3

‘The King’s Right Eye’

At the beginning of July 1318, with the negotiations with Lancaster at their most tense, a man called John of Powderham, the son of a tanner from Exeter, was brought before the king at Northampton after claiming that he, not Edward II, was the true King of England. Edward, he insisted, was really the son of a groom or a carter, a changeling smuggled into the royal nursery following an accident. At first Edward refused to take him seriously. ‘Welcome, my brother!’ he jeered when John first appeared before him, suggesting that he be given a wand and put to work as a jester, but Queen Isabella and others, more alert to the danger, realized that if the rumour spread it could seriously damage the king’s credibility. A formal trial was thus held in the royal household, presided over by William Montague as steward. John’s parents were summoned from Exeter to confirm his birth, and notwithstanding his plea that he had been misled by the Devil, he was drawn and hanged.1

Despite the delicacy of the political situation, there was no suggestion that he had been put up to this by Lancaster or anyone else. What made his allegations dangerous was Edward’s unkingly behaviour – rowing, carting, grooming horses – evidence to a society with a strong belief in heredity of unkingly blood. News of the impostor spread and, ‘because the said Edward resembled the elder Edward in none of his virtues’, was apparently widely believed. It was a measure of how low the king’s reputation had sunk. There was still hope, however: as the author of the Vita pointed out, the great Nebuchadnezzar achieved ‘nothing memorable’ during the first twelve years of his reign, but after that ‘he began to flourish and to conquer nations and kingdoms’; would that Edward might emulate him, and ‘now at least try to attack his enemies, so that he might repair the damage and disgrace which he has borne so long’.2 And at first the omens were good. At the York parliament of October 1318 – the first that Lancaster had attended for nearly three years – the Treaty of Leake and the Ordinances were confirmed, a review of royal grants was instituted, and a schedule drawn up for the reform of the king’s household. Even after Edward returned to Westminster early in 1319, he continued to acknowledge the authority of the standing council set up at Leake.

The main business during the spring of 1319 was to plan a Scottish campaign. In May, another parliament at York granted taxes, and by early August a force of some 10,000 infantry and 500 cavalry had mustered at Newcastle, while around 80 ships were requisitioned to ferry supplies up the coast. It was the most impressive English military effort for five years and the most unified of the reign: for the first time since 1307, even Lancaster agreed to serve, providing about one-fifth of the royal army. The first objective was Berwick, which was reached on 7 September and stormed the next day, though without success. A second assault on 13 September almost succeeded, but at this point things began to go wrong.

Barely had the king arrived at Berwick when he began, ‘with his usual fatuity’, to court controversy by handing out favours: once it was captured, he is alleged to have declared, he would make Damory captain of the town, the Younger Despenser captain of the castle, and finally get his revenge for Gaveston’s death.3 The mood in the besiegers’ camp was thus already fragile when, on the morning of 14 September, news arrived of another Scottish incursion. Led by Randolph and Douglas, a diversionary force had crossed the border at the end of August and, avoiding Edward’s army, pressed on to Myton-on-Swale, near York, where on 12 September it annihilated a makeshift home guard led by the archbishop and mayor of York. Because of the large number of clerics killed, the engagement came to be known as the Chapter of Myton. The only compensation was that the Scots had failed in their attempt to seize Queen Isabella, whom Edward had left at York, but the debacle threw the continuance of the siege of Berwick into the balance. As soon as the news arrived, the king held a council: he and the southern lords were for pressing on with the siege, but Lancaster and some of the northerners claimed that they needed to go home to protect their lands, and three days later Lancaster left, taking his two thousand or so retainers with him. Without them, it was impossible to continue the siege, and by 21 September Edward and the remnants of his army were back at Newcastle, while Randolph and Douglas ravaged their way back to Scotland via the West March. Yet another English campaign had collapsed in ignominy, and the north was desperate for a respite. In December 1319 a two-year Anglo-Scottish truce was agreed.

