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.