Of bastard he was none

The arms of Sir John Botetourt, 1st Baron Botetourt and lord of Mendlesham. John was once thought to have been a bastard son of Edward I, a myth that remained popular until quite recently: he appears as the king’s ‘massively tall and sombre-eyed bastard’ in Nigel Tranter’s series of novels on Robert de Bruce. 

Whether or not he was a massively tall sombre-eyed bastard, John was no son of Edward I. The mistake stems from his inclusion in a genealogical table in a Hailes Abbey chronicle, where his name is scribbled over an erasure. No explanation is given for John’s appearance on the table, and his alleged bastardy is not explicitly stated in the chronicle or anywhere else. He was in fact the son of a Norfolk knight, Guy de Botetourt.

John began in royal service as a falconer and rose to the status of banneret. In 1295, as admiral of the Yarmouth fleet, he burnt and plundered the town of Cherbourg on the coast of Normandy, as well as the abbey. He did the usual exhausting round of military service required of so many English knights in the latter part of the reign. In the summer of 1295 he led a relief force to Gascony, where he was wounded in action, apparently while defending two Franciscan monks from the French. John also served in Scotland, where in 1298 he fought in the king’s bataille at Falkirk.

Like many of Edward I’s veterans, John reacted with horror to the doings of the old king’s successor. He loathed the royal favourite, Piers Gaveston, and helped the Earl of Warwick to carry off Piers from the protective custody of the Earl of Pembroke. John made his peace with Edward II in 1313, but later went back into rebellion under Thomas of Lancaster. He fought on the losing side at Boroughbridge, and for some reason was excluded from the stiff round of executions that followed. He was pardoned on 8 October 1322 and died in 1324, leaving a grandson to succeed him.