Edward II: The Unconventional King (22 page)

Lancaster must have been dismayed on 15 November 1317 when the English, Welsh and Irish lands of the late earl of Gloucester were finally partitioned, nearly three and a half years after his death at Bannockburn, among his three sisters and their husbands. Hugh and Eleanor Despenser, who had fought so hard for their inheritance, now held lands worth £1,415 a year, Hugh and Margaret Audley lands worth £1,292, and Roger and Elizabeth Damory £1,287.
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Although they were nowhere near the same league as Lancaster, who had a gross annual income of £11,000, this wealth catapulted all three men to the forefront of the nobility. Hugh Despenser had still not reached the lofty position he would later occupy as Edward’s favourite – Edward seems barely to have noticed him before 1318 – but as co-owner of the de Clare inheritance and the new lord of Glamorgan, he had become far more significant than previously. Lancaster’s nemesis Damory, now the king’s nephew-in-law, rich in his own right and not merely dependent on Edward’s favour, with vast influence over the king, had become a much more powerful enemy. Lancaster’s fear and hatred of him knew no bounds: the following July, he accused Damory of trying to murder him, and also claimed that he had intercepted letters at Pontefract, written by Edward and sent to Scotland, inviting the Scots to help kill the earl.
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The earl of Lancaster was not the only man to fear the malign influence of the men who surrounded Edward. By late November 1317, a group of barons and prelates, sick of the dreadful relations between Edward and Lancaster and the constant political instability it engendered, had formed themselves into a loose coalition known to early twentieth-century historians as the ‘Middle Party’. The nucleus of the ‘party’ – an anachronistic term for the early fourteenth century – was the earl of Pembroke and Bartholomew Badlesmere, and also included the earl of Hereford, the archbishops of Canterbury and Dublin, and the bishops of Norwich and Winchester. The group was loyal to the king and determined to improve the relations between himself and Lancaster. In order to achieve this, they needed to limit the harmful and self-serving influence his friends, especially Roger Damory, held over him. To this end, the earl of Pembroke and Bartholomew Badlesmere signed an indenture with Damory on 24 November 1317, wherein the favourite promised that he would do his best to prevent Edward from taking action prejudicial to himself or his kingdom – a telling comment which demonstrates what little faith Pembroke and Badlesmere had in Edward – and if he were unable to dissuade him, would inform Pembroke and Badlesmere as soon as possible so that the three of them together could talk Edward out of whatever foolishness he might be planning. This was a sensible idea; the
Flores
, fairly, criticises Edward for making decisions ‘in secret in his chamber, with his intimates’, and complains that he broke his word, ‘forgetting in the morning what he had said in the evening’.
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This indenture may be unique, or it may be one of a series which Pembroke and Badlesmere signed around this time with Edward’s friends, and the only one which happens to survive.
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On 3 November 1317, Edward appointed another friend and ally as the new steward of Gascony: his rather extraordinary choice was Antonio di Pessagno, a merchant of Genoa.
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Pessagno, whose enormous wealth enabled him to make frequent loans to Edward, enjoyed a great deal of influence at the English court. In 1313, Biagio Aldobrandini of the banking firm the Frescobaldi wrote to his colleagues that Pessagno’s influence equalled Piers Gaveston’s: ‘He is now in such a condition that he fears nobody, and what he wants is made in the court … and the court is led according to his judgement.’
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A grateful Pessagno gave the king a gift of two camels.
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Edward had owned a camel as a child, which he kept in the stables at Langley, and his father brought a lion and a lynx back to England in 1289, when he was five.
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In the early 1300s, Edward took a lion with him on his travels around the country, with its own cart, a collar, a silver chain and a keeper called Adam of Lichfield.
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He kept a lion and a leopard in the Tower of London throughout his reign, allowing each animal six pence a day for sustenance, while Peter Fabre of Montpellier, ‘keeper of the king’s lion and leopard’, received only one and a half pence a day in wages.
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Both the lion and the leopard ate a quarter of mutton daily, even during the Great Famine, while six pence a day was more than most people in the country earned. Edward loved animals: he kept and bred greyhounds, bought the stud-farm of the late earl of Surrey in 1304, and frequently sent men to Spain to purchase horses for him. In the first year of his reign alone, he spent almost £1,200 buying horses.
