The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Once more the court was convened along the injudicious lines that had been drawn up when Gaveston and Lancaster were killed. It was certain that the defendant would die, and would die without the right to speak in his own favour. The earl of Arundel had been beheaded in Hereford a week previously, and it was certain that the favourite would join him.

  Despenser’s crimes were read out to the court. The list was exhaustingly long and included breaking the terms of exile, breaching Magna Carta and the Ordinances of 1311, killing, imprisoning and tyrannizing the great and good of the realm, causing the king to fight in Scotland at the cost of thousands of men’s lives, usurping royal authority and attempting to fund the destruction of Queen Isabella and her son Duke Edward while they were in France. Sir William, sitting in judgement, condemned Despenser to the full and hideous death of a robber, traitor and tyrant. He was to be hanged, drawn and quartered, his entrails were to be burned before him and he would be beheaded. ‘Go to meet your fate, traitor, tyrant, renegade,’ thundered Trussel. ‘Go to receive your justice, traitor, evil man, criminal!’

  Along with his associate Simon de Reading, who had been tried alongside him, Despenser was roped to four horses, and dragged through the streets of Hereford to the walls of the castle. Here both men had nooses placed around their necks, and Despenser was hoisted onto a specially made 50-foot gallows, designed to make punishment visible to everyone in the town. A fire burned beneath the scaffold, and it was here that Despenser’s genitals were thrown when the executioner had scaled a ladder and hacked them off with a knife. He was then drawn: his intestines and heart were cut out and also hurled down into the flames. Finally, his body was lowered back to the ground and butchered. The crowd whooped with joy as Despenser’s head was cut off, to be sent to London, while his body was quartered for distribution about the country.

  This was the fate of the most notorious traitor in England: another baron slaughtered in the orgy of violence that had engulfed the realm since Edward’s accession. But what of the king himself?

  What to do with Edward was a vexing question. Given everything that had passed, he was irrecoverably estranged from Mortimer and his wife. The queen could not even visit her husband in his prison at Kenilworth castle, where he was held over Christmas 1326. Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford, reported that if Edward saw his wife, he was liable to kill her. Words later attributed to Orleton (although he denied them) were that Edward ‘carried a knife in his hose to kill Queen Isabella, and that if he had no other weapon he would crush her with his teeth’.

  Twenty disastrous years had demonstrated to all that the king was incapable of ruling competently. Yet nearly 175 years of Plantagenet rule had been based on an evolving partnership between kings and the community of the realm. Kings had been threatened with deposition – John, Henry III and Edward I had all been warned that they might be deprived of their thrones in moments of crisis – but the reality was quite different. The whole basis of English law and governance, which for the most part operated efficiently and to the advantage of the majority of English subjects, rested on an authority that stemmed ultimately from the Crown. The king was counselled by his advisers and he consulted parliaments over matters of taxation and war, but he remained the source of all public authority and, in a properly functioning realm, the bulwark against anarchy. Who had the right to depose him and declare another man king? Who could speak for this higher authority? If the realm unilaterally deposed – or worse, killed – the king, was it not killing itself? What hope was there of order in a state where a king who upset a faction of his kingdom might be summarily removed?

  These were all, to some degree, unanswerable questions. Yet everyone agreed on the practical reality: Edward had to be removed from power. To bolster the case against him, Isabella and Mortimer’s propaganda machine ground into action. Bishop Orleton was active in preaching that Isabella and her son had returned to England because the king and Despenser were sodomites and tyrants. From this point on, Edward’s reputation as a degenerate homosexual began to run wild throughout contemporary chronicles.

  As soon as the Christmas celebrations had finished, parliament assembled at Westminster to decide the king’s fate. Edward utterly refused to travel from Kenilworth and engage with proceedings, probably reasoning that without him present the parliament would lack legitimacy. But this was another misjudgement, and business carried on without him. The bishop of Hereford addressed parliament on 12 January and asked the assembly whether Edward II should continue as king, or be replaced by his son. By the evening it was decided that he should be replaced, and a series of articles of accusation was drawn up.

