3.) Edward II (1307- 1327)

Pre-reading task: How does Edward II illustrate the proverb ‘Appearances are deceptive’?

The name of Edward II was to become a byword for bad kingship, in contrast to 'the Hammer of the Scots', his famous father, the second Edward was an ineffectual dilettante, and his rule brought little but defeat and disorder to England.

Edward II was 23 when he succeeded to the throne in July 1307. Tall, fair and attractive, he appeared to be a typical Plantagenet monarch, but to his contempor­aries' disgust his interests were anything but kingly. He had no taste for combat; what he enjoyed was a curious mixture of the luxurious, such as dancing and finery, and the physical, such as swimming, rowing and digging. It had been Edward I's last wish that his son should pursue the war with Scotland unrelentingly, but the new king quickly abandoned the turbulent north and returned to the pleasures of his court in London. Then he renewed his passionate friendship with a handsome young Gascon named Piers Gaveston – ‘brother Perrot’, as the King called him. Edward showered Gaveston witt gifts, raised him to the title of Earl of Cornwall, normally reserved for royalty, and outraged the barons by leaving Gaveston as Regent while he went to France to marry the Princess Isabella, in 1308. Even the charms of his young bride could not distract King Edward from his male favourite for long; he handed over a selection of the richest wedding-gifts to Gaveston on his return.

If the King's behaviour towards his barons was foolish, Gaveston's was actively insulting. He ridiculed some of the most powerful with nicknames - Guy Beauchamp of Warwick was 'the Black Dog of Arden', Lancaster 'the Fiddler' - as though heedless of the danger from disaffected barons with large private armies. Within a year of his accession Edward II was obliged to submit to the will of his nobles and exile the hated favourite. Twice Gaveston was obliged to leave the kingdom, and twice he managed to return to his royal patron's side, until eventually a group of his enemies decided the matter by capturing and murdering him, in June 1312.

Though Piers Gaveston was gone, opposi­tion to the incompetent king remained, headed by Thomas of Lancaster, Edward II's first cousin. Lancaster was a dangerously powerful subject; by 1311 he controlled five earldoms and a large private army, and he aimed also to control the kingdom.

In 1314 he showed open defiance to King Edward when he failed to follow him to battle against the Scots. The unwarlike Edward II had hoped to rescue his prestige and his barons' loyalty by earning some military glory, but he failed utterly in the attempt, Against the Scottish hero Robert Bruce Edward's ill-conceived efforts were useless; and at Bannockburn, on Midsummer Day 13I4, the English army was utterly routed by a Scots force of one-third its strength. It was one of the most resounding defeats in England's history.

Lancaster, who had stayed out of it, gained immeasurably in political strength. Amid the disorder which followed the defeat at Ban­nockburn Lancaster became virtual ruler of England; and even after 1318, when a standing council was established to direct the King's actions, Lancaster remained a major force in the land. Edward, deprived of his independent powers, turned to two new favourites for support - Hugh le Despenser and his son, two great Marcher lords from the Welsh borders. With the Despensers' assistance, the King broke away from the nobles' control, rewarding his favourites lavishly in return. Inevitably, the Despensers earned the hatred of their peers, and in 1321 Edward was forced to exile them.

But in the following year the King struck back with surprising success. The other Welsh Marcher lords were forced to yield; Lancaster, deprived of their help, turned traitor and requested the support of none other than Robert Bruce. It was a foolish move, as it turned his countrymen against him. Thomas of Lancaster was finally cap­tured and beheaded in March 1322, and Edward II and the Despensers held sway once more.

A new figure now entered the political arena - Isabella, Edward's Queen. As a young bride she had suffered her husband's churlish treatment of her and his open preference for Gaveston, and she had dutiful­ly borne Edward four children, but by 1325, with the Despensers triumphant at court, a new side of Queen Isabella emerged, one that was to earn her the nickname of 'the She-Wolf of France'.

In that year she went on a diplomatic mission to her brother, the King of France; and once out of England she began to hold open house for enemies of the Despensers. One of them, a Marcher lord named Roger Mortimer, became her lover, and together Isabella and Mortimer began to plot the invasion of England, on behalf of her elder son, Edward, who had joined her in France. It was a state of affairs which greatly shocked the 'She-Wolf's' brother, the King of France, and so Isabella and Mortimer left his territory and went on to Hainault, where the Count of Hainault had no such scruples, in return for an agreement that his daughter, Philippa, should marry the heir to the English throne, young Edward, he gave his aimed support to Queen Isabella's cause, and in September 1326 the Queen, her lover and her son set out on the invasion of England.

