The Despensers

Meanwhile, having been deprived of one favourite, Piers Gaveston, Edward II merely turned to others, and in particular to the two men, Hugh Despenser the elder and Hugh his son, whose rise at court began shortly after Bannockburn. Once again there were probably unfounded rumours here of a sexual infatuation, but above all a pattern of over-lavish patronage and dependence which speaks of a King unable to keep either his emotions or his public actions under proper restraint. Most of the English earls had hated Piers Gaveston. Pretty much everybody hated the Despensers. The irony is that, although fiercely loyal both to Edward II and to his father, the Despensers were descended, as son and grandson, from another Hugh Despenser, baronial justiciar during the 1260s, who had died as a rebel fighting alongside Simon de Montfort at Evesham. From traitors to royal favourites over three generations, the Despensers were held in check only by the power still exercised by Thomas of Lancaster.

In 1321, in an attempted repeat of the coup against Gaveston, Thomas and a group of northern magnates entered into a pact with the Earl of Hereford and other barons from the Welsh Marches, intended to force the Despensers into exile. Within a year, the King was openly at war with his barons. In March 1322, outflanking the army of Thomas of Lancaster and the Earl of Hereford, Edward forced the earls to flee. They had got only so far as Boroughbridge in Yorkshire when they were intercepted by the King’s captain, Andrew Harclay. The Earl of Hereford was killed in the fight that followed. Thomas of Lancaster was taken prisoner, tried before the King at Pontefract and beheaded as a traitor. At least a hundred of his baronial and knightly followers lost either their lands or their lives. Harclay, who had been created Earl of Carlisle in the immediate aftermath of Boroughbridge, was himself executed, drawn and quartered within less than a year, following allegations of defeatism and treason in his dealings with the Scots. Mistrust and the fear of conspiracy were (and remain) contagious commodities.

King Edward, with the Despensers at his side and with the hated Ordinances of 1311 now officially revoked, embarked on a policy of terror and extortion unprecedented since the reign of King John. Like John, Edward became immensely rich, amassing a fortune of at least £60,000 to set against the debts of nearly £200,000 that his father had bequeathed. Also like John, he became the object of dark rumours, not only of sexual deviancy but of sorcery and plots, leading to the arrest of twenty-eight conspirators in Coventry, accused of employing a necromancer, John of Nottingham, to make wax images and cast spells so as to harm Edward, the Despensers and the prior of Coventry, one of the principal local landholders. This, the first public accusation to combine witchcraft with treason, was an ill omen of many such accusations still to come, not least against those in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries accused of ‘maleficium’ against the Tudor and Stuart kings. An attempt by Edward to follow up his success against the rebels of 1322, with a campaign in Scotland, ended in failure with his army forced southwards by starvation and disease. Even so, in Scotland, and from 1323 in France, Edward now had the resources, thanks in large part to the confiscations made after 1322, to wage war on a scale unseen since Bannockburn.

In the longer term, none of this was of any account. Thomas of Lancaster had been a self-seeking and uninspiring politician. Despite his great wealth, his finances, like those of the King, were permanently overstretched so that, like the other earls, he found it difficult to operate outside the court, whilst his pursuit of royal patronage brought even him, the richest baron in England, into competition with Edward II’s low-born favourites. His had been a futile career. He was nonetheless the grandson of a king. His death, by many regarded as a martyrdom, was followed by a popular outcry for his recognition as a saint. In much the same way, the monks of Evesham, after Simon de Montfort’s death in 1265, had encouraged the veneration of Montfort and his relics as a focus of miracles and political opposition to the crown.