Edward II: The Unconventional King (39 page)

On 4 February, Edward ordered numerous sheriffs, mayors and bailiffs to search anyone leaving the country to make sure that they were not taking armour, horses, gold, silver or money with them without his permission. Five days later he issued a proclamation that no one except merchants, who were to be searched and made to swear an oath that they were not carrying weapons or letters prejudicial to Edward or his subjects, might leave the country without his special licence.
⁵⁴
This proclamation had already been issued in December 1325, and would be repeated several more times in 1326.
⁵⁵
Edward also ordered all his sheriffs and John Sturmy and Nicholas Kyriel, admirals of his fleet, to be prepared to set out against ‘the aliens, strangers and enemies of the king who may attack the realm’. The recipients of the letter were ordered to receive Isabella and Edward of Windsor ‘honourably and courteously’ and to treat all the others as the king’s enemies but ‘to save the bodies of the queen and Edward’.
⁵⁶

The king ordered an inquisition a few days later into a whale cast ashore at Walton, and wrote to Jaime II of Aragon’s son Pedro, count of Ribagorza, and to Eleanor Despenser.
⁵⁷
A rather fascinating entry in Edward’s chamber account of 7 February records a very large payment of twenty marks to his squire Oliver de Bordeaux ‘when the king sat beside his bed a little before midnight’ at Harpley in Norfolk.
⁵⁸
Another indication of the familiarity between the king and his household staff and their families is a royal gift of twenty shillings to Edward Pymock, son of another of Edward II’s squires: Pymock was said to be the king’s
confrere
, brother or companion, and he is elsewhere called
le petit Pymock
, ‘the little Pymock’. An odd nickname for one of Edward’s chamber staff was
le petit Cotel le Roi
, ‘the king’s little Knife’. Edward gave a gift of twenty shillings later in 1326 to be shared among six of his (more than thirty) chamber valets who woke up at night whenever he himself awoke, in recognition of their hard work.
⁵⁹
His Household Ordinance of December 1318 stated that he should choose four of his thirty sergeants-at-arms to sleep outside his chamber ‘as near to it as they can’, with the other twenty-six to remain in the hall ‘to be nearby when the king needs them’.
⁶⁰
In addition to the four sergeants outside his chamber door, and the six or more valets presumably inside, Edward had a sergeant porter ‘who will guard the door of there where the king sleeps’.

Edward and Hugh Despenser were apart once again, and the king sent frequent letters to his chamberlain in London between 11 February and 31 March while he himself stayed in Leicestershire and Staffordshire and at the great Warwickshire stronghold of Kenilworth.
⁶¹
He gave a gift of forty shillings to a retired sailor he met while riding through Tamworth, who had become destitute and a beggar.
⁶²
Sailors paid out of the king’s accounts earned three pence a day, so this represented almost half a year’s wages in the man’s former job. A pleasant interlude took place on 11 March, when Edward gave, with his own hands, fifty shillings (two and a half pounds) to his painter Jack of St Albans for dancing before him on a table and making him laugh; he intended the money to support Jack’s wife and children. Edward was evidently coping with the stress of Isabella and Mortimer’s impending invasion better than Hugh Despenser, who was said to have ‘made a small affray’ in Northamptonshire in late February.
⁶³

Also in late February, Edward ordered all his keepers of the peace to be ‘more active in dispersing unlawful assemblies and arresting malefactors, as the king is astonished to hear that these evils are now more frequent than before their appointment, which may be set down to their negligence and connivance’.
⁶⁴
Knowing that an invasion was coming and that his enemies abroad had many supporters in England, Edward did all he could to avoid his fate; but in fact there was little he could do, nearly two decades of misrule ensuring that he was widely unpopular and that there were few men indeed who would fight to save him. Discontent had been rife in England since 1322, but there was no one in the country capable of organising and leading a revolt against the king and the Despensers. Queen Isabella and her son served as powerful figureheads for the rebels abroad, who had – and must have known that they had – considerable support in Edward’s kingdom. There is little to indicate that Isabella enjoyed much popularity in England before 1326, although several chroniclers comment approvingly on her efforts to negotiate and make peace between her husband and his barons.
⁶⁵
The Lanercost chronicler, apparently attempting the world record for the number of times he could write ‘England’ in one short sentence, says ‘it was publicly rumoured in England that the queen of England was coming to England’. Not to be outdone in repetition, Edward ordered men in Portchester and Southampton to arrest everyone ‘entering the realm to spy out the secrets of the realm in order to do certain things prejudicial to the king and his realm’ on 10 March.
⁶⁶
The Lanercost chronicler thought that Isabella wanted to avenge herself on the Despensers for the execution of her uncle the earl of Lancaster.
⁶⁷
Even more damaging than the rumours of invasion, however, were the rumours that Edward had publicly declared his wife and son to be his enemies and exiled them from his realm, and intended to harm them. He wrote to the pope indignantly refuting this, and his surviving proclamations make clear that although he named Isabella’s allies as ‘the king’s enemies’, he specifically excluded Isabella herself, Edward of Windsor and the earl of Kent, even after the invasion.
⁶⁸
According to the
Brut
, Edward was informed after his deposition that people suspected him of wanting to strangle his wife and son to death. He responded, ‘God knows, I thought it never, and now I would that I were dead! So would God that I were! For then were all my sorrow passed.’
⁶⁹
If Edward truly was informed that people believed him capable of murdering his own wife and son, it is hardly a wonder that he was deeply upset.

