Pembroke found more trustworthy allies than Warenne in Bartholomew, Lord Badlesmere, the sometime instigator of the Bristol troubles, and a bitter opponent of Lancaster, and in Roger of Amory, the husband of one of the three co-heiresses who now divided the Gloucester inheritance. Edward, who had profited by the divisions of his enemies to revive the court party, formed a coalition between his friends and the followers of Pembroke. All lovers of order, of moderation, and of the supremacy of the law necessarily made common cause with them. Thus it followed that the same machinery, which Lancaster a few years earlier had turned against the king, was now turned against him. An additional motive to bring peaceable Englishmen into line was found in the capture of Berwick by Bruce in April, 1318. After this negotiations for peace began. The king and Lancaster treated as two independent princes. Lancaster was no longer supported by any prominent earl, and even his clerical friends were falling from him. Ordainers as jealous as Arundel, royalists as fierce as Mortimer, served along with trimmers like Pembroke and Badlesmere, in acting as mediators. Lancaster could no more resist than Edward could in 1312. On August 9 he accepted at Leek, in Staffordshire, the conditions drawn up for him.
The treaty of Leek marks the triumph of the middle party and the removal of Lancaster from the first place in the royal council. A pardon was granted to him and his followers, but Thomas gained little else by the compact. Pembroke and his friends showed themselves as jealous of Edward as ever the ordainers had been. The ordinances were once more confirmed, and a new council of seventeen was nominated, including eight bishops, four earls, four barons, and one banneret. The earls were Pembroke, Arundel, Richmond, and Hereford. Of these the Breton Earl of Richmond was the most friendly to the king, but it was significant to find so truculent a politician as Hereford making common cause with Pembroke. The most important of the four barons was Roger Mortimer of Wigmore. Lancaster though not paramount was still powerful, but his habit of absenting himself from parliaments made it useless to offer him a place in the council, and he was represented by a single banneret, nominated by him. Of these councillors two bishops, one earl, one baron, and Lancaster's nominee were to be in constant attendance. They were virtually to control Edward's policy, and to see that he consulted parliament in all matters that required its assent. A few days after the treaty Edward and Lancaster met at Hathern, near Loughborough, and exchanged the kiss of peace. Roger of Amory and other magnates of the middle party reconciled themselves to Lancaster, and he condescendingly restored them to his favour. But he would not deign to admit Hugh Despenser to his presence, and declared that he was still free to carry on his quarrel against Warenne. In October, a parliament at York confirmed the treaty of Leek, adding new members to the council and appointing another commission to reform the king's household. From that time until 1321, Pembroke and his friends controlled the English state, though often checked both by the king and even more by Lancaster, who still stood ostentatiously aloof from parliaments and campaigns. These years, though neither glorious nor prosperous, were the most peaceable and uneventful of the whole of Edward II.'s reign. They are noteworthy for the only serious attempt made to check the progress of the Scots after Bannockburn. From 1318 to 1320 king and court were almost continually in the north. York became the regular meeting-place of parliaments for even a longer period.
Since 1314, the Scots had mercilessly devastated the whole north of England. The population made little attempt at resistance, and sought to buy them off by large payments of money. The Scots took the cash and soon came again for more. They wandered at will over the open country, and only the castles and walled towns afforded protection against them. Their forays extended as far south as Lancashire and Yorkshire, and, so early as 1315, Carlisle and Berwick were regularly besieged by them. It was to no purpose that in 1317 the pope issued a bull insisting upon a truce. The English welcomed an armistice on any terms, but the Scots' interest was in the continuance of the war, and they paid no attention to the papal proposal. The result was a renewal of Bruce's excommunication, and the placing of all Scotland under interdict. Yet no papal censures checked Robert's career or lessened his hold over Scotland. Next year he showed greater activity than ever. In April, 1318, he captured the town of Berwick by treachery. Peter of Spalding, one of the English burgesses who formed the town guard, was bribed to allow a band of Scots to seize that section of the town wall of which he was guardian. Then the intruders captured the gates and admitted their comrades. Thus the last Scottish town to be held by the English went back to its natural rulers. The English burgesses were expelled, though Bruce showed wonderful moderation, and few of his enemies were slain. Berwick castle held out for a time, until lack of victuals caused its surrender. In May the Scots marched through Northumberland and Durham into Yorkshire, burnt Northallerton and Boroughbridge, and exacted a thousand marks from Ripon, as the price of respecting the church of St. Wilfred. They then spent three days at Knaresborough, and made their way home through Craven.
