Edward II: The Unconventional King (27 page)

The Marchers arrived outside London on 29 July, two weeks late for parliament, and the citizens refused to admit them.
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Edward also refused to meet them or even to listen to their demands that the Despensers be perpetually exiled from England, and they and their heirs disinherited ‘as false and traitorous criminals and spies’. The barons therefore placed themselves and their armies outside the city walls, at strategic locations, to prevent the king leaving.
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They sent two knights as envoys to Edward to tell him that they wished both Despensers to be exiled, but Edward refused to meet the envoys, offering the rather feeble excuse that they had no letters of credence.
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The Marchers finally entered London on 1 August 1321. The
Annales Paulini
say that Hugh Despenser was sailing along the Thames off Gravesend at this time, visiting the king at night and urging him to delay any agreement with the Marchers. Apparently incapable of reacting to anything except with violence, the Marchers threatened to burn the city from Charing Cross to Westminster if Despenser didn’t desist.
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The Marchers demanded that if Edward refused to consent to the Despensers’ exile, he would be deposed. The events of almost exactly ten years before, when the Ordainers had threatened him with deposition if he did not consent to Piers Gaveston’s exile, were repeating themselves. The royalist earl of Pembroke told him, ‘Consider, lord king, the power of the barons … Do not for any living soul lose thy kingdom,’ and, quoting the Bible, ‘He perishes on the rocks that loves another more than himself.’ He went on to advise the king ‘if you will listen to your barons you shall reign in power and glory; but if, on the other hand, you close your ears to their petitions, you may perchance lose the kingdom and all of us’.
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Even these heartfelt words and the renewed threat of deposition did not move Edward. Anguished at the thought of his friends being sent into exile, he continued to refuse. He suggested that they go to Ireland until the anger of the Marchers had cooled, and declared that it was deplorable for noblemen to be judged in such a manner and that he knew they were not traitors.
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It fell to Queen Isabella to break the deadlock. She went down on her knees before her husband and begged him, for the good of his realm, to exile the Despensers.
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Finally accepting that he had no choice, Edward entered the great hall of Westminster on 14 August, with his cousins Pembroke and Richmond on either side of him, and agreed to banish his friends.
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Chroniclers Adam Murimuth and Geoffrey le Baker both make the point that Edward was afraid of civil war if he did not do so, but never consented inwardly to the barons’ demands, while the Rochester chronicler says that he was compelled by force and fear.
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In the presence of Edward, but not the Despensers themselves, judgement was given against the two men, and it was decreed that they would be disinherited and perpetually exiled from England.
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Even the author of the
Vita
, who criticised the Despensers severely and condemned their greed and brutality, thought ‘they had been banished out of malice’.
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The date of their departure was set as the feast of the Beheading of St John the Baptist, 29 August 1321.
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Between 20 August and late September, Edward was forced to grant a pardon to more than 400 men for the murders, abductions, thefts and vandalism they had committed in the Despensers’ lands.
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Not surprisingly, he later protested that he had done this unwillingly and that any pardon he had given under coercion was invalid.
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On the day the Despensers were ordered into exile, Edward retired to his chamber, ‘anxious and sad’. The next morning at breakfast, he invited Hamo Hethe, bishop of Rochester, to his table, and whispered to him that the Despensers had been condemned unjustly. Hethe replied consolingly that Edward could ‘amend the defeat’. Edward responded that he ‘would within half a year make such an amend that the whole world would hear of it and tremble’.
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It took him a little more than half a year, but he was as good as his word.

