Edward II: The Unconventional King (35 page)

When Isabella later accused Hugh Despenser of persuading Edward to reduce her income and of dishonouring her in numerous other ways, she said nothing about her children being ‘removed’ from her. Nor is there any evidence that she believed her husband had deprived her of her children, or that anyone else, including the pope and the king of France, thought that Edward had done anything out of the ordinary. No chronicler waxed indignant about the king’s establishment of separate households for John, Eleanor and Joan either.
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Yet it is often unfairly used nowadays, in a world with very different cultural and familial norms, as a stick to beat Edward for his supposed nastiness towards his wife. All the people Edward appointed to look after his children were members of his extended family: his niece, his niece’s sister-in-law, his former brother-in-law, his half-brother’s sister-in-law. It is hard to see how any of them were an inappropriate choice.

The establishment of separate households for the royal children certainly does not mean that the queen never saw her children again or that Edward intended this, and granting custody of young royals to noblewomen and setting up their own households was entirely normal. Edward I ordered in 1301 that his eldest grandchild, ten-year-old Gilbert de Clare, be sent to live with the boy’s step-grandmother Queen Marguerite, even though Gilbert’s mother Joan of Acre was alive. Eleanor de Bohun, another grandchild of Edward I, also lived in Marguerite’s household and later at Amesbury Priory at her uncle Edward II’s expense, though her mother Elizabeth lived until 1316 and her father the earl of Hereford until 1322.
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In the summer of 1340, Edward III set up a household for his children Isabella, Joan, Lionel and John, aged eight, six, twenty months and four months, under the supervision of the lady de la Mote, and Joan had previously been in the care of the dowager countess of Pembroke. Edward II and Isabella’s elder daughter Eleanor of Woodstock was in the custody of her sister-in-law Queen Philippa in 1331, not her mother.
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Edward I set up a household for his younger sons Thomas and Edmund when they were still babies in 1301, and they did not live with their mother Queen Marguerite.
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No one ever accuses Edward I or III of cruelty to their wives on this account, however; Edward II is judged differently for doing the same thing as other kings by some modern commentators determined to put a negative spin on everything he did.

Lanercost
and
Flores
say that Edward and Despenser appointed Eleanor Despenser as a kind of guardian over Isabella in 1324, charged with spying on her, carrying her seal and monitoring her correspondence.
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This may have some truth in it, though far from being foisted on the queen, as is sometimes claimed, Eleanor had been her lady-in-waiting since at least 1311 and probably since Isabella’s arrival in England in 1308. In July 1311, Isabella paid for ale for Eleanor’s breakfast when they were staying near Durham, and in October that year had to make alternative arrangements for transporting Eleanor’s possessions, ‘because the lord Hugh le Despenser her husband stole away from her her sumpter-horses and other carriage’.
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Eleanor was with Isabella at Tynemouth in 1322 when Edward supposedly abandoned his queen to danger at Hugh Despenser’s instigation, and with her in the Tower in early 1323 when they both wrote letters on behalf of Roger Mortimer’s wife. There is nothing to indicate hostility between the two women in 1324/25, either because Eleanor had been given custody of Isabella’s son John to punish the queen or because she had been appointed some kind of spy over her, and Isabella sent letters to the justice John Stonor on behalf of Eleanor’s chaplain John Sadington in early 1326, after her refusal to return to England.
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Parliament opened on 20 October 1324 in London and Westminster, its aims to discuss the war in Gascony. Edward’s opening address, delivered in French, is the only one of his parliamentary speeches to survive. He began,

Lords, I have shown you certain things which concern the Crown which have come under debate, as one who is your chief and who has the sovereign keeping of it, and as one who is ready to maintain the Crown in all its rights, with your counsel and aid, and to defend it as far as a man can, by the power of all your might, on which matter I have always asked for your counsel, and have done nothing in the said business without counsel, in which I believe that I have done my part,

