The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

  • • •

  While towns and villages throughout Europe and Britain continued to experience the torments of weather and war, Edward II resolved to use his newfound popularity against his own tormenters. In January 1322, he recalled the Despensers, father and son, from exile, assembled several thousand troops, and pointed them at his rebellious nobles, advancing up the east bank of the Severn to Shrewsbury, where the earl of Hereford and the Mortimers had retreated. There they sur-rendered to the king without a fight, leaving Edward free to turn north in pursuit of the peer who had been his most reliably hostile vassal for the preceding fourteen years: the earl of Lancaster. He would never have a better opportunity to land a decisive blow. Letters between Lancaster and both James Douglas and the earl of Moray (in which Lancaster was referred to by his code name, “King Arthur”) had appeared, in which the earl offered to swear fealty to Robert Bruce—as clear evidence of treason as any king could ask. Lancaster’s plan to sell his honor, however, was a failure, since his potential customer doubted he had any worth buying: King Robert is supposed to have responded, “How will a man who cannot keep faith with his own lord keep faith with me?”

  Lancaster was neither a gifted soldier nor, except by accident of feudal inheritance, a formidable political force, and the circumstances of his last rebellion seem scripted to make Edward look good by comparison. Whatever plan he had when “King Arthur” marched south from his castle at Pontrefact to besiege a royal castle at Tickhill is lost to history and certainly isn’t obvious in retrospect. Having neither the siege engines needed to batter down the castle’s walls nor the time to starve the garrison out, he stayed only a few days (perhaps hoping that the garrison was even less adept at analyzing the tactical situation than he was) before continuing south to Burton-on-Trent. With Edward and the royal troops on the move, however, Lancaster was in danger of being cut off from his northern home, and retreated, first back to Pontrefact, then farther north, one step ahead of the king.

  His backing-and-forthing eventually came to an end in Boroughbridge, at the River Ure, north of the city of York. There Lancaster, leading perhaps seven hundred knights, plus their retainers and men-at-arms, found himself on the southern end of the bridge over the river staring at the opposite shore, where four thousand light cavalrymen held the bridge’s opposite end. They were under the command of the sheriff of Cumberland, Sir Andrew Harclay, an experienced soldier who had been fighting on the Scottish borders since at least 1304, when he was a lieutenant of Robert de Clifford—decidedly not what the earl had hoped to find blocking his retreat north.

  With Edward marching rapidly from the south, Lancaster was out of options. On March 17, 1322, and for the last time, he unfurled his banners and ordered the attack.*

  The battle was a replay in miniature of Stirling Bridge, if not Bannockburn. Harclay had dismounted his cavalry into a formation that mimicked the Scottish schiltroms, and placed archers on the flanks so that when Lancaster’s cavalrymen tried a frontal assault across the bridge they were broken by Harclay’s spears, and their attempts to flank the position allowed his archers to decimate them. The earl of Hereford was killed by a Welsh infantryman hiding under a bridge as he crossed. At least he tried. Lancaster simply surrendered.

  Harclay brought the earl back to his own castle of Pontrefact, where Edward was now ensconced. On March 22, without bothering with any formality such as a trial, the king sentenced the grandest noble in England, lord of four different earldoms, to death as a traitor, but out of deference to Lancaster’s rank, he commuted the traditional punishment—drawing, quartering, and so on—to a simple beheading.

  On the same day twenty-four of Lancaster’s followers were executed in various, more grisly, ways; the following day, six more. The king’s justice continued for a month, during which 118 of Lancaster’s men were executed, exiled, or imprisoned. Six other high nobles were executed, including Baron Badlesmere, who was dragged through the streets of Canterbury before being hanged and beheaded, with his head mounted on the city gate. The Mortimers forfeited all their properties and were sentenced to death, a sentence commuted by the king. The murder of Piers Gaveston had been avenged.