The political settlement of 1318–19 now started to unravel in a welter of recrimination. Rumours abounded concerning Lancaster’s ‘treachery’ at Berwick: that he had received £40,000 from Bruce to subvert the siege; that he had passed unhindered through James Douglas’s lines and Douglas through his. The man Lancaster blamed for spreading these tales was the Younger Despenser, and not without reason, for a letter written by Despenser on 21 September to his chief agent in Wales, John Inge, put the blame for the raising of the siege squarely on Earl Thomas and alleged that the Scottish invasion had been undertaken with his ‘encouragement and assistance’. Whatever the truth of the matter in 1319, within another two years at most it had become clear that Lancaster was colluding with Bruce.4

By this time a new clique of favourites was establishing a stranglehold on the king’s favour. Montague died in 1319, Damory and Audley were rapidly losing ground, and although Pembroke was still at court he was by now an elder statesman enjoying little real power. The Elder Despenser, however, trading on his son’s new-found prominence, was once more firmly embedded in the king’s inner circle, as were Bartholomew de Badlesmere, who had replaced Montague as steward of the royal household, and Robert Baldock, appointed in January 1320 as keeper of the king’s privy seal. Head and shoulders above them all, however, was the Younger Despenser.

Hugh Despenser the Younger was the king’s junior by two years, and to many his rise seemed all too reminiscent of the Gaveston years, but the two favourites were quite different men. Where Gaveston was charming and foolish, Despenser was a clever and manipulative bully. Unlike Gaveston, he had not risen ‘as if from nothing’. His father, Hugh the Elder, had served Edward I and Edward II as soldier, diplomat and councillor with conspicuous loyalty for twenty-five years, trusted by both kings to the same degree as he was distrusted by their opponents. Almost alone among the barons, he had supported Gaveston to the end and refused to put his seal to the Ordinances.5 That is why Lancaster hated him and why he was obliged to withdraw from court in 1318. Meanwhile, his son was steadily, almost stealthily, worming his way into royal favour, and by 1320, with Damory and Audley shuffled off to the wings, the stage was set for him to exploit to the full his appointment as Edward’s chamberlain.

The chamberlainship was a post of great influence – or at least it had the potential to be, for the chamberlain controlled access to the royal apartments, vetting suitors and intercessors and deciding who should or should not be admitted to the king’s presence. Contemporaries were in no doubt that the Younger Despenser took full advantage of the opportunities it afforded: ‘If anyone wished to speak with the king, he did not dare to do so except in the presence of Sir Hugh’; he was ‘not just a second king, but the ruler of the king, and he had bewitched the king’s mind’; ‘his commandments were carried out everywhere and in every way, and everyone feared and hated him from the bottom of their hearts’.6 He was, concluded one, ‘the king’s right eye’.⁷ Handsome, haughty and inordinately greedy, Hugh was later accused of being a sodomite, but it may be that it was his wife, Eleanor de Clare, the king’s niece, whom Edward loved; the king certainly showed great fondness for her, and there were rumours that she was his mistress.⁸ Despenser himself seems to have been almost as much feared as loved by Edward, but the king also found his financial acumen indispensable. He told the king that he would make him wealthy and spared no effort to see that he did; what Hugh really wanted, though, as he wrote to John Inge, was that ‘Despenser may be rich and may attain his ends, of which Inge is well aware’.⁹ Even when writing to his most trusted officials, his letters exuded an air of menace. It was not so much outrage, as with Gaveston, that motivated the opposition to Despenser, but real fear.