and asked for advice from every man present (and then, one hopes, took a breath after such a long sentence). Parliament decided that Edward must lead an army into Gascony in February or March 1325, on the grounds that the king of France had maliciously deprived him of his inheritance.
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Hugh Despenser’s dominance of the English government is obvious from the many letters between England and Gascony during the St-Sardos war, which were mostly sent to and from him rather than Edward. His correspondents addressed him in fawning terms: ‘To the very noble and wise man, his very dear and very honourable lord’, ‘To the very puissant, very noble, very honourable and wise lord, if it please him’ and ‘My very dear and very dread lord’ are typical examples.
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Even Despenser’s social superiors were not immune from the desire to flatter him. In a letter of May 1325, the earl of Surrey carefully addressed him as ‘very dear cousin’ five times in five sentences. The earl of Kent, for his part, called Despenser ‘very dear nephew’ or ‘beloved nephew’ no fewer than seven times in four sentences in one letter, and in another, told Despenser that he had heard news of his good health, ‘for which we devoutly thank God’.
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Despenser’s self-importance, arrogance and certainty of his hold over the king are evident from the many letters where he speaks for himself and Edward: ‘It seems to the king and to us that…’ and ‘the king and ourselves think that…’ appear frequently.
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An interesting light is thrown on standards of literacy among the nobility of the early fourteenth century by Despenser’s statement in letters to two men that he had read their previous correspondence out loud to the king in detail.
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In the end, Edward did not take an army to Gascony, and although he never visited his duchy, the
Scalacronica
thought it was ‘the country and nation which he loved best’.
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As it was the homeland of Edward’s beloved Piers Gaveston, the chronicler’s statement may be correct. Despenser informed Ralph Basset that Edward would go to Gascony with ‘a great and noble array’ and, interestingly, with Robert Bruce, if the ‘business’ between them went well. The draft of this letter reveals that Despenser at first named Bruce as ‘king of Scotland’ (
le
roi Descoce
), then ordered his scribe to cross that part out.
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Edward opened negotiations with Robert Bruce again in 1324, probably because he was worried that Bruce would join with France against him, and offered safe-conducts to Bruce’s envoys.
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They arrived in England in November, and presented Bruce’s demands that ‘Scotland should be forever free from every English exaction’, that the Scottish king should be restored to the barony in Essex which he had forfeited to Edward I in 1306, and that England should return the Stone of Scone to Scotland (it remained in London until 1996, exactly 700 years after Edward I had removed it). Bruce also proposed that Edward’s son Edward of Windsor marry one of his daughters. Edward responded, in a fascinating illustration of how he had been raised to think of Scotland as part of his inheritance and subject to England,

How without prejudice to our Crown can we surrender the right we have in Scotland, which from the coming of the Britons to the coming of the Saxons and down to our own time, is known always to have been subject to our ancestors; which, although in rebellion it often spurned our authority, was, nevertheless, as no one doubts, reduced to its due state of servitude, though unwillingly?

