Tag archieven: English history

april 10, 2015 · 10:23 pm

[Lady Despenser’s Scribery]/The flight and capture of Hugh Despenser and Edward II

 

Invasion

When Isabella, Edward’s estranged queen, and his foremost enemy, Roger de Mortimer landed on British soil near to the manor of Walton in Suffolk on 24th September 1326, Edward was taken by surprise. Not so much by the invasion itself, as he had been preparing for such an event for the past couple of months – but that the force they brought with them was so small. It consisted of about 1500 soldiers (exiled Contrariants and Hainault mercenaries) – hardly enough to constitute a great threat. However, if Edward thought his wife and Mortimer’s rebellion a pathetic gesture, he was soon forced to think again.

 

 

 

 

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· 4:43 pm

[EdwardthesecondBlogspot]/Piers Gaveston’s second exile

 

Edward II recalled Piers from the exile imposed on him by Edward I immediately after he heard the news that his father was dead, on 11 July 1307. Piers was back in England by early August, and Edward created him earl of Cornwall on 6 August, possibly without Piers’ prior knowledge – or so Edward would claim in letters to the Pope and the king of France the following year. (Edward can’t entirely be trusted here, however – he also claimed that he made Piers an earl at the urging of his barons – which was emphatically not the case!)Edward also arranged Piers’ marriage to his (Edward’s, not Piers’, obviously) niece Margaret de Clare, which took place on 1 November 1307, but which had been planned for months – the charter granting the earldom of Cornwall to Piers on 6 August was decorated with the de Clare arms as well as Piers’ own. Piers had an annual income of £4000, making him one of the richest men in the country.As though all this wasn’t bad enough – making the younger son of a minor Gascon noble a wealthy earl and a member of the royal family by marriage – Piers dominated Edward’s favour and attention. According to the contemporary Vita Edwardi Secundi, Piers “alone found favour in the king’s eyes and lorded it over them [the English barons] like a second king, to whom all were subject and none equal. Almost all the land hated him..his name was reviled far and wide…he was an object of mockery to almost everyone in the kingdom.” The comment that Piers was ‘like a second king’ is echoed in other chronicles – the (later) Meaux chronicle called him “almost a king” (quasi rex) and the canon of Bridlington claimed there were two kings in England.

 

 

 

 

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· 4:31 pm

[EdwardthesecondBlogspot]/Edward II’s Coronation oath, 25 February 1308

 

 

Sire, volez vous graunter, è garder, &, par vostre serment, confermer au poeple d’Engleterre les leys, & les custumes, à eux grauntees par les auntiens Rois d’Engleterre, voz predecessours droitures & devotz a DIEU; & nomement les lois, les custumes, & les fraunchises, grantez au clerge, è au poeple par le glorieus Roi seint Edward, vostre predecessour? Jeo les grante & promette. Sire, garderez vous à DIEU, & seinte eglise, & au clerge, & au poeple paes, & acord en DIEU entierment, solonc vostre poer? Jeo les garderai. Sire, freez vous faire, en touz voz jugementz, ovele & droit justice & discretion, en misericorde & verite, à vostre poer? Jeo le frai. Sire, graunte vous à tenir & garder les loys & les custumes droitureles, les quiels la communaute de vostre roiaume aura esleu, & les defendrez & afforcerez, al honour de DIEU, à vostre poer? Jeo les graunte & promette.

 

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· 4:12 pm

[EdwardthesecondBlogspot]/25 February 1308:”Coronation of Edward II

 

On this day 700 years ago, Edward II and Isabella were crowned king and queen of England at Westminster Abbey. Edward was exactly twenty-three and ten months, Isabella just twelve.The coronation differed from its predecessors in several respects. Firstly, the wives of peers attended for the first time. Secondly, Edward took his oath in French, not Latin – a fact often used to condemn him as ‘stupid, lazy, ignorant and uneducated’ by historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, conveniently ignoring the fact that Edward, even if he was ignorant of Latin, which is most unlikely, could easily have learnt the short responses by heart, and that French was the native language of probably everyone attending the coronation.* Thirdly, a new clause was added to the coronation oath: “Sire, do you grant to be held and observed the just laws and customs that the community of your realm shall determine, and will you, so far as in you lies, defend and strengthen them to the honour of God?”More ink has been spilt on the meaning and intention of this clause than you could possibly imagine, but I’m not going to analyse it here because, frankly, the whole subject is tedious beyond belief. (The full text of Edward’s oath, in the French original and English, is in the sidebar on the left.)