Edward II's own shortcomings had made their undertaking an easy one. Few of his subjects rose to his support, and the invaders soon had control of the kingdom. The Despensers and the other few friends of the King were sought out and killed; Edward II himself was captured and deposed in favour of his young son. The former king's treat­ment was at first reasonably courteous, and during the early part of his captivity he was kept in relative comfort at Kenilworth Castle. But with a new king, Edward III, on the throne, the presence of the previous mon­arch in the kingdom became an embarrass­ment. To the brutal Mortimer, the solution was simple, and he gave orders accordingly.

In September 1327, Edward II was put to death in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle, by the hideous means of a red-hot iron thrust up him. Two months later he was buried in Gloucester Abbey, in great splendour, and as if to compound murder with hypocrisy, Queen Isabella attended the ceremony, accompanied by her son Edward III.

(from “The Kings and Queens of Great Britain” by Josephine Ross, L. 1982)

The fourteenth century had hardly opened when Edward I died. In 1299 he was forced to marry Margaret, the daughter of the King of France, after the death of his great love, his wife Eleanor of Castile. This was yet another diplomatic marriage to signify some sort of peace between the two enemies. But Margaret sided against him.

Churchill called Edward 'a master-builder of British life, character, and fame'. It is true that he laid the basis of taxation through a parliament, established a documented and efficient administrative process and made clear the laws of his kingdom. And he did most of this without excessively offending his aristocracy which was becoming increasingly established and class conscious. But he left the country in debt because of his wars with Scotland. He left the matter of the monarch's standing as the Duke of Aquitaine unsettled. And this could, and would, threaten the peace of Europe.

He left also an heir, Edward II. A feckless prince whose love, whose obsession, for Piers Gaveston, a son of a Gascon knight, was to bring about anarchy and war.

C+Edward II's reign may fairly be regarded as a melancholy appendix to his father's and the prelude to his son's. He was addicted to rowing, swimming, and baths. He carried his friendship for his advisers beyond dignity and decency. On the death of Edward I, the barons succeeded in gaining control of the mixed body of powerful magnates and competent Household officials [the Curia Regis]. They set up a committee called 'the Lords Ordainers', who represented the baronial and ecclesiastical interests of the State.

Scotland and France remained the external problems confronting diese new masters of government, but their first anger was directed upon the favourite of the King. Piers Gaveston, a young, handsome Gascon, enjoyed his fullest confidence. His decisions made or marred. There was a temper which would submit to the rule of a King, but would not tolerate the pretensions of his personal cronies. The barons' parry attacked Рiers Gaveston. As Prince of Wales, Edward had become infatuated with Gaveston. Immedi­ately he became King, Edward made, his young friend Earl of Cornwall. When the King went to France to marry Isabella, the twelve-year-old daughter of Philip IV, he left Gaveston as 'Keeper of the realm’, effectively ruler оf 'England. At the coronation on 25 February 1308, it was Gaveston who carried, in procession, the crown and the sword of St Edward. It was Gaveston who was described as being dressed more like the god Mars than a mere mortal. After the coronation, Isabella's kinsmen returned to France. They took with them а story that Edward loved Gaveston more than his Queen. The movement against Edward grew. At its head was Henry, the Earl of Lincoln. The barons would stand for no more of this domination by the King's favourite. An ordinance was presented to Edward, demanding that dignity be returned to the Crown. Indiscretion was one thing but allowing the object of that indiscretion to become a powerful figure in the governance of the realm was quite another. In other words, Gaveston must be banished.

At the April Parliament the barons forced the King to agree to their wishes. But Edward could not bear to lose his friend for so long. His appointed him his Lieutenant in Ireland and, when the time came for his sailing from Bristol, Edward was there to see him off. But even this temporary exile did not settle the aristocracy's long list of grievances. When that list was presented, in 1309, Edward agreed to reforms, but in return demanded the recall of Gaveston.

Lords Ordainers, a committee of twenty-one lay, ecclesiastical and lordly representatives, wrote the forty-one articles which have become known as the Ordinances of 1311. The Ordinances, among other things, declared that the King was not to leave the realm without the consent of the barons, was not to appoint a keeper of the realm (as he had Gaveston), was not to appoint whomsoever he wished as senior officials, and that all officials had to take an oath to uphold the Ordinances. Perhaps Gaveston was all the things the barons said he was. He was also a scapegoat for Edward's weaknesses and lack of kingship. Gavestonon was exiled, yet again, this time to Flanders. And, yet again, he returned.

