On 24 November the whole population of the town of Hereford assembled in the market square. Before them sat a now familiar form of court, headed by Sir William Trussel, the man who had sent the elder Despenser, earl of Winchester, to the gallows less than a month previously.
Before the court stood Hugh Despenser the younger, a dishevelled and sorry shadow of the man who had ruled England through the king. He had been brought to the town earlier in the day to the sound of drums and trumpets. A large crowd had gathered to see the fallen favourite arrive, and they bayed and cheered as the captive Despenser approached on horseback, a crown of nettles on his head to symbolize his crime of accroaching royal power, and his arms reversed on his tunic to proclaim his treachery. The front of his tunic bore a Latin verse from the New Testament: ‘Quid gloriaris in malicia qui potens est in iniquitate?’ (‘Why do you glory in malice, you who are mighty in iniquity?’) For almost a week before his transfer to Hereford the captive had been attempting to starve himself to death. But he was allowed no such easy fate. The crowd dragged him to the ground, stripped off his clothes and scrawled biblical slogans on his skin. Then he was hauled before the court.
Once more the court was convened along the injudicious lines that had been drawn up when Gaveston and Lancaster were killed. It was certain that the defendant would die, and would die without the right to speak in his own favour. The earl of Arundel had been beheaded in Hereford a week previously, and it was certain that the favourite would join him.
Despenser’s crimes were read out to the court. The list was exhaustingly long and included breaking the terms of exile, breaching Magna Carta and the Ordinances of 1311, killing, imprisoning and tyrannizing the great and good of the realm, causing the king to fight in Scotland at the cost of thousands of men’s lives, usurping royal authority and attempting to fund the destruction of Queen Isabella and her son Duke Edward while they were in France. Sir William, sitting in judgement, condemned Despenser to the full and hideous death of a robber, traitor and tyrant. He was to be hanged, drawn and quartered, his entrails were to be burned before him and he would be beheaded. ‘Go to meet your fate, traitor, tyrant, renegade,’ thundered Trussel. ‘Go to receive your justice, traitor, evil man, criminal!’
Along with his associate Simon de Reading, who had been tried alongside him, Despenser was roped to four horses, and dragged through the streets of Hereford to the walls of the castle. Here both men had nooses placed around their necks, and Despenser was hoisted onto a specially made 50-foot gallows, designed to make punishment visible to everyone in the town. A fire burned beneath the scaffold, and it was here that Despenser’s genitals were thrown when the executioner had scaled a ladder and hacked them off with a knife. He was then drawn: his intestines and heart were cut out and also hurled down into the flames. Finally, his body was lowered back to the ground and butchered. The crowd whooped with joy as Despenser’s head was cut off, to be sent to London, while his body was quartered for distribution about the country.
This was the fate of the most notorious traitor in England: another baron slaughtered in the orgy of violence that had engulfed the realm since Edward’s accession. But what of the king himself?
What to do with Edward was a vexing question. Given everything that had passed, he was irrecoverably estranged from Mortimer and his wife. The queen could not even visit her husband in his prison at Kenilworth castle, where he was held over Christmas 1326. Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford, reported that if Edward saw his wife, he was liable to kill her. Words later attributed to Orleton (although he denied them) were that Edward ‘carried a knife in his hose to kill Queen Isabella, and that if he had no other weapon he would crush her with his teeth’.
Twenty disastrous years had demonstrated to all that the king was incapable of ruling competently. Yet nearly 175 years of Plantagenet rule had been based on an evolving partnership between kings and the community of the realm. Kings had been threatened with deposition – John, Henry III and Edward I had all been warned that they might be deprived of their thrones in moments of crisis – but the reality was quite different. The whole basis of English law and governance, which for the most part operated efficiently and to the advantage of the majority of English subjects, rested on an authority that stemmed ultimately from the Crown. The king was counselled by his advisers and he consulted parliaments over matters of taxation and war, but he remained the source of all public authority and, in a properly functioning realm, the bulwark against anarchy. Who had the right to depose him and declare another man king? Who could speak for this higher authority? If the realm unilaterally deposed – or worse, killed – the king, was it not killing itself? What hope was there of order in a state where a king who upset a faction of his kingdom might be summarily removed?
These were all, to some degree, unanswerable questions. Yet everyone agreed on the practical reality: Edward had to be removed from power. To bolster the case against him, Isabella and Mortimer’s propaganda machine ground into action. Bishop Orleton was active in preaching that Isabella and her son had returned to England because the king and Despenser were sodomites and tyrants. From this point on, Edward’s reputation as a degenerate homosexual began to run wild throughout contemporary chronicles.
As soon as the Christmas celebrations had finished, parliament assembled at Westminster to decide the king’s fate. Edward utterly refused to travel from Kenilworth and engage with proceedings, probably reasoning that without him present the parliament would lack legitimacy. But this was another misjudgement, and business carried on without him. The bishop of Hereford addressed parliament on 12 January and asked the assembly whether Edward II should continue as king, or be replaced by his son. By the evening it was decided that he should be replaced, and a series of articles of accusation was drawn up.
The following day Roger Mortimer stood up in Westminster Hall and told the assembled prelates and lay nobles that magnates collectively wished for the inadequate king to be removed from the realm. Westminster then heard sermons from the leading bishops of the realm, giving ecclesiastical weight to the decision that had been taken. The bishop of Hereford preached upon the text of Proverbs 11:14 (‘Where there is no governor the people shall fall’). The bishop of Winchester used the phrase Caput meum doleo (‘My head hurts’) to argue that an evil head spread evil throughout the body of the kingdom. Finally, the archbishop of Canterbury gave a sermon in French, using the text ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God’. When he had finished telling the assembly that God had heard their prayers for a remedy to the evils of Edward’s reign, he introduced the fourteen-year-old boy, Edward duke of Aquitaine, who was to be the new king. ‘Glory, laud and honour’ was sung. Later in the day oaths were sworn at the Guildhall to protect and uphold the honour of Queen Isabella and her son who would be king.
All that now remained was to convince Edward himself to concur with the wishes of the community of the realm and voluntarily relinquish his office. To that end, a delegation of twenty-four worthy men was sent to Kenilworth to confront him.
Henry of Lancaster and the bishops of Winchester and Lincoln were sent ahead of the rest of the group, and on 20 January they met the king and told him that his time had passed. Edward resisted. The chronicler Geoffrey le Baker says that he was told that failure to abdicate in favour of his son would mean deposition. A new, non-Plantagenet king would be elected and his entire bloodline, not merely his own person, would be removed from kingship. A tearful argument followed, and by the time the twenty-one remaining representatives of the realm arrived, Edward was so grief-stricken that he had to be held on his feet by Lancaster and the bishop of Winchester.
On 24 January 1327 London woke to proclamations that Edward had ‘of his own good will and with the common assent of the prelates, earls and barons, and other nobles and of all the commonalty of the realm, resigned the government of the realm’. A new king had been appointed. Edward duke of Aquitaine had become King Edward III; and King Edward II was reduced once more to Edward of Caernarfon. Sir William Trussel, the hanging judge of the invasion, had formally withdrawn homage on behalf of all the kingdom. Oaths were sworn to the new king. And those voices that dissented were momentarily drowned out by the clamour of the revolutionaries.