ABSTRACT
The history of the years of Edward II’s reign that followed Bannockburn is confused and anarchic. For convenience it may be divided into four periods. The first runs from the autumn of 1314 to the middle of 1316. After his great defeat at the hands of the Scots, Edward was in no position to resist the demands of his powerful domestic opponents, and in this period the influence of Earl Thomas of Lancaster was a decisive force in government. Partly on account of his own lethargy and incompetence, and partly because of misfortunes which it was beyond the earl’s power to avoid, his influence was on the wane well before the end of 1316. By that time a new group of influential men was gathering at the king’s court, who were opposed to the earl personally and to his policy of enforcing the Ordinances to the letter. The question during our second period, which extends from 1316 to 1320, was whether this hostility would degenerate into an open breach, or whether some modus vivendi could be established between the king’s new friends at court and the king’s greatest subject, Lancaster. Such a reconciliation was the object striven after by a group of moderate men, who included a number of bishops, the Earl of Pembroke, and perhaps the Earl of Hereford (though both these men had close associations with the court too). In 1320, the rapid rise to royal favour and influence of the two Despensers, father and son, upset the balance anew, and here our third period begins. The year 1321 saw a head-on confrontation between the king and the Despensers on the one hand, and a combination of Lancaster with the powerful barons of the Welsh march on the other. The defeat and subsequent execution of the king’s chief opponents, including the earls of Lancaster and Hereford, at Boroughbridge in 1322, marks the end of this third period. In the fourth and terminal period from 1322 to 1326 the triumphant king and the Despensers abused their recovered power in England, and allowed themselves to be drawn into a confrontation with France which very nearly cost Edward his inheritance beyond the sea in Gascony. His deposition in 1327, however, solved nothing. In the depressing epilogue to his reign which runs to 1330, his Queen Isabella and her paramour Roger Mortimer were no more successful in their efforts to govern England than he had been.
