The Traitor's Wife (41 page)

“You were right, Hugh.”

“And can he really be signing himself 'King Arthur'! I'm not sure which is worse, the treason or the delusion.”

“We have him,” said Hugh the elder. “Your grace, do you intend to make this public?”

Edward grinned. “For once, Hugh, you've not anticipated me. I forwarded these to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and to all of the sheriffs of England, to be read and published. Soon all of England will recognize Lancaster for the traitor he is.”

By March 7, the two forces were facing each other near Burton, one on each side of the Trent. Lancaster's forces burned the bridge and the nearby town, but after three days of fighting, Pembroke and Richmond discovered a ford upstream, over which most of the royal army crossed. Lancaster had unfurled his banners and wanted to meet the king in battle, but the five hundred men he had expected one of his retainers, Robert Holland, to bring did not materialize, nor did Holland, who later gave himself up to the king. Meanwhile, Hugh the younger had stopped the king from unfurling his own banners as the army crossed the Trent. “Sire, no! They should never be able to claim that you made war against them!”

“It is war as far as I am concerned,” snapped the king. But he kept the banners rolled up.

Lancaster and Hereford abandoned the castle of Tutbury, Hereford privately making plans to escape abroad to Hainault, where he had relations. They fled to Pontefract.

As the king's men were feasting on the provisions left behind at Tutbury, a servant of the king's approached him and whispered something. The king winced and without explanation followed the man to Tutbury Priory, hard by the castle. There in the infirmary lay Roger Damory, a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around his belly. “Roger.”

“Your grace.”

“Roger, why? I trusted you, gave you land, honors, even my niece—all because I was your friend. I would have pardoned you at any time, even yesterday, if you'd left Lancaster. Why didn't you?”

Roger shrugged. He was too weak to do much talking, and even if he had not been, what use was it to explain to this fool of a king what anyone else could have seen, that his had always been an eye for the main chance? He watched with no emotion but contempt as the king walked toward a window and began to sob for his dying former friend.

Damory died on March 12. The day before, the king had officially pronounced him, Lancaster, Audley, Hereford, and the rest to be traitors, but Damory did not suffer the horrid traitor's death, or any execution at all. He died of his wounds in the priory and was given an honorable burial by the king.

At Pontefract, Lancaster balked at going to his own castle at Dunstanburgh, belatedly worrying that a flight north would be seen as an attempt to seek aid from the Scots. Better sit and wait for Edward's forgiveness, he advised; after all, the king was his first cousin. Only under threat of death from one of his followers, Roger Clifford, did Lancaster relent. Meanwhile, Sir Andrew Harclay, having been given his promised orders by the king, came south from Carlisle and met Lancaster and his small army at the town of Boroughbridge. Lancaster first tried in vain to bribe him, promising him five earldoms if Harclay would join his forces. Harclay would have none of it. His experiences fighting the Scots had not been wasted on him, and Robert Bruce himself would have approved of the close-packed formations of pikemen that greeted Hereford's men as they attempted to cross the bridge. Pushed together, much like the king's forces had been at the Bannock Burn, Hereford's men could see little but the masses of arrows flying from the archers beyond the schiltron. Nor could they see the men hidden under the bridge, one of whose spear, thrust upward, skewered Hereford himself as he led the way across it. With Hereford's death, Lancaster halted the attack. He agreed to either do battle the next morning or surrender.

But in the end, he did neither. Overnight, scores of his men deserted him, abandoning their armor and dressing themselves in whatever rags they could find in order to be taken for common beggars as they made their way out of Boroughbridge. Harclay, seeing this, decided there was no point in waiting. He captured Lancaster, and virtually everyone of importance with him, the next morning, March 17.

“So this is where Lancaster planned to keep me?”

Edward and Hugh the younger were standing in one of Pontefract Castle's towers. This one was visibly newer than the rest. Hugh nodded. “So they say. He intended to shut you up for life in it.”

