The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Yet Edward was from his earliest months as king viewed with suspicion and hostility. Every aspect of his life seemed at odds with the office of kingship. This was most obvious from his social habits. In an age when chivalry and martial valour still formed a crucial part of the royal ideal, Edward was constantly portrayed as a degenerate. Many of the most poisonous chroniclers’ pen-portraits of him date from a time when disaster had struck his reign, but it was nevertheless commonly and contemptuously said that he was obsessed with peasant activities such as swimming, rowing, ditching and thatching.

  Edward was accused by the chronicler Ranulph Higden of preferring the company of ‘jesters, singers, actors, carriage drivers, diggers, oarsmen, [and] sailors’ to fraternizing with nobles and knights, and indeed, sailors, bargemasters and carpenters were recorded dining in the king’s chamber at times during the reign. ‘If only he had given to arms the attention that he expended on rustic pursuits he would have raised England on high,’ bemoaned the anonymous author of The Life of Edward II, a contemporary history of the king’s reign. A royal messenger once said that the king preferred thatching and ditching to hearing the mass. Although there is other evidence to say that Edward was conventionally pious and could hold his own in battle, his reputation for frivolity and lowly sports preceded him. He did not enjoy or hold tournaments, nor did he sponsor great chivalric occasions such as the Feast of the Swans at which his father had belted him as a knight. This lack of interest in the proper public conduct of kingship nagged away at his reputation throughout his reign and eventually reduced him to a figure of popular derision.

  Edward also had a reputation for favouritism, and this was a great deal more damaging. He spent his entire adult life under the shadow of cronies with whom he fostered unhealthy obsessions. ‘The king dishonoured the good people of his land and honoured its enemies, such as flatterers, false counsellors and wrongdoers, who gave him advice contrary to his royal estates and the common profit of the land, and he held them very dear,’ wrote the Anonimalle chronicler. There were several such favourites during Edward’s lifetime, but one for whom his passion ran highest of all. From as early as 1300, Edward was dominated by one notorious individual in particular: Gaveston.

  Gaveston was a Gascon knight. He was slightly older than Edward, and was probably placed in his household by Edward I following good service rendered on campaign with the old king in Flanders in 1297 and Scotland in 1300. According to the chronicler Geoffrey Baker, Gaveston was ‘graceful and agile in body, sharp-witted, refined in manners, … [and] well versed in military matters’. He must have struck the elder Edward as a perfect model of knightly chivalry for his eldest son to follow.

  It would quickly prove otherwise. Whatever strange relationship developed between Gaveston and Edward, it was clear from very early in their acquaintance that they shared a bond of unhealthy closeness, in which the pliable Edward was led by the nose wherever the clever, ambitious and grasping Gaveston would take him. Gaveston was a highly charismatic individual, but insufferably arrogant, a trait that the author of The Life of Edward II called ‘intolerable to the barons and the main cause of both the hatred and the anger’. But Gaveston’s puffed-up pride delighted the king as much as it infuriated his contemporaries. ‘If an earl or baron entered [Edward’s] chamber … while Piers was there, [Edward] addressed no one except Piers alone,’ wrote the same chronicler, who also suggested that ‘Piers was regarded as a sorcerer’.

  We will never know if Edward II and Piers Gaveston were lovers, whether in the sense we would understand such a relationship now or on any other terms. It seems likely that they shared some bond of adoptive brotherhood, modelled perhaps on that of Jonathan and David in the Old Testament, in which ‘Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself.’ Every major chronicler of the reign noted that Edward treated Gaveston as a brother, and the king referred to his friend as such in official documents. Perhaps there was a sexual dimension to the relationship as well, but if there was, it was not known at the beginning of the reign when Edward was betrothed to Philip IV of France’s daughter Isabella. A fiercely conventional king such as Philip would never have allowed his daughter to marry a sodomite and a heretic.

  But there was nevertheless an intimacy to Gaveston and Edward’s relationship that scandalized their contemporaries, and it fell into a wider pattern of behaviour that Edward’s subjects and contemporaries thought of and characterized as abominable and unkingly.

  This first became a matter of national importance in 1305, when Gaveston was banished from the young Edward’s company as part of the prince’s punishment for a bitter argument with Edward I’s treasurer, Walter Langton. Although he was readmitted and knighted in the great ceremony that preceded Edward I’s final Scottish invasion the following year, Gaveston absconded from the campaign with twenty-one other knights and disappeared overseas to take part in tournaments. For this indiscretion he was exiled from England on a pension of 100 marks per year.

  When Edward of Caernarfon learned that his father had died in Burgh-by-Sands, and that he was now Edward II, king of England, his first act was to recall Gaveston from exile, grant him the earldom of Cornwall and award him marriage to Margaret de Clare, the daughter of Gilbert earl of Gloucester and Joan of Acre, Edward’s own sister.

  This was an inordinately lavish promotion for a knight. Indeed, it was one rightly fit only for a kinsman of the king. The earldom of Cornwall was one of the great Plantagenet titles. It had most famously been held by Henry III’s brother Richard, who in his day had been one of the senior noblemen in Europe, king of Germany and count of Poitou. It brought with it lands not just in the south-west, but in Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Yorkshire. The annual income was around £4,000. It was both a royal, fraternal title, and an award of enormous and significant power. To bestow it on a mere household companion like Gaveston was not merely overly generous: it was politically very dangerous.

