Edward II: The Unconventional King (43 page)

Before he died, Despenser was given a mock trial during which William Trussell, who had also presided over his father’s trial, read out a long list of charges against him in French.
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Some of them are true or partly true, some are perfectly ludicrous, and most of them pile all the blame for Edward II’s failed reign on Despenser’s head. The king’s enemies did not yet dare blame Edward himself, at least not publicly, for his manifold failings, and Despenser was a useful scapegoat.
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He was accused of sole responsibility, with his father, for Thomas of Lancaster’s death, the earl of Kent’s attendance at Lancaster’s execution and at those of the Despensers still escaping the notice of chroniclers; murdering, executing and imprisoning many magnates; piracy (correctly); leaving the queen in peril at Tynemouth in 1322; destroying the privileges of Holy Church, robbing prelates and plundering the Church ‘as a false Christian’; forcing the king to ride against the Contrariants in 1322; trying to bribe people at the French court to kill the queen; and most curiously of all, of breaking the limbs of one Lady Baret until she was ‘forever more driven mad and lost’. Another charge was that he ‘procured discord’ between Edward and Isabella, more evidence of the queen’s anger that Despenser had come between herself and her husband.

The verdict was never in doubt: Sir Hugh Despenser, lord of Glamorgan, then probably in his late thirties, was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Trussell ended the sentence by declaring, ‘Withdraw, you traitor, tyrant, renegade; go to take your own justice, traitor, evil man, criminal!’ Despenser was tied to a hurdle and dragged by four horses through the streets to the castle, his own, where a gallows fifty feet high had been especially erected. A noose was thrown around his neck and he was hauled up and partially strangled, then lowered onto a ladder, where according to Froissart, his penis and testicles were cut off, ‘because he was a heretic and a sodomite, even, it was said, with the king, and this was why the king had driven away the queen’, though this was not part of his sentence. His heart and intestines were cut out and thrown onto a fire, ‘because he was a false-hearted traitor’. Merciful death came at last when he was beheaded. Simon of Reading, the obscure sergeant-at-arms, was hanged below him. Despenser’s head was taken to London and, to great jubilation, placed on London Bridge, and the four quarters of his body were sent to Carlisle, York, Bristol and Dover to be displayed in public.
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Shortly after Roger Mortimer’s own execution in November 1330, Edward III granted permission for ‘the friends of Hugh’ to gather and bury his remains wherever they wished, which they duly did at Tewkesbury Abbey, where his tomb still exists.
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The precious goods Despenser kept in the Tower of London, which included almost thirty gold cups with matching ewers, were transferred into Isabella’s possession on 6 December.
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On 1 January 1327, Isabella ordered Despenser’s middle three daughters Joan, Eleanor and Margaret, aged roughly ten, seven and four, to be sent to three separate convents and forced to take the veil as nuns. Evidently the queen believed this matter to be extremely pressing, as the girls were to be ‘admitted and veiled without delay’.
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Despenser’s eldest daughter Isabel, about fourteen, escaped the order as she was already married to the earl of Arundel’s son, as did his youngest daughter Elizabeth, a baby or possibly still
in utero
. Edward II had sent three of Roger Mortimer’s daughters to convents in 1324, but they were not forced to take binding, lifelong vows as nuns. It has been suggested that Isabella’s motive was to prevent anyone claiming the Despenser lands through the girls via marriage, which is most unlikely, as the lands were forfeit to the Crown and the de Clare inheritance belonged to their mother. Besides, as the girls had four brothers, their chances of inheriting their parents’ lands were remote.
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More plausibly, the order is further evidence of Isabella’s virulent hatred of Despenser and her fierce desire for revenge on him, which, his execution notwithstanding, still remained, and thus she lashed out at some of his children. The girls’ mother, Despenser’s widow Eleanor, was detained at the Tower of London – according to a Hainault chronicler, in case she might be pregnant by her uncle the king – and their eldest brother Hugh or Huchon was imprisoned until 1331.