  The following day Roger Mortimer stood up in Westminster Hall and told the assembled prelates and lay nobles that magnates collectively wished for the inadequate king to be removed from the realm. Westminster then heard sermons from the leading bishops of the realm, giving ecclesiastical weight to the decision that had been taken. The bishop of Hereford preached upon the text of Proverbs 11:14 (‘Where there is no governor the people shall fall’). The bishop of Winchester used the phrase Caput meum doleo (‘My head hurts’) to argue that an evil head spread evil throughout the body of the kingdom. Finally, the archbishop of Canterbury gave a sermon in French, using the text ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God’. When he had finished telling the assembly that God had heard their prayers for a remedy to the evils of Edward’s reign, he introduced the fourteen-year-old boy, Edward duke of Aquitaine, who was to be the new king. ‘Glory, laud and honour’ was sung. Later in the day oaths were sworn at the Guildhall to protect and uphold the honour of Queen Isabella and her son who would be king.

  All that now remained was to convince Edward himself to concur with the wishes of the community of the realm and voluntarily relinquish his office. To that end, a delegation of twenty-four worthy men was sent to Kenilworth to confront him.

  Henry of Lancaster and the bishops of Winchester and Lincoln were sent ahead of the rest of the group, and on 20 January they met the king and told him that his time had passed. Edward resisted. The chronicler Geoffrey le Baker says that he was told that failure to abdicate in favour of his son would mean deposition. A new, non-Plantagenet king would be elected and his entire bloodline, not merely his own person, would be removed from kingship. A tearful argument followed, and by the time the twenty-one remaining representatives of the realm arrived, Edward was so grief-stricken that he had to be held on his feet by Lancaster and the bishop of Winchester.

  On 24 January 1327 London woke to proclamations that Edward had ‘of his own good will and with the common assent of the prelates, earls and barons, and other nobles and of all the commonalty of the realm, resigned the government of the realm’. A new king had been appointed. Edward duke of Aquitaine had become King Edward III; and King Edward II was reduced once more to Edward of Caernarfon. Sir William Trussel, the hanging judge of the invasion, had formally withdrawn homage on behalf of all the kingdom. Oaths were sworn to the new king. And those voices that dissented were momentarily drowned out by the clamour of the revolutionaries.

  False Dawn

  The boy-king Edward III was crowned at Westminster on 1 February, in a ceremony arranged at unprecedented speed. Royal authority had collapsed to a baleful condition under his father; the immediate priority for the new king and his minders was to re-establish it. Fortunately, since most of England’s political community were in London at the end of January, it proved relatively simple to assemble them at Westminster at short notice to see Edward, along with three of Roger Mortimer’s sons, knighted by the 36-year-old Henry of Lancaster. Then, on the day of the coronation itself, Westminster Abbey filled with magnates and prelates to watch Archbishop Reynolds of Canterbury lower the large, heavy crown of the Confessor – fitted with extra padding to ensure it did not topple off at some critical, ill-omened moment – onto the head of the fourteen-year-old king.

  Edward swore the same coronation oath that Edward II had taken in 1307, includ
ing the novel fourth vow that his father had so conspicuously failed to observe: that he would ‘hold and preserve the laws and righteous customs which the community of the realm shall have chosen’. The new reign was then celebrated with a feast in Westminster Hall of wilder extravagance and luxury than would be seen again for another half-century. The hall was transformed into a richly furnished paradise of kingship, glittering with priceless cloth and precious plate. The royal throne was hung on every side with cloth of gold. The celebratory atmosphere served as a much-needed counterpoint to the miserable, bloody events of the previous year, and there was no mistaking the political message: the old king might have fallen, but the Crown itself remained supreme and magnificent.

