She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (39 page)

The younger Despenser did not go far, and while he prowled the waters of the Channel as a ‘sea-monster’ (the
Vita
says), preying on unsuspecting merchant ships to add to his fleet and his treasure, Edward gave no consideration to his own role in the chain of events that had left him once again cornered by a pack of enraged and fearful lords. Instead, as so often before, his thoughts were all of escape, and revenge. And this time it was Isabella who provided the momentary diversion that allowed him to spring the trap.

On 13 October, Isabella rode to the gates of Leeds Castle – a stronghold with mighty defences of stone and water, built on an island in a lake thirty miles from Dover and the Kent coast. Her public purpose was a pilgrimage to Canterbury, although Leeds lay off the beaten track that pilgrims usually trod, and her husband, who was also in Kent, was clearly preoccupied not at all with spiritual concerns but entirely with Despenser, who had just made landfall once again, despite the injunctions against him, in the east of the shire on the Isle of Thanet. Nor, in fact, was Isabella’s presence at Leeds Castle entirely innocent. Its owner, Bartholomew Badlesmere, had a long history of loyal service at Edward’s court, but just three months earlier – with his own alarm at Despenser’s belligerence intensified by the fact that his eight-year-old daughter was married to the son and heir of Roger Mortimer of Wigmore – he had suddenly thrown in his lot with the marcher lords. Badlesmere, Edward believed, was not only a traitorous ingrate but a weak link in the rebels’ ranks, since his last-minute defection to their cause had done nothing to reconcile him with Thomas of Lancaster, who had furiously objected to Badlesmere’s appointment in 1318 as steward of the royal household, an office to which the earl claimed a hereditary right. It seemed possible, therefore, that Badlesmere’s castles in Kent could be picked off without precipitating a general mobilisation of the marcher armies, and that feat, should Edward achieve it, would give him a strategic base from which to advance against Lancaster and his confederates.

The appearance of the queen as a pilgrim at Badlesmere’s gate – which would normally have been a signal honour, and a welcome opportunity to display the largesse of his hospitality – was therefore laden with unspoken menace. Badlesmere himself was not there, having left the castle with its treasure and garrison in the care of his wife with strict instructions that she was to admit no one – instructions which she followed to the letter, leaving Isabella incensed and without shelter. Her mood was not improved by the knowledge that the castle had been held by her aunt, Edward I’s queen Marguerite, until her death in 1318, and should therefore
have passed into her own hands as part of her queenly dower, had her husband not chosen instead to grant it to Badlesmere. Irritated and imperious, she ordered her escort to force an entry. Lady Badlesmere responded by giving her archers the signal to shoot. Within minutes, six of the queen’s men lay dead.

Perhaps Isabella had been following a script to which she had agreed in advance, or perhaps she had been used as a pawn in a strategem planned by her husband and his favourite of which she was not fully aware. Either way, her presence at Leeds Castle served to precipitate a vertiginous descent from military posturing into the stark reality of war. Badlesmere’s violent reception of Edward’s anointed queen was not only an unforgivable insult but out-and-out treason, the king insisted, and he immediately despatched troops and siege engines to attack the castle. The Mortimers, uncle and nephew, and the earl of Hereford marched south from Oxford with Badlesmere himself, intending to relieve the small garrison at Leeds; but at Kingston-upon-Thames, southwest of the capital, they halted, stopped in their tracks by news that Lancaster was refusing to join them. The earl saw no reason to lift his sword for a man he despised, whose immediate cause had nothing to do with the campaign against Despenser. And while the marcher lords hesitated in consternation before wheeling north to consult their more powerful ally, Lady Badlesmere and the soldiers at Leeds opened the castle gates to throw themselves on the king’s mercy.

Ostensibly, Edward had made his point; Badlesmere’s castles in the south-east were now his for the taking. But in the wider and deeper conflict within which this was merely a skirmish, the king now had a choice. Lancaster was a unique and uniquely intractable opponent, but the fragility of the coalition gathered around him had just been painfully exposed to public view. If Edward now chose to affirm his commitment to the rule of law, to reassure the lords who had felt the intense threat of Despenser’s apparently unbridled self-aggrandisement, he might divide the rebels and re-establish his rule by offering the good government that all
his subjects, Lancaster apart, had sought for the last decade.