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Edward and Queen Isabella spent Christmas 1317 at Westminster, where Edward spent one pound, thirteen shillings and six pence on a ‘great wooden table’ to be placed in the palace hall, and also paid thirty pounds to Thomas de Hebenhith, mercer of London, for ‘a great hanging of wool, woven with figures of the king and earls on it’. By New Year, someone had realised that constantly taking the hanging up and down was damaging it, so Edward paid Thomas de Verlay six shillings and three pence to make and sew a border of green cloth around it.
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The court spent New Year at Windsor, where Edward gave silver-gilt goblets worth seven pounds each to twenty-five knights, including Robert Umfraville, earl of Angus, who had been captured after Bannockburn.
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This year, it was the turn of Thomas de Weston, a squire of Edward’s household, to act as King of the Bean, and he received ‘a silver-gilt basin with stand and cover, and a silver-gilt pitcher to match’ from the king.
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Edward gave rings to his nieces Margaret and Elizabeth and his sons Edward and John, although the latter was only sixteen months old. His five-year-old great-niece Joan Gaveston, Piers’ daughter, received a gold ring with two emeralds and three pearls, worth thirty-two shillings, and another gold ring with six emeralds, worth twenty marks, went to his sister Mary, the nun. Queen Isabella’s gift from her husband was an enamelled silver-gilt bowl, with foot and cover, worth seventeen pounds.
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Edward received a New Year gift of a sort from Pope John XXII, who on 29 December once more excommunicated ‘all those who invade the realm of England or disturb its peace’.
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By New Year 1318, Isabella had probably passed the first trimester of pregnancy, and it is likely that the king knew she was expecting their third child. Now twenty-two, Isabella had so far played little discernible role in English politics, although she had by the mid-1320s gained a reputation as a mediator between the king and his barons. Isabella’s attitude towards Roger Damory and her husband’s other male favourites is a matter for conjecture, although at some point she gave Damory a number of splendid gifts for his chapel, including a chasuble of red cloth ‘sprinkled with diverse flowers of Indian colour’, and there is no evidence of any hostility towards them on her part.
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In July 1317, Edward gave his wife the county of Cornwall, formerly Piers Gaveston’s, and in March 1318 granted her his county of Ponthieu for life.
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And Isabella became even richer after 14 February 1318, when her aunt and Edward’s stepmother Queen Marguerite died at her castle of Marlborough in Wiltshire, in her late thirties, and the dower lands she had held passed by right to Isabella.
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Edward’s reaction to Marguerite’s death is not recorded. He had been close to her before his accession, but possibly had never forgiven her for her opposition to Piers Gaveston in 1308. He appointed Marguerite’s sons, his teenage half-brothers Thomas and Edmund, as the executors of her will.
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On 8 March, Edward sent two pieces of Lucca cloth to lie over Marguerite’s body at Marlborough, and sent six more pieces after it was moved to London shortly afterwards. He visited his stepmother’s remains at St Mary’s church in Southwark on 14 March, and attended her funeral at the Greyfriars church the following day, purchasing six pieces of Lucca cloth for himself and two pieces each for his sister Mary and Roger Damory.
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After Marguerite’s funeral, Edward travelled via Bow, Thundersley and Cressing to Clare Castle in Suffolk, where he spent 23–27 March 1318 with Roger Damory and his wife, Edward’s niece Elizabeth, who was about seven months pregnant. Shortly before 18 May, she gave birth to a daughter, also Elizabeth, who would be Damory’s only legitimate child and therefore his heir. Edward gave Damory’s valet the huge sum of twenty pounds for bringing him news of the birth, an enormous increase on the price of the silver cup he had sent to little Elizabeth’s half-sister Isabella Verdon the year before, although both girls were his great-nieces – probably evidence of his strong feelings for Roger Damory.
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The Damorys had a household of at least fifty people, and their extant accounts of 1319 provide a fascinating insight into what they ate and drank in a day: forty gallons of ale and eight of wine, a hundred and fifty eggs, two ducks, six hens, thirteen pullets, half a carcass of salt beef, half a pig, a quantity of mutton, forty herrings, two salt stockfish, two ling, salmon, whiting and eels.
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On 18 March 1318, Edward sent more envoys, led by his good friend and ally William Melton, archbishop of York, to Scotland to arrange a peace treaty with Robert Bruce. A year later, he belatedly remembered to obtain the pope’s permission to negotiate with an excommunicate.
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Unfortunately for him, Robert Bruce finally managed to take the vital port of Berwick-on-Tweed on 2 April, after several unsuccessful attempts, although the castle, under the command of Sir Roger Horsley, held out until July.
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The treachery of the Englishman Peter Spalding, who was responsible for a section of the town wall and whom the Scots ‘bribed by a great sum of money … and the promise of land’, contributed in large part to James Douglas’s success.