  Those who weren’t punished were rewarded. Harclay was made earl of Carlisle and Hugh le Despenser the Elder earned the title of earl of Winchester a few months later. Hugh the Younger was given no new titles but much property, including spoils from the lands of Mowbray, Damory, the earl of Norfolk, and, of course, Thomas, the erstwhile earl of Lancaster. Lancaster’s widow lost not only manors but additional lands comprising 175 “knight’s fees,” which was the amount of land thought necessary, ever since the Norman Conquest, to provide the revenue that would keep, arm, and armor a single knight, his retainers, and horses. Given that knight’s fees were financial measures and not geographical ones, each represented a highly variable bit of property, ranging from as little as fifty acres to more than a thousand; one estimate calculates a knight’s fee to be as much as twenty-seven hides, each of one hundred-plus acres. Which meant that the widow Lancaster was being fined perhaps ten thousand acres. On the other hand, she did get to marry her longtime lover, Eubulo L’Estrange.

  Thus, the spring of 1322 saw one of Edward’s rare high points. At a parliament called by the king to meet at York in May, the Ordinances of 1311 were repealed; the Lord Ordainers were no more, though the king’s actions and establishments would “be treated, granted and established in Parliament by our lord the King and with the consent of the prelates, earls, and barons, and of the commonalty of the realm, as has been hitherto accustomed.” The king’s position was restored. Edward even refrained from using his newfound strength to establish himself as a tyrant, instead showing both moderation and magnanimity to his formerly rebellious barons. Given the king’s history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, it’s no shock to learn that the real result wasn’t to promote affection but to invite criticism of his lack of ruthlessness.

  If the Lancaster rebellion of 1322 was notable for how it restored Edward’s fortunes—at least temporarily—it is even more remarkable for just how much it hammered the already fragile agricultural economy of Britain. After three relatively good years, the harvest of 1321 had been another disaster, compounded by the king’s confiscation of grain at far below market price. Moreover, looting was widespread, an explicit tactic of both the king’s party and Lancaster’s. In response, when the Despensers were restored to power, they wasted no time in seeking redress. Hugh the Elder claimed recompense from the confiscated rebel lands for two years of lost harvests: one burned on the ground, the other in the barn. And, with remarkable specificity, he demanded repayment for 38,000 lost sheep, 1,400 oxen, 1,700 cows, 420 horses, 2,400 pigs, and 300 goats taken or destroyed on his lands in England and Wales.

  And as in 1315, what was left by rebel raids and royal demands was taken by the weather: a winter that was so harsh that the royal lands in Herefordshire were reduced to what the royal custodian called “sterility.” Once the snow and ice started to melt, in spring of 1322, rivers like the Severn rose so high that they flooded half the lands in Gloucestershire. Neither were the cities immune, not even London: desperation caused fifty-two deaths as people were crushed at the gate of the Preaching Friars, fighting over alms.

  It was an omen of worse to come. At the end of the summer of 1322, the truce with Scotland having run its two years, Robert Bruce raided into England as far south as Preston (more or less as far from Edinburgh as Leeds). In response, Edward summoned a very large force—thirty-eight thousand English infantry, six thousand Irish infantry, another thousand cavalry, along with ten thousand Welsh archers. The summons wasn’t exactly ignored so much as approximated. The army that Edward led north in August comprised twenty thousand infantry (including archers), four thousand light cavalry, and about two thousand heavy cavalry. Another war was about to amplify a famine that was now in its seventh year.

  Once again, the English encou
ntered Bruce’s scorched-earth tactics. In Barbour’s poem Le Brus, the only provender the English could find was “one lame cow,” called by the earl of Surrey “the dearest beef I’ve ever seen . . . for a fact, it cost a thousand pounds or more.” Unable to feed his own army, Edward made it only as far as Holyrood Abbey before retreating back to England, harried by Black Douglas all the way. In the words of Sir Thomas Grey’s 1836 Scalacronica:

  The king marched upon, where at Leith there came such a sickness and famine upon the common soldiers of that great army, that they were forced to beat a retreat for want of food; at which time the king’s light horse were defeated by James de Douglas. . . . before they arrived in Newcastle there was such a murrain in the army for want of food, that they were obliged of necessity to disband.