When he heard the news of his and his son’s perpetual banishment from their homeland, Hugh Despenser the Elder ‘cursed the time that ever he begot Sir Hugh his son, and said that for him he had lost England’. He immediately departed from Dover, and took himself off abroad somewhere.
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As for his son Hugh Despenser, Edward II placed his friend under the protection of the men of the Cinque Ports, and Despenser, never one to sit around when there was money to be made, became a pirate in the English Channel, where he was ‘master of the seas, their merchandise and chattels, and no ship got through unharmed’. Despenser attacked two great Genoese ships off Sandwich, killed their crew, and took for himself the vast wealth he found, supposedly £40,000.
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Edward II’s son paid compensation in the 1330s.
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In June 1325, Edward officially pardoned Despenser for his piracy, on the extremely dubious grounds that ‘he through fear of death adhered to diverse malefactors at sea and on land, and stayed with them to save his life, while they perpetrated depredations and other crimes’.
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Parliament ended on 22 August 1321, and Edward left Westminster five days later and travelled to the island of Thanet in Kent. It seems as though he sent most of his household away while he stayed with Despenser, plotting revenge on their enemies, as the well-informed royal clerk and chronicler Adam Murimuth suggests.
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In the meantime, the Marchers retired to Oxford to stay close at hand in case Edward attempted to recall the Despensers. As they surely knew, Edward had no intention of allowing his friends to remain in exile. Over the next few months, he proved himself energetic and extremely capable in bringing about their return, which must have caused some people to wonder why he didn’t behave like that more often; only when his favourites were threatened and his personal feelings were involved did he stir himself to action. Edward had a very loyal ally in the autumn of 1321: Queen Isabella. Between 3 and 24 August, and again between 23 October and 5 November, he granted her custody of the great seal, demonstrating the enormous trust he placed in his wife.
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Isabella hated the Despensers and must have been glad to see them go into exile, but she hated to see her husband’s royal powers eroded even more.

The king arrived at Portchester on 4 October, and stayed for eight days. It is likely that Edward secretly met Hugh Despenser again there, to discuss their next moves; at his 1326 trial, Despenser was charged with returning to England illegally during his exile. Despenser’s crimes of 1321 might have encompassed more than piracy: Robert Batail of Winchelsea, baron of the Cinque Ports, and his allies attacked Southampton on 30 September. A petition by the people of Southampton claims that Batail and his men burnt and stole their ships, chattels, merchandise and goods to a loss of £8,000 in conspiracy with Hugh Despenser, who accused the townspeople of supporting the earl of Lancaster against the king.
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Given that Edward placed Despenser under the care of the men of the Cinque Ports, and that the king arrived at Portchester four days after the attack on Southampton, the two men’s involvement in this latest piece of lawlessness seems quite possible.

The plan which Edward and Despenser conceived centred around Bartholomew Badlesmere. Edward was furious with his former steward for switching sides and betraying him, and probably saw a kind of poetic justice in using Badlesmere as a dupe to strike at his other enemies. The king asked Isabella to set off for a pilgrimage to Canterbury, and on her way back to London, to ask for a night’s accommodation at Leeds Castle, which belonged to Badlesmere. In fact, the usual route from Canterbury to London went through northern Kent and nowhere near Leeds. Badlesmere was with the Marchers at Oxford, having put his Kent castles in a state of defence in response to Edward’s sending men into the county against him, but his wife was in residence at the castle. Edward hoped that she would refuse to allow Isabella entry, which would be a gross insult to the royal family and would give Edward an excuse to attack the castle.
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Badlesmere owned many lands in Kent, which isolated him geographically from his allies in the Welsh Marches and the south-west of England. Roger Clifford was the nephew of Badlesmere’s wife and Badlesmere’s daughter was married to Roger Mortimer’s son, so if Edward struck at Badlesmere, the Marchers would probably feel honour-bound to come to his aid and would thus be in armed rebellion against the king. Edward and Despenser knew that the earl of Lancaster detested Badlesmere, and gambled that the powerful magnate would not help him. In addition, although Lancaster and Isabella were not allies, she was his niece and the queen of England, and he could hardly be seen to defend a man who had insulted her. In this way, Edward could divide and conquer his enemies, and pick them off piecemeal.