“Well, I can't do the same for him, but we'll let him spend the night here, shan't we?” He shook his head. “What I would like to do,” he said softly, “is to shut him up in one of his dungeons for nine days, as was my brother Piers. But no, let's get it over with.”

Lancaster was tried the next morning before a tribunal that included the Earls of Kent, Warenne, Richmond, Pembroke, and Arundel, the two Despensers, and the king. The charges included negotiating with the Scots, further proof of which had been found on Hereford's body in the form of an agreement under which Robert Bruce and two other Scottish leaders would come with all of their forces to Lancaster, where they would make war against all those whom the earl and his allies wished to come to harm. As with Gaveston, the earl was not permitted to reply to the charges against him. He was ordered to be hanged, drawn, and beheaded, but in consideration of his royal blood—and as with Gaveston—his sentence was commuted to beheading alone. It was to be carried out that same day, March 22, 1322.

A late-season snow was falling as Lancaster, mounted on a unprepossessing-looking mule, was led from the castle to the place of execution a short distance away. Enough had fallen already for some of Lancaster's own tenants to pelt him with snowballs; he had not been a popular landlord. As Lancaster, not without dignity, knelt before the executioner, the king watched as one last snowball hit his cousin, his mind not on the present winter's day but on a perfect midsummer's day nearly ten years before.

“Perrot,” he whispered, “the Fiddler has played his last tune.”

W
ITH THE KING'S ENEMIES DEFEATED, THE KING ONCE AGAIN TURNED HIS attention to the Scots. The result was yet another disaster. The English had moved into Scotland to find that all around them had been stripped of crops and livestock. Starving and sick, the English army had retreated to England, only to find that Bruce had moved into Yorkshire and was planning to capture the king himself. Edward, who had sent most of his troops away, heard the news while he and Hugh were dining at Rievaulx Abbey. Leaving their valuables behind, he and Hugh had fled to York with the Scots at their heels.

Eleanor had remained at York, while the queen had stayed at Tynemouth. The day after the king and Hugh arrived, exhausted by their flight from Bruce and disheartened at the ruin into which the Scottish campaign had fallen, yet oddly exhilarated by their shared ordeal, the queen joined them. Though the king had not forgotten her safety, sending troops to protect her, they themselves had encountered the Scots, leaving Isabella to escape Tynemouth by boat with the help of her household squires. Even with their heroism, the Scots and their arrows had caught up with the boat just as it sailed, fatally wounding one of her ladies and causing another to go into premature labor.

Eleanor had wept for the fate of the queen's unfortunate women, while the king had thanked the Lord (aloud) for the queen's preservation and Hugh had thanked the Lord (silently) that Eleanor had not been with her. The queen, however, was neither tearful nor thankful. She stared straight at the king's chamberlain. “This was your doing, Sir Hugh.”

“My doing?”

“That I was put in this danger.”

“Your grace, perhaps you are unaware that the king himself was in danger? He came within a hair's breadth of being captured, along with myself for that matter. Many of our own men were killed; many captured, among them the Earl of Richmond and Henry Sully, who was to protect you. All of us were in grave danger.”

“Except your lady wife. How prudent to keep her out of harm's way.”

“Your grace, that is nonsense! You know I would have gone with you if asked, and that the king and Hugh would have agreed to it. But you did not ask.”

“This is nonsense, indeed,” said Edward coldly. “Isabella, you are tired and overwrought. You have been through a terrible ordeal, of course. That is making you talk foolishly and to place blame where none lies. I will accept your apologies on behalf of Lord and Lady Despenser while you go to rest—What is it?”

“Your son Adam, my lord.”

Adam had finally gotten his way and had been allowed to accompany his father on his expedition to Scotland. The king had armored him expensively and carefully for his first taste of battle, but no armor could protect the boy against the fever that had stricken so many of the king's men. For some weeks he had been lying ill at the nearby priory, but in the last few days, he had seemed to be recovering. “How fares he?”

“He is very ill, your grace. He is being shriven. You must hurry.”