A third of the earldom of Gloucester would have satisfied many a baron, but not the Younger Despenser. His share of the Clare inheritance consisted principally of the lordship of Glamorgan with its great castles at Cardiff and Caerphilly, but no sooner had the partition been agreed in November 1317 than he began scheming to enlarge it. In March 1318 he was told to keep his hands off Newport, which bordered Glamorgan to the east and had been apportioned to Hugh Audley, but he ignored the order and by the end of the year had pressurized Audley into ceding it in return for less valuable lands in England. To the west of Glamorgan lay Dryslwyn and Cantref Mawr, over which he persuaded the king to grant him control, and he made no secret of the fact that he also coveted Cantref Bychan and Brecon to the north, which were held by John Giffard of Brimpsfield and Roger Mortimer of Chirk respectively. Following the death of the dowager countess of Gloucester, he also set his sights on the lordship of Usk, even though by right it fell to Roger Damory. His aim was nothing less than to reconstitute the earldom of Gloucester, and it was widely believed that before long the title would be his as well.

Damory, Audley, Mortimer and Giffard were men who had served Edward II loyally, but as it became increasingly clear that the king was prepared to connive at Despenser’s self-aggrandizement, their loyalty disintegrated. During the early months of 1320, the king was preoccupied with Anglo-French affairs, for Philip V, who had succeeded his brother Louis X as King of France in 1316, had been pressing for some time for the English king to do homage for Gascony. On 19 June, therefore, Edward crossed the Channel, performing homage to Philip at Amiens Cathedral on 30 June and not returning to London until 2 August. It was after his return, said the author of the Vita, that ‘a great quarrel arose between some of the greater barons and Hugh Despenser the son’.10 At its heart lay the lordship of Gower, centred on Swansea, held by the elderly Marcher baron William de Braose. Braose’s only son had died in 1315, and although he had designated his son-in-law John de Mowbray as his heir, with reversion to the Earl of Hereford, the Younger Despenser spied an opportunity. Barely had Mowbray entered upon his inheritance when, on 26 October 1320, Despenser persuaded the king not to sanction the alienation and instead to seize Gower, probably on the grounds that no royal licence had been issued for its alienation.

The latter was true, but whether the king was entitled to intervene was debatable. The Marcher lordships, into which east and south Wales was partitioned, had been created piecemeal during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a kind of buffer zone between England and the native Welsh principalities, and their lords’ ‘service’ to the crown consisted in effect in the subjection of the Welsh and the protection of the border. In return, they enjoyed a range of judicial, financial and administrative privileges such as the right to make private war and to exchange or alienate lands without royal permission. Although these did not always go unchallenged by the crown, especially since the king now held north-western Wales, Edward’s disregard for the Marchers’ privileges in the interests of his favourite united them against him.11 The Younger Despenser, they now saw, was a threat to all of them, and they were determined to resist him; the problem was that they would also have to resist the king.

Contemporaries began to notice a change in Edward’s behaviour around this time. During the October 1320 parliament – so the Bishop of Worcester informed the pope – the king was getting up earlier than usual, attending almost every day and taking a constructive interest in the business of the realm. A chronicler noted that, ‘to the amazement of many’, Edward ‘showed prudence in answering the petitions of the poor, and as much clemency as severity in judicial matters’. When he met Philip V at Amiens in the summer, he agreed to pay homage for Gascony, but when also asked to swear fealty he vigorously asserted that this had not been demanded of previous English kings and ‘we certainly do not intend to do so’.12 Stunned into silence, the French dropped the matter. Galvanized perhaps by the Younger Despenser, Edward was demonstrating that he was no longer willing to be pushed around, a robustness that also manifested itself in his dealings with Lancaster. Well aware that Earl Thomas loathed every one of them, the king and his tight little circle of favourites now abandoned their attempts to reconcile him, leaving him to glower ineffectually from Pontefract. For the moment, the fact that he continued to treat the north like a private fiefdom mattered less, for the Anglo-Scottish truce had relieved the pressure. The truce also reduced the king’s demands for men, money and provisions from his subjects, boosting both his personal standing and the economic recovery which had followed the good harvests of 1318, 1319 and 1320. Optimism was to be short-lived, however: to be sure, kingly vigour was a quality to be admired, but it could also be manipulated, and no one knew how to do so better than the Younger Despenser.

