Thomas, earl of Lancaster (b. c.1278), cousin of Edward II and for much of that King’s reign the leader of opposition to him, has proved a divisive figure in death as well as life. The near-contemporary monastic chronicler Ranulf Higden (d.1364) cited his virtues – his generous alms-giving, his respect for churchmen and his consistency of political action – but balanced them against his more lurid demerits. Not only did he mistreat his wife, the great heiress Alice de Lacy, but he ‘defouled a greet multitude of women and of gentil wenches’; he was murderously vindictive to his enemies; and he supported ‘apostates and evel doers’. The ‘Oh! Earl of Lancaster’ lament of the Vita Edwardi Secundi cited above hints at his pride and overweening ambition. Modern judgments tend to emphasise these negatives. To his modern biographer, John Maddicott, he was, ‘unscrupulous, violent and avaricious’ and ‘not a man likely to convince others that he could either lead or govern’; and, to May McKisack, more neutrally, he was ‘the supreme example of the over-mighty subject whose end must be either to destroy or be destroyed’. Here he appears as, in part at least, a victim of circumstance, with his great wealth and Edward II’s misrule forcing him into the role of leader of opposition, one to which he was ill-suited by temperament and ability. Nowhere are his weaknesses as a leader more clearly illustrated than in the campaign that ended in his execution after the battle of Boroughbridge.

The prelude to that campaign was the rise of a new royal favourite, Hugh Despenser the younger. His ruthless-acquisitiveness in the marches of Wales, as he sought to add to the lordship of Glamorgan, the inheritance of his wife, united against him most of the Marcher lords, headed by Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford. In May 1321 they drove him out of Glamorgan and systematically ravaged his estates, and, in the Parliament of the following July, with Lancaster’s active support, they used the threat of deposition to force the King to exile him. The striking thing about the eight months that followed is the ease with which Edward II turned the tables on opponents who had appeared so strong. Now deprived of the focus their hatred of Despenser had given them, an infirmity of purpose seems to have overtaken them. This, in part, explains their failure to co-ordinate their opposition. But Lancaster’s fatal weakness for placing his own personal enmities before a common purpose was a more important factor. His personal hatred for Bartholomew, Lord Badlesmere, once steward of Edward II’s household but now allied with the Marchers, ensured that the King began his campaign of recovery with a bloodless victory. The Marcher lords had moved to lift the royal siege of Badlesmere’s castle at Leeds in Kent in October 1321, advancing as far as Kingston-on-Thames, only some 50 miles away, but Lancaster ordered them to desist.

The King now turned his attention to the Marcher lords, winning victory against them without the need to give battle. Here Edward was able to exploit the hostility of the native Welsh for the Marchers, but the principal reason for his facile victory was Lancaster’s failure to come to their aid. This, in turn, reflects the earl’s political and military weakness. His efforts to raise a coalition of northern lords against the King had failed, and, more alarmingly still, there were signs that his own great affinity was disintegrating. The most notable desertions were those of the northern lord, William, Lord Latimer, who went on to be one of the royalist commanders at Boroughbridge, and Sir Robert Holland, the earl’s most intimate friend and one who owed his wealth and position entirely to his patronage. So weak was his position that, as the royal army advanced north-east from the Marches, Lancaster, who had advanced south to Burton-on-Trent, withdrew north. His intention was probably to retreat to his cliff-top castle of Dunstanborough in Northumberland, where he might receive help from the Scots. But, on 16 March 1322, he found his way barred at the crossing of the River Ure at Boroughbridge by levies raised in Cumberland by a veteran of the Scottish wars, Sir Andrew Harclay. Battle was joined around the narrow wooden bridge over the River Ure, and Lancaster’s principal ally, the earl of Hereford, was killed early in the engagement as Lancaster’s army failed to force a passage of the river. A truce was then concluded until the following day. The two near-contemporary accounts of the battle differ as to what happened next. According to the Lanercost chronicle, desertions from his ranks caused Lancaster to surrender to Harclay when the truce expired.  The Vita Edwardi Secundi, however, indirectly accuses Harclay of duplicity. Afforced by the arrival of the Yorkshire lives during the night, he entered the town before morning and seized the unsuspecting Lancaster when technically the truce was still in force. 

Here a parallel is to be drawn with the battle of Ludford Bridge fought, or rather not fought, some 137 years later.  Then the duke of York withdrew from the field under cover of darkness and, sensibly, fled without giving battle to a superior force. Lancaster had the opportunity to do the same but either turned it down or delayed and was overtaken by events. Thus, while York survived to fight another day (not that it did him personally much good but his cause survived), Lancaster fell into the merciless hands of Edward II and Despenser. He was executed, after the most summary and questionable legal process, at his own castle at Pontefract on 22 March.

The manner of his death gave the earl an afterlife hardly justified by his personal qualities. It raised him to the status of a popular hero with stories of miracles at his tomb current within a short time of his death. The unpopularity of Edward II and Despenser, which intensified in their period of misrule after Boroughbridge, ensured that the cult took root, and, in the Parliament of 1327, after Edward’s deposition, the Commons went so far as to petition the new King, Edward III, to seek the earl’s canonization. That did not come, but his cult survived, albeit in attenuated form, until the Reformation.       

S.P.

