‘SEEING THAT SIR EDWARD, lately King of England, has by his own will and the general advice and assent of the prelates, earls, barons and other nobles, and that of all the population of the kingdom, resigned the government of the realm, and consented and willed that the government of the said realm pass to Sir Edward, his eldest son and heir, and that the latter should govern and be crowned King, on which account all the nobility have done homage, we proclaim and publish the peace of our Lord Sir Edward the son and order on his behalf that no one disturb the peace of our said Lord the King, for he will protect the rights of everyone in his said kingdom, both rich and poor, against whomsoever it may be. And if any have just cause or complaint against another, let him have resort to the law, and use neither force nor other violence.’
This proclamation was read on 24 January 1327 to the Parliament of England, and a Council of Regency was immediately appointed; the Queen presided over this Council of twelve members among whom were the Earls of Kent, Norfolk and Lancaster, the Marshal Sir Thomas Wake and, the most important of all, Roger Mortimer, Baron of Wigmore.
Edward III was crowned on Sunday, February 1, at Westminster. The day before, Henry Crouchback had armed the young King a knight together with the three elder sons of Roger Mortimer.
Lady Jeanne Mortimer, who had recovered both her liberty and her property, but lost her husband’s love, was present. She dared not look at the Queen nor did the Queen dare look at her. Lady Jeanne suffered greatly from this betrayal by the two people in the world she had loved most and served best. Did fifteen years of attendance on Queen Isabella, of devotion, intimacy and shared risks, deserve such a reward? And did twenty-three years of marriage to Mortimer, to whom she had borne eleven children, deserve to come to an end like this? In this great upheaval, which was altering the destiny of the kingdom and giving her husband the highest power, Lady Jeanne, who had always been so loyal, found herself among the vanquished. And yet she could forgive, she could retire with dignity, precisely because the two people she most admired were concerned and because she understood that these two people were bound inevitably to fall in love as soon as Fate had brought them together.
After the coronation, the crowd was allowed to invade the Bishop of London’s palace to kill the ex-Chancellor Robert de Baldock; and, the next week, Messire Jean de Hainaut received an income of one thousand marks sterling from the duty on wool and leather in the Port of London.
Messire Jean de Hainaut would have liked to stay longer at the Court of England. But he had promised to go to a great tournament at Condé-sur-l’Escault, where many princes, among them the King of Bohemia, were to meet. There would be jousting and parading and an opportunity to meet many beautiful women who had crossed Europe to watch the greatest knights compete; there would be dancing and flirting and feasting and masks. Messire Jean de Hainaut could not miss all that, nor the opportunity of shining in his plumed helm in the sanded lists. He agreed to take with him fifteen English knights who wanted to take part in the tournament.
In March the treaty was signed with France at last. It regularized the question of Aquitaine, and to England’s great detriment. But could Mortimer make Edward III refuse the clauses that he himself had negotiated so that they might be imposed on Edward II? It was a legacy from a bad reign, and it had to be paid. Besides, Mortimer took little interest in Guyenne where he had no lands. At the moment his attention was concentrated, as it had been before his imprisonment, on Wales and the Welsh Marches.
The envoys he sent to Paris to ratify the treaty found King Charles IV very sad and cast down, for the child born to Jeanne of Évreux in the previous month of November had not only been a girl, when he had hoped for a boy, but had not lived two months.
Order was only just being restored in the kingdom of England, when the old King of Scotland, Robert the Bruce, who had caused Edward II so much trouble, though he was now old in years and suffered moreover from leprosy, sent on April 1, twelve days after Easter, a defiance to young Edward, informing him that he was about to invade his country.
Roger Mortimer’s first reaction was to make ex-King Edward change his residence. It was only prudent. Moreover, Henry of Lancaster and his banners were needed with the army. And then, according to reports from Kenilworth, Lancaster seemed to be treating his prisoner too kindly, keeping but a lax guard over him and allowing him a certain amount of communication with the outside world. And the partisans of the Despensers had not all been executed, indeed far from it; in the first place the Earl of Warenne, more fortunate than his brother-in-law the Earl of Arundel, had managed to escape. Some had gone to earth in their manors or in friends’ houses while waiting for the storm to blow over; others had fled the kingdom. It might even be that the defiance sent by the old King of Scotland had been inspired by them.
Moreover, the great popular enthusiasm with which the liberation had been welcomed was now beginning seriously to decrease. From the mere fact of having governed for six months, Roger Mortimer was already less beloved and less adulated; for there were still taxes to pay and people were still being sent to prison for failure to pay them. In the circles of power, people were beginning to reproach Mortimer with his too peremptory authority, which seemed to increase day by day, and with the great ambitions he was beginning to reveal. He had recovered all the estates which had been seized from him by the Earl of Arundel, and had added to them the county of Glamorgan as well as the greater part of Hugh the Younger’s possessions. His three sons-in-law – for Mortimer already had three married daughters – Lord de Berkeley, the Earl of Charlton and the Earl of Warwick, served to increase his territorial power. Having conferred on himself the appointment of Justiciar of Wales, which had been his uncle of Chirk’s, as well as his uncle’s lands, he was thinking of having himself created Earl of March, which would have given him a fabulous semi-independent principality in the west of the kingdom.
