The Plantagenets (55 page)

More executions followed. Twenty other men were killed for their part in the rebellion against Edward’s rule. The horror of Edward’s revenge shocked the country. Gibbets were erected in London, Windsor, Bristol, Cardiff and Swansea. The bodies of executed men
swung in chains, bloating and decaying, for more than two years. Everyone who entered a major town between 1322 and 1324 might have shuddered at the sight of once great men butchered and hung up like hogs. It was not surprising that Roger of Wendover, the author of the
Flores Historiarum
chronicle, wrote that the king ‘hated all the magnates with such mad fury that he plotted the complete and permanent overthrow of all the great men of the realm’.

Of the most prominent contrariants, the two Roger Mortimers, the Marcher lords who had been involved in the initial attacks on Despenser property, were both sentenced to death, but had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. Maurice de Berkeley and both Hugh Audley the younger and the elder – once loyal lords who had been driven away from the king by hatred of the Despensers – were also imprisoned rather than executed. The Tower of London heaved with well-born prisoners, while contrariants’ families were deprived of their lands and property or imprisoned in castles across England and Wales.

In such an atmosphere it was unsurprising that the May 1322 parliament tore up almost everything that Lancaster and his allies had attempted to impose on the king since 1311. The Ordinances were repealed, save six so-called ‘Good Clauses’ that were reissued in the Statute of York. The legal processes that had been started against the Despensers prior to the civil war were halted, and a process by which Lancaster’s extensive lands were taken into royal hands was begun. Various other items of parliamentary business, concerning trade regulation and legal procedures, were discussed and referred to the royal council, but it was clear to all who gathered at York that these were matters incidental to the king’s revenge on his enemies.

During the rest of the year Edward handed out the spoils of the civil war. There was a limited programme by which those contrariants who survived the bloodletting could buy back their estates at extortionate prices. But in the main Edward distributed the confiscated possessions to his followers. Andrew Harclay, for his part in capturing Lancaster, was raised to a new earldom of Carlisle. The loyal earls of Pembroke and Surrey were all given manors and lands that had either
been confiscated from them by Lancaster in 1318–19 or else were taken from Lancaster’s own estates. The earl of Arundel was given lands confiscated from Roger Mortimer of Chirk, as well as the latter’s title of justice of Wales. The king’s half-brother Edmund earl of Kent gained castles in the Midlands and Wales, and Edward’s younger son John of Eltham, although only six years old in August 1322, was given the Lancastrian castle of Tutbury.

Most heavily rewarded, unsurprisingly, were the Despensers. The 61-year-old Hugh the elder was raised to the earldom of Winchester with five separate grants of land to support his new rank, including the valuable lordship of Denbigh, in north Wales, which had been stripped from Lancaster. Hugh the younger, meanwhile, received virtually all the lands (albeit not the title) of the earldom of Gloucester. He was restored to all the estates in Wales – Glamorgan, Cantref Mawr and Gower – that had been raided and taken from him in the civil war, and over the next two years these western landholdings were linked up by the award of lordships in Usk, Is Cennen, Brecon, Chepstow and Pembroke. He was de facto lord of south Wales, vastly wealthy, with an income of perhaps £5,000 a year, and now the trustee of almost unfettered royal power in the west. After 1322, the two Despensers and Edward controlled between them perhaps three-quarters of Wales.

If the Despensers prospered, so too did the king. Tens of thousands of pounds of revenue from confiscated lands and fines paid by disgraced nobles now flowed directly into his chamber. The York parliament granted him taxation amounting to more than £40,000 for a war with the Scots, but a botched invasion in August and September 1322 in which Queen Isabella was almost captured was swiftly aborted in favour of a thirteen-year truce. More than half of the money raised for defending the northern border went unspent, and the coin was sent in large barrels for safekeeping in the Tower of London. More followed from a clerical tax, also supposed to fund a Scottish war. The king took a close personal interest in collecting money, and his coffers filled accordingly. The author of the
Brut
chronicle reckoned Edward to be the richest king since William the Conqueror.

Emboldened by the security of his riches, Edward now became a tyrant. It seemed to the country that he governed in alliance with the Despensers – the chronicler Thomas de la More wrote afterwards that under Edward and the Despensers, England had three kings at once. The younger Despenser dominated the highest reaches of the state, sending covering letters with documents sealed by the king, involving himself deeply in affairs of state and spreading a network of retainers and followers throughout county government.

No one was safe from the vengeance of the king and the Despensers when matters did not go their way. Cruelty was rife. When the Scottish invasion failed, casual vengeance was taken upon a man who had only months previously found himself high in royal favour: when Andrew Harclay, the newly ennobled earl of Carlisle, was discovered to have opened independent negotiations with Robert the Bruce in early 1323, he was hanged, drawn and quartered as a common traitor. The hero of Boroughbridge was dead within a month of his greatest act of loyalty.

All the king’s enemies were vulnerable. The earl of Pembroke, who had been conspicuously loyal between his roles in Gaveston’s death and the attacks on the Despensers of 1321, was forced to swear an oath of allegiance to the king, guaranteed by his life, his lands and his goods. He was broken politically and would die in 1324. Meanwhile, Lancaster’s young widow, Alice de Lacy, had been imprisoned in York castle along with her mother following the earl’s death. The Despensers threatened both women with burning if they did not surrender their estates in exchange for empty honorific titles and a small cash pension. Hundreds of others were affected in this way. Meanwhile Hugh Despenser the younger built himself a hall of regal magnificence at Caerphilly castle, spending vast sums using master craftsmen and the finest materials. Despenser revelled in his position as the king’s most trusted adviser and recipient of the most generous royal patronage, and his hand appeared everywhere in government.

Under the influence of the Despensers, and in particular Hugh the younger, the period between 1322 and 1326 was characterized by grotesque cruelty. ‘The king’s harshness has indeed increased so much
today that no one, however great or wise, dares to cross the king’s will,’ wrote the author of
The Life of Edward II
. ‘Parliaments, consultations and councils decide nothing … For the nobles of the realm, terrified by threats and the penalties inflicted on others, let the king’s will have free rein. Thus today will conquers reason. For whatever pleases the king, though lacking in reason, has force of law.’

Edward had defeated his enemies and enriched the Crown. But he had not done anything to strengthen his rule. Indeed, by wielding his office solely in his own and his favourites’ interest he was simply making his overlordship worthless to all those men who could not gain access to his justice or protection from his law. For all the magnificence that accrued to him in victory, he was fatally undermining his own reign.

Mortimer, Isabella and Prince Edward

On the night of 1 August 1323 the Tower of London came silently to life. The Tower was full of Edward’s political prisoners, and chief among them were two men from the Marches: Roger Mortimer of Chirk, by now in his mid-sixties, and his nephew, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, who was twenty-six. These one-time contrariants had been imprisoned since surrendering to the Crown in the midst of the civil war. They had both been tried and condemned to death. Both had thus far escaped execution of their sentence. But with an unpredictable king in the grip of the two Despensers, who bore the whole Mortimer dynasty a grudge, they could not hope to live for much longer.

Their time in the Tower had been ruinous. The Mortimers had been helpless as their lands in Wales and the Marches were parcelled up and awarded to their enemies. But they were determined not to suffer indefinitely. During the months of their imprisonment they crafted a plan for one of them to escape. As darkness fell on the night of 1 August, the deputy constable of the Tower, Gerard d’Alspaye, slipped a sleeping draught into the drinks of the constable and the Mortimers’ guards. Then he hurried to Roger Mortimer of Wigmore’s cell, unlocked the door and led the knight through the castle kitchens and on to the Tower’s southern wall.

Once at the top of the wall, the two men unfurled a rope ladder. It rolled quietly down against the sheer stone towards the river Thames, directly below them, where several co-conspirators were waiting in a boat. Mortimer and d’Alspaye slid down the ladder, climbed into their
escape vessel, rowed across to the south bank of the river and escaped on horseback to the south coast of England. Mortimer put to sea at Porchester and within days had evaded recapture and taken refuge in France.