C+Compelling him [Gaveston] to take refuge in the North, they [the Lords Ordainers] pursued him. Besieged in the castle of Scarborough, Gaveston made terms with his foes. His life was to be spared; and on this they took him under guard. But other nobles, led by the Earl of Warwick, one of the foremost Ordainers, who had not been present at the agreement of Scarborough, violated diese conditions. They overpowered the escort, seized the favourite at Deddington in Oxfordshire, and hewed off his head on Blacklow Hill, near Warwick.

The immediate effect of his execution was the utter distraction of Edward, and the break up of the group of Lords Ordainers who most wanted change. Nevertheless the barons had the changes they'd wanted.

But the King still possessed significant powers, and he was going to need them, for wars awaited him.

C+ In spite of diese successes by the Ordainers. royal power remained formidable. Edward was still in control of Government, although he was under their restraint. Troubles in France and war in Scotland confronted him. To wipe out his setbacks at home he resolved upon the conquest of the northern kingdom. A general levy of the whole power of England was set on foot to beat the Scots. A great army crossed the Tweed in the summer of 1314. Twenty-five thousand men, hard to gather, harder still to feed in those days, with at least 3000 armoured knights and men-at-arms, under the nominal but none the less baffling command of Edward II, moved against the Scottish host. The new champion of Scotland, Robert the Bruce, now faced the vengeance of England. The Scottish army, of perhaps 10,000 men, was composed, as at Falkirk, mainly of the hard, unyielding spearmen who feared nought and, once set in position, had to be killed. But Bruce had pondered deeply upon the impotence of pikemen, however faithful, if exposed to the alternations of an arrow shower and an armoured charge. He therefore took three precautions. First he chose a position where his flanks were secured by impenetrable woods; secondly, he dug upon his front a large number of small round holes, or 'pones', and covered them with branches and turfs as a trap for charging cavalry; thirdly, he kept in his own hand his small but highly trained force of mounted knights to break up any attempt at planting archers upon his flank to derange his schiltrons. The story of what happened at Bannockburn has been told in verse and chronicle. There were 20.000 men and all their baggage trains. Many of the such as the archers from Wales and the foot soldiers from the Midlands and the North-West, were experienced and in little hurry to get into battle with what they saw as a well-organized enemy. In fact the King's nephew, the Earl of Gloucester, wisely said that the troops should be rested for a day after their long march. Edward accused him of cowardice. The young Earl immediately led his cavalry against the massed schiltrons — those oblong hedges of Scottish shields and pikes - and was killed. It was 24 June 1314. The Battle of Bannockburn was on.

C+... the English advanced, and a dense wave of steel-clad horsemen descended the slope, splashed and scrambled through the Bannock Burn, and charged uphill upon the schiltrons. Though much disordered by the ‘pottes’, they came to deadly grip with the Scottish spearmen. As neither side would withdraw, the struggle was prolonged and covered the whole front. The strong corps of archers could not intervene. When they shot their arrows into the air, as William had done at Hastings, they hit more of their own men than of the Scottish infantry. At length, a detachment of archers was brought round the Scottish left flank. But for this Bruce had made effective рrоvision. His small cavalry force charged them with the utmost promptitude, and drove them back into the great mass waiting to engage, and now already showing signs of disorder. Continuous reinforcements streamed forward towards the English fighting line. Confusion steadily increased. The [English] retreat speedily became a rout. The Scottish schiltrons hurled themselves forward down the slope, inflicting immense carnage upon the English even before they could recross the Bannock Burn. No more grievous slaughter of English chivalry ever took place in a single day. Bruce himself was a hero and sent his troops to raid, kill, and destroy great swadies of Northern England as far south as Yorkshire. Edward's own authority was reduced even further. After Bannockburn he was unpopular and very much reliant upon his closest officials. The growing aristocracy wanted control of the inner cabinet of the King’s advisers - the King's Wardrobe - without either destroying the monarchy or bringing about the downfall of the bureaucracy so necessary for running of the state affairs. Edward very quickly found himself at contemptuous mercy of his own people, particularly the group of Lords Ordainers led by Thomas of Lancaster.