He had also managed to quarrel with Adam Orleton, who had been sent to Avignon to hasten the necessary dispensations for the marriage of the young King; and, since the Bishopric of Worcester happened to be vacant, Orleton had asked the Pope for this important diocese. Mortimer had taken offence that Orleton had not first asked his agreement, and had opposed the appointment. Edward II had behaved towards Orleton in exactly the same way over the see of Hereford.
It was natural that the Queen should also suffer from this decreasing popularity.
And now war had been declared, war with Scotland again. Nothing seemed to have changed. And the people had hoped for so much that they were bound to be disappointed. Suppose the armies were defeated and there was a conspiracy by which Edward II escaped, then the Scots, allies of the old Despenser party for the occasion, would have a King ready to replace on the throne and one who would undoubtedly be willing to surrender the northern provinces to them in exchange for his liberty and recovered power.43
During the night of April 3 the ex-King was awakened and asked to dress quickly. He found himself in the presence of a tall, bony, ungainly knight, with long yellow teeth, dark straight hair falling over his ears, and very much the appearance of a horse.
‘Where are you taking me, Maltravers?’ Edward asked in terror, recognizing a baron whom he had once ruined and banished, and who looked very like a murderer.
‘I’m taking you to a place of greater security, Plantagenet; and so that the security shall be effective, you are not to know where you’re going, and then there’ll be no risk of your mentioning it.’
Maltravers had instructions to avoid the towns and not to linger on the road. On April 5, after a journey made entirely at a canter or indeed a gallop, and broken only by a single halt at an abbey near Gloucester, the ex-King reached Berkeley Castle, where his gaoler was one of Mortimer’s sons-in-law.
The English army, summoned first to Newcastle for Ascension Day, finally assembled in the town of York at Pentecost. The Government of the kingdom had moved there, and Parliament held a session there, exactly as in the old days of the fallen King when the Scots invaded.
And soon Messire Jean de Hainaut and his Hennuyers arrived, for they had been called to the rescue. Once again, mounted on their big chestnut horses, and still in great excitement from the wonderful tournament of Condé-sur-l’Escaut, there appeared the Lords of Ligne, Enghien, Mons and Sarre, and Guillaume de Bailleul, Perceval de Sémeries, Sance de Boussoy, and Oulfart de Ghistelles, who had all carried the colours of Hainaut to success in the jousting, and Messires Thierry de Wallecourt, Rasses de Grez, Jean Pilastre and the three brothers Harlebeke under the banners of Brabant; and other Lords of Flanders, Cambrésis and Artois, and with them the sons of the Marquis de Juliers.
Jean de Hainaut had had no difficulty in assembling them at Condé. You just went from wars to jousts and from jousts to wars. My God, what fun it was!
Great festivities were held in York in honour of the Hennuyers’ return. The best lodgings were given them; they were feasted and banqueted, with an abundance of meat and poultry. The wines of Gascony and the Rhine flowed from open barrels.
These festivities for the foreigners irritated the English archers, of whom there were some six thousand, among whom were many old soldiers of the Earl of Arundel, who had been beheaded.
One night a brawl, as often happens indeed in the ordinary way among troops in garrison, broke out over a game of dice between some English archers and the squires of a Brabant knight. The English, who were simply awaiting an opportunity, called their comrades to come and help; and all the archers rose to teach these continental cads a lesson; the Hennuyers ran to their billets for shelter. The knights, who had been feasting, were drawn into the streets by the noise and immediately set on by the English archers. They tried to take refuge in their billets, but could gain no entrance to them since their own men had barricaded the doors. And now, the flower of the nobility of Flanders was without arms or any means of defence. But it consisted of stout men. Messires Perceval de Sémeries, Fastres de Rues and Sance de Boussoy armed themselves with heavy pieces of oak they had found in a wheelwright’s, put their backs to the wall and killed, between the three of them, some sixty archers belonging to the Bishop of Lincoln.
This minor quarrel between allies resulted in over three hundred dead.
The six thousand archers, forgetting all about the Scottish war, thought only of exterminating the Hennuyers. Messire Jean de Hainaut, who was both furious and outraged, determined to go home, if only the siege of his lines could be raised. In the end, after a few hangings, things calmed down. The English ladies, who had accompanied their husbands to the army, were particularly gracious to the Hainaut knights and pleaded with them to stay with tears in their eyes. The Hennuyers were then encamped half a league away from the rest of the army, and so a month went by during which they looked at each other like cats and dogs.
Finally the decision was taken to start campaigning. Young King Edward III, for this his first war, had under command eight thousand knights and thirty thousand footmen.