It was a brilliantly realized escape, which threw Edward’s court into a state of paranoia. An inveterate opponent of the king had fled from what was supposed to be the greatest fortress in the capital. Rumours reached the royal household that this was part of a wider conspiracy to seize royal castles, and even to send assassins to murder Edward and the Despensers. From the autumn of 1323 onwards, spies across the Continent began to send reports back of plots and invasion attempts involving Mortimer. A devastating chain of events had begun.

Mortimer’s escape was a vital element in a political and diplomatic crisis that escalated steadily between 1323 and 1326. Driven by individual ambition and wider geopolitics, the crisis unfurled in a region that had caused little trouble to Edward since his accession: Gascony.

When Mortimer fled to France, he was welcomed to the country by a new king. Charles IV had succeeded his brother Philip V in January 1322. Like all new French kings he was eager to show the kings of England that he regarded their claims to the duchy of Gascony with a suspicion that bordered on hostility. When a violent dispute broke out over a French
bastide
(fortified town) built on English territory at St-Sardos in the Agenais, Charles used the ensuing quarrel as a pretext for an invasion of Gascony. The earls of Kent and Pembroke were sent to protest, and dismissed haughtily. Charles wanted to discomfit the English as much as possible. In August 1324 he moved thousands of troops to the borders of the duchy and began to besiege its major towns. Almost in a blink, England and France were once again at war.

Back in England the outbreak of war put Edward in a painful bind that exposed precisely why his aggressive, divisive approach to kingship could only lead to ruin. He could not trust his own subjects to obey his rule, for other than a small band of handsomely rewarded favourites, he had never given them reason to do so. He could – and
did – arrest all Frenchmen in England and confiscate all lands held by French citizens, including the queen. But when he began to make plans to lead an army to Gascony in person, he faced a dilemma. Were he to leave England with an invasion force he would have to take with him most of the officials and magnates who were still loyal to him, and trust in the regency of his eleven-year-old son and heir Edward, earl of Chester. That would leave England highly vulnerable to plots, rebellions and invasion. If he left the Despensers behind him to keep order he risked losing them the way he had lost Gaveston. Furthermore, he feared rumours of Roger Mortimer’s plotting on the Continent, and imagined that either he or the Despensers could be kidnapped if they happened across Mortimer’s agents overseas.

Rather than cross the Channel, Edward sent more envoys to negotiate for peace. In the first instance he sent an embassy led by the bishops of Winchester and Norwich, the earl of Richmond and Henry de Beaumont. But in March 1325, a diplomat of altogether higher status was sent: Queen Isabella.

Both of Isabella’s two eldest brothers had been crowned king of France: Charles IV was the third and last. She had long enjoyed close links with her Capetian family, despite her involvement in the Tour de Nesle scandal of 1314, in which Charles’s wife Blanche had been imprisoned for adultery and her lover beaten to death in public. If anyone could appeal to Charles to end his aggression, reasoned Edward and the Despensers, it was Isabella.

It would prove to be a fatal decision. Although she had been staunchly loyal to her husband during the convulsions of his reign, the queen had been rewarded, in the end, with little more than the same humiliation that she had suffered as a teenager, when she was sidelined by Gaveston at her own coronation. She suffered roundly at Edward and Despenser’s hands when war broke out: her lands had been confiscated, her servants exiled or imprisoned, and her maintenance payments from the king were both reduced and diverted via the younger Despenser. (She had written furiously to her brother Charles, complaining that she was treated like a maidservant.) On top of that, Despenser’s wife Eleanor de Clare was detailed to spy on Isabella’s
correspondence. The queen had borne all this with public dignity, but she was clearly simmering with rage. Yet now the king and his ally decided that she was to be of some use to them after all, exploiting her relationship with the French king to try and dig her husband out of a situation in which he risked losing the last of the Plantagenet lands on the Continent.

Isabella was, unsurprisingly, very pleased to leave England. ‘The queen departed very joyfully,’ wrote the author of
The Life of Edward II
. She was ‘pleased in fact to visit her native land and her relatives, pleased to leave the company of some whom she did not like’. This was something of an understatement. Isabella could not leave the Despensers and her weak, unpleasant husband quickly enough.