  Yet kingship was palpably not recovered. At fourteen, Edward had reached the age of discretion, but he was not fit to rule in his own right. This presented an ambiguous state of affairs: a king too old to be a mere figurehead, but not yet old enough to take the reins of power in both hands. Although he took control of his own household from March 1327, the real business of government very quickly fell to Queen Isabella, who controlled influence and access to her son, and Roger Mortimer, who performed a similar role towards the queen. It would not be very long before they, too, had perverted the principles of the royal office they were supposed to protect.

  The first task of the new regime was to rehabilitate the outcasts of the previous reign. A parliament assembled the day after the coronation reversed the sentences of treason that had been passed on Thomas earl of Lancaster and his allies in 1322, and allowed for the proper inheritance of the family estates and titles, which were largely awarded to Henry of Lancaster. Mortimer, too, was restored to his lands and titles, and began an aggressive pursuit of other Marcher territories, beginning with those belonging to his uncle, Roger Mortimer of Chirk, who had recently died. None of this was very unusual, for Mortimer, like Henry of Lancaster, was fully entitled to reclaim what had been unfairly taken from him by Edward II and the Despensers. Yet there were signs very early that Isabella and Mortimer had just as grasping a mindset as their forerunner partisans and favourites.

  Before Edward’s coronation, during the chaotic bloodletting that preceded her husband’s abdication, Queen Isabella had resumed all the lands of her dowry, worth some £4,500. After her son was crowned, she was awarded further estates, taking her landed income to 20,000 marks – making her a greater landowner than any other magnate in England. This massive accumulation of wealth, combined with her access to the large stockpiles of treasure that had been amassed by her husband and the Despensers, rattled onlookers.

  Of more immediate concern, however, was the queen’s involvement in foreign politics. Here, three urgent issues pressed the new government. Peace with Isabella’s brother Charles IV of France had to be formalized, to protect the disputed borders of the beleaguered Aquitanian territories. Scotland required a show of force to subdue its impertinent natives, some of whom had led a successful assault on the English-held castle at Norham on 1 February – the very day that Edward was crowned. Finally, Edward needed a bride, through whom to sire a new generation of Plantagenets.

  Failure greeted almost every move. The terms of the Treaty of Paris, hastily agreed with the French Crown, reached the king in Lincolnshire in mid-April, and it was clear that they were designed not only to humiliate him, but also to cripple his realm financially. English possessions in south-west France were reduced to the Gascon coast between Bordeaux and Bayonne. Everything else would be controlled directly by the French king. The cost to Edward for retaining this tiny sliver of the former Plantagenet empire was a punitive bill of 50,000 marks. It seems that Isabella and Mortimer recognized just how high a price they were paying for peace, since the detailed terms of the treaty were suppressed on the English side of the Channel. This represented a helpless acquiescence – an acceptance that England was too mired in internal discord to contemplate reconquest in France.

  Even when Charles died in 1328 without a Capetian heir, minimal effort was made to turn the situation to England’s advantage. Although Edward was one of the three surviving grandsons of Philip IV, and thus had a claim to the French Crown, only token protests were made when Charles’s cousin Philip of Valois was crowned Philip VI. Edward travelled to Amiens in 1329 to do homage to the new king for the rump of Aquitaine and the county of Ponthieu. This was hardly a sign that the English were prepared to use Edward’s dynastic claim as a bargaining lever for greater security in what remained of the Plantagenet continental lands.

  In Scotland, things fared worse. Border raids continued from February to the summer, with bands of Scots crossing into northern England to burn and plunder as they pleased. At the same time as the terms of the Treaty of Paris were put before a disappointed Edward III in Lincolnshire, royal orders were heading north for an old-fashioned feudal muster of troops at Newcastle-upon-Tyne and York.

