Edward II: The Unconventional King (32 page)

Harclay was condemned to the full horrors of the traitor’s death by hanging, drawing and quartering, his head to be set on London Bridge and the four quarters of his body publicly displayed in Carlisle, Newcastle, Shrewsbury and York. On 3 March, Harclay died well and bravely at Carlisle: when he heard the sentence, he announced, ‘You have divided my carcass according to your pleasure, and I commend myself to God,’ and gazed towards the heavens, hands clasped and held aloft, as horses dragged him through the streets of the town he had defended so staunchly for many years.
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Harclay’s sister Sarah Leyburne finally received permission to bury his remains in August 1328.
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Lanercost
points out that he was ‘a single individual, none of whose business it was to transact such affairs’, and certainly he had considerably overstepped his authority, but it is easy to sympathise with his growing frustration with Edward.
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The king, with his usual malice towards family members of people who angered him, ordered the treasurer and barons of the exchequer to remove Harclay’s cousin Patrick Corewen from his position as sheriff of Westmorland, and appoint instead ‘a successor of undoubted loyalty’.
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Harclay had certainly committed treason, though unlike the earl of Lancaster did not do so for his own benefit, but to spare the inhabitants of northern England the endless suffering inflicted on them by Scottish raids. Although Edward had no choice but to punish Harclay, he thus destroyed a man who had always been loyal to him, who had staunchly defended Carlisle and Cumberland against Robert Bruce for years and who was one of the very few men of the reign to enjoy military success.

Still unwilling to take responsibility for his own failures in Scotland, Edward sent a bitterly sarcastic letter to his kinsman Louis Beaumont, bishop of Durham, on 10 February 1323, reminding Louis that his brother Henry had once told the king that if Louis were appointed to the bishopric, ‘a defence like a stone wall would be provided for those parts’, in contrast to the negligence of Louis’s predecessor Richard Kellaw. Edward fumed, ‘The king knows actually that greater damage is done in the bishopric by the bishop’s default, negligence and laziness than in the time of his predecessor.’
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Given that Edward himself had few equals when it came to negligence and laziness, there is much of the pot calling the kettle black about this letter. On a happier note, he gave five shillings to a girl who had travelled the thirty miles from York to Pontefract to bring him ale as a gift from her mother Alice de Brunne, and amusingly, one of his clerks had to pay four pence to replace a key which opened a chest of money, ‘which the king himself lost’.
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Somewhat mysteriously, Edward gave twenty-two shillings to John Sturmy and other squires of his chamber, ‘sent secretly on the king’s business without other mention’, in late January. In February at Pontefract, Edward accompanied his valet Edmund ‘Monde’ Fisher (father of his page Little Will Fisher) to buy fishing nets.
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But yet more problems beset the king in early 1323: Lord Berkeley and Hugh Audley the Elder almost escaped from Wallingford Castle when they overcame their guards and took over the castle. The
Vita
says that only the quick thinking of a boy in the gatehouse, who realised that something was amiss and raised the hue and cry, prevented their flight.
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The Sempringham annalist has a completely different story, saying that the castle was taken by Lord Berkeley’s wife Isabel, the much older half-sister of Eleanor Despenser.
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Edward sent his steward Richard Damory and the sheriffs of Oxfordshire and Berkshire to besiege the castle, though the
Vita
gives the earls of Kent and Winchester as the men responsible.
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This was, or at least Edward believed that it was, the first stage of a plan to seize Windsor Castle and the Tower of London, where many Contrariants were imprisoned.
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It was around this time that Edward suddenly took it into his head to try to claim a share of Provence in the south-east of France, and wrote several letters to this effect to the pope, asking for his help.
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His claim came through his grandmother Queen Eleanor, second of the four daughters of Count Raymond-Berenger V of Provence, and also through the third daughter, Sanchia, who married Richard of Cornwall, brother of Edward’s grandfather Henry III; Edward was also her heir. In fact Edward had no genuine claim to Provence, as Raymond-Berenger had left the entire county to his fourth daughter Beatrice in his will. Edward wrote to Beatrice’s grandson Robert, king of Sicily and count of Provence, asking him to ‘restore to the king amicably’ the portions of the county that Edward said fell to him by inheritance.