Most unfortunately the Scots proved elusive. The barbarians made war with neither baggage nor baggage-train. Their light troops needed no more than a flat stone at the saddle-bow and a small bag of flour; and on this they were able to live for several days, damping the flour in the burns and cooking it into cakes on the stones they heated in a fire. The Scots mocked the huge English army, made contact, skirmished and retreated, crossed and recrossed the rivers, drew the enemy into bogs, forests and narrow defiles. The English advanced at hazard between the Tyne and the Cheviot hills.
One day there was a considerable stir in some woods through which the English were marching. The alarm was sounded. Everyone charged, visors down, targes at the ready, lances in rest, waiting for no one, father, brother or comrade, only to find, somewhat abashed, that a herd of deer were fleeing in terror from the clatter of their arms.
Supply was becoming difficult; there was no food to be found in the country except what was brought with considerable difficulty by a few merchants who sold their goods for ten times their value. The horses were lacking oats and forage. And then it rained without stopping for a whole week. Saddle-flaps began rotting under their riders’ thighs; the horses cast their shoes in the mud; and the whole army was rusting. At night the knights had to cut branches with their swords to make themselves shelters. And the Scots were still proving elusive.
Sir Thomas Wake, the Marshal of the Army, was in despair. The Earl of Kent almost regretted La Réole; at least they had had fine weather there. Henry Crouchback had rheumatism in his neck. Mortimer was becoming increasingly bad-tempered and growing weary of going to and fro between the army and Yorkshire, where the Queen and the Government offices were lying. A hopelessness, giving rise to every kind of dissatisfaction, was beginning to take effect among the troops; they were talking of being betrayed.
One day, while the commanders of the banners were discussing angrily what had not been done and what ought to have been done, young King Edward III gathered a few squires of his own age together, and promised both a knighthood and lands worth a hundred pounds a year to anyone who could discover where the Scots army was. Some twenty boys, between fourteen and eighteen years of age, set out to scour the country. The first to return was Thomas de Rokesby; breathless and exhausted, he cried: ‘Sire Edward, the Scots are four leagues from us among the hills and they have been there for a week. They have no more idea of where you are than you have of their position.’
Young Edward immediately had the trumpets sounded, assembled the army on what was known as ‘the white moor’, and ordered an advance against the Scots. The great men of the lists were astonished. But the noise this huge armoured force made as it advanced through the hills was heard afar off by Robert the Bruce’s men. And when the knights of England and Hainaut reached the crest of a hill and were preparing to descend into the further valley, they suddenly saw the whole Scots army drawn up on foot in battle array with their arrows already slotted to their bow-strings. They stared at each other from a distance and did not dare come to battle, for the terrain was ill-suited to the launching of cavalry. They stared at each other for twenty-two days.
Since the Scots had apparently no intention of moving from a position that was so favourable to them, and the knights were disinclined to give battle on a terrain which prevented their proper deployment, the armies remained on either side of the crest, each waiting for the other to move. They contented themselves with skirmishing, generally by night, and with leaving these minor engagements to the infantry.
The most important action of this strange war, which was being fought between an octogenarian leper and a fifteen-year-old king, was carried out by the Scot James Douglas who, with two hundred horsemen of his clan, fell on the English camp one moonlit night, slaughtered everyone in his path and, to the cry of ‘Douglas! Douglas!’ succeeded in cutting three of the King’s tent-ropes before retiring. After that night the English knights slept in their armour.
And then, one morning before dawn, two Scots scouts, who appeared to be watching the English army, were captured. It seemed almost as if they wanted to be taken. And when they were brought before the English King, they said: ‘Sire, what do you seek here? We Scots have gone back to the mountains, and Sire Robert, our King, has told us to inform you of it, and also that he will make no more war against you this year, unless you pursue him.’
The English advanced carefully, fearing a trap, and found themselves suddenly face to face with four hundred camp-kettles for boiling meat hanging in a line. The Scots had left them there so as to travel light and make no noise during their retreat. They found, too, in a huge heap, five thousand worn rawhide boots. The Scots had changed their footgear before departing. There was not a living soul in the camp except five English prisoners who, completely naked and bound to posts, had had their legs broken by blows from cudgels.
To pursue the Scots through the mountains, over difficult country, in which the whole population was hostile to the English, and where the army, already exhausted, would have had to fight a war of ambushes for which it was not trained, was clearly pure folly. The campaign was declared at an end. The army returned to York and was disbanded.
Messire Jean de Hainaut had to take stock of his dead and useless horses, and he presented a bill for fourteen thousand livres. Young King Edward had insufficient money in his Treasury, particularly since he had still to pay his own troops. So Messire Jean de Hainaut, making his usual grand gesture, guaranteed to his knights all the sums due to them from his future nephew.
During the course of the summer, Roger Mortimer, who had no interests in the north of the kingdom, concluded a treaty of peace. Edward III had to renounce all suzerainty over Scotland and to recognize Robert the Bruce as King of that country, which Edward II had always refused to do. Moreover, David Bruce, the son of Robert, married Jane of England, Queen Isabella’s second daughter.
Had it really been worth depriving the former King, who was now living in seclusion at Berkeley Castle, of his powers for such a result as this?