But Edward had acquired no longer sight, no greater understanding of his own responsibilities, in the years since Gaveston’s death. Still he sought revenge for the loss of his soulmate and for his own inability to protect him. And now, in this moment, it seemed he had a chance to replay the traumatic events of a decade earlier, but this time in defence of a different favourite and in hope of a different outcome. He did not hesitate. When the defenders of Leeds Castle emerged before him, a sorry sight after two weeks under heavy siege, twelve men were immediately seized and hanged from the walls. And while the corpses kicked and swung, Lady Badlesmere and her young children were sent as prisoners to the Tower.

If execution without trial represented any kind of justice at all, it was the summary justice offered by martial law. Edward’s subjects could be under no illusion that once again they faced a stark choice: either fight for the king, or take up arms against him. With a heavy heart, the earl of Pembroke – now nearing fifty, and wearied by the years he had spent seeking to save the king from himself – summoned his men to Edward’s side. With him were Lancaster’s old enemy the earl of Surrey; the earl of Arundel, who had hitched himself to Despenser’s star by marrying his son to Despenser’s daughter earlier in the year; and the king’s young half-brothers Thomas and Edmund, the sons of Edward I’s second marriage to Isabella’s aunt Marguerite. As this royal army marched north-westward from London, the rebel lords – who were struggling now to maintain their brittle unity – fell back before its approach.

For once, momentum lay with the king, and it seemed that Edward might carry all before him. At Shrewsbury in January 1322 the Mortimers surrendered. The faith they had placed in Lancaster’s support had been destroyed by the earl’s failure to emerge from his fortresses in the north. But if they had hoped that Edward would look with favour on their submission, they were to be bitterly disappointed. Both uncle and nephew were
despatched in chains to London, where they too were incarcerated in the Tower. The king pressed on northwards, determined now to seize this chance to destroy the man who had killed Gaveston and dismembered his kingdom. Support for Lancaster was ebbing away with every mile he retreated before Edward’s advance, and Isabella sent word on her husband’s behalf to Andrew Harclay, a veteran of the Scottish war and warden of the western frontier with Scotland, that he should move south to cut off Lancaster’s escape. The earl was still hoping to reach his newly built fortress at Dunstanburgh on the Northumbrian coast, but when his much diminished army arrived at Boroughbridge in Yorkshire on 16 March they found their way north across the river Ure blocked by Harclay and his men. With Edward’s forces not far behind, they had no option but to fight. While Lancaster tried to take the ford across the swollen water at the head of his cavalry, the earl of Hereford – who had joined Lancaster at Pontefract after the Mortimers’ surrender – led an assault on the narrow wooden bridge. But Harclay had stationed soldiers in hiding under the bridge, and one of them speared Hereford from below through a gap in the planks as he tried to cross. His screams as he died in gut-wrenching agony sowed panic among troops who were already buckling under heavy fire from Harclay’s archers. Lancaster was forced into retreat, and at daybreak the next morning Harclay’s men swarmed across the river to complete their victory.

Lancaster had come to believe that he was untouchable. Cousin to the king, uncle to the queen, an earl five times over, he could stand alone in condemnation of Edward’s failings and never fear the consequences of his wrath. Now, as he was escorted south as a prisoner to his own castle at Pontefract, he had time to consider the fate that awaited him: royal revenge, ten years in the making. Hereford was dead; so too was Despenser’s brother-in-law and Edward’s former confidant Roger Damory, who had been fatally wounded a few days earlier. Despenser’s other brother-in-law Hugh Audley was a prisoner, taken in Lancaster’s company at Boroughbridge, as was John Mowbray, whose claim to Gower had
served to spark this conflagration; while the Mortimers, kept close in the Tower, awaited trial in London.

