Edward II: The Unconventional King (33 page)

Historians have wondered whether Queen Isabella had anything to do with Mortimer’s escape, but the first people to suggest that she did – indeed, the first people to suggest that she had any kind of relationship with Mortimer before late 1325 – were the dramatists Christopher Marlowe and Michael Drayton in the 1590s.
¹¹⁷
Isabella was not in or near the Tower at the time that Mortimer escaped, as sometimes stated; she was probably with Edward in Yorkshire. There is no evidence that as early as 1323 Isabella had any interest in acting against her husband, nor that she had ever had any personal contact with Mortimer. Chronicler Geoffrey le Baker decades later invented a conspiracy whereby two bishops (Orleton of Hereford and Burghersh of Lincoln), Isabella, Roger Mortimer and Charles IV of France conceived a cunning plan to bring about Edward’s downfall years before it in fact happened, Mortimer’s escape being the first step in this deep conspiracy. Although this story has often been repeated as fact, it owes far more to Baker’s overheated imagination and many years’ hindsight than to anything resembling reality. Mortimer was an intelligent, resourceful and courageous man, and it is far more probable that he planned his escape himself, working on the sympathy of his guards, including Gerald Alspaye, who fled with him. Sympathetic Londoners – Edward II was extremely unpopular in his capital – procured the sedatives for him.
¹¹⁸
Mortimer later made his way to Charles IV’s court. Although it has been postulated that Charles would never have welcomed Mortimer without Isabella’s recommendation, this is not the case: Mortimer was a nobleman, an experienced and able soldier and administrator and still only thirty-six, and such men were welcome anywhere. Besides, Mortimer was not alone at the French court. Other English exiles, men who had fled after Boroughbridge, among them John Maltravers and William Trussell, accompanied him there. So if Isabella asked her brother to welcome Mortimer, presumably she must also have asked him to receive the other exiles, which seems improbable.

Edward was still ordering numerous bailiffs to search for Mortimer in September, and by 1 October, had finally learned where he was: in Picardy, with his kinsmen the Fiennes brothers.
¹¹⁹
As early as mid-November 1323, Mortimer incited ‘aliens to enter the kingdom and to murder the king’s counsellors’, meaning the Despensers, Mortimer’s detested cousin the earl of Arundel and Despenser’s protégé Robert Baldock, whom Edward appointed chancellor of England in August 1323.
¹²⁰
Although Mortimer was the most important Contrariant to break prison, he was not the only one: Hugh Audley escaped from Nottingham, Thomas Berkeley from the Tower of London, Robert Walkfare and two others from Corfe, Henry Leyburne from Devizes and Robert Holland from Northampton, all in the last year or so of Edward’s reign.
¹²¹

Edward made a renewed onslaught against Roger Mortimer’s family and supporters in March and April 1324, and ordered a commission to find people who had adhered to him in 1322.
¹²²
This was no doubt inspired at least in part by his frustration at being unable to recapture his enemy, though as Mortimer had sent assassins to kill Edward’s friends, it is hardly surprising that the king would retaliate, and Mortimer fled the country in the full knowledge that he was leaving his family to Edward’s not-so-tender mercies. His wife Joan and her servants were moved from Southampton to Skipton-in-Craven, and three of their eight daughters – Margaret Berkeley, Joan and Isabella – were sent to live at separate convents and granted the small amounts of fifteen pence (Margaret) or twelve pence (Joan and Isabella) per week for their sustenance.
¹²³
Three of Mortimer’s four sons remained under Edward’s control, though Geoffrey was reunited with his father on the Continent.
¹²⁴
Edward also began proceedings against Mortimer’s ally Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford, whom he had publicly reprimanded for aiding the Marchers in 1322. It is odd that he waited two years to prosecute Orleton for this if he genuinely believed the charge to be true, and it probably represents Edward’s frustration and anger at Mortimer’s escape rather than anything else. The vindictiveness with which Edward pursued Orleton is astonishing: he confiscated the bishop’s lands, and even allowed his goods to be thrown into the street to be ransacked and looted by passers-by.
¹²⁵
This, of course, ensured that Orleton would join the king’s enemies in 1326, and was also one of the factors which gradually lost Edward the support of the archbishop of Canterbury, who had long been one of his most loyal allies. As for Orleton, he had lost favour with Roger Mortimer within months of Edward’s deposition and was probably not nearly as committed to the Marcher as Edward believed, and the king would have been far more sensible to court the intelligent and able bishop as an ally. But then, common sense was hardly one of Edward’s defining features. He also foolishly alienated his cousin Henry of Lancaster, who had taken no part in the 1322 rebellion of his brother Thomas, with whom he had a cool relationship.
¹²⁶
Edward claimed that Henry had abetted Orleton, and, angered by Henry’s adoption of his brother’s coat of arms and a cross he had erected in Leicester in Thomas’s memory, accused him of treason.
¹²⁷
As with Orleton, this ensured that in 1326 Henry would also join the king’s enemies, taking the enormous Lancastrian faction with him. Edward did allow Henry to assume the earldom of Leicester in April 1324, but retained most of the Lancastrian inheritance himself, including the great castle of Kenilworth.
¹²⁸