C+ In the long story of a nation we often see that capable rulers, by their very virtues, sow the seeds of future evil, and weak or degenerate princes open the pathway of progress. We have traced the ever growing influence, and at times authority, of the permanent officials of the royal Household. The feudal baronage could no more contemplate the abolition of diese officials than their ancestors the destruction of the monarchy. The whole tendency of their movement was therefore, in this generation, to acquire control of an invaluable machine. Thomas of Lancaster, nephew to Edward I, was [at] the forefront of the baronial opposition. Little is known to his credit. Into the hands of Thomas and his fellow Ordainers, Edward was now thrown by the disaster of Bannockburn, and Thomas for a while became the most important man in the land. Within a few years, however, the moderates among the Ordainen became so disgusted with Lancaster's incompetence and with the weakness into which the process of Government had sunk, that they joined with the royalists to edge him from power.

It took some doing. From the autumn of 1315, Lancaster’s authority had been unchallenged. He had control of the country’s administration. He gave instructions to the chancellor, made appointments, and even issued pardons. He was Steward of England. And while all this was going on, the people were suffering a famine. For three years torrential rains ruined the harvests of Europe from as far north as Scotland and Russia, south to Italy. In England, men murdered for food. Cannibalism was recorded. Prices rose by as much as 800% in one year. Families fought each other. Counties were in rebellion, including Lancaster. Thomas not only had a revolt in his own county, but his wife, Alice Lacy, left him and hid with another earl, thus starting a private war with Yorkshire.

In all the disorganization of the King's realm, there emerged a new grouping, a middle party. It was led by the Earl of Pembroke who had fallen from favour after Bannockburn, and included the bishops. They appear to have been sincere in their aims for administrative reform.

C+The victory of this middle party did not please the King. Aiming to be more efficient than Lancaster, Pembroke and his friends tried to enforce the Ordinances more effectively, and carried out a great reform of the Household.

Edward, for his part, began to build up a royalist party, at the head of which were the Despensers, father and son, both named Hugh. Diese belonged to the nobility, and their power lay on the Welsh border. Against both of them the hatreds grew, because of their self-seeking and the King's infatuation with the younger man.

But the Despensers were not favoured because the younger Hugh had taken the place of Piers Gaveston in the King's heart. Hugh the elder had long been a loyal royalist. He'd been a loyal servant of Edward I. Also, he'd been the only baron to support Gaveston during the move to get rid of him in 1308. He was on Edward's side at the retreat from Bannockburn. And Hugh the younger had been a member of Edward's household while he was still Prince of Wales. He’d married Eleanor, the King's niece. The Despensers were certainly no more opportunists than Lancaster and his supporters. But the clue to the great opposition to them is in their rank. The Despensers may have gained lands, titles and influence, but theirs was not one of the great families. In the mediaeval pecking order only the great landowning families had the right so clearly influence the King.

C+They were especially unpopular among the Marcher lords, who were disturbed by their restless ambitions in South Wales. In 1321, the Welsh Marcher lords and the Lancastrian party joined hands with intent to procure the exile of Despensers. Edward soon recalled them, and for once showed energy and resolution. By speed of movement he defeated first the Marcher lords and then, in the next year, the Northern barons under Lancaster at Boroughbridge in Yorkshire. Lancaster was beheaded by the King. But tragedy was waiting for Edward II. His wife, Isabella, disgusted by her husband’s passion for Hugh Despenser, became the lover and confederate of Roger Mortimer, one of the chief Marcher lords, who had escaped to France. Isabella had gone to France to negotiate the restoration of Gascony - seized by her brother, Charles IV of France - to England.

In 1324, perhaps, with Despenser's authority, Isabella's estates were scquestrated. There was also a rumour that the young Hugh was attempting an annulment of her marriage to the King.

C+She hit on the stroke of having her son, Prince Edward, sent over from England to do homage for Gascony. As soon as the fourteen-year-old prince, who is as heir to the throne [and] could be used to legitimatize opposition to King Edward, was in her possession, she and Mortimer staged an invasion of England at the head of a large band of exiles.

So unpopular and precarious was Edward's government, that Isabella's triumph was swift and complete, and she and Mortimer were emboldened to depose him. The Despensers were seized and hanged. For the King, a more terrible death was reserved. He was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle, and there by hideous methods which left no mark on his skin, was slaughtered. His screams, as his bowels were burnt out bу red-hot irons passed into his body, were heard outside the prison walls.Edward was murdered because of his foolishness. He was weak, without po1itical imagination or intelligence. He lacked dignity, he lacked thoughtfulness. And in reality, be was no longer king when he was imprisoned. He'd already been forced to abdicate and his young son was crowned in his place.

(from “This Sceptred Isle” by Christopher Lee, L. 1990)

4.) Edward III (1327-77)

Pre-reading tasks: