Authors: Thomas B. Costain
Lancaster, acting for once with some acumen, saw his chance to regain the confidence of his fellow barons. He came out strongly for action against the new favorites, and the nobility almost to a man rallied behind him: the aggrieved brothers-in-law of the younger Despenser; the Mortimers, who had always been a tough and hard-bitten lot; the earls of Hereford, Warenne, and Arundel. Without waiting for parliamentary action, the neighbors in the Marcher country invaded the lands of the favorites and burned their houses. They were led by the Mortimers, who had adopted a special uniform, green with a yellow sleeve on the right arm. In a few nights of pillaging they practically destroyed all the properties the younger Despenser held through his wife and did damage amounting to hundreds of thousands. In addition they had ravaged sixty-three manors belonging to the elder Despenser, which he claimed represented a loss to him of forty-six thousand pounds; an indication of the enormous wealth he had been able to accumulate through the influence of the king. The elder’s detailed statement of losses provides an interesting light on the life of a great baronial establishment of the day. He was robbed by his neighbors of twenty-eight thousand sheep, one thousand oxen, twelve hundred cows with their calves, five hundred and sixty horses, two thousand hogs and, from his larders, “six hundred bacons, eighty carcasses of beef and six hundred muttons.” It paid well to stand in the favor of Edward!
The king, in a panic, issued a writ forbidding any attack on the Despensers. But writs were of small avail against a whole ruling class in arms, so in May 1321 Edward had to call Parliament to deal with the situation. The barons attended in force, wearing a white favor on the arm as a sign
of their unanimity. This led to the session’s being called the Parliament of the White Bands. The one thing on which the magnates were in agreement was the need to be rid of the leeches. Charges were brought against the Despensers and a decree was passed condemning them to exile and the forfeiture of much of their property, all the ill-gained part, at least.
The elder Despenser was sensible enough to bow his head to the storm. He accepted the decree of banishment by going abroad. The son, however, was of tougher mettle. He left in a fury of dissent. Where he set himself up is not on record, but it is possible that he had found a refuge in Bristol Channel, perhaps on Lundy Island, the centuries-long home of pirates. At any rate, he suddenly appeared with an armed vessel and seized two merchant ships coming in to port and robbed them of their cargoes.
The king, regarding this act of piracy, perhaps, as an amusing piece of horseplay, had begun to plan and conspire to get them back, almost as soon as he had affixed the royal seal to the decree of banishment. The Gaveston story was to be repeated, apparently, over and over.
During the month of October 1321, Queen Isabella decided to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury. Leeds Castle, which had been given to her as part of her dower, was selected to break the journey, and the queen sent her marshal ahead to announce her coming.
One of the lesser barons, Bartholomew Badlesmere, had been made castellan of Leeds but was away at the time. Having been put in that post since the rise of Lancaster to his position of dominance, Badlesmere had left instructions to his wife not to admit anyone who did not carry the necessary order. Had he paused to consider the character of his wife, he would have qualified his instructions to cover a situation of this kind. Every word in the English language which applies to women of violent disposition—harridan, virago, beldame—could be used to describe his far from fair lady. She was, as well, a bitter partisan by association and had, it was soon made clear, no regard at all for the royal family.
She met the queen’s official on the lowered drawbridge and with an angry wave of her hand bade him begone.
“The queen,” she declared, “must seek some other lodging. I will not admit anyone without an order from my lord.”
The marshal, most rudely taken aback by the attitude of the castellan’s wife, demanded if she knew that he was there on behalf of Isabella of England. That the queen, moreover, owned this castle and would not consider seeking lodging elsewhere. None of this had any effect on iron-willed
Lady Badlesmere. She reiterated what she had said. How was she to know if this demand for admittance came from the queen? In any event, let the queen go where she listed: she would not spend the night at Leeds.
While this argument was in progress, the royal party put in an appearance at the outer barbican. The madwoman screeched an order to her archers, who had assembled along the battlements, and the queen was greeted, not by the usual obsequious compliments and the strewing of flowers along the drawbridge, but by a volley of arrows. Six of her party were killed or wounded. Isabella of England, in a state of mind beggaring description, turned her horse and fled.
