The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March (26 page)

Edward was at Kirkham when he was told the news. From there he sent messengers to all the sheriffs and all the keepers of the peace in England to proclaim that ‘all and singular who are in the king’s peace shall pursue with hue and cry Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, the king’s rebel …, and that they shall arrest him alive or dead …’. The king also declared that any who were contrary or slow in their pursuit should be punished as abettors. He ordered spies to watch all the ports and to inquire whether Roger had yet crossed the sea, and, if so, who had taken him, and whither he had gone. Letters were sent to the constables of eighty castles, instructing them to ensure that all their prisoners were kept securely and that their garrisons were on the highest alert. The king also sent orders to the Justiciar of Wales to prepare all the Welsh castles for war, and he wrote to Sir John de Bermingham in Ireland for the castles there to be secured against Roger. All tournaments throughout the country were banned. Finally, Edward ordered the Bishop of Exeter, Walter de Stapeldon, to go to the Tower of London and take over from Stephen de Segrave. Edward was so unsure of his authority in the city that he ordered the bishop to go in his capacity as Treasurer, and only after entering was he to show his commission to take control of the castle.
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Throughout August the desperate commands continued, each one naming Roger as ‘the king’s rebel’ or ‘the king’s enemy’, but none betraying any knowledge of his whereabouts. By the 26th the king seems to have become convinced that Roger had left the country and was sailing to Ireland, as on that day he ordered the Earl of Kent to seize three Irish ships off the coast of Dover. He was still convinced that Roger was in Ireland two days later, when he sent letters to all the principal Irish lords,
including several of Roger’s own vassals, ordering them to pursue him. Mayors of ports were ordered to search every item coming into and going out of the country for letters to or from Roger. The court was in complete panic. Edward fully expected Roger immediately to gather an army from his lands in Ireland, Wales and the Marches, and to come to do battle. But Roger was not so foolish as to attempt a confrontation without due preparation.

By the end of September the king’s spy network had established that Roger was in Picardy, in France, staying with his uncle and cousin, John and Robert de Fiennes. The king wrote to the elder de Fiennes that he was ‘astonished’ at his harbouring Roger, since John held lands in England and was Edward’s vassal, and because Edward had favoured him in the past. Both John and Robert were ordered to arrest Roger. Needless to say, they ignored the command.

One can understand the king’s fear of imminent attack. Everything was going Roger’s way. He had not only escaped the Tower, he had succeeded in getting out of the country and finding safe refuge beyond the king’s reach. He had eluded Edward so effectively that for a long time the king did not know where he was, or where he was heading. Even now the king had only the slightest grasp of Roger’s location, and no intelligence regarding his plans. Because of this, and because of the hatred of the Despensers, support for Roger was gathering at home, and various demonstrations in his favour took place, normally in the form of attacks on the manors of the Despensers. But Roger’s luck did not end there. His third son, Geoffrey, was also in France, and Geoffrey was the sole heir to the estates of his grandmother, Joan’s mother, which included a portion of the de Lusignan inheritance. Just before Roger escaped from the Tower, old age conveniently carried her off.
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By the end of 1323 Geoffrey had inherited her estates, had sworn fealty to the French king, and was thus able to help support his father.

Even this was not the limit of his luck. War now seemed likely between England and France. Tension had been high between the two countries for the past few years, owing to problems arising from Edward’s lordship of Gascony. For this Edward was required to do homage to the King of France in person, a humbling act he had hitherto avoided. Now King Charles had every legal right to confiscate the lordship. Furthermore, the duchy had seen several conflicts which Edward had failed to subdue, and in such circumstances it was incumbent upon the King of France to resolve matters, using a French army to suppress the rebellious Gascon lords, if necessary. This was a highly contentious issue, and one which threatened to flare up into war in the autumn of 1323. Arriving at precisely the right
time, Roger was welcomed as an ally and treated with great honour by Charles IV. Edward was naturally infuriated by this, but there was little he could do, for in a final piece of amazing good fortune for Roger, in mid-October 1323 a French attempt to build a fortified town at Saint Sardos was met with resistance from a Gascon lord, Raymond Bernard. Bernard was felt to be acting with the connivance of the Seneschal of Gascony, Sir Ralph Basset, and Basset did not help matters by taking no action against Bernard, despite the murder of a French royal official. When Edward also refused to act to bring the offenders to justice, and refused again to do homage for Gascony (on the advice of Hugh Despenser), the French king confiscated the duchy and sent a royal army to take possession. Thus it is not surprising that Roger was welcomed by Charles: they had a common enemy in King Edward.

With Roger in France, all Edward could do to control him was to keep his spies on the lookout. On 6 December the seneschal wrote to Edward to report that Roger and his companions were travelling towards Germany.
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A week later Edward’s envoys to Paris sent news that ‘the Mortimer’ (as Edward now referred to him) and the other rebels with him were being entertained by the Count of Boulogne, who was then on his way to Toulouse.
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It seems that Roger and his French friends were leading the English spies a merry dance. The panic felt at the English court did not diminish. News of the arrival of German ships in the Channel, or a Hainault invasion fleet, or Genoese armed ships, swept the country regularly. Fears of a foreign invasion led by Roger abounded and were widely believed.

The only action left open to Edward was the persecution of anyone in England who supported Roger, such as John de Gisors and Ralph de Bocton, who were accused of helping Roger to escape. De Bocton lost his lands and possessions. So too did John le Mercer of London. So too did William de Boarhunt and his wife Alice, who lost their lands on the Isle of Wight. The English lands of the de Fiennes family were confiscated. Edward even accused King Charles of France of complicity in Roger’s plot.
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The Bishop of Hereford was again questioned, and found guilty of providing arms and horses to help Roger escape, in an irregular – and probably illegal – court, with a jury specially selected by the king for the purpose.
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The Bishop of Lincoln was also accused.
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Finally, and most importantly, the king and Despenser took steps against Queen Isabella. Whether she was suspected of complicity in Roger’s escape is not known, and with no evidence on which to work the king did not dare accuse her directly, but when she declared herself to be in favour of the accused bishops she incurred the full wrath of the king.

In April 1324 Edward ordered Isabella to write to Charles to try to end the dispute over Saint Sardos. She was the obvious person to make peace: the wife of one king and the sister of the other. But Edward’s motive was not just to buy time. He ordered the queen to state in her letter that peace between England and France was the very reason for her marriage to Edward, as the marriage had originally been arranged by Edward I in order to settle a dispute between the two countries. It followed that if war broke out the marriage had failed. In the summer the Pope also suggested that she mediate, but in person, not by letter. Edward would not let her leave the country. He suspected she would meet Roger and form an alliance with him. His preference was to keep her under strict control. He ordered that his debts to her should not be repaid. At the same time, Isabella was aware that she was being spied upon by Hugh Despenser’s wife, who was even reading her letters. In September 1324, when Despenser heard rumours that Roger might invade from Hainault,
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Edward confiscated all her lands and property. It was said that Despenser had sent men to the Pope to request a divorce between Isabella and Edward. The following month the queen’s personal living expenses were reduced to a fraction of their former level, to be paid not by her but directly by the Exchequer. All Frenchmen in England were arrested. Twenty-seven of Isabella’s household retainers, including her clerks and her doctor, were imprisoned, and she was expressly forbidden to help them. Her income, including the money owed to her by the king, was appropriated for the king’s use. Lastly her children were removed from her and placed in the keeping of Hugh Despenser’s wife.
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The woman who had come to England as an innocent and beautiful twelve-year-old bride, who had put up with her husband’s affection for Gaveston, who had endured the petty squabbles with the Earl of Lancaster, who had dutifully given birth to four children, who had been abandoned to the Scots at Tynemouth, and who had steadfastly supported her husband despite everything, had now lost her husband’s love, her position, her status, her income, her friends, her companions in faith, and her children.