The plan went off brilliantly. Isabella approached the castle with a military escort, and Lady Badlesmere refused to admit her, announcing that the queen must seek accommodation elsewhere.
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Isabella ordered her escort to force an entry into the castle, and the garrison opened up a volley of arrows at them, killing six. Feigning outrage at the insult to his consort, when he must have been delighted that all had gone according to plan, Edward mustered men to attack Leeds. Badlesmere’s wife had played right into his hands, and so did Badlesmere himself, informing Edward that he approved of his wife’s conduct.
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To ‘punish the disobedience and contempt against the queen’, Edward ordered the sheriffs of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire and Essex to muster knights and footmen ‘with horses and arms and as much power as possible’ at Leeds on 23 October, and sent the earls of Pembroke and Richmond and the Scottish earl of Atholl as an advance guard. The city of London sent 500 men to the siege.
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Edward arrived at Leeds on 26 October, and, apparently bored, ordered his hunting dogs sent to him.
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His half-brothers Norfolk and Kent, now twenty and twenty-one, joined the siege, as did the earls of Surrey and Arundel.
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With Pembroke and Richmond, this represented all the English earls alive in 1321 except Lancaster and Hereford, the shadowy Oxford who played no role whatsoever in Edward’s reign, and Edward’s son Edward of Windsor, earl of Chester, who was not yet nine.

Badlesmere begged the Marchers to take their armies and relieve the siege of Leeds. This put them in a very awkward position. Badlesmere was their ally, yet the men willing to fight against the Despensers were reluctant to take up arms against their king, and probably also reluctant to help a man who had so recently switched sides. Neither were they willing to be seen to acknowledge Badlesmere’s insult of the queen, and indeed two chroniclers say they refused to go to the aid of the Leeds garrison out of respect for Isabella.
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And the earl of Lancaster also played into Edward’s hands, as Edward and Despenser had no doubt predicted he would: he sent the Marchers a letter, ordering them to not to aid the detested Badlesmere.
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Leeds surrendered on 31 October, and thirteen members of the garrison were drawn and hanged shortly afterwards.
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Although this was not unprecedented – King Stephen hanged nearly a hundred of the Shrewsbury Castle garrison for holding out against him in 1138 – men had never been executed for holding a castle against the king within living memory.
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Edward’s father and grandfather had not hanged the men who held Kenilworth Castle against them in the 1260s. Still, the author of the
Vita
, at least, approved of Edward’s actions and described the executed men as ‘robbers, homicides, and traitors’, stating that ‘just as no one can build castles in the land without the king’s licence, so it is wrong to defend castles in the kingdom against the king’.
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By 12 November, Edward had heard that the earl of Lancaster was planning to hold an assembly at Doncaster, and forbade him, the earl of Hereford and more than 100 others from attending. Some of the men Edward ordered not to attend were in fact his allies, such as his half-brother Norfolk, his and Hugh Despenser’s brother-in-law Ralph Monthermer, the earls of Arundel, Surrey, Atholl and Angus, and Ralph Camoys, another of Despenser’s brothers-in-law.
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Lancaster’s attempts to win over men whose support he had no hope of gaining is a measure of the weakness of his position; he had hoped that the northern barons would help him, but they refused to go against the king.
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Lancaster and his Marcher allies, despite Edward’s prohibition, did meet on 29 November, probably at Pontefract rather than Doncaster.
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They drew up a petition which accused Edward of supporting Hugh Despenser in his piracy and his attempts to persuade the king to attack the peers of the realm, and asked the king to respond by 20 December. Edward had no intention of doing so, and informed Lancaster, in a surprisingly mild letter, that imposing a deadline on him gave the impression that the king was the earl’s subject, not vice versa.
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Edward ordered Walter Reynolds, archbishop of Canterbury, to summon the prelates to a provincial meeting at St Paul’s on 1 December, and the day before, sent the earls of Pembroke and Richmond and Robert Baldock, lawyer, archdeacon of Middlesex and Despenser adherent, to present the Despensers’ petition protesting their banishment.
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Owing to the difficulty of winter travel and the short notice of the meeting, only four bishops attended the convocation.
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Reynolds and the four bishops dutifully agreed to petition for the annulment of the judgement on the Despensers, while the earls of Arundel, Pembroke and Richmond claimed they had only consented to the exile through fear.
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