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Although Edward wrote again to John XXII and Robert in August 1323, nothing came of it, and he abandoned his efforts.
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His envoys to Robert of Sicily were Rigaud d’Assier, the French bishop of Winchester, and John Stratford, archdeacon of Lincoln; d’Assier died on the trip, and John XXII appointed Stratford to his vacant bishopric.
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Edward, who had written to the pope several times asking him to elect Hugh Despenser’s ally Robert Baldock, was furious, and asked John XXII to revoke Stratford’s appointment.
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Subsequently Edward petulantly refused to grant a petition simply because it was supported by Stratford, with whom he declared himself ‘exceedingly incensed’ and described as ‘faithless and ungrateful’.
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In November 1323, Edward ordered the keepers of more than seventy ports and the sheriffs of twenty counties not to permit Stratford to leave the country.
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He forced Stratford to acknowledge a huge debt of £10,000 to him in June 1324, and began proceedings against him before the King’s Bench. Hugh Despenser extorted £1,000 from the unfortunate bishop, which he deposited with his Italian bankers, the Peruzzi.
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Late 1321 had seen the beginning of an extraordinary vendetta on the king’s part against some of the English bishops, which he continued into 1323 and beyond. Edward wrote to the pope about Henry Burghersh, bishop of Lincoln, whose appointment he himself had actively promoted, complaining that Burghersh was insufficiently qualified and that he, Edward, had been deceived by him.
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That Burghersh was the nephew of the executed Bartholomew Badlesmere was not, of course, a coincidence. The king asked John XXII to translate Burghersh and John Droxford of Bath and Wells to other offices outside England and replace Droxford as bishop with Edward’s friend William, abbot of Langdon; Droxford had supported the Marchers in 1322, or at least Edward believed that he had.
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John Hothum of Ely – who had acted as Piers Gaveston’s attorney in 1311 – also fell from favour in 1322 for obscure reasons and William Airmyn of Norwich infuriated the king in 1326, though Edward reserved his most virulent hatred for Adam Orleton of Hereford, whom he persecuted.
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Always prone to emotional outbursts, Edward told the pope that Burghersh, Droxford and Orleton were ‘the worst poison’ and ‘descended from the race of traitors’, and declared that they had brought notorious misfortunes to England and that he could no longer bear the scandal of having them in his kingdom.
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John XXII refused to translate them from their bishoprics, and told John Stratford that ‘God is offended’ by the king’s actions.
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Even Edward’s friend and ally Walter Reynolds, archbishop of Canterbury, was not immune from the king’s wrath. On one occasion, Edward flew into such a screaming fury with Reynolds that the archbishop was forced to invent a hasty excuse in order to escape from the king’s presence.
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Edward’s vile temper and unpredictable moods became ever worse as he grew older. Still, his rages were an exercise in restraint by the standards of his Castilian cousins Sancho IV and Alfonso XI, who on occasion beat their relatives and dissident nobles to death with their own hands.
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Edward spent the first half of March 1323 at Knaresborough Castle, which had once belonged to Piers Gaveston. He had not forgotten his earlier wish to found a house of Dominican nuns at Langley, and wrote to the master of the Dominican order asking him to find four devout women.
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Presumably Hervey was unable to find any, as nothing came of it. Miracles were still being reported at the site of the earl of Lancaster’s execution in 1323: 2,000 people, some from as far away as Kent, gathered to pray and make oblations at Lancaster’s tomb in Pontefract.
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The archbishop of York twice had to remind his archdeacon that Lancaster was not a canonised saint and order him to disperse the throng gathering at the earl’s tomb, some of whom were crushed to death.
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Edward sent his clerk Richard Moseley to investigate, the king’s attitude to the situation apparent from his description of the crowd as ‘malefactors and apostates’ and his comment that they were praying ‘not to God but rather to idols’. The crowd made their feelings clear, too: Moseley was assaulted, and two of his servants killed.
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The
Brut
includes a bizarrely disgusting story in which Hugh Despenser, troubled and angered by the ‘great heresy’ of the alleged miracles, sent a messenger to Edward to inform him about them. As the messenger passed through Pontefract, he ‘made his ordure’ at the place where Lancaster had been beheaded – and later suffered punishment for this sacrilegious act when he ‘shed all his bowels at his fundament’.