In November 1320, there were signs that the king was still looking to compromise: financial inducements were offered to some of the disaffected, and the partition of the Gloucester inheritance was confirmed. In December, however, royal officials took possession of Gower, making it clear that the threat to the Marchers had not been lifted, and early in 1321 the latter began organizing for war, withdrawing to their lordships, leaguing together and summoning their retainers. Their spokesman was Humphrey, Earl of Hereford, a royalist since 1314 and the widower of the king’s favourite sister, Elizabeth, but now enraged by Edward’s refusal to acknowledge his concerns. Earl Humphrey also bore a private grudge against the Younger Despenser, who had executed the Welsh rebel Llewellyn Bren in barbarous fashion after Hereford had accepted his surrender. Behind him ranged most of the barons of the southern and middle March – John de Mowbray, John Giffard of Brimpsfield, the erstwhile favourites Damory and Audley, Roger Mortimer of Chirk and his nephew and namesake of Wigmore – who, according to the author of the Vita, ‘unanimously decided that Hugh Despenser [the Younger] must be pursued, brought down and utterly destroyed’. When Despenser’s tenants approached them to offer support, they were informed that they must renounce their allegiance to Despenser and agree never to acknowledge him as their lord.13 When Edward invited Hereford to a council to discuss his grievances, Earl Humphrey refused to appear until Hugh was removed from the king’s presence. Ominously, the Marchers were also in contact with Lancaster, who made no secret of his support for them despite his reluctance to join them in taking action.

Although it was the Marchers who set the pace in 1321 – not least because private warfare was an accepted way to settle differences in the March – opposition to the Younger Despenser also ran deep within the royal circle. During the earlier crises of 1308–12 and 1316–18, the knights of the household, of whom there were usually fifty to sixty, remained overwhelmingly loyal, but by 1321 many of them had either left or been dismissed from the king’s service and no fewer than twenty-five of them later joined the opposition. So too did twenty-four barons, most of whom were not Marchers: they included Maurice de Berkeley and Roger de Clifford. Supremely confident of the king’s support, Despenser had no qualms about targeting the strong along with the less strong. He manipulated the law to his own and his retainers’ advantage, monopolized royal patronage and filled the royal household with placemen such as Robert Baldock. Edward, apparently oblivious to the danger of allowing the royal retinue, the bedrock of his personal and military support, to fragment in such fashion, denounced those who opposed him as ‘Contrariants’; like the Marchers, many of them were undeniably threatened by the insatiable favourite, but they were also trying to save the king from the consequences of his own folly.14

Warned by his ubiquitous spies that an attack on the Younger Despenser’s lands was imminent, Edward left Windsor on 6 March 1321 and by the end of the month had reached Gloucester, where he ordered the seizure of some of Damory’s and Audley’s castles. Hereford now wrote to the king suggesting that the Younger Despenser should be committed to Lancaster’s keeping until he could be brought before Parliament, but Edward was never going to agree to that. He replied (rather deftly) that his chamberlain had not technically been accused of any crime and that to place him in custody would contravene both Magna Carta and the Ordinances; if Hereford wanted a parliament, why would he not come to a council to set a date for one? By this time, however, the Contrariants, ‘white-hot with hatred’, were mobilized for war, and probably the only thing that could have prevented it was the banishment of the Despensers, which the king continued to resist.15

The threatened violence erupted at the beginning of May. The first of the Younger Despenser’s lands to be targeted was Newport Castle, which was assaulted on 4 May. Its capitulation four days later was followed by the systematic devastation of his properties, causing damage later estimated at £14,000, and the capture of Cardiff and Swansea on 9 and 13 May respectively. Resistance was minimal, since neither the Welsh nor the English had any desire to fight for the hated favourite. Nor did Despenser’s allies escape: Roger Mortimer of Wigmore attacked Clun, a lordship held by the Earl of Arundel, who in February had married his son to Hugh’s daughter. A few of the Elder Despenser’s properties in Wiltshire were also raided, but an attempt to win over the citizens of Bristol failed when the mayor declared his loyalty to the king. Nevertheless, by early June the aggrieved Marchers had regained control of the lordships they claimed, while the king, ‘with his own Hugh always at his side’, had withdrawn to London.¹⁶

