Foundation

by Peter Ackroyd

  The king’s court at Westminster was not immune from lawlessness. An attorney was sitting on a table in the great hall – ‘close to the sellers of jewels’ – when the other party to his suit threatened to kill him if he did not abandon it; he was then dragged off the table and struck on the head. Someone else pulled a knife on him. The attorney extricated himself from his attackers and ran to the bar of the court calling for help; the men followed him, their swords drawn, but the officials of the court somehow managed to bar the doors against them. They were then disarmed and taken to the Tower.

  In the summer of 1322 the king called a parliament at York, in the course of which a statute was passed that allowed him complete and independent rule. The ordinances of 1311 were once more abandoned. Contemporaries were in no doubt about the situation. The magnates were now too frightened to thwart the will of the king. Parliaments were of no account. Reason had given way to threats and penalties. Whatever pleased Edward, now had the force of law. He sought out the rebels in every shire, confiscating their lands or fining them heavily. His treasury grew and grew on the proceeds. ‘Serve us in such a way that we will become rich’, he wrote to the officials of his exchequer.

  He was not to find riches in conquest. He led a campaign in Scotland against Robert Bruce, but achieved nothing except the detention of six Scottish prisoners; with the absence of provisions severely affecting his troops, he marched southwards across the border. But the Scottish army pursued him, and almost caught him near Bridlington in East Yorkshire; he fled in panic to York, a singularly unfortunate end to a futile expedition. He was forced to sign a treaty with Robert Bruce at the beginning of 1323, the principles of which he broke almost immediately. The king’s bastard son, Adam, was killed in the course of the campaign.

  The difficulties with France, over the disputed territory of Gascony, had not been resolved. The French had even planted a bastide or fortified town in the middle of the duchy. So the king sent his wife, Isabella, to negotiate with the French king, Charles IV; since she was that king’s sister, some hope of success could be conjectured. But there was a problem. Edward did not trust Isabella, and Isabella had no affection for Edward. Once they were separated by the Channel, anything might happen. The king made another fateful decision; he sent his eldest son, Edward, to the French court to do fealty for the land of Gascony. Both wife and son were now in France.

  The king did not travel there himself because he was too concerned about the stability of his own kingdom. It was said at the time that the Despensers advised him to stay at home, because they feared the wrath of the other barons descending upon them in his absence. There were reasons to be fearful. Edward’s rule had become a form of covert tyranny. He became according to one chronicler ‘as wood [mad] as a lion’. He disinherited many magnates so that the Despensers could have their lands; as a result, no landowner felt secure. When a king of England disregards the rights to property, he cannot long endure. For four years, however, Edward lavished earldoms and other titles on his favourites; he harried and persecuted all those who opposed his will. It was so arranged that revenue went into the king’s own chamber rather than to the general exchequer, and the king demanded absolute secrecy from his officials. He resembled a later king in his countinghouse, counting out his money. In truth his opponents could do nothing. After the execution of Lancaster, and the imprisonment of other prominent nobles, he was pre-eminent.

  Yet he still had enemies in exile, particularly in France. One of them, Roger Mortimer, had been part of the rising against the Despensers; he had submitted to the king and had been imprisoned in the Tower of London. From that place, with a little help from his friends, he managed to escape; it is reported that he drugged his captors and then climbed down from his chamber on a rope. It sounds apocryphal, but it may be accurate. There were very few other paths out of the Tower, except of course by way of the gallows. He sailed to France and offered his services to the French king. It was at Charles IV’s court that he began an intrigue, in every sense, with Queen Isabella. Around the queen there now gathered a cluster of exiled or disaffected barons and bishops. When her son arrived to offer fealty to her brother, she had found the perfect weapon. The king ordered her to return to England, but she refused to do so; she declared that she would come back only if the Despensers were banished. In any case she preferred the more benign atmosphere of the French court.