There had been some trouble earlier between the queen and this furious beldame. This added a still more violent tincture to the report of the extraordinary incident which reached the ears of the king. Badlesmere himself added fuel to the flames of the royal wrath by writing an explanation, couched in impudent terms, in which he excused the action of his wife in closing the castle to the queen. Edward spluttered with a degree of anger he had seldom felt before and decided to take action at once to avenge the affront.
The Ordainers, in whose hands rested all authority, seemed little disturbed over the incident. Lancaster, with his gift for doing the wrong thing, chose to be stiffly hostile. The queen’s indignation mounted with each day and hour, so Edward finally decided to take the punishment of the Badlesmeres on his own shoulders. He made an announcement accordingly that, inasmuch as his beloved consort had been treated with violence and contempt, a general muster of all persons between the ages of sixteen and sixty was called to attend the king in an expedition against Leeds Castle.
It was London which responded with the greatest good will to this summons. The queen was still the darling of the citizens, and the trained bands turned out in force to avenge the injury which had been done her. They kept pace with the mounted knights in their eagerness to have a hand in the punishment of the castellan and his wife. Badlesmere himself, after having defended his wife’s folly, had been very careful not to join her in the castle. He had, in fact, gone in great haste to Stowe Park, which was the seat of the Bishop of Lincoln, his nephew, which seemed a reasonably safe place. The belligerent chatelaine expected that Lancaster would come to her support and she defied the royal forces when they appeared before the castle. She did not fully understand that dilatory gentleman. Lancaster had come to see that he was on the wrong side of things in this instance and he had no intention of involving himself. The virago of Leeds was left to face alone the storm she had raised.
The attack launched against the castle was a spirited one, and in a matter of a few days the garrison surrendered. The punishment was first
vented on the garrison, who had been guilty only of obeying orders; the usual procedure in these chivalrous days. The seneschal, one Walter Colepepper, was taken up to the battlements and there hanged with eleven of his men. Lady Badlesmere was taken to the Tower of London. It has been said that she thus became the first woman prisoner to be lodged in the White Tower. This is not correct, for an unfortunate and lovely lady, a daughter of Robert Fitz-Walter and best known as Maud the Fair, was kept in the Tower by King John and was killed there finally by a poisoned egg sent to her by that worthy king.
Lady Badlesmere was promised a hempen ending, which would have pleased the people of London who had followed her through the streets, jeering and storming at her and calling her Jezebel. But after a long imprisonment she was released. Her husband was not to fare so well.
The capture of Leeds Castle was Edward’s first successful military exploit. It seems to have gone to his head. He returned to London with the forces which had rallied to his support, which included no fewer than six earls, in a mood to assert himself and reclaim the royal prerogatives which had slipped from his hands. Nothing could have been more fortunate for him than this incident provided by the Badlesmere woman. The baronial strength had been so sharply split that Edward could have found parliamentary support for almost any steps he might dictate. The queen, moreover, was showing how much she resembled her implacable father. The hanging of a few minions had not satisfied her, and she was now urging the king to take action against the barons, even Lancaster, who had been responsible in a sense for the humiliation she had suffered. The time was indeed ripe to come to grips, to toss aside the ordinances, to defy the Ordainers, to break the power of Lancaster.
Unfortunately Edward’s first thought seems to have been to take advantage of his new popularity to bring the Despensers back. On December 10 he appeared at a convocation of the clergy and won from the bishops an opinion that the banishing of the precious pair had been illegal. With this backing he summoned the Despensers to return.
The familiar pattern was being repeated. If there had been a grain of sense in the king’s head, he would have seen that the end must also be the same.
E
DWARD realized that he must cross the Severn if he expected to break up the noisy rebellion the Marcher barons had started along the borders of Wales. When he reached Shrewsbury and rode along the peninsula, it seemed to him that he was unlikely to accomplish his objective. There were armed men in large numbers on the other side, wearing the green and yellow. Mortimer again! That obnoxious fellow, who had blocked the way at Bridgnorth, had kept pace along the other side of the river and was prepared, obviously, to dispute any attempt to pass over.