 

 

 

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april 5, 2015 · 1:53 pm

King Edward II/[Edward the second Blogspot]/What happened after the barons killed Piers Gaveston

 

 

 

A post about what happened in the days after Piers Gaveston’s death, which I’d originally intended to coincide with the anniversary of said death, i.e. 19 June. Oh well, only six weeks late.Piers was killed at Blacklow Hill in Warwickshire on Monday 19 June 1312 – see this post, and Anerje’s great blog about Piers, for more details. On that day, Edward II was staying 150 miles away at Burstwick-in-Holderness near Hull, with Queen Isabella, who was about four months pregnant with Edward III. Let me emphasise the fact that Isabella was already pregnant when Piers died; too many websites give the impression that Edward only began a proper relationship with his wife after the death of his favourite, as though the killing of Piers Gaveston was a necessary step to ensure the continuation of the royal English line.

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· 1:42 pm

Historical writing and research[Edward the second Blogspot]/Ten commandments about history and discussing it online

Some things I need to get off my chest, based on reading about and discussing history on various online forums and Facebook groups, and certain articles and books.1) You shall remember that people who lived hundreds of years ago were complex human beings every bit as complex and human as we are, who had families, and feelings, and human dignity, and that therefore you should write about them with respect, in the same way that you would wish writers to treat the memory of you and your loved ones with respect decades or centuries hence.  You will not laugh or sneer or gloat at their painful deaths and suffering, or claim that they deserved everything they got, or express a wish that they’d suffered even more, or call them vile names.  If you wouldn’t want someone in the future to make light of tragic events which have befallen you and your loved ones, or to depict your beloved father as a callously neglectful parent or not in fact your biological father thanks to your mother’s cheating on him, or your kind and wonderful husband as a spineless snivelling coward who frequently beat you up and forced himself on you, or your daughter as a cold-blooded child killer – and if it would make you angry and upset if anyone wrote things like this about your favourite historical person – then you should think twice about inventing such calumnies about other people merely because you don’t like them or because they were an enemy of your favourite historical person.

 

 

 

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· 1:32 pm

King Edward II/[Edward the second Blogspot]/Isabella of France and her relationship with Edward II

This is a post which I originally wrote a few months ago as a guest post on my lovely friend Sarah’s history blog, which is now sadly defunct, though she writes one about Edward II’s grandfather Henry III instead, yay.Isabella of France, queen consort of England, lady of Ireland, duchess of Aquitaine, countess of Chester and Ponthieu, had a remarkably illustrious lineage: she was the daughter of Philip IV, king of France and of Joan, queen of Navarre and countess of Brie, Bigorre and Champagne in her own right. Isabella was the sixth of Philip and Joan’s seven children. Her three older brothers all reigned as kings of France, Louis X, Philip V and Charles IV, her younger brother Robert died in 1308 aged about eleven, and she also had two older sisters, Marguerite and Blanche, who both died in early childhood in or shortly after 1294. Her paternal grandmother Isabel, queen of Philip III of France, after whom she was presumably named, was the daughter of King Jaime I ‘el Conquistador’ of Aragon and the granddaughter of King Andras II of Hungary; via the Hungarian line, Isabella of France was the seven greats granddaughter of Harold Godwinson, the king of England killed at Hastings in 1066.  She and her husband Edward II were related: her great-grandmother Marguerite of Provence, queen of France was the older sister of Edward’s paternal grandmother Eleanor of Provence, queen of England.  They were also related rather more distantly via the Castilian royal family, Edward’s great-grandmother Berenguela, queen of Castile and Leon, being the sister of Isabella’s great-great-grandmother Blanche of Castile, queen of France.