  Throughout 1325 rumours and fears of invasion circulated through the kingdom. It was believed that Isabella would sail with the French king, but she was more immediately concerned to increase her support among the interlinked royal families of north-western Europe. She travelled north to Hainault (a Flemish province now in south-western Belgium) where the count of that region was amenable to the proposition that his daughter, Philippa, should marry the lord Edward; this young man of fourteen would, in all likelihood, be the next king of England. With Philippa’s dowry Isabella and Mortimer then raised troops for the coming invasion.

  Fifteen hundred men took to their ships from the port of Dordrecht in Holland and, having endured storms at sea, landed at the haven of Orwell in Suffolk on 24 September 1326. There had been no attempt to harry or prevent them, and it is likely that Edward still believed that the invading force was to come from Normandy. The commander of the royal fleet along the eastern coast, in any case, allowed her to land without obstruction. He had in the past been an opponent of the king, and once more turned against him. It is also reported that English sailors refused to fight Isabella because of the hatred they felt for the Despensers.

  Her progress was swift. Her supporters flocked to her, and the king’s secret enemies now rose in defiance of his rule. The queen moved on to Dunstable, her troops ransacking the lands of the Despensers on their way, where she learned that the king and the Despensers had in their panic fled from London and marched to the west; it is a measure of their confusion that they left most of their treasure behind. The king’s supporters now changed sides; one who remained loyal, the elder Despenser, the earl of Winchester, was executed in Bristol under the distraint of martial law. His son, Hugh, was captured and awaited trial.

  Edward fled into Wales, with only a handful of supporters, and the last surviving record of his reign is an account book found at Caerphilly. He had nowhere to turn. He was pursued by Isabella’s men, and taken somewhere near Neath in the middle of November. From there he was escorted under armed guard to the royal castle of Kenilworth.

  Hugh Despenser had refused food and drink since his capture, hoping perhaps to die before he was painfully killed. He was taken to Reading, where he was crowned with a ring of nettles; words of execration were cut into his skin. To the sound of drum and trumpets, and to the shrieks of the crowd, he was hanged from a gallows 50 feet (15 metres) high; while still alive he was hacked down and his intestines were burned before his face. Finally, he was beheaded.

  Despenser had been executed in Reading rather than in London because the capital was in a feverish state. The citizens, having long been under the financial constraint of the king, exulted in their liberty and turned on any of the officials of the old regime they could find. Bishop Stapledon, once the royal treasurer, was dragged from his horse and butchered. Merchants and bankers, who had financed the king, were murdered.

  Yet how were the victors to depose a lawful king? It was illegal and unprecedented. The king was supposed to be protected by the majesty of God. It would be difficult to lay hands on God’s anointed. At the beginning of 1327 a parliament was held – although, without the requisite presence of the king himself, it should more properly be called an assembly, or convention – in the name of the king’s son, the prince of Wales. He had been appointed as keeper of the realm for the duration of the king’s absence ‘abroad’, although of course Edward had got no further than Kenilworth Castle. Various acclamations and proclamations were made in favour of Isabella and Prince Edward, so that the power of London could be shown to be firmly with them. Two bishops were despatched t
o Kenilworth, but no record of their interview with the king survives; it is reported that he cursed them, and refused to return with them to London.

  A second meeting of the assembly was then convened, under the control of Mortimer, at Westminster. In careful words he declared that the magnates of the land had deposed Edward, on the grounds that he had not followed his coronation oath and had fallen under the control of evil advisers; he had been bent on the destruction of the Church and of the magnates of the realm. Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford, then delivered a sermon with the theme that ‘where there is no true ruler, the people will be destroyed’. There seems to have been a general assent.