Edward visited Liverpool for the only time in his reign in late October 1323, paying a ferryman two shillings to take himself and part of his household across the Mersey, and in early November spent a night at Vale Royal, a Cistercian abbey in Cheshire his father had founded in 1270.
¹²⁹
That he was furious and deeply concerned about Roger Mortimer’s escape is apparent from the strenuous efforts he made to capture him and his actions against Mortimer’s supporters, but neither Edward nor anyone else could have predicted that it would set off a chain of events which would ultimately result in his deposition, and he soon had more pressing problems to deal with.

Not entirely surprisingly, these problems arose in his French duchy of Gascony. One of Edward’s exasperated officials wrote in 1314 that ‘the Gascon business is like a mighty sea, full of shipwrecks, and has no port of safety’, and Edward I had gone to war with the French over the duchy in 1294.
¹³⁰
The accession of Charles IV of France in January 1322 meant that Edward now owed homage for Gascony and Ponthieu to the last of Queen Isabella’s short-lived brothers. Charles politely waited until Edward had destroyed the Contrariants and until England was quiet, and sent Edward amicable letters in July 1323 asking him to present himself at Amiens between Candlemas (2 February) and Easter (15 April) 1324. Edward, predictably, made excuses, claiming that England was still in a state of turmoil and he could not possibly leave.
¹³¹
Charles had probably expected this, but a particularly unfortunate piece of timing soon turned the situation dangerous, and a sergeant-at-arms, a wooden stake and the lord of Montpezat were about to inadvertently start a war between England and France.

The trouble began in the small Gascon village of St-Sardos. Philip V had in 1318 granted permission for a
bastide
, a fortified town, to be built there, and on 15 October 1323 a French sergeant-at-arms drove a stake bearing the royal arms of France into the ground, to claim the land. This was a direct provocation to Edward, who could hardly be expected to tolerate a French fortress in the middle of his duchy. Raymond-Bernard, lord of nearby Montpezat, took matters into his own hands and hanged the sergeant-at-arms from the stake he had just erected, and burned the village to the ground. News of this offence reached Charles IV on 1 November, but Edward himself did not learn of the event until three weeks later, just after his messengers had departed to proffer his excuses for delaying homage – most unfortunate timing. Ralph Basset, Edward’s new steward of Gascony, and Raymond-Bernard made matters worse by refusing to appear before Charles IV at the Paris
parlement
of February 1324 to explain their actions.

Charles wrote to Edward acknowledging his brother-in-law’s problems with Scotland and his other ‘great business’. Addressing Edward as ‘fair brother’ and talking of ‘the love which we have for you’, he told him that he did not hold him responsible for the St-Sardos outrage and that he was willing to postpone the ceremony of homage until 1 July 1324.
¹³²
Edward, however, was angry with Charles, believing that he had welcomed Roger Mortimer and other Contrariants at his court, and wrote to him in November asking him to banish them from France. Edward’s envoys told him on 13 December 1323, ‘As for Mortimer and the other rebels, forbidden to stay within the power of the king of France, they are received and favoured on the power of the count of Boulogne.’
¹³³
Edward believed in October 1324 that the exiles had found refuge with Count William of Hainault, and asked him to arrest them and send them to him.
¹³⁴
Relations between Edward and the count of Hainault had cooled considerably since their marriage negotiations of the late 1310s, and William followed a pro-French line, his wife Joan being the daughter of Charles IV’s uncle Charles, count of Valois. In 1323 and 1324, men of Hainault attacked several English ships, and Edward ordered that all Hainault ships be seized in retaliation.
¹³⁵
William wrote curtly to Edward in January 1324 to say that many of his own subjects had been robbed in England, and ‘he has often written to the king for restitution, but the king has done nothing. If the king will act he will act’.
¹³⁶