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Edward, declaring himself ‘justly incensed’ at the ‘carelessness’ of the burgesses of Berwick, ordered their goods and chattels to be seized.
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It was vital for Edward to retake Berwick, and on 10 June he summoned the earl of Lancaster and many others to muster against the Scots.
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However, because of the endless conflict with Lancaster, the expedition did not take place until the following year, allowing Robert Bruce ample time to strengthen the town fortifications and make it much harder for Edward to retake. In May 1318, Scottish forces invaded Yorkshire, drove off many cattle, and ‘made men and women captives, making the poor folks drive the cattle, carrying them off to Scotland without any opposition’.
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The year 1318 was not, however, an unqualified success for the Bruces: the pope excommunicated Robert again on 28 June, and Robert’s brother Edward, high king of Ireland, was killed at the battle of Faughart in October.
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The
Vita Edwardi Secundi
in 1318 recalls the story of the biblical king Nebuchadnezzar, who ‘began to flourish and the nations and kingdoms to bow down to him’ only in the twelfth year of his reign, and goes on to say that ‘neither has our King Edward who has reigned eleven years and more, done anything that ought to be preached in the market place or upon the house-tops’.
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In late April, Edward turned his attention to Langley Priory, which he had founded in 1308 and where he had buried Piers Gaveston, and wrote to the pope asking his permission to found a house of Dominican nuns there.
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He probably intended to make his foundation independent of his own grants of money from the Exchequer, and as the Dominicans were not allowed to own property, he planned for the nuns to hold lands in trust for them.
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Although Edward wrote again to John XXII in October 1318 and January 1319 asking him to appropriate the church of Kingsclere for the sisters and to expedite the process, and wrote to the master of the Dominicans asking him to have seven sisters ready to send, his plans foundered.
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In 1349, his son Edward III finally established the sisters’ house. Edward II took a great interest in Langley Priory: he gave them his garden next to the parish church, two plots of land, his dwelling called ‘Little London’ until the priory was ready for habitation, 700 marks for the costs of building the priory, and increased its annual grants to 500 marks a year in September 1312.
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On 18 June 1318, Queen Isabella gave birth to a daughter, Eleanor, at Woodstock Palace in Oxfordshire. Edward had been on pilgrimage in Canterbury, but managed to arrive at Woodstock on the day of his daughter’s birth. The king and queen followed contemporary convention by naming their first daughter after her paternal grandmother, Eleanor of Castile, although the spelling ‘Eleanor’ didn’t appear until much later, and in the fourteenth century was spelt Alianor, Alianore or Alienora. Edward’s wardrobe accounts record a payment of 500 marks to Isabella for the ‘feast of her purification’.
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Shortly after her birth, Eleanor of Woodstock joined the household of her brothers Edward and John, under the care of a nurse named Joan du Bois.
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In July, Edward summoned a meeting of his great council at Northampton, and he and Queen Isabella left Woodstock on 27 June, only nine days after she had borne Eleanor. The council meeting at Northampton is best known for a ‘certain unknown and ignoble individual’ named John of Powderham, who came before Edward, claiming to be the rightful king of England. John said that he ‘was the true heir of the realm, as the son of the illustrious King Edward [I]’, and declared that ‘my lord Edward [II] … was not of the blood royal, nor had any right to the realm’. Edward, who never lacked an ironic sense of humour, greeted John with the words ‘Welcome, my brother’. John answered, ‘Thou art no brother of mine, but falsely thou claimest the kingdom for thyself.’
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John claimed to be the real son of Edward I and to have been switched in the cradle for a peasant baby.
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In fact he was the son of a tanner from Exeter, and Edward summoned his parents to Northampton to have them questioned and examined.
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John’s claims became the gossip of the kingdom and ‘annoyed the queen unspeakably’, though it is extremely doubtful that Isabella believed them.
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The
Anonimalle
claims that Edward decided not to execute John, but to employ him as a court fool. However, several magnates, not named, ordered him to be hanged and drawn.
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There was no truth at all to the story, but the impostor was given widespread credence; most people found it hard to accept the fact that their king preferred hedging, ditching and swimming to governing, fighting and jousting, and believed John ‘all the more readily because the said lord Edward resembled the elder lord Edward [I] in none of his virtues’, according to
Lanercost
.
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John of Powderham suffered death by drawing and hanging sometime between 20 and 24 July, and his body remained on public display until long afterwards.
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It is unclear whether Edward witnessed the execution.