It is probable that the king had always disliked Mortimer of Wigmore. As a minor and an orphan, Mortimer had been put under the guardianship of Piers de Gaveston, an arrangement that promised to be most profitable to Brother Perrot. By some legal wriggling the guardianship had been broken, much to Edward’s annoyance. Mortimer was almost the complete antithesis of the slothful, careless king. He was brisk, fiery, keen, and acquisitive. He had, moreover, a dark kind of good looks, accentuated by a lively black eye, which made him popular with the other sex. He had, as might be expected, married an heiress, one of the most eligible in the kingdom, Joan de Glenville. His wife’s holdings included much land in Shropshire, the town and castle of Ludlow, and a generous share of County Meath in Ireland. In passing, one might conjecture that in this period of history some disability may have attended these amassers of unusual wealth which made it possible to beget handsome daughters but no sons. All the great estates at one time or other fell into the possession of heiresses, some of whom allowed themselves to be trapped into matrimony by handsome but unscrupulous young men such as Mortimer.
Mortimer had not been particularly active against Edward but he had been made one of the Ordainers and had been on the commission to reform the royal household. His active resistance had started with the rise in favor
of the Despensers. He hated them both, the mealymouthed father and the pushing son. Their greed, as it happened, had prompted them to separate Mortimer from some lands he regarded as his own, and that was something he could not forgive. And so here was Roger de Mortimer and his uncle of Chirk with a solid little army on the other side of the Severn, prepared seriously to block the king’s progress.
To Edward’s great surprise, however, he found that they were no longer in a fighting mood. Lancaster, as usual, had failed to keep his promises. It had been agreed that he would bring his strength down from the north to support the Marcher barons in their resistance to the king, but instead he was dawdling around his castle of Pontefract and showing no inclination to help. The king was allowed to cross the river, therefore, and on the other side he was met by an angry and disappointed pair with an offer to lay down their arms. All they demanded was a safe-conduct.
Ever since the capture of Leeds, Edward had been riding on the crest of a wave. Everything had been going right for him, but this was, clearly, the best stroke of all. He packed his two prisoners off to London, to be incarcerated in the Tower pending the disposition of their case. He was carrying in his pocket a petition from the common people who had endured the harshness and tyranny of the Mortimers and were asking that no grace be shown them. In spite of the letters of safe-conduct, it was not in Edward’s mind to be lenient. He appointed a commission to try them, but when a sentence of death for treason was pronounced on the pair, he seemed to relent. The sentence, at any rate, was commuted to life imprisonment in the Tower.
As it turned out, this was an evil mischance for the king. Mortimer in the Tower could be more harmful than Mortimer ruffling it on the borders of Wales.
With the capture and disposal of the Mortimers, the resistance in the west collapsed. The king took the castles of all the other dissenting barons and then spent Christmas at Cirencester in a mood of deep satisfaction. He enjoyed the jests of the Lord of Misrule and the other mumming antics of yuletide. He dipped a gold mug in the wassail bowl with no thought but to enjoy himself again as in the old days at King’s Langley.
On February 11 he issued a writ for the recall of the Despensers.
All that remained for Edward to do now was to deal with Cousin Lancaster.
The latter found himself in a desperate dilemma because of his inability to make up his mind. Several courses had been open to him, but he had
taken none. He could have moved down to support the Marcher barons, as he had promised to do before they took up arms, in which case the king would have found himself between two arms of a pincer. He could have disbanded his troops and announced his intention of supporting the king. He could have run away, either to Scotland or the continent. He could have gone into hiding. The castle of Pontefract stood on a high hill covering eight acres and had many secret subterranean chambers in the rock beneath it Here he could have remained until the storm blew over, as the Jacobite leaders did later in caves in the Highland glens. But he did none of these things. He sat around and waited while everything went wrong. And then suddenly he found himself alone in arms against the king, who was hurrying north with a victorious army to deal with him.