proved himself skilled over the previous years at attracting, and maintaining, the support of a vast majority of his magnates.