  Grey was citing, five centuries after the fact, the many chronicles that recorded that Edward’s troops were starving, but this is probably an exaggeration; soldiers are among the last to starve in a famine, as long as they are able to take food from those who grow it.

  Their four-legged companions were another matter. Beginning in the summer of 1319, the rinderpest outbreak, followed by the epidemic of sheep liver fluke, had already killed two-thirds of the cows, oxen, sheep, and goats in most of northern Europe, but had left horses—non-bovids—largely alone. They survived just long enough to encounter the bacterium known as Burkholderia mallei, the carrier of the respiratory disease known as glanders, which is a killer of horses, mules, donkeys, dogs, cats . . . and, frequently, humans. Nearly half the horses in Europe died between 1320 and 1322. Edward invaded Scotland with an army that was a quarter cavalry; he retreated with one that was virtually all infantry.

  A chronicle written in that year by a monk at Bridlington Priory in Yorkshire noted that the Scots carried “a true famine, so that many villeins of those parts, who possessed a very full abundance of sheep and cattle on their farms and among their goods, now are compelled to go through the countryside, begging.” In July, as if to prove him correct, King Robert led an incursion down through Cumberland, burning and taking all cattle while ordering all the food stocks he couldn’t carry destroyed. The tactics were brutal; the strategy, effective. Slowly but surely, Bruce was raising the cost to England of Scottish invasions while simultaneously reducing the income available to pay for them.

  It was likely the prospect of further damage to northern England’s productivity that inspired Bruce, along with the earl of Moray and James Douglas, to enter Yorkshire again, in October 1322. If so, he must have been pleasantly surprised to find not just grain and cattle but England’s king and queen.

  Edward and Isabella had been touring the important monasteries of Yorkshire, and had just arrived at Rievaulx Abbey, the Cistercian monastery near the River Wye, when they learned that several thousand of Bruce’s hobelars were less than ten miles away. The royals weren’t necessarily trapped; the only approach available to the Scots was a narrow and apparently defensible path, strongly held by knights and foot soldiers of the earl of Richmond. On October 14, nonetheless, King Robert sent Douglas (later joined by Moray, who realized that it isn’t every day that you might be able to capture a king and his queen) straight up the hillside between Rievaulx and Byland Abbeys, while a group of the same mountaineers that had taken Edinburgh eight years earlier climbed the escarpment on the English flank. Trapped, the English defense collapsed, though in truth, it wasn’t much of a scrap.

  To elude capture, Edward and his queen took separate routes. Isabella and her retinue rode northeast to the Benedictine priory at Tynemouth, just ahead of Douglas’s light cavalry. In 1312, Isabella had been left at Tynemouth while the king and Gaveston were chased by Lancaster. Seven years after that, she had been abandoned by her husband in precisely the same place while being pursued by the same Black Douglas (who, once again, captured the king’s household silver, his clothes, and—again—his Royal Seal). In 1319, she had taken ship from the banks of the Tyne; in 1322, she was compelled to do so again. Isabella was furious; Edward, merely humiliated.

  A king’s authority depends utterly on the loyalty and faith of his people. Faith in Edward, which had never been higher than after his victory over Lancaster in the spring, had virtually disappeared by year’s end. The Chronicle of Lanercost described him as “chicken-hearted and luckless in war.” The Archbishop of York, demonstrating that discretion is the better part of loyalty, permitted his monasteries and other houses to treat with Bruce for immunity. After the defeat on the hills between Old Byland and Rievaulx Abbey, Andrew Harclay, the new earl of Carlisle, followed Bruce back to Scotland and, in January 1323, presented the Scottish king with an unauthorized peace plan. In return for recognition by Edward of his sovereignty over Scotland, King Robert would agree to pay England a war indemnity of 40,000 marks, or £27,000, over the next ten years. A commission of twelve lords, six of them English, six Scottish, would negotiate a final peace treaty, which would be followed by a royal marriage between the two houses.

