to his more famous brother.  But the tragedy of Pontefract and his unsatisfied claim on the Lancaster earldom stood between Henry and the government, and the imprudence of the Despensers soon utterly estranged him from the king, though he was the last man to indulge in indiscriminate opposition, and Edward dared not push his powerful cousin to extremities.  In these circumstances, the king had no wise or strong advisers whose influence might counteract the Despensers.  His loneliness and isolation made him increasingly dependent upon the favourites.

The older nobles were already alienated, when the Despensers provoked a quarrel with the queen.  Isabella was a woman of strong character and violent passions, with the lack of morals and scruples which might have been expected from a girlhood passed amidst the domestic scandals of her father’s household.  She resented her want of influence over her husband, and hated the Despensers because of their superior power with him.  The favourites met her hostility by an open declaration of warfare.  In 1324 the king deprived her of her separate estate, drove her favourite servants from court, and put her on an allowance of a pound a day.  The wife of the younger Hugh, her husband’s niece, was deputed to watch her, and she could not even write a letter without the Lady Despenser’s knowledge.  Isabella bitterly chafed under her humiliation.  She was, she declared, treated like a maidservant and made the hireling of the Despensers.  Finding, however, that nothing was to be gained by complaints, she prudently dissembled her wrath and waited patiently for revenge.

The Despensers’ chief helpers were among the clergy.  Conspicuous among them were Walter Stapledon, Bishop of Exeter, the treasurer, and Robert Baldock, the chancellor.  The records of Stapledon’s magnificence survive in the nave of his cathedral church, and in Exeter College, Oxford; but the great builder and pious founder was a worldly, greedy, and corrupt public minister.  So unpopular was he that, in 1325, it was thought wise to remove him from office.  Thereupon another building prelate, William Melton, Archbishop of York, whose piety and charity long intercourse with courtiers had not extinguished, abandoned his northern flock for London and the treasury.  But the best of officials could do little to help the unthrifty king.  Edward was so poorly respected that he could not even obtain a bishopric for his chancellor.  On two occasions the envoys sent to Avignon, to urge Baldock’s claims on vacant sees, secured for themselves the mitre destined for the minister.  In this way John Stratford became Bishop of Winchester and William Ayermine, Bishop of Norwich.  Edward had not even the spirit to show manifest disfavour to these self-seeking prelates, but his inaction was so clearly the result of weakness that it involved no gratitude, and the two bishops secretly hated the ruling clique, as likely to do them an evil turn if it dared.  Nor were the older prelates better