The outbreak of hostilities was the cue for Lancaster to enter the fray. For the first time in five years, Earl Thomas was presented with the opportunity to move from one-man opposition to leadership of a party, and although he did not for the moment wish to join in the raids on the Despensers’ lands, he wanted to ensure in so far as he could that his own agenda was not ignored. Whereas the Contrariants’ wrath was focused on the Younger Despenser, Lancaster regarded his father as equally culpable and impressed upon his new-found allies that both of them must be removed.¹⁷ As was his wont, he had also developed an intense loathing for Bartholomew de Badlesmere, perhaps because he felt that, being the hereditary steward of England – a point he seldom failed to mention in his dealings with Edward – he should have had the right to appoint the steward of the royal household. Although Lancaster still took his stand on the Ordinances, in practice his ‘programme’, such as it was, had by now boiled down to the removal of the ‘evil counsellors’ who surrounded the king, the grievance most likely to attract the widest support. Yet he also needed to ensure that support within his heartland remained solid, for by now some of his own retainers were getting nervous about where Earl Thomas’s persistent defiance of the king might lead them, and desertions from his retinue were mounting.

It was to try to satisfy these various needs that Lancaster twice summoned what some contemporaries termed parliaments, the first at Pontefract on 24 May 1321, the second at Sherburn-in-Elmet, eight miles north of Pontefract, on 28 June. His aim was to build a coalition strong enough to force the king to do his bidding, to which end he summoned some fifteen lords from the northern counties as well as his own retainers and the leading Contrariants. The Bishops of York, Durham and Carlisle also attended, perhaps in the hope that they could act as intermediaries. His ‘parliaments’ certainly did not give Lancaster everything he wanted, for the northern lords and bishops, fearful of the consequences of rebellion, refused to commit themselves. However, the southern Contrariants seemed happy to accept his leadership, not least because of the legitimacy his tenure of the stewardship conferred on their actions, and he probably went some way towards reassuring his more hesitant retainers.

There was also one unexpected conversion to the opposition. Warned in advance about the Sherburn meeting, the king sent the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bartholomew de Badlesmere to try to persuade the barons to desist from violence and bring their grievances to a real parliament, but to Edward’s surprise and fury Badlesmere promptly changed sides. The king’s steward had close connections with several of the leading rebels, but his overriding reason for joining them was almost certainly jealousy of the Younger Despenser, who by this time had eclipsed him at court and was probably instrumental in securing his removal from the constableship of Dover Castle five days before the Sherburn assembly. Needless to say, Badlesmere immediately lost the stewardship as well. Yet if he thought that by switching sides he could allay Earl Thomas’s enmity towards him, he was mistaken. Lancaster had never located a burial ground for hatchets, and in the long term Badlesmere’s defection weakened rather than strengthened the baronial coalition, introducing internal divisions and mutual distrust. As with the opposition to Gaveston, this was a coalition united by little more than the desire to remove a royal favourite.

For the moment, however, its objective was clear and its resolve undimmed. Edward, taken aback by the strength of the opposition, tried to rally support by summoning a parliament to Westminster on 15 July. Mindful of what had happened to Gaveston, he also placed the Despensers out of harm’s way, entrusting Hugh the Younger to the protection of the men of the Cinque Ports. The Contrariants, after plundering Despenser properties in Leicestershire, reached the outskirts of London on 29 July, led by Hereford, the Mortimers, Damory and Audley, and accompanied by some five thousand retainers, all clothed in livery of green with yellow and white bends in the right quarter, as a result of which the meeting came to be known as ‘the parliament of the white bend’.18 Lancaster was not with them, but the king knew full well that he was behind them, and it was at Lancaster’s Inn outside the capital that Hereford billeted his men. There was a last-minute attempt at mediation by the bishops, but when Badlesmere told them that the Younger Despenser was ‘a manifest traitor and enemy of the king and kingdom’, it was clear that the time for compromise was past.¹⁹ Several of the prelates, the Earls of Pembroke, Arundel, Richmond and Warenne, and even Queen Isabella, now urged the king to give way in order to prevent civil war. If the Despensers were not exiled, Pembroke warned him, it was quite likely that he would lose his throne.