Isabella was just one of the many who were suffering. Bishop Orleton was sent for trial. Assize courts were held in many counties, so that anyone who had helped Roger escape, or who was suspected of having dealings with him in the recent past, or who had sided with the Mortimers and the rest of the Marchers in the rebellion against Despenser in 1321 was to be tried. No matter how great or small, all were judged, and many were imprisoned or hanged. Even Henry of Lancaster was accused. Roger’s relatives fared particularly badly. His sons in England were imprisoned. In April 1324 his wife was removed from her lodging in Hampshire, where
she was under house arrest, and imprisoned in the royal castle of Skipton-in-Craven in Yorkshire. The men of her household were removed, although she was still allowed a damsel, an esquire, a laundress, a groom and a page; but she was permitted only one mark per day to keep and feed herself and them. Her daughters fared worse. Margaret, married to Thomas de Berkeley, was shut up in Shouldham Priory, with 15d weekly for her expenses – a smaller allowance than the criminals in the Tower were allowed. Her younger sisters fared even worse. Joan, who was twelve or thirteen, was sent to Sempringham Priory by herself, and received only 12d a week to feed her and one mark a year for her clothes. Her young sister, Isabella, suffered a similar fate, being incarcerated at Chicksands Priory.

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There is little evidence as to where Roger was and what he was doing while on the Continent. Traditionally this has been seen as a period in which he was wholly opportunistic: that he was waiting, with no distinct plan in mind, until Isabella traded her son’s marriage for an army. This ignores the fact that Isabella, while known for her intelligence, was not a military leader; her attempts to use force in the past had ended in failure, and it is unlikely she sought military help without first establishing military leadership. It also presumes that, because Isabella maintained the higher profile throughout the later campaign, Roger was dependent on her for direction. It is far more likely that when Roger arrived in France, and was welcomed with ‘great honour’ by Charles, the seeds of a future attack on England were then sown. This is not to say that Charles and Roger planned the following two years’ events at the end of 1323; but it is unrealistic to suggest two men at war with the King of England idled away their time together in jousting and falconry. They almost certainly discussed the possibilities open to them, and probably established a framework for future action. This limited the need for direct communication, and what need there was could be satisfied by Charles’s personal messengers. The fact that such a framework was possible was due to one factor which Edward did not understand: Gascony.

Charles and Roger knew that, sooner or later, Edward would have to do homage for Gascony. Edward would have to leave England, and, when he did so, he would have to leave Hugh Despenser behind. As Charles implied in a firm statement about exiles in a letter of 29 December 1323, Despenser was no more welcome in France than Roger was in England.
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Edward would of course have ignored Charles’s request that Despenser be ousted from England in return for Roger being asked to leave France,
but there was little doubt that, if Edward came to France, he would be cut off from Despenser in the same way that he had been cut off from Gaveston in 1312. On that earlier occasion Thomas of Lancaster had astutely moved between the two parties and taken Gaveston prisoner. Roger hoped that, with Edward held in France under the watchful eye of the French king, an English lord, perhaps Henry of Lancaster, could move against Despenser. Henry was no friend of the Despensers and very wary of Edward. He had received none of his brother’s vast estates, which had all been confiscated by the king on the execution of Earl Thomas. Moreover, when he had supported the Bishop of Hereford, Edward had prosecuted him, and only his extremely able defence in court had saved his life. He was also of royal blood, so he was the obvious candidate for leading the disaffected English lords against the favourite. As it happened, this course of events did not occur, but the clear potential for Despenser to be isolated by a known and predictable event allowed Roger and Charles to discuss possible strategies.

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It was particularly foolish of Edward to allow Despenser to counsel him to antagonise the French over Gascony. All his experiences in Scotland had proved that he was an incompetent military leader and a poor judge of military commanders. For Gascony he chose to send his young and inexperienced brother, the Earl of Kent. This was equally foolish; not long after arriving Kent greatly angered the people of Agen by trying to extract large sums of money from them and abducting a young girl from the town.
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Nor were his military engagements any more successful. When Charles de Valois, uncle of King Charles, moved against him in August 1324 his defences crumpled. After losing several key towns, he fell back to the castle of La Réole and was forced to sue for peace. King Charles readily agreed to a six-month truce, but he kept possession of the lands his uncle had conquered.