The king seized the lands of the men refusing to return to England with the queen in March 1326, and told the constable of Dover Castle to arrest anyone bringing in or taking out of the realm letters contrary to his proclamation of a few weeks earlier, as ‘the king is astonished to hear that many enemies and rebels continue to do so and are not arrested’.
⁷⁰
His only hope in averting an invasion lay in persuading his son to come home to him or persuading Charles IV to send the boy back, and he wrote to both of them on 18 March. Isabella had told Charles that she ‘greatly wished to be with the king and in his company, as a good wife ought to be with her lord’, but reiterated that she was afraid of Despenser. Edward once more devoted many lines to defending his ‘dear and faithful nephew’ Despenser to Charles, complained about Isabella retaining Mortimer in her council, and asked his brother-in-law not to have ‘regard to the wilful pleasure of woman’. He promised that Isabella did not ‘receive evil or villainy from the king or from anyone else, and the king would not suffer her to do so for anything’. Edward of Windsor had also written to his father, saying that he remembered the king’s injunctions to him at Dover not to marry, and promised always to obey Edward’s orders with all his power. He had supposedly claimed that he ‘cannot come to the king so speedily as the king has ordered him, by reason of his mother, who is … in great uneasiness of heart’ and that it was his duty not to leave Isabella for long in her unhappiness, which sounds far more like something dictated by the queen herself than by an adolescent boy. Edward, in ‘wrath and indignation’, threatened his son with forfeiture of all that he had if he did not return to England.
⁷¹

Isabella, in using her son as a weapon against her husband, forced Edward of Windsor to choose between his parents: young Edward could either betray his father, or abandon his mother. The
Vita
says that the boy hated Despenser the Elder, earl of Winchester, and he can hardly have felt any less hatred for Hugh Despenser, his father’s favourite and perhaps his lover.
⁷²
Almost certainly, he desired the Despensers’ removal from his father’s side as much as his mother did. If Edward of Windsor stayed with his mother and helped her and her allies destroy the Despensers, however, he would be committing treason, betraying and disobeying his father, and would ultimately invade his kingdom with an army. If he went back to his father, he would leave his mother with a choice of returning to England and her husband, perhaps to be imprisoned or sent to a convent, losing her income and her position, or remaining in France with her brother, where she would be dependent on Charles IV for income, reduced to the status of a petitioner. As for the boy himself, whichever parent he chose, he would lose the other. The emotional strain inflicted on a thirteen-year-old, faced with this dilemma, can only be imagined. Although Isabella told Edward that she would not prevent their son returning to him, this was untrue. The boy was little more than a prisoner.
⁷³