Edward’s victory was complete. That much was clear to Lancaster on the morning of 22 March, when he was brought into Pontefract’s great hall to face a hastily assembled tribunal of lords, including the earls of Pembroke, Surrey and Arundel and Edward’s young half-brother the earl of Kent. An indictment of his crimes was read, reaching backward from the immediate fact of his armed defiance, through charges of treasonous communications with the Scots, all the way to his seizure of the king’s jewels and horses at Newcastle in 1312. The royal pardons he had knelt to receive since then were now worthless, it was obvious, and Lancaster was not allowed to speak in his own defence, beyond a bitterly wry aside which the
Vita
puts into his mouth: ‘This is a powerful court, and great in authority, where no answer is heard nor any excuse admitted …’

Only one verdict was possible after such a trial. The earl was sentenced, as a traitor, to be hanged and then, while still alive, cut down and beheaded – although the king conceded that he should be spared the gallows in deference to his royal blood (and, according to one chronicler, out of respect for his niece, the queen). This was martial law enacted away from the battlefield, while banners were furled and arms sheathed, and, if it did not closely resemble due judicial process, it was Lancaster himself who had set the precedent by which he was condemned. As the
Vita
observed, ‘the earl of Lancaster once cut off Piers Gaveston’s head, and now by the king’s command the earl himself has lost his head. Thus, perhaps not unjustly, the earl received measure for measure.’

And there were unmistakable echoes of Blacklow Hill when Lancaster, dressed in penitential rags, was bundled onto a scrawny mule and led out from Pontefract’s great gate, through a freezing downpour of sleet, to a nearby hill. There he was made to kneel with his face turned towards Scotland, the enemy with whom he was accused of conspiring. He bent his head, as if in prayer; and with two or three clumsy strokes the executioner hacked it from
his body. As Edward watched, the severed head was lifted into the air in public demonstration of its owner’s fate, before the monks of Pontefract Priory gathered up the bloodstained corpse for burial before the altar of their church.

Unhappy precedent there may have been, but, however shattering the repercussions of Gaveston’s death, they could not compare with the shock to the political system that Lancaster’s execution represented. Gaveston had been a peer of the realm in name, but not by hereditary right or territorial reach. And, crucially, his death had not been ordered by the king. Now, for the first time since the Conquest, a lord – and not just any lord, but the greatest of them all – had been executed as a traitor. The dreadful penalties that now faced anyone who dared to oppose Edward were rammed home in the minds of his subjects in the days that followed Lancaster’s death. Dozens of those who had joined the earl’s revolt, lords and knights and squires, met their deaths on gallows erected for the purpose in places where they had once been powerful. John Mowbray was hanged at York on 23 March, and his body left suspended in chains to rot under the spring skies. Three weeks later Bartholomew Badlesmere was dragged by a horse through the city of Canterbury and out to a crossroads where he was hanged and then decapitated, his head speared on a pike and set to stare down, hollow-eyed, on the cowed townspeople from the city’s east gate. Dozens more – including the sons of Mowbray and Badlesmere – now filled prison cells in royal castles around the country, and rebels’ wives and young children were among those who lost their liberty. Even Lancaster’s estranged wife, the perennially unfortunate Alice Lacy, and her elderly stepmother, the dowager countess of Lincoln, were taken into custody.

This was a new and frightening incarnation of a king whose failings had once been those of omission and distraction. The violence was authentically Edward’s, the emotional response of a man for whom revenge was no less immediately visceral for having been delayed for a decade. But the thoroughgoing ruthlessness was Despenser’s. The favourite and his father had been back at
Edward’s side since the beginning of March. Two months later, after Boroughbridge and the bloodletting that followed, the elder Despenser was created earl of Winchester. That title was just the first of the spoils of victory that the two men now began to amass, using threats and force to supplement the royal favour in which they basked.

If Isabella was glad to see her husband restored to the fullness of his power, that joy was rapidly eroded by the realisation of the role Despenser now played in the direction of policy, and of the latitude that Edward was prepared to allow him. She had gone down on her knees to beg for his banishment in 1321 – an intervention that represented not personal enmity but her queenly duty in the search for peace, no more and no less. But now it became clear that all those who had sought to broker a settlement between Edward and the rebels were regarded as potential enemies of the new regime. In May 1322 the long-suffering earl of Pembroke was compelled to swear an extraordinary oath of loyalty to the king ‘for certain reasons he was given to understand’, the royal chancery tersely recorded; and Isabella found herself frozen out of Edward’s counsels, while her own properties, it soon emerged, were not immune from the Despensers’ covetous glances.