  Another delegation visited the king at Kenilworth, where they gave him an ultimatum. Adam Orleton lectured him once more on the evils of his arrogant and unworthy reign before declaring that ‘his son should be substituted for him if he should give his assent’. The assent was crucial for lending at least a veneer of legality to the proceedings. It is claimed that the king, wearing a black gown, was consumed with tears and sighs; when he saw the delegation, he swooned in fear. On recovering he first refused to surrender his crown but then, after further argument, reluctantly assented. The threat, of course, was that he could be forcibly removed and someone else put in his place. The truth of the proceedings will never be known, but it can be assumed that the whole affair was messy, unpredictable and uncertain. Too many interests were at stake to make it otherwise. Some magnates and bishops, for example, must have doubted the legality of the whole exercise.

  Yet it had come to pass. The dethroned king was taken from Kenilworth and consigned to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. He seems to have been treated well at first, but an uncrowned king can never be safe. Two attempts at rescue were made, one of them partially successful, and with the possibility of escape his fate was determined. It has been said that ‘between the prison and the grave of a king there is little space’. His death, in September 1327, has a quality of barbarity that has scarcely been equalled in the annals of England. It was said that he was slain with a poker, red-hot, inserted into his fundament. Or as Ranulf Higden put it in his Polychronicon, ‘he was sleyne with a hoote broche putte thro the secrete place posterialle’. Yet this may simply be a poetical touch, an allusion to his supposed sodomitical tendencies. His heart was taken from his body and placed in a silver vase, which was put later in Isabella’s own coffin. His body was viewed, at a distance, by the knights and magnates of Gloucestershire. At his funeral, in Gloucester Abbey, large oak barricades were built to hold back the crowds. None of his gaolers were ever convicted of his death; two were found innocent, one entered the service of Edward III, and the fourth was murdered in strange circumstances.

  There is a stranger epilogue still. In the archives of the French province of Languedoc was found a letter addressed to Edward III, from an important papal official named Manuel di Fieschi. He repeats the confession of a hermit, whom he calls ‘your father’. In specific and circumstantial detail the hermit gives an account of his flight, arrest and detention in Kenilworth and Berkeley castles. He describes how his guard in Berkeley warned him that two knights, Lord Thomas de Gornay and Lord Simon d’Esberfort [Beresford], were coming to kill him. The specific details, again, are given. The king put on different clothes, and made his way out of the castle. He killed the porter, sleeping, at the last door and then took his keys before escaping into the night.

  It is recorded that the two knights, thwarted of their victim and terrified of the wrath of the queen, cut out the heart of the porter and put his corpse into a wooden chest. They then pretended that the organ and the body were those of Edward II. In this account, therefore, the queen was buried with the porter’s heart, and the porter’s body still rests beneath the canopied shrine of Edward II in what is now Gloucester Cathedral.

  The hermit goes on to recount a period of concealment in Corfe Castle before he began his wanderings through Ireland and France. He was received by Pope John in Avignon, where he remained for two weeks. In the habit of a hermit he crossed into Germany and then into Lombardy, in which region he wrote down his confession. The letter ends with a sentence from Manuel di Fieschi to the king. ‘In testimony of these things I have appended a seal for your lordship’s consideration.’ This was, perhaps, the privy seal that accompanied the king’s person. It all sounds the merest melodrama, unworthy of serious consideration, but the writer of the letter was a papal official of repute. He would not have written to the king of England on a mere whim. The details of the account, too, are accurate as far as they can be checked in the historical record. So it remains a surmise and a mystery. It is possible, to put it no higher, that Edward II ended his life as a hermit in Italy. It would have been an edifying end to a not very edifying life.

  The brief supremacy of Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer, lasting from the autumn of 1326 to the autumn of 1330, was not itself a glorious one. The lands and treasures of the deposed king, and of the Despensers, were seized by the victors; the queen and her consort took the greater share, of course, and the rest was distributed among their followers. They also had to reward the mercenaries they had brought with them from Hainault. So the financial reserves of the Crown were severely depleted; the sum of £61,921 left by Edward in 1326 had been reduced by 1330 to £41. Taxation, and loans from Florentine bankers, were the only expedients.