 

 

 

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· 1:17 pm

King Edward II/[Edward the Second Blogspot]/Edward II and his children and why neither William Wallace nor Roger Mortimer was their father

 

This (long!) article was inspired by my huge irritation a) that so many people still think the Braveheart story of William Wallace fathering Isabella of France’s child is somehow factual – people hit this blog pretty well every day searching for it – and b) that the notion of Edward II not being the father of his own eldest child has so well and truly taken hold in the popular imagination.  For examples, if you can stomach them, seehere, here, here, here and here, and the novels cited below.  Read them and weep.  I cannot adequately express my annoyance that a man with an Oxford doctorate on Isabella (Paul Doherty) wrote a novel (Death of a King) in which Edward III’s biological father is Roger Mortimer, which Doherty must know is absolute BS but chose to sex up his novel by including it anyway and thereby giving the notion spurious plausibility. Agh.
EDIT: Thanks to Susan Higginbotham for telling me about a very recent post claiming that Edward II may have been ‘cuckolded’ and not the father of his children, in the Yahoo group of the Richard III Society, no less.  Check out Susan’s excellent and elegant rebuttal.Braveheart features the future King Edward II as a fairly major character, with Edward – in real life, an enormously strong, athletic and handsome man – caricatured as a useless feeble court fop whose lover is thrown out of a window and whose wife cuckolds him with William Wallace.  There are countless historical inaccuracies in Braveheart, which have been well detailed elsewhere, and I won’t go into them here.  I just want to focus on one: the statement at the end of the film that Wallace is the real father of the baby Edward’s wife Isabella is carrying, who is, presumably, intended to be Isabella’s first-born child King Edward III.Let’s check some basic dates and facts here:

 

 

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· 12:59 pm

King Edward II [Kathryn Warners’ Edward the second Blogspot]/Hugh, Lord Despenser (c. 1309-1349)

A post today about Hugh, Lord Despenser, the eldest son of Hugh Despenser the Younger and Eleanor de Clare, and grandson of Hugh Despenser the Elder, earl of Winchester.  As was the case with many noble families of the Middle Ages, the Despensers were none too creative when it came to naming their children; the chancery rolls of the 1320s, when all three generations of Hugh Despensers were active, contain a few confusing references to ‘Hugh, son of Hugh le Despenser the son’.  Hrrrrrm.  Edward II’s last chamber journal of 1325/26 refers to Hugh by the short form Huchon, and the Anonimalle chronicle calls him Hughelyn or ‘little Hugh’, both of which I think are absolutely delightful.  In this post, I’ll call him Huchon to save any confusion with his father and grandfather, and because this seems to have been how he was known by his great-uncle Edward II.  I’ve also been known, along with Susan Higginbotham, to call him Hugh Despenser the Even Younger or HDEY for short.

 

 

 

 

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· 11:36 am

[Susan Higginbotham’s History Refreshed]/Guest Post by Kathryn Warner: Edward II and the Despensers

 

I’m so pleased to welcome my friend Kathryn Warner for her new biography of Edward II. I’ve been looking forward to a book like this for years, and what better person than Kathryn to write it?

 

9781445641201

Kathryn and I first met online a number of years ago, when I published my first novel, The Traitor’s Wife, about Eleanor de Clare, Edward II’s favorite niece and the wife of his favorite, Hugh le Despenser the younger.  Given that, what better topic for this guest post than Edward II and the Despenser family? Over to Kathryn:

 

Edward II Effigy

King Edward II of England (reigned 1307 to 1327) is famous, or infamous, for his reliance on male ‘favourites’, the best known of whom is Piers Gaveston, whom Edward made earl of Cornwall and who was beheaded by a group of the king’s aggrieved barons in June 1312.  The last of the favourites, Hugh Despenser the Younger, is not nearly so well-known, even though he was far more politically powerful than Piers Gaveston and helped bring about the king’s downfall and his own in 1326/27.  Rather curiously, Edward II also had some kind of intense relationship near the end of his reign with Hugh Despenser’s wife – who happened to be his own niece, Eleanor de Clare.

 

Hugh Despenser the Younger was born sometime in the late 1280s as the elder son of Hugh Despenser the Elder, stepson of the earl of Norfolk and later earl of Winchester (1261-1326) and Isabel Beauchamp (1260s-1306), daughter and sister of earls of Warwick and first cousin of the earl of Ulster.  Hugh the Younger made a splendid marriage in May 1306 when Edward I arranged and attended his wedding to his eldest granddaughter Eleanor de Clare, thirteen-year-old daughter of the earl of Gloucester and Edward I’s second daughter Joan of Acre.  Hugh and Eleanor’s relationship seems to have been successful, as they had at least ten children together in their twenty-year marriage: Hugh, Edward, Gilbert, John, Isabel, Joan, Eleanor, Margaret, Elizabeth and an unnamed boy who died young in 1321.

 

 

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