ton 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