Edward and Isabella spent Christmas 1323 at Kenilworth, where the king gave a pound each to two minstrels of the bishop of Ely who performed for them. He also gave half a mark each to three of his watchmen to buy themselves ‘winter tunics for their night vigils’.
¹³⁷
The couple travelled west and spent six days in mid-January 1324 as guests of Hugh Despenser at his Worcestershire castle of Hanley, where the king gave a bonus of two pounds to twelve carpenters for building a new perimeter wall, drawbridge and hall, described as the ‘finest in the land’.
¹³⁸
Edward made a quick visit to Despenser’s nearby manor of Tewkesbury, where he placed a bright green and gold cloth on the tomb of his nephew the earl of Gloucester in the abbey.
¹³⁹
He also spent a few days in the town of Gloucester, where, although he couldn’t have known it, he would one day be buried.

During the February/March 1324 parliament at Westminster, a group of prelates – not the queen, as sometimes stated – petitioned Edward to allow the bodies of the Contrariants executed in 1322 decent burial, and he duly ordered the sheriffs of London, Middlesex, Kent, Gloucestershire, Yorkshire and Buckinghamshire to take the bodies down and bury them.
¹⁴⁰
In the spring of 1324, Edward sent two envoys to France to try to settle the St-Sardos affair and to postpone his homage: his brother Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent, and Alexander Bicknor, archbishop of Dublin. These were hardly the wisest choices. Although Kent was Charles IV’s first cousin and a staunch ally of Edward, he was still only twenty-two and inexperienced, while Archbishop Bicknor loathed Hugh Despenser and could, therefore, hardly have been expected to do his best on Edward’s behalf. Edward sent more envoys to Charles IV in June, doing his utmost to make an awkward situation even worse by failing to travel to Amiens to pay homage and ordering the envoys ‘to make excuses and defence’ for his non-appearance.
¹⁴¹
They found Charles IV at Annet-sur-Marne on 5 July, four days after Edward should have paid homage, in the process of marrying his third wife Jeanne, fourteen-year-old daughter of Count Louis of Evreux and thus Charles’s first cousin; her sister Marie was married to Edward’s nephew John III, duke of Brabant.
¹⁴²
Charles brusquely told the envoys that because he had ‘found no man’ for Gascony or Ponthieu on the appointed date, he had taken them into his hands before their arrival. Charles sent his uncle Valois into Gascony with an army in early August, and suddenly Edward II was at war with France.
¹⁴³

A bizarre plot to kill Edward II and the Despensers by necromancy was discovered in the spring of 1324, when John of Nottingham admitted that a group of people from Coventry had asked him to make wax figures of the three men. John and his assistants tested their method by driving a leather bodkin or a sharpened feather two inches into the figure of Richard de Sowe, who was supposedly discovered soon afterwards out of his mind and unable to recognise anyone. After they removed the bodkin from the figure’s forehead and drove it instead into the heart, Sowe died within a few hours. Before they could try out the wax figures of Edward and the Despensers, John’s lodger Robert gave the game away to the authorities.
¹
Despenser wrote to the pope to complain about the ‘magical and secret dealings’ threatening him, and received an unsympathetic response.
²
Despenser, all-powerful at court and supremely rich, was living in a nightmare world of fear and paranoia; well aware of how much he and his father were hated, for good reason, his frantic, desperate pleas to Edward in 1325 not to leave him behind in England to travel to France were ultimately to bring about his and the king’s downfall.

On the verge of war with France and in need of allies, Edward reached out to the Spanish kingdoms, and wrote to King Jaime II of Aragon regarding a marriage between Edward of Windsor and Jaime’s daughter.
³
Edward also sent envoys to his kinsmen in Castile, asking the twelve-year-old King Alfonso XI and his regents to give credence to what the envoys told them. The regents included Edward’s first cousin Juan Manuel, lord of Peñafiel and one of the greatest Spanish writers of the Middle Ages; Felipe, lord of Cabrera and Ribera; Juan el Tuerto (‘the one-eyed’), lord of Biscay, and his mother Maria Diaz de Haro. Edward addressed Felipe and Juan el Tuerto as his nephews, though they were in fact his first cousins once removed.
⁴