Such successes show clearly enough that the treaty of Leek was not signed a moment too soon. It was, however, too late for any great effort against the Scots in 1318. A strenuous endeavour was made to levy a formidable expedition for 1319. In strict accordance with the ordinances, the parliament, which met at York in May of that year, agreed that there should be a muster at Berwick for July 22, and granted a liberal subsidy. An insolent offer of peace, coupled with a promise of freedom of life and limb to Bruce, should he resign his crown, provoked from the Scots king the reply that Scotland was his kingdom both by hereditary right and the law of arms, and that he was indifferent whether he had peace with the English king or not. On July 22, the feast of St. Mary Magdalen and the anniversary of Falkirk fight, the barons assembled at Newcastle. Thomas of Lancaster was there with his brother Henry. Warenne, newly reconciled with Lancaster by a large surrender of lands, also attended, as did Pembroke, Arundel, Hereford, and the husbands of the three Gloucester co-heiresses. There was a braver show of earls than even in 1314. An offer of lands, when Scotland was conquered, attracted a large number of volunteer infantry, while the cupidity of the seamen was appealed to by a promise of ample plunder. In August the host and fleet moved northwards, and closely beset Berwick.
The Scots were too astute to offer battle. While the English were employed at Berwick, Sir James Douglas led their main force into the heart of Yorkshire. Douglas hoped to capture Queen Isabella, who was staying near York. A spy betrayed this design to the English, and Isabella was hurried off by water to Nottingham, while Douglas pressed on into the heart of Yorkshire. The Yorkshiremen had to defend their own shire while their best soldiers were with the king at Berwick. A hastily gathered assembly of improvised warriors flocked into York. Archbishop Melton put himself at their head, and the clergy, both secular and religious, formed a considerable element in the host. Then they marched out against the Scots, and found them at Myton in Swaledale. The Scots despised the disorderly mob of squires and farmers, priests and canons, monks and friars. "These are not warriors," they cried, "but huntsmen. They will do nought against us." Concealing their movements by kindling great fires of hay, they bore down upon the Yorkshiremen and put them to flight with much loss. The fight was called "the white battle of Myton" on account of the large number of white-robed monks who took part in it The archbishop escaped with the utmost difficulty. Many fugitives were drowned in the Swale, and not one would have escaped had not night stopped the Scots' pursuit. The victors then pushed as far south as Pontefract. On the news of the battle, the besiegers of Berwick were dismayed. There was talk of dividing the army, and sending one part to drive Douglas out of Yorkshire while the other continued the siege. But the magnates, in no mood to run risks, insisted on an immediate return to England. Before Edward had reached Yorkshire, Douglas had made his way home over Stainmoor and Gilsland. Thereupon the king sent back his troops, each man to his own house. The magnificent army had accomplished nothing at all. So inglorious a termination of the campaign naturally gave rise to suspicions of treason. A story was spread abroad that Lancaster had received £4,000 from the King of Scots and had consequently done his best to help his ally. The rumour was so seriously believed that the earl offered to purge himself by ordeal of hot iron. In despair Edward made a two years' truce with the Scots. It was the best way of avoiding another Bannockburn.