Edward II spent the whole of April 1326 at Kenilworth and most of May in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, giving generous amounts of cash to those members of his wife and son’s households still straggling back to England, supposedly for their expenses but presumably also for showing loyalty to him.
⁷⁴
While at Kenilworth, he ordered his chamber valets to help a group of workmen dig and enclose a ditch and palisade in the castle park, and the valets received a gift of two barrels of ale from the mother of a local resident as they worked.
⁷⁵
On 13 April, Edward told the archbishop and prior of Canterbury and the abbot of St Augustine’s that ‘an invasion of the realm by aliens is threatened’, ordering them to prepare themselves to defend the realm, and told his admirals John Sturmy and Nicholas Kyriel two weeks later to prepare and equip as many ships as possible, as he wished ‘to provide for the safety of his realm and to escape the machinations of the evil wishers who are scheming to aggrieve him and his realm by sudden attacks’. He also ordered Sturmy and Kyriel to ‘cause the actions of those men beyond sea to be spied upon diligently and watchfully’.
⁷⁶
Meanwhile, relatives of Contrariants executed in 1322 were doing their best to make trouble for the king in England: the castle of Tickhill, where Edward’s friend, the none too scrupulous William Aune, was constable, was besieged that April by John Mowbray’s fifteen-year-old son and Roger Clifford’s brother, among others.
⁷⁷
In many ways, however, Edward’s life continued in much the same way as it always had: he gave five shillings to his page Little Will Fisher for ‘what he did when the king mounted his horse’ at Kenilworth, another five shillings to a man who gave him twelve chickens, and varying amounts of money to many others who brought him presents of fish and other food – all of which he handed over to his subjects with his own hands. Edward also bought himself many splendid jewels and clothes, including two gold crowns studded with rubies, pearls and emeralds which cost ninety pounds, a silver crown, a gold chaplet, a white velvet hat lined with miniver, and several hats of vermilion velvet, one decorated with bells and another ‘powdered with diverse animals’.
⁷⁸

On 11 May 1326, Charles IV’s young wife Jeanne of Evreux was crowned queen of France at Sainte Chapelle in Paris. Isabella was an honoured guest, and although Roger Mortimer had not been invited, perhaps out of respect to Edward II, he went anyway and carried Edward of Windsor’s train.
⁷⁹
Edward II was furious and sent a bitter complaint to his son on 19 June, although the boy had surely had little say in the matter. This letter was the last contact he ever had with his son. Edward’s fury and anguish are apparent, especially as his son had told him untruthfully that Mortimer was not an adherent of himself or his mother, ‘whereby the king considers himself very evilly paid’. Edward wrote that his son had not behaved as a good son should by obeying his father’s commands, once more threatened him with forfeiture if he did not return, and ordered him again not to marry. He ended the letter by writing that if his son was ‘contrary and disobedient hereafter to his will … he will ordain in such wise that Edward [of Windsor] will feel it all the days of his life, and that all other sons shall take example thereby of disobeying their lords and fathers’.
⁸⁰
As it turned out some months later, this was an empty threat, but it must have pained the young duke of Aquitaine to read such harsh words. The king distracted himself from his woes on 19 May by attending the wedding of Hugh Despenser’s niece Margaret Hastings to Robert Wateville in Marlborough, where he must have seen his daughters Eleanor and Joan – as far as Edward knew, the future queens of Castile and Aragon – who were living there. He gave a pound to the servant Will Muleward, ‘who was for some time with the king and made him laugh greatly’; despite the crisis he was facing, Edward’s sense of humour remained intact. There are many references in his chamber journal of May and June 1326 to his playing cross and pile, and he celebrated the Nativity of John the Baptist on 24 June – exactly twelve years after his defeat at Bannockburn – by playing dice with Giles Beauchamp, a knight of his chamber. He also bought four cows to provide ‘milk for the mouth of the king and Sir Hugh [Despenser]’.
⁸¹
Edward was in dire straits in 1326, but at least he was getting enough calcium.

Pope John XXII in Avignon was exerting himself to bring about a reconciliation between the king and queen and avert civil war, and sent envoys, the archbishop of Vienne and the bishop of Orange, to both Edward and Isabella ‘to remove the dissension’ between them. The envoys had full powers to ‘remove any obstacles’ which hindered the couple’s reconciliation.
⁸²
The main obstacle was Hugh Despenser, but Edward would not send him away, even at this desperate stage. The Rochester chronicler thought that the envoys’ mission was to ensure the safe return of the queen, her son and the earl of Kent to England, while Henry Eastry believed that they had persuaded Isabella to return on condition that the Despensers retired from court and that the queen was fully restored to her estates.
⁸³
Edward granted the envoys a safe-conduct to travel to England, and sent a letter to the constable of Dover Castle ordering him to treat them ‘courteously and amiably’.
⁸⁴
This contradicts the beliefs of several contemporary chroniclers: the
Annales Paulini
claim that the envoys were ‘anxious and afraid’ at the thought of meeting the king, and the
French Chronicle of London
says, ludicrously, that Edward had threatened them with death. This rumour reached the ears of John XXII, who informed Edward that he did not believe the king would mistreat them.
⁸⁵