Edward II’s reaction to hearing of his beloved chamberlain’s terrible death is not recorded, and indeed it is not even clear where he was on 24 November, as he had been given into the custody of Henry of Lancaster, and Lancaster attended Despenser’s execution.
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One hopes that Edward wasn’t forced to watch it. Two months later, when a deputation from parliament visited Edward at Kenilworth, William Trussell was their main spokesperson and officially renounced the kingdom’s allegiance to Edward. Perhaps the man who pronounced the death sentence on Despenser was sent deliberately in order to inflict maximum emotional pain on Edward, as surely there must have been other men who could have gone instead. If this was the plan, however, it backfired: Trussell ‘knelt before our lord the king and cried him mercy, begging him to pardon his trespasses against him, and he [Edward] pardoned him and gave him the sign of peace in front of them all’.
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Edward reached Kenilworth Castle by 5 December, and spent a very lonely and cheerless Christmas there, as the
Flores
points out.
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He must have been deeply distraught at his sudden, shocking downfall, the betrayal of his wife and son, the deaths of Hugh Despenser and the others, the knowledge that few people had been willing to support him against the invaders, the awareness that he had so completely failed as a king and a leader. We can only imagine what thoughts went through his head at this time. Meanwhile, Isabella, Roger Mortimer and their allies spent Christmas at Wallingford. Edward of Windsor was of course also present, and his brother John of Eltham was brought there by a group of Londoners.
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Unsurprisingly, discussions about Edward II’s fate dominated proceedings, though even at this late date it was unclear what should happen to the king. Many people, not least the pope, were also uneasy about the queen’s failure to return to her husband.
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But Isabella’s rebellion, invasion and participation in the execution of the Despensers made it impossible that she and Edward could simply resume their marital relationship as if nothing had happened. Neither would Roger Mortimer have permitted her to; he had come far too close to power to allow Isabella to return to Edward, and his ambition required him to stay in her favour. And so Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford, claimed that Edward carried a knife within his hose to kill Isabella, and if he had no other weapon he would crush her with his teeth; and therefore, the queen could never again live with her husband.
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Edward indignantly refuted the allegation that he meant his wife any harm when he heard about it, and there is no other evidence that Edward was or wished to be violent towards his wife. Nor is there any reason to suppose that Isabella, despite her rebellion, wished Edward any physical harm, and it is unknown whether at Christmas 1326 she spoke in favour of his deposition or was, even now, reluctant to take this enormous step.
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Perhaps, like her brother-in-law the earl of Kent, she had sought the destruction of the Despensers but not of her husband. The overwhelming success of the invasion must have taken everyone by surprise, even those who took part, and it may be that Isabella – and perhaps even some of her allies – had not anticipated or desired the king’s humiliation. She sent Edward letters and gifts in 1327, and in April told a council meeting that she was ready and willing to visit him (they forbade it).
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Whatever the queen’s opinion, she must, like her allies, have come to the conclusion that allowing Edward to remain on the throne was impossible, whether they had originally planned this or not. And so finally the council decided that he should be deposed in favour of his son, not executed, but allowed to live in comfortable custody for the rest of his life.

The parliament during which Edward II was deposed began in London on 7 January 1327, though as Edward did not summon it, its legality was highly questionable. Whether Edward was deposed
in
this parliament or
by
this parliament is a question which has been frequently debated and need not concern us much here.
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It is almost impossible to know what really happened in January 1327 and how Edward reacted to losing his throne, as we only know the official story which was allowed to come out, as with his handing over his Great Seal supposedly with pleasure some weeks before. The official version of events was that he piously and obediently, albeit with sighs and tears, consented to abdicate his throne to his son. What his real attitude was, we will never know. Early in January, Adam Orleton and others are said to have travelled to Kenilworth to persuade Edward to attend the parliament, but he ‘cursed them contemptuously, declaring that he would not come among his enemies’.
