The parliament summoned to York in May 1322 was advertised as an opportunity for a ‘colloquium’ and ‘tractatum’ – a chance for the king to discuss and treat with his country. Summonses were sent far and wide. The Cinque Ports were granted parliamentary representation for the first time in recognition of the fact that they had harboured the Despensers during their exile, while the Principality of Wales was similarly rewarded for assisting in the fight against the Marcher lords. Yet despite this new inclusiveness and the language of consultation and peacemaking, Edward used the parliament for one clear end: to reward and rehabilitate the Despensers and formalize the destruction of the late Thomas earl of Lancaster’s whole programme of reform.
Parliament met against a background of blood. Edward’s revenge on the contrariants was near-merciless. The gibbet in York, visible to everyone who attended parliament, held the bloated corpses of John de Mowbray, Roger Clifford and Jocelin d’Eyville – all lords of considerable renown and wealth, who had been hanged in chains the day after Lancaster died. On 14 April, Bartholomew Badlesmere, the moderate baron who had been a prominent peacemaker earlier in Edward’s reign, was viciously executed in Canterbury. He was dragged through the streets, hanged and beheaded, and his head placed on the Burgate.
More executions followed. Twenty other men were killed for their part in the rebellion against Edward’s rule. The horror of Edward’s revenge shocked the country. Gibbets were erected in London, Windsor, Bristol, Cardiff and Swansea. The bodies of executed men swung in chains, bloating and decaying, for more than two years. Everyone who entered a major town between 1322 and 1324 might have shuddered at the sight of once great men butchered and hung up like hogs. It was not surprising that Roger of Wendover, the author of the Flores Historiarum chronicle, wrote that the king ‘hated all the magnates with such mad fury that he plotted the complete and permanent overthrow of all the great men of the realm’.
Of the most prominent contrariants, the two Roger Mortimers, the Marcher lords who had been involved in the initial attacks on Despenser property, were both sentenced to death, but had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. Maurice de Berkeley and both Hugh Audley the younger and the elder – once loyal lords who had been driven away from the king by hatred of the Despensers – were also imprisoned rather than executed. The Tower of London heaved with well-born prisoners, while contrariants’ families were deprived of their lands and property or imprisoned in castles across England and Wales.
In such an atmosphere it was unsurprising that the May 1322 parliament tore up almost everything that Lancaster and his allies had attempted to impose on the king since 1311. The Ordinances were repealed, save six so-called ‘Good Clauses’ that were reissued in the Statute of York. The legal processes that had been started against the Despensers prior to the civil war were halted, and a process by which Lancaster’s extensive lands were taken into royal hands was begun. Various other items of parliamentary business, concerning trade regulation and legal procedures, were discussed and referred to the royal council, but it was clear to all who gathered at York that these were matters incidental to the king’s revenge on his enemies.
During the rest of the year Edward handed out the spoils of the civil war. There was a limited programme by which those contrariants who survived the bloodletting could buy back their estates at extortionate prices. But in the main Edward distributed the confiscated possessions to his followers. Andrew Harclay, for his part in capturing Lancaster, was raised to a new earldom of Carlisle. The loyal earls of Pembroke and Surrey were all given manors and lands that had either been confiscated from them by Lancaster in 1318–19 or else were taken from Lancaster’s own estates. The earl of Arundel was given lands confiscated from Roger Mortimer of Chirk, as well as the latter’s title of justice of Wales. The king’s half-brother Edmund earl of Kent gained castles in the Midlands and Wales, and Edward’s younger son John of Eltham, although only six years old in August 1322, was given the Lancastrian castle of Tutbury.
Most heavily rewarded, unsurprisingly, were the Despensers. The 61-year-old Hugh the elder was raised to the earldom of Winchester with five separate grants of land to support his new rank, including the valuable lordship of Denbigh, in north Wales, which had been stripped from Lancaster. Hugh the younger, meanwhile, received virtually all the lands (albeit not the title) of the earldom of Gloucester. He was restored to all the estates in Wales – Glamorgan, Cantref Mawr and Gower – that had been raided and taken from him in the civil war, and over the next two years these western landholdings were linked up by the award of lordships in Usk, Is Cennen, Brecon, Chepstow and Pembroke. He was de facto lord of south Wales, vastly wealthy, with an income of perhaps £5,000 a year, and now the trustee of almost unfettered royal power in the west. After 1322, the two Despensers and Edward controlled between them perhaps three-quarters of Wales.
If the Despensers prospered, so too did the king. Tens of thousands of pounds of revenue from confiscated lands and fines paid by disgraced nobles now flowed directly into his chamber. The York parliament granted him taxation amounting to more than £40,000 for a war with the Scots, but a botched invasion in August and September 1322 in which Queen Isabella was almost captured was swiftly aborted in favour of a thirteen-year truce. More than half of the money raised for defending the northern border went unspent, and the coin was sent in large barrels for safekeeping in the Tower of London. More followed from a clerical tax, also supposed to fund a Scottish war. The king took a close personal interest in collecting money, and his coffers filled accordingly. The author of the Brut chronicle reckoned Edward to be the richest king since William the Conqueror.
Emboldened by the security of his riches, Edward now became a tyrant. It seemed to the country that he governed in alliance with the Despensers – the chronicler Thomas de la More wrote afterwards that under Edward and the Despensers, England had three kings at once. The younger Despenser dominated the highest reaches of the state, sending covering letters with documents sealed by the king, involving himself deeply in affairs of state and spreading a network of retainers and followers throughout county government.
No one was safe from the vengeance of the king and the Despensers when matters did not go their way. Cruelty was rife. When the Scottish invasion failed, casual vengeance was taken upon a man who had only months previously found himself high in royal favour: when Andrew Harclay, the newly ennobled earl of Carlisle, was discovered to have opened independent negotiations with Robert the Bruce in early 1323, he was hanged, drawn and quartered as a common traitor. The hero of Boroughbridge was dead within a month of his greatest act of loyalty.
All the king’s enemies were vulnerable. The earl of Pembroke, who had been conspicuously loyal between his roles in Gaveston’s death and the attacks on the Despensers of 1321, was forced to swear an oath of allegiance to the king, guaranteed by his life, his lands and his goods. He was broken politically and would die in 1324. Meanwhile, Lancaster’s young widow, Alice de Lacy, had been imprisoned in York castle along with her mother following the earl’s death. The Despensers threatened both women with burning if they did not surrender their estates in exchange for empty honorific titles and a small cash pension. Hundreds of others were affected in this way. Meanwhile Hugh Despenser the younger built himself a hall of regal magnificence at Caerphilly castle, spending vast sums using master craftsmen and the finest materials. Despenser revelled in his position as the king’s most trusted adviser and recipient of the most generous royal patronage, and his hand appeared everywhere in government.
Under the influence of the Despensers, and in particular Hugh the younger, the period between 1322 and 1326 was characterized by grotesque cruelty. ‘The king’s harshness has indeed increased so much today that no one, however great or wise, dares to cross the king’s will,’ wrote the author of The Life of Edward II. ‘Parliaments, consultations and councils decide nothing … For the nobles of the realm, terrified by threats and the penalties inflicted on others, let the king’s will have free rein. Thus today will conquers reason. For whatever pleases the king, though lacking in reason, has force of law.’
Edward had defeated his enemies and enriched the Crown. But he had not done anything to strengthen his rule. Indeed, by wielding his office solely in his own and his favourites’ interest he was simply making his overlordship worthless to all those men who could not gain access to his justice or protection from his law. For all the magnificence that accrued to him in victory, he was fatally undermining his own reign.