  Bruce promptly agreed to the terms. However, Harclay’s insistence on a clause providing that Harclay’s own estates would remain untouched in the event that Scotland were to invade England in the future gave the agreement a self-serving flavor. The earl must have been suffering from political tone-deafness, because he still presented the agreement to Edward on his return in February 1323, Harclay immunity clause and all. It looked more like treason than diplomacy to the king, who refused to renounce his claim to overlordship of Scotland (most of Edward’s passions for kingly privilege were directly related to rights he felt he had inherited from his father, and Scotland was one of them). He did agree to a truce, brokered by Pembroke and Hugh the Younger, this one to last thirteen years. To Harclay, he was brutal: the old soldier was removed from the rolls of knighthood, and his earldom was revoked before he was hanged, drawn, and quartered on March 3, evidence that the reign of Edward II was capable of being as stern and vindictive as that of Edward I; toward his own subjects, even crueler.

  Isabella, still furious over her near capture at Tynemouth Priory, certainly thought so. With the royal union by now so severely strained that the king was publicly asserting that he had been forced into his marriage, it’s probably not too much to suggest that this was the moment that Isabella’s conspiracy against her husband began.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “The Mouse Tower of Bingen”

  800–1323

  It was meteorologically inevitable that the clouds that covered England and France (and Scotland and Flanders) at the beginning of the fourteenth century would spread, in due course, across the Rhine and, eventually, the Elbe. It is metaphorically satisfying to note that the prevailing winds that brought massive floods and bone-crushing cold to the European continent were also winds of war. But while Isabella’s husband and brothers went to war over territory, and their opponents in Scotland and Flanders were fighting for their independence, the German casus belli was all about titles. Specifically, it was about the most confusing and contradictory title in the history of European sovereigns: Holy Roman Emperor.

  The untidy birth of the Holy Roman Empire is incomprehensible to anyone without an understanding of the decline of the original version, and barely so even then. Voltaire’s famous 1756 slur—“the body that was called, and still calls itself, the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”—isn’t false, but it isn’t completely true, either. The Imperium Romanum Sacrum, to give the institution its Latin name, wasn’t especially holy, but the word “sacrum” can just as easily mean “ordained” as “holy”; and the empire—technically, any territory ruled by an emperor, which makes the third part of Voltaire’s mockery a reverse tautology—was certainly ordained by Rome.

  By the time it got around to doing the ordaining, however, Rome hadn’t really been the Rome of the Caesars for more than four centuries. The fourth-century empire did not adopt Christianity as a state policy for some decades after the conversion of
the future emperor, Constantine, in 312, but by the end of the century, Constantine’s successors were the defenders of Christianity; and since Rome was the place where St. Peter was—in legend, at least—martyred, the security of the Bishop of Rome was one of their clearest responsibilities.

  That responsibility was discharged from Constantinople, the “New Rome” that Constantine had built on the Sea of Marmara and dedicated in 330. For the next century and a half, the empire periodically divided itself into eastern and western zones of imperial responsibility, but the emperor in Constantinople was nearly always the senior partner. By 476, when the last Roman emperor in the West was deposed by one of his own generals, Constantinople was home to the only emperor left, who remained nominally responsible for the safety of the bishop of Rome—for another century, anyway.

  In 568, a Germanic tribe known as the Langobards, or Lombards, invaded the Italian peninsula and established their own “kingdom”—the term tends to flatter; better to regard it as several dozen quasi-independent dukedoms—controlling the Piedmont, Tuscany, the Po Valley, Naples, and Calabria. The emperor’s provincial capital in the Italian peninsula—the formal term was “exarchate”—had been pushed into a coastal strip surrounding the city of Ravenna on the Adriatic, and a corridor reaching from Ravenna to Rome.

  The decline in imperial influence in Italy after seven centuries meant de facto abandonment, not just of the north—the city of Venice was built as a refuge against the Lombards—but the papacy itself. The very existence of a Lombard kingdom in Italy was a powerful reminder that the emperor had higher priorities than protecting the empire’s birthplace; with an aggressive Bulgarian kingdom to its north, and facing the powerful and dynamic armies of Islam to the east, Constantinople was an undependable protector. By 751, when the Lombards finally conquered Ravenna and executed the last exarch, it was an impotent one as well. It was time for Rome to seek one elsewhere.