  The young king was crowned in 1327, but his power was nominal rather than real. He was governed by a council of barons and bishops, while Roger Mortimer was at the head of affairs. Robert Bruce could not let slip this opportunity of a minority and so invaded the northern territories of England; Mortimer and the young king led armies to oppose him, but achieved nothing. It is said that Edward III wept at the failure of the campaign, which was followed by a treaty in which the title of Bruce to the throne of Scotland was recognized. The capitulation did not bode well for his future reign.

  Yet the new king was of a quite different stamp from his father. At the age of eighteen, he was becoming restless and resentful. Like his grandfather, Edward I, he longed for martial glory as the prerogative of sovereignty. He may have blamed Mortimer for the fiasco in Scotland, and have held him responsible for the decline of his revenues. Mortimer had become another ‘over-mighty’ subject at odds with the king.

  Isabella was also now carrying Mortimer’s child, and Edward feared a forced change in succession. He was told that it was better to eat the dog than allow the dog to eat him. So an assassination was planned. Mortimer and Isabella had travelled to Nottingham Castle, where a party of knights under the command of Edward had concealed themselves in the undergrowth outside the walls. An official of the castle had revealed to them a secret passage that led directly into the private quarters; there they surprised Mortimer, and arrested him. Isabella ran out of the chamber, shrieking, ‘Good son, have pity on noble Mortimer!’ But, in that period, pity was in short supply. He was tried, and summarily executed, in London. Isabella was sent to one of her private houses. Edward III had obtained his kingdom.

  22

  Birth and death

  The infant mortality rates of the medieval period were high, with over a third of boys and a quarter of girls dying at or soon after birth. That is why baptism was of overwhelming importance to the family of the child; if not baptized, the infant would go into the indeterminate eternal world of limbo and be denied the bliss of heaven. In the event of imminent death the midwife was permitted to sprinkle water over the child and pronounce ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’ If the mother died in labour, the midwife was obliged to cut the child from the womb in order to save its soul. In extreme cases the infant was baptized even before birth, given a name such as ‘Vitalis’ or ‘Creature’ or ‘Child of God’.

  The room of birth was supposed to be warm and dark, with a scent of rose petals somewhere in the air, but of course not all births could be performed in ideal conditions. That accounts for a large number of the deaths. Men were not a
llowed to witness the birth. The husband was permitted to mimic a symbolic act of release at that moment, however, by firing an arrow into the air or opening a box.

  The infant survivors came into what was for some a world of pain and suffering. There is widespread evidence of anaemia, sinusitis, leprosy and tuberculosis; osteoarthritis and diabetes were common, but essentially for no larger a proportion of the population than in the twenty-first century. Eye complaints such as sore eyes, red eyes, watering eyes, running eyes and ‘boiling eyes’ were ubiquitous.

  Doctors or ‘leeches’ could be summoned for a relatively large fee. Their medical skills were not remarkable. One of the more famous of them in the fourteenth century, John of Arderne, wrote in a treatise that a young doctor should learn ‘good proverbs pertaining to his craft in comforting of patients. Also it speedeth that a leech can talk of good and honest tales that may make the patients to laugh, as well as of the Bible and other tragedies.’

  Laughter was perhaps, under the circumstances, the best medicine. The cure for toothache was to burn a piece of mutton fat under the affected tooth, so that the ‘worms’ would fall out. A remedy for the stone was a mash made out of the bodies of beetles and crickets applied to the sick part of the body. The cure for tonsillitis was inspired. ‘Take a fat cat, skin it, draw out the guts and take the grease of a hedgehog and the fat of a bear … All this crumble small and stuff the cat, roast it whole and gather the grease and anoint the patient therewith.’ The lice of hogs was a sovereign curative of consumption. If you combed your hair with an ivory comb, your memory would be improved. For a condition known as ‘web in the eye’ the marrow from the great bone of a goose wing was to be mingled with the juice of the red honeysuckle, but the flower had to be plucked ‘with the saying of nine paternosters, nine aves and a creed’.