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One might question whether Edward really was asked to come to London or whether this story was a cover for the reality that Edward’s enemies did not want him to appear before parliament and give him a chance to create sympathy for himself, and perhaps even, at this late stage, save his throne. No English king had ever been deposed and therefore it was entirely unclear how it should be done, and Roger Mortimer, the two bishops Adam Orleton and John Stratford and their allies were groping around in the dark. Ann Lyon has described the parliament of January 1327 as ‘an attempt by what was a relatively small group of enemies of Edward II, most of its leaders motivated by personal grudges against him, to give an aura of legality to acts which were unprecedented and therefore illegal’.
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Claire Valente points out that ‘the new regime was also careful to conceal all evidence of opposition’ to the deposition and that all but one chronicler, Rochester, associated with Bishop Hamo Hethe, ‘recorded nothing but smooth sailing, one sign of a successful cover-up’.
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Rochester is the only chronicle which records that William Melton, archbishop of York, and the bishops of Rochester, London and Carlisle openly spoke out for Edward and did not consent to his removal. Matters did not go as smoothly as the king’s enemies had hoped: Adam Orleton made a speech on 12 January and asked whether the assembly would prefer to have Edward II as king or his son, and evidently the response was not nearly as enthusiastic as Orleton and others would have liked, which perturbed them.
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When parliament gathered again on the 13th, Thomas Wake was planted in the crowd to shout approval at appropriate moments during speeches by his cousin Mortimer, the bishops of Hereford and Winchester (Orleton and Stratford) and the archbishop of Canterbury (Walter Reynolds, formerly a friend of Edward), declaring that Edward had broken his coronation oath and should no longer be their king.
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Swept up in the fervour of the moment and in the stage-managed piece of grand theatre it undoubtedly was, the gathering consented that Edward would be removed and his son crowned in his place, and a deputation of twenty-four men was sent to Kenilworth to inform Edward of the decision. They included William Trussell, Edward’s nephew-in-law the earl of Surrey, who had switched sides to Isabella at some point, perhaps on hearing of the slow and bloody death of his brother-in-law Arundel, and the royal justice Geoffrey Scrope, also a former close ally of Edward.
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Many chronicles describe Edward’s reaction to hearing the news, and they all depict it the same way. A penitent half-fainting Edward, in tears, reacts with patience and humble subservience, agrees that as things cannot be otherwise he is content that his son will succeed him, and blesses his son, who he hopes will find greater favour with the people than he has.
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The Pipewell chronicle says that Edward begged his subjects’ forgiveness on his knees, and
Flores
that he lamented his failings but could not be other than he was, though Adam Murimuth says that Edward’s agreement was reported to parliament ‘more fully than it was done’, that is, his weeping and begging for forgiveness were exaggerated.
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According to the chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker decades later, but no one else, Edward was threatened that if he did not consent, his sons Edward and John would be passed over and the throne given to someone of non-royal birth, which has long been assumed to be a reference to Roger Mortimer (though Baker does not say this). This is an extremely unlikely story, and Mortimer, or anyone other than Edward of Windsor, would never have been accepted as king by the magnates and prelates or indeed by Isabella.
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The official proclamation of the transfer of power declared that Edward had of his own free will decided that the governance of the realm should devolve to his son, and that this had been accepted by his magnates, prelates and the community of the realm. In short, it was presented not as Edward being made to accept his deposition, but his kingdom accepting his wish to abdicate.
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Trussell formally withdrew the kingdom’s allegiance from Edward, his steward Thomas le Blount ceremonially broke his staff of office, and Edward II’s reign was over. His son’s reign as Edward III, king of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Aquitaine, count of Ponthieu and earl of Chester, officially began on 25 January 1327, and the fourteen-year-old was crowned at Westminster on 2 February by Archbishop Reynolds. The other archbishop, Melton of York, refused to attend out of loyalty to Edward II, though evidently he became reconciled to the young king, as he performed the marriage ceremony of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault a year later. Melton’s involvement in the former king’s life was certainly not yet over, however.