Backed into a corner, Edward finally submitted. Since the Despensers were absent, there was no trial and no opportunity for them to defend themselves: they were exiled by ‘award’ – that is, on the record – of the peers of the realm, the charges against them being read out in Westminster Hall on 14 August by Hereford. The Three Articles of 1308, originally composed to secure the exile of Gaveston, were once again presented as a way of justifying opposition to the ‘unreasonable’ king while maintaining faith with the crown. It was clear from the indictment that the Younger Despenser was viewed as the real culprit. It was he who had ‘drawn over to his cause’ his father, so that together they had usurped royal power and plotted to have ‘sole government of the realm’. One of the charges against him recited how, when Edward showed reluctance to do his bidding, he ‘was angry with the king’ and schemed ‘to lead the king to do his will by duress, with the result that he did not forgive him when he did not do it’ – a revealing insight into their relationship. Charges relating to the seizure of lands in the March and the execution of Llewellyn Bren were also included, but the main thrust of the indictment was in line with the comments of the chroniclers, namely that the Despensers had monopolized access to Edward, his counsel and his patronage, thereby inciting war and imperilling the kingdom.20

After hearing Hereford out, Edward agreed, ‘with bitterness in his soul’, that both father and son should be exiled from the realm in perpetuity and their heirs disinherited; they were to leave from Dover within two weeks, and if they ever returned they would be treated as enemies of the king and the realm. All those involved in the attacks on them and their lands over the previous few months were granted statutory pardons by the king. ‘Anxious and sad’, Edward retired to his chamber, but two days later, while dining with the strongly royalist Bishop of Rochester, he told him that ‘he would within half a year set matters to right in such a way that the entire world would take note and would tremble’.²¹

The next half-year would indeed be Edward’s finest hour, and if the whole world did not tremble, England certainly did. The exile of the Despensers instantly tilted the balance of right and wrong back in favour of the king, putting the Contrariants in an almost impossible position. If they disarmed and went home, it was virtually certain that Edward would claim duress, recall the Despensers and start picking off his enemies one by one. If, however, having achieved their stated aim of saving the king and the kingdom from the hated favourites, they remained in arms, it would be the king they were opposing, laying them open to the charge of treason. Moreover, although they knew that Lancaster supported them, he showed no sign of leaving Pontefract. Not surprisingly, many of the less committed or less threatened now began to melt away, although the leading Marchers and others too deeply implicated, such as Badlesmere, remained at Oxford, ready to act if necessary.

Unslaked for a decade, Edward’s thirst for vengeance would wait no longer. Just as galling to him as the Despensers’ exile – as it had been during the Gaveston years – was the insult to his royal dignity, and he planned to recall them as soon as possible. He was certainly in touch with the Younger Despenser in September 1321, for although Hugh had put to sea he had not departed the realm, but was roaming the Channel and the North Sea with men of the Cinque Ports, committing acts of piracy ‘like a monster of the sea’ and occasionally coming ashore.22 It was at one of his ports of call, probably Minster-in-Thanet, in early September that he and Edward met and plotted their revenge. Yet the campaign the king subsequently launched was undertaken under his personal direction; apart from a brief rendezvous at Portchester in October, he saw neither of the Despensers again until early March 1322. In the meantime, he relied on his own leadership, on his household knights and bannerets, whose ranks he hastily replenished to replace those whose reliability was suspect, and on the retinues of the Earls of Pembroke, Arundel, Warenne and Richmond, and of his half-brothers, Thomas, Earl of Norfolk and Edmund, Earl of Kent, now twenty-one and twenty respectively.