Troublous times soon began again. Since Edward surrendered himself to the guidance of Pembroke and Badlesmere, he had enjoyed comparative repose and dignity. It was only when a great enterprise, like the Scots campaign, was attempted that the evil results of anarchy and the still-abiding influence of Lancaster made themselves felt. But Edward bore no love to Pembroke and his associates, and was quietly feeling his way towards the re-establishment of the court party. His chief helpers in this work were the two Despensers, father and son, both named Hugh. The elder Despenser, then nearly sixty years of age, had grown grey in the service of Edward I. A baron of competent estate, he inherited from his father, the justiciar who fell at Evesham, an hereditary bias towards the constitutional tradition, but he looked to the monarch or to the popular estates, rather than to the baronage, as the best embodiment of his ideals. Ambitious and not over-scrupulous, he saw more advantage to himself in playing the game of the king than in joining a swarm of quarrelsome opposition lords. From the beginning of the reign he had identified himself with Gaveston and the courtiers, and had incurred the special wrath of Lancaster and the ordainers. Excluded from court, forced into hiding, excepted from several pacifications as he had been, Despenser never long absented himself from the court. His ambition was kindled by the circumstance that his eldest son had become the most intimate personal friend of the king. Brought up as a boy in the household of Edward when Prince of Wales, the ties of old comradeship gradually drew the younger Hugh into Gaveston's old position as the chief favourite. Neither a foreigner nor an adventurer, Despenser had the good sense to avoid the worst errors of his predecessor. As chamberlain, he was in constant attendance on the king; and having married Edward's niece Eleanor, the eldest of the Gloucester co-heiresses, he sought to establish himself among the higher aristocracy. Royal grants and offices rained upon father and son. The household officers were changed at their caprice. The only safe way to the king's favour was by purchasing their good-will. Their good fortune stirred up fierce animosities, and the barons showed that they could hate a renegade as bitterly as a foreign adventurer.
The Despensers' ambition to attain high rank was the more natural from the havoc which death had played among the earls. "Time was," said the monk of Malmesbury, "when fifteen earls and more followed the king to war; but now only five or six gave him their assistance." The five earldoms of Thomas of Lancaster meant the extinction of as many ancient houses. The earldoms of Chester, Cornwall, and Norfolk had long been in the king's hands. If the comital rank was not to be extinguished altogether, it had to be recruited with fresh blood. And who were so fit to fill up the vacant places as these well-born favourites?
A little had been done under Edward II to remedy the desolation of the earldoms. The revival of the earldom of Cornwall in favour of Gaveston had not been a happy experiment. But the king's elder half-brother, Thomas of Brotherton, invested with the estates and dignities of the Bigods, was made earl marshal and Earl of Norfolk. In 1321 the earldom of Kent, extinct since the fall of Hubert de Burgh, was revived in favour of Edmund of Woodstock, the younger half-brother of the king. The titular Scottish earldoms of some English barons, such as the Umfraville earls of Angus, kept up the name, if not the state of earls, and we have seen the reward of the victor of Dundalk in the creation of a new earldom of Louth in Ireland. But there were certain hereditary dignities whose suspension seemed unnatural. Conspicuous among these was the Gloucester earldom which, from the days of the valiant son of Henry I. to the death of the last male Clare at Bannockburn, had played a unique part in English history.
Both the Despensers desired to be earls, and the younger Hugh wished that the Gloucester earldom should be revived in his favour. Assured of the good-will of the king, both had to contend against the jealousy of the baronage and the exclusiveness of the existing earls. The younger Hugh had also to reckon with his two brothers-in-law, with whom he had divided the Clare estates. These were Hugh of Audley, who had married Margaret the widow of Gaveston, and Roger of Amory, the husband of Elizabeth, the youngest of the Clare sisters. There had been difficulty enough in effecting the partition of the Gloucester inheritance among the three co-heiresses. In 1317 the division was made, and Despenser had become lord of Glamorgan, which politically and strategically was most important of all the Gloucester lands.[1] Yet even then, Despenser was not satisfied with his position. His rival Audley had been allotted Newport and Netherwent, while Amory had been assigned the castle of Usk and estates higher up the Usk valley. Annoyed that he should be a lesser personage in south Wales than Earl Gilbert had been, Despenser began to intrigue against his wife's brothers-in-law. Each of the co-heirs had already become deadly rivals. Their hostility was the more keen since the three had already taken different sides in English politics. Despenser was the soul of the court faction; Amory was the ally of Pembroke and Badlesmere, the men of the middle party; and Audley was an uncompromising adherent of Thomas of Lancaster. There was every chance that each one of the three would have competent backing. To each the triumph of his friends meant the prospect of his becoming Earl of Gloucester.
[1] See for this, W.H. Stevenson, A Letter of the Younger Despenser in 1321 in Engl. Hist. Rev., xii. (1897), 755-61.