  The list of people who might be offended by Gaveston’s promotion was long. Chief among them was Margaret of France, the dowager queen, who had understood from the late King Edward I that the earldom would go to one of her sons, Edward II’s half-brothers Thomas of Brotherton and Edmund of Woodstock, born in 1300 and 1301 respectively, towards the end of the old king’s reign. Despite their youth, either of these might have been expected to be placed in nominal charge of England’s government when Edward went to France to marry Philip IV’s daughter Isabella. But they were not: that honour fell to Gaveston.

  From the beginning of his reign Edward made clear that Gaveston was not merely a court favourite, but that he intended him to play a role as quasi-king. When Edward left England in January 1308 to be married and do homage for Gascony, he left Gaveston as regent of England with extraordinary, unprecedented powers backed up by a new royal seal of absence.

  That the office of regent was one that traditionally fell to a senior royal official, a member of the royal family or the queen did not trouble Edward. Yet it troubled all around him. Gaveston, elevated to that title, was manifestly not a Plantagenet. Nor was he a justiciar, a chancellor or an archbishop. ‘Yesterday’s exile and outcast has been made governor and keeper of the land,’ wrote the author of The Life of Edward II, in disbelief. But regent was not the zenith of Gaveston’s rise, as the king’s coronation set out to prove.

  Coronation

  Edward II was crowned at Westminster on 25 February 1308. The great ceremony was attended by the combined nobility of England and France. All packed together into Westminster Abbey to witness the anointing of a new king, accompanied by his twelve-year-old queen, Isabella, whom Edward had married in Boulogne a month previously, in a shimmering ceremony attended by five kings and three queens.

  Westminster heaved with bodies. The abbey church and the streets around were packed with participants and onlookers. (The crush was so intense that a knight and former seneschal of Ponthieu, Sir John Bakewell, was killed when a wall collapsed.) Inside the church the assemble
d nobility literally glittered in cloth of gold. The French had sent a magnificent delegation, including the counts of Valois and Evreux, Isabella’s brother Charles (the future Charles IV of France), John, duke of Brabant, with his wife Margaret, Edward II’s sister; Henry, count of Luxembourg (soon to become the Emperor Henry VII), and many more besides. The English earls, barons and knights of the shire packed alongside them in the abbey church, to witness the most important political ceremony of all.

  Silent, but also present, were the remains of the old king. Edward I’s newly constructed tomb was a smooth and austere box of black Purbeck marble, inscribed with the words EDWARDUS PRIMUS SCOTTORUM MALLEUS HIC EST. PACTUM SERVA. (This is Edward the First, Hammer of the Scots. Honour the vow.) It was a cool reminder that kingship brought military responsibility – and all who had sworn to see out the vision of a reunited, Arthurian Britain were held to their responsibility and the oath that had been sworn at the Feast of the Swans.

  All eyes anticipated the new king. He entered the abbey church wearing a green robe with black hose, walking barefoot along a carpet of flowers with his young bride beside him. Above the royal couple was held a great embroidered canopy, and in front of them processed the magnates and prelates of England.

  There was strict protocol to the order of procession, which invariably caused arguments at coronations. Each earl at the ceremony had a certain role to fulfil. At Edward’s coronation the earls of Lancaster, Warwick and Lincoln carried great swords; the king’s cousin Henry of Lancaster carried the royal sceptre; four other barons – Hugh Despenser the elder, Roger Mortimer of Chirk, Thomas de Vere, son of the earl of Oxford, and Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel – bore a board on which the heavy and luxurious royal coronation robes were placed.

  Yet among all these great men walked Piers Gaveston, proceeding in pride of place directly before Edward and Isabella. According to the Annalist of St Paul’s, he was decked out like ‘the God Mars’. Gaveston, ludicrously, trumped the assembled nobles in their cloth of gold by wearing silks of royal purple, decorated with pearls. He carried the crown of Edward the Confessor – the most sacred item among all the royal regalia.

  It was a grave and unmistakable sign of Gaveston’s role in the new regime, and could not have been construed by the assembled nobles as anything but a vile insult against their lineage and status. This was exactly as Edward and Gaveston intended. For months before the ceremony, the new king had been imagining his public declaration of the new royal partnership: his brotherhood with Gaveston.

  Before the stunned congregation, Edward swore his coronation oaths in French, rather than the traditional Latin. In a development of the coronation oath, the king promised to uphold both the laws of St Edward the Confessor and also ‘the laws and rightful customs which the community of the realm shall have chosen’. Under the king’s father, parliaments had been held frequently and were used as the forum for political dissent, discussion, debate and negotiation. By including in the sacred coronation vows a nod to the developing role of the political community, pageantry reflected the new political reality.

  Yet it was Gaveston, and not the new coronation oath, that occupied everyone’s attention. At every juncture his presence offended the other nobles present. When the time came for the ceremonial fixing of the king’s boots, Gaveston shared duties with the count of Valois and the earl of Pembroke, fixing the left spur to the king’s heel. After Edward and Isabella had been anointed, and the king had sat on the throne containing the Stone of Scone to receive homage from his magnates, Gaveston led the outward procession carrying the royal sword Curtana, which