The campaign to restore royal authority was carefully planned. Back at Westminster by 25 September, Edward began by ordering the Marchers to give up the lands they had seized from the Despensers. When this was predictably ignored, he sent Queen Isabella to demand entry to Leeds Castle in Kent, which was in Badlesmere’s custody, although he was not there at the time. Fearing a ruse, and under orders from Badlesmere to defend the castle, the garrison refused to admit her, whereupon, on 16 October, Edward announced his intention to besiege it. The former steward was a well-chosen target: despised by both the king and Lancaster, he was doubly vulnerable. Led by Hereford and the Mortimers, the Contrariants, when they heard of developments at Leeds, exhibited enough solidarity to advance as far as Kingston-upon-Thames (Surrey), but here they received a warning from Lancaster not to help Badlesmere since he could not be trusted. Leeds duly surrendered on 31 October, Badlesmere’s wife and children were sent to the Tower of London, and thirteen of the garrison were hanged, which ‘terrified everyone immensely’.23

November was spent preparing for war. By this time, with the number of desertions from his retinue rising, Lancaster was trying to negotiate help from the Scots, under the pseudonym ‘King Arthur’. Yet the core of the Marchers’ support remained solid, and by early December they had established their base at Gloucester to prevent the king from crossing the Severn and entering Wales. For the moment, Edward remained in London, where, on 1 December, a council of prelates, earls and royal justices proclaimed the exile of the Despensers to have been unlawful and authorized the despatch of safe-conducts to them. Thus fortified, Edward felt strong enough to begin operations, and having ordered his forces to muster at Cirencester, he joined them there for Christmas, pausing only to seize and destroy a number of rebel castles along the way.

On 27 December the king and his army marched out. With the crossing at Gloucester blocked, they went north to Worcester, only to find that this was also in rebel hands. An advance guard was sent to hold Bridgnorth, but on 5 January the Contrariants burned the bridge there too, so that the royal army was eventually forced to go as far north as Shrewsbury to cross the Severn. Meanwhile the king had written to his Welsh supporters to close in from the north, rightly reckoning that they would jump at the chance of vengeance against the Marchers who lorded it over them; and, once Edward entered Wales on 14 January, resistance soon crumbled. The two Roger Mortimers, whose lands in the northern and middle March were being harried by a Welsh force under Sir Griffith Lloyd, Sheriff of Merioneth and the king’s key agent in north Wales, cut their losses and submitted to the king at Shrewsbury on 22 January.24 They were sent to the Tower of London. Further defections followed as the king turned southwards: Maurice de Berkeley surrendered at Gloucester on 6 February, and even Hereford thought of giving himself up, although when he realized that the king was in no mood to grant pardons he instead fled to join Lancaster. Damory, Audley and others went with him, hastened on their way by the hanging of three rebel knights at Gloucester.

Edward’s shrewd and ruthless campaign against the Contrariants had been totally successful, and all that was left to the fugitives was to put their faith in Lancaster. Had Earl Thomas come to their aid, it might have been a different story, but failure of nerve seems to have prevented him from abandoning the safety of his northern heartland. Instead, his chosen method of showing solidarity with his allies was to try (unsuccessfully) to capture the royal castle of Tickhill, twenty-five miles from Pontefract. On 8 February the king wrote to his cousin ordering him not to give any succour to the rebels; supercilious to the last, Lancaster replied that he was unaware of having encountered any, but if he did so he would be sure to kill or exile them. By now, however, his braggadocio was almost played out. Fearing that the earl would try to reach Scotland, the king ordered Sir Andrew Harclay, Sheriff of Cumberland, to cut him off, while Edward himself summoned 12,000 more men to join him at Coventry and began moving northwards, seizing Lancaster’s castle of Kenilworth on the way. The net was closing, and to make matters worse for Lancaster the Archbishop of York sent the king recently discovered treasonable correspondence between him and the Scots, which Edward published on 1 March. Two days later the Despensers rejoined the king at Lichfield, and on 11 March Lancaster, Hereford and their remaining allies were publicly denounced as traitors. Even Earl Thomas’s closest lieutenants such as Sir Robert Holand, ‘whom he trusted more than any man alive’, now began to desert him.25