It is a central tenet of parliamentary history that the political complexion of a Parliament was determined by its membership, particularly that of its fluctuating electoral element, the Commons. This, in turn, rests on the assumption that the most important events during a Parliament occurred within the chambers of Lords and Commons. In one sense, this assumption is incontrovertible: taxation was granted and legislation enacted within and by Parliament. In another, however, this focus on composition is to conceive Parliament, understood as a political rather than a purely legal entity, too narrowly. Parliament was (and is) not simply an assembly of its members. This latter observation is starkly true of medieval assemblies. These were very considerable gatherings which brought to Westminster, or to wherever the Parliament was summoned, not only the MPs (and their personal servants) but numerous unelected royal and baronial retainers who, although they had no place within the Parliament, contributed powerfully to the atmosphere in which it met.

On occasion, that contribution was very direct and immediately threatening. The most famous instance dates from the so-called ‘Revenge Parliament’ of September 1397 when Richard II sought to use Parliament against his enemies in the same way as they had used it against his servants in the ‘Merciless Parliament’ of 1388. One chronicler describes the King, ‘riding menacingly through the middle of London surrounded by five thousand armed men’ adding, gratuitously and in an expression of his own political sympathies, ‘most of whom were malefactors’; another claims he drew up his archers around Westminster palace yard. This episode, however, is an isolated one. No doubt the presence of the royal retinue outside Parliament, as well as inside it, had an impact on its deliberations on other occasions, but it was baronial retinues that were the more frequent ‘destabilising’ factor at time of Parliament.

Sometimes their appearance had a determining effect on the course of political and parliamentary events. The clearest and most straightforward example is the Parliament of July 1321. The presence of the great retinues of Humphrey Bohun, earl of Hereford, and other lords of the Welsh March, all seemingly clothed in a common livery of green and yellow with a white band as a symbol of their unity, effectively forced Edward II into exiling his favourites, the Despensers. This and other examples from that troubled reign relate to the intimidation not of the institution of Parliament but of the person of the King, with Edward’s principal opponent, his first cousin, Thomas, earl of Lancaster, a routine offender. According to the Vita Edwardi Secundi, Lancaster came to the Westminster Parliament of August 1312 at the head of 1,000 horse and 1,500 foot; and, in an indictment laid against him after his execution in 1322, he was accused of impeding the work of the Parliament which met at York in 1318 by bringing 1,000 men. Indeed, at this date, riding in the lord’s retinue to Parliament was part of the service a lord expected of those he retained, with the obligation laid down in the indenture of retainer. In May 1319, to cite a notable example, Lancaster retained no lesser a man that William, Lord Latimer, to come to him to Parliament at the head of his own retinue.

In the fifteenth century parliamentary politics was more complex than it had been in Edward II’s reign. Then it had been possible to see Parliament principally in the context of the relationship between the King and the great lords; but the growing independence of the Lower House meant that this was no longer the case by the end of the fourteenth century. Richard II certainly used employed the tactics of direct intimidation during the ‘Revenge Parliament’ but he also employed more subtle ones, seeking to control the Commons through a compliant Speaker, Sir John Bussy, and intervening in county elections to secure the return of an unusually large proportion of royal retainers. The future of royal regulation of Parliament lay in such comparative subtleties, and the great lords too came to see the exertion of influence within the chambers of Lords and Commons as more effective (and more politically acceptable) than the intimidatory use of their retinues. It may be significant that the last indenture of retainer to contain the retainer’s obligation of parliamentary service dates from as early as 1332. None the less, the pressure of events produced an occasional regression to the parliamentary politics of Edward II’s reign, with the Parliament of November 1450 as comfortably the most striking example.

This met in an atmosphere of the acutest political tension. The twin shocks of popular rebellion, in the shape of Jack Cade, and the loss of Normandy were followed by the return, uninvited by the King, of the duke of York from Ireland, where he was lieutenant. In accordance with the new dispensation, he immediately began a successful campaign to secure the return of MPs favourable to his cause, most notably that his chamberlain, Sir William Oldhall, who was to be chosen Speaker. Yet he was not content with this. On 23 November, 17 days after Parliament convened, he arrived in London at the head of a retinue that one chronicler put at as many as 3,000 men, quickly afforced by the retinues of his allies, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, and John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk. The author of Gregory’s chronicle was struck by the impressive and intimidating spectacle of ‘every lorde whythe hyr retynowe welle harnysyd and welle be-sene; and every lorde hadde hys bagge a-pon hys harnys, and hyr mayny also, that they myght ben knowe by hyr baggys and levereys’.

The undesirability of this state of affairs, however impressive the spectacle, seems to have been recognised by the leaders of both York and Lancaster. In respect of the Parliaments of 1455, which met in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans, the lords were instructing to come to Parliament only ‘mesurably accompaignied accordyng to yo[ur]estate w[ith] yo[ur]household mayney and noon otherwise’. The dominance of the Lancastrians when Parliament met at Coventry in 1459 and of the Yorkists when it met at Westminster at 1460 probably explains why they too, despite the controversy of the proceedings in Parliament, were not attended by large-scale disturbances outside. Parliamentary politics had been, seemingly, permanently returned to a more peaceful course, with no return to the days of Edward II.

S J P

Further reading

J.R. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 1307-1322

The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England,1275-1504, XII

Follow the work of our Commons 1461-1504 project via the Commons in the Wars of the Roses blog page.