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Miracles were also said to have taken place at the execution site of the Contrariants Henry Montfort and Henry Wilington: the mayor of Bristol told the king that Montfort’s brother bribed a poor child with two shillings ‘to pronounce to the people that he received healing of his sight’.
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Less than four months after Andrew Harclay’s abortive negotiations with Robert Bruce, Edward finally bowed to the inevitable and signed a thirteen-year peace treaty with Scotland. He still refused to recognise Bruce as king of Scots, which has far less to do with his own stubbornness or stupidity than the fact that such a recognition would make him profoundly unpopular among his magnates; he had already been accused several times of ‘losing’ Scotland, and this would be one of the charges against him at his deposition. In 1328, Queen Isabella and her favourite Roger Mortimer, ruling the country in the name of the underage Edward III, signed the deeply unpopular Treaty of Northampton, or the ‘Shameful Peace’ as many people in England called it, which finally recognised Bruce as king and arranged the marriage of Edward II’s daughter Joan of the Tower to Bruce’s son and heir David. Thomas Randolph, earl of Moray, travelled to England to negotiate terms in May 1323, and Edward sent several hostages to Tweedmouth to assure Bruce of his safe return.
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Edward signed the treaty on 30 May; Bruce ratified it a week later.
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Early June 1323 found Edward in communication with King Sancho of Majorca regarding a robbery committed by some Englishmen on Sancho’s subjects, and with Queen Isabella’s uncle Charles, count of Valois, who had proposed a marriage alliance between one of his many daughters and Edward’s ten-year-old son Edward of Windsor.
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Valois also sent envoys to England sometime before January 1324 to negotiate other marriages between his family and Edward’s, this time involving the latter’s two daughters Eleanor and Joan, one of whom was proposed as a bride for Valois’s youngest son and the other for one of his grandsons.
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The queen had joined Edward at Cowick by 10 June. The king spent the rest of the summer in Yorkshire, and Isabella probably remained with him, though once again her whereabouts are uncertain and it is possible that she resumed her pilgrimage. Edward gave two pounds to the minstrel of Hugues de Bouville, chamberlain of his brother-in-law Charles IV, who played before him and perhaps Isabella at Pickering, and on 15 August sent a gift of ‘coursing dogs’ to Charles.
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On 1 August 1323, the feast of St Peter in Chains, the king’s most dangerous enemy Roger Mortimer escaped from the Tower of London, having fed his guards sedatives in their wine, and made his way to the Continent. Five days after the escape, Stephen Segrave, constable of the Tower, was still seriously ill from the sedatives.
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Edward, at Kirkham in Yorkshire, heard the news on 6 August, and ordered all the sheriffs and keepers of the peace in England and the bailiffs of fifteen ports to pursue Mortimer with hue and cry and take him dead or alive.
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Assuming that he had fled to Wales, Edward ordered the loyal Welshmen Rhys ap Gruffydd and Gruffydd Llwyd to search for him there, though an inquisition taken at Portsmouth as early as 10 August established that Mortimer had taken a ship to the Continent.
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On 26 August, Edward told his brother the earl of Kent that he thought Mortimer was intending to travel to Ireland, and, afraid that Mortimer’s escape was only the first of many Contrariants breaking prison, also told the constables of no fewer than eighty castles to guard their charges safely – which demonstrates what a large number of men were still in prison, despite the many who had been released on payment of a fine.
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Edward’s insecurity and paranoia are painfully apparent in 1323; eighteen months after his victory over the Contrariants, his reign was descending into a nightmare of fear and unrest. For this, he had no one to blame but himself.

Several chronicles claim that Edward had been intending to execute Mortimer, who was therefore compelled to escape before the sentence was carried out, while others do not mention an impending execution.
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The
Flores
’ account of the event owes far more to the story of St Peter’s escape from Herod’s prison than to reality, being almost a direct quotation from various verses of Acts of the Apostles.
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Whether Edward really was about to put Mortimer to death, or if this was merely a rumour that found its way into several chronicles or an invention to explain his dramatic escape, is not clear; the
Brut
, implausibly, has Mortimer fleeing the day before his planned execution. Adam Murimuth, who came to know Mortimer well after 1326, says only that he escaped and fled to France and does not mention an impending execution.
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Nor is there anything in any official record to confirm that Edward was planning his death.