After trying unsuccessfully to defend the bridge at Burton-on-Trent, most of the Contrariants who had not fled now sought refuge in Pontefract Castle. Others went into hiding, though not Damory, who had been mortally wounded at Burton and left behind at Tutbury, where the king caught up with him on 13 March. Although convicted of treason, the former favourite was spared public execution and allowed to die of his wounds in the abbey. Meanwhile, at Pontefract, confusion reigned. Lancaster, still under the illusion that Edward might accept that they had taken up arms not against him but against the Despensers, and perhaps believing that the king would not dare to put his own cousin to death, thought they should hold out and hope for terms. Others thought they should throw themselves on Edward’s mercy, but the majority opinion was that they should flee to the Lancastrian stronghold of Dunstanburgh in Northumberland and hope that the king’s anger might cool. Only when Roger de Clifford drew his sword on him did Lancaster agree to go with them. However, they got no further than Boroughbridge, where they found Andrew Harclay guarding the bridge over the Ure with 4,000 northerners, all dismounted and packed into schiltrons bristling with pikes and longbows, ‘according to the manner of the Scots’.²⁶ Desperation spurred the Contrariant army forward. Hereford led an assault to try to force a crossing but was killed by a Welshman lurking below, who found ‘a hole in the planking and stabbed him in the groin, a private part where soldiers are not usually protected’.27 Following this, hostilities were suspended for the night, but early the next morning, 17 March, Harclay’s men surrounded the Contrariant camp. Lancaster tried to slip away in disguise but was captured, as were the other rebel leaders. Two days later, Edward and the Despensers reached Pontefract – that great monument to treachery in their eyes – and the castle immediately surrendered.

After being held at York for four days, Earl Thomas was brought to Pontefract, where Edward and the Younger Despenser ‘contemptuously insulted him to his face with malicious and arrogant words’, before locking him away in a newly constructed tower in which it was said that he had planned to imprison the king if he ever laid hands on him.²⁸ The next morning, 22 March, he was brought before a tribunal of seven earls and a royal justice sitting in the great hall where ‘he had held many a fair feast’, to hear a catalogue of his more notorious crimes and insults to the king over the past decade. The charge, inescapably, was treason, the verdict guilty, the sentence death. When told that (like the Despensers seven months previously) he had no right of reply, he merely remarked that this was ‘a powerful court, and very great in authority, where no answer is heard nor any mitigation admitted’. He was immediately led out of the castle to a little hillock outside the walls, the spot from which he and his men had jeered at the king in 1317.²⁹ Now the jeers were for him. One chronicler likened his last journey to Christ’s ascent of Calvary: ‘some worthless beast of burden’ was found to carry him, and ‘upon his head they set an old chaplet, all rent and torn’. There were shouts of ‘King Arthur!’ and ‘Traitor!’ Snow lay on the ground, and a few bystanders threw snowballs at him. His last conversation was with a Dominican friar who confessed him. ‘Fair father,’ he begged, ‘stay with me until I am dead, for my flesh quakes for dread of death.’ When they reached the summit, Lancaster knelt facing east, but a ‘ribald’ took hold of him, saying, ‘Traitor, look towards the Scots!’ ‘As you wish,’ he replied, and turned to the north, whereupon the friar stepped back and ‘this earl, lately the terror of the whole land, stretched forth his neck as if in prayer, and with two or three blows the executioner cut off his head’.30