Edward refused to restore Bruce to the Essex manor Edward I had confiscated, claiming, ‘It is not fitting that the son should make void what his father decreed,’ and said that he would be willing to return the Stone of Scone to the Scots ‘if their other demands were not beyond all reason’. He also declared that Bruce’s proposal that one of his daughters marry Edward’s son ‘is unsuitable for us’. However, both sides did agree to maintain the truce, and Robert Bruce did not join Charles IV.
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The king spent Christmas 1324 at Nottingham, though whether Isabella was with him is uncertain. If the couple were together, it would be the last Christmas they ever spent in each other’s company. Edward moved on to Ravensdale in Derbyshire, where he gave an Epiphany gift of fifty shillings to his minstrels and two shillings to his piper Little Alein for his performance, and perhaps watched deer coursing, as Ravensdale had a course about a mile long and 80 feet wide enclosed by hedges.
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The king must have heard the sad news that his great-niece Joan, Piers Gaveston’s daughter, had died of an unspecified illness at Amesbury Priory on 13 January, probably the day after her thirteenth birthday.
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Edward had in 1317 arranged a marriage for Joan with John Multon, eldest grandson of the earl of Ulster, but she died before the wedding took place. The eccentric Edward spent much time in 1325 at Burgundy, his cottage at Westminster, and was there on 12 February 1325 watching two squires of his chamber, Berduk de Till and Giles of Spain, perform some kind of act for his entertainment involving fire. Unfortunately it went badly wrong, and both of them burnt their arms and, in Berduk’s case, his thighs too. Edward gave them the large sum of twenty pounds in compensation.
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He spent a month from mid-February to mid-March at the Tower of London, and gave a pound to Thomelyn the psalterer for playing for him there.
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Two staunch allies of the king died in the early spring of 1325: Robert Umfraville, earl of Angus, and the king and Hugh Despenser’s brother-in-law Ralph Monthermer, who left sons Thomas and Edward and daughters Joan, a nun at Amesbury, and Mary, countess of Fife. Monthermer had married Edward’s widowed sister Joan of Acre in secret in early 1297, and Edward I, who had been negotiating for her to marry Count Amadeus V of Savoy, imprisoned Monthermer in fury. He married his second wife Isabel Hastings (
née
Despenser) in 1318 also without the king’s permission, and Edward II temporarily seized their lands and fined the couple 1,000 marks, though he pardoned the debt in 1321.
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Edward’s daughters Eleanor and Joan remained in Isabel Hastings’ custody, and he granted her ‘the king’s houses’ within the walls of Marlborough Castle ‘for the safer dwelling of herself and the king’s daughters’.
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The number of the king and Despenser’s supporters was dwindling rapidly, though Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, was still close to them, and his daughter Alice married Edward’s nephew John de Bohun in 1325.
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Edward’s reign began to stagger towards its disastrous end in March 1325 when he sent Queen Isabella to France to negotiate a peace settlement with her brother Charles IV, a journey from which she would finally return eighteen months later with an invasion force. Given the ultimate result of Isabella’s trip to France, who first conceived the idea that she should go has been the subject of much debate. The often-repeated notion that Charles IV of France conceived the idea with the aim of helping his sister, Roger Mortimer and other enemies of Edward’s regime in some deep conspiracy to deprive Edward of his throne is implausible in the extreme.
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The Lanercost chronicler and Geoffrey le Baker, with years of hindsight, turned the chaos of the end of Edward’s reign into a coherent narrative and invented a preconceived pattern and plan which never existed:
Lanercost
thought that Isabella had ‘astutely contrived’ to leave England with her son – who remained in England for six months after her departure – and Baker invented a conspiracy whereby the bishops of Hereford and Lincoln worked on the queen in order to persuade her to bring down the Despensers. The much later chronicler Jean Froissart, who wasn’t even born until about 1337 and is for the most part utterly unreliable for Edward II’s reign, presented Isabella as a persecuted victim expelled from Edward’s kingdom with her son at risk to their lives, escaping from Winchelsea to France after pretending to go on pilgrimage to Canterbury.
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The Hainault chronicler thought that Edward had ordered the arrest of his wife and that she fled to Paris with the earl of Kent, while French chroniclers wrote that Isabella had been banished from Edward’s kingdom and ‘crowned the exiled queen, tortured by her cruel husband, with a martyr’s halo’.
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These wildly inaccurate accounts have been followed rather too slavishly by some later writers, and it is still sometimes written today that Isabella fled to Paris because of Edward’s mistreatment of her. It had been suggested as early as April 1324 that Isabella might intercede with her brother on Edward’s behalf.
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Charles IV’s counsellors suggested at the beginning of 1325 that Isabella and her elder son Edward of Windsor, earl of Chester, should travel to France, the queen to negotiate for peace and the earl to pay homage for Gascony and Ponthieu on his father’s behalf. Although happy enough for Isabella to travel to her homeland, Edward’s own counsellors ‘with one voice’ refused to allow young Edward to go, understandably unwilling to send the twelve-year-old heir to the throne to an enemy country until peace had been established.
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Geoffrey le Baker thought that the boy might fall prey to many misfortunes if he were exposed to ‘French cunning and greed’.
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The suggestion to send the young earl of Chester to France has sometimes imaginatively been seen as evidence that Charles IV was planning a trap for Edward at the instigation of Isabella and Roger Mortimer, who were hoping to get her son out of the country to use him as a hostage. Pope John XXII, who called Isabella an ‘angel of peace’, wrote to her several times between April 1324 and January 1325 begging her to use her influence with her husband and her brother to bring about their reconciliation and declared that the hope of peace would be ‘greatly promoted’ if she went to France, and is in fact by far the most likely person to have suggested her journey.
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Edward wrote in May 1325 that he had sent Isabella at the pope’s urging, and as this was six months before she refused to return to him, there is no reason to assume that he was not telling the truth.
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