  Edward and his mother travelled to York in late May, where they met with a band of 500 Flemish knights under Isabella’s continental ally John of Hainault. This elite fighting unit made itself immediately unpopular with the citizens of England’s second city by fighting with the English troops, rampaging in violent disorder through the streets of York. Despite this unpromising background, Edward left Isabella in York in early July and set out for the Scottish border, aiming to meet the enemy, who were amassed under the veteran commander Sir James Douglas, and bring them to battle. The mission was a disaster: Douglas spent several weeks dodging his English pursuers, before abruptly changing tack at the end of the month. He fell upon the royal camp near Stanhope Park near Durham, causing havoc, scattering the king’s attendants, and according to one chronicle, riding to the middle of the royal encampment, ‘always crying “Douglas!”, and stroke asunder two or three cords of the King’s tent’. Several days later Douglas took his rampant troops on a final retreat back into Scotland.

  Edward was said by several chroniclers to have been so enraged at his own failure that he wept in fury. Well might he have done: the campaign ran through funds so quickly that the crown jewels had to be pawned to keep English government solvent. By the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton (so-called because it was sealed in Edinburgh by Robert the Bruce in early 1328 and subsequently ratified in an English parliament held in May at Northampton), Mortimer and Isabella accepted that they could not afford to wage a war in the north. They settled with the Scots, disgracefully giving up England’s claim to overlordship in Scotland for a paltry £20,000. Scotland was recognized as a sovereign kingdom, ruled over by Bruce and his heirs and constrained by the border as it had been in Alexander III’s time. Edward’s six-year-old sister Joanna was betrothed and swiftly married to Bruce’s infant son David. This did little to obscure the fact that everything the English had fought for since Edward I’s glorious war had begun in 1295 was forfeited in a stroke.

  Edward’s wedding, at least, was more certain. The alliance made with the count of Hainault before Isabella and Mortimer’s invasion was honoured, and the young Philippa of Hainault – born some time between 1310 and 1315, so approximately Edward’s own age – was brought over to London in late 1327. The couple were married at York Minster on 26 January 1328 in an opulent, gold-trimmed ceremony designed to demonstrate as surely to Edward’s northern subjects as his coronation had shown his southern that royal power was not in decline. (That such magnificence could be afforded against a background of war-weary penury was thanks to the Plantagenets’ generous Italian bankers, the Bardi family. The Bardis would learn their lesson some years later when Edward’s repeated defaults on his loans ruined them – a financial catastrophe that began the rise of the Medici family in Italy.) Marriage was one area of foreign diplomacy in which Isabella and Mortimer succeeded – although Isabella’s wish to exercise the powers of queen consort meant that she would not allow the girl’s coronation for nearly two years. Yet Edward’s wedding came against the background of strange events closer to home.

  During the night hours of 23 Septe
mber 1327, the young king was woken in his chamber at Lincoln and told that his father was dead. Since April, Edward of Caernarfon had been imprisoned in a dungeon in Berkeley castle, Gloucestershire, and it was there that he had died two days previously, according to the messengers, from natural causes. Since the young king was pressingly engaged with parliamentary business related to the Scottish situation, plans to bury the old king were made for December.

  At the time of Edward’s death, very few people questioned the cause. Edward III, certainly, seems to have accepted that his father had died in unexceptional circumstances, and organized a funeral for him. But as the years passed, a number of descriptions of Edward of Caernarfon’s death circulated, beginning to suggest that there had been foul play. At first the king was said to have died from grief or illness, or in some sort of pain. Soon, though, talk turned to the presumption of murder.

  Three times during Edward of Caernarfon’s imprisonment plots had been uncovered to release him from captivity: once in April while he was imprisoned at Kenilworth and twice, in July and September, during his captivity at Berkeley. The first two plots involved Dominican friars, but the third involved men from Wales, the most prominent being Rhys ap Gruffudd, a long-time ally of Edward II, who had come to his assistance in 1321–2 and had been with him during his final flight in 1326. It began to be rumoured that these repeated escape attempts had exhausted the patience of the Isabella–Mortimer regime, and eventually Mortimer had ordered that the old king be slain in his cell. In October 1330 it was stated before parliament that Edward had been murdered. Two decades after Edward’s death, the well-informed chronicler Adam of Murimuth wrote that the king had been killed by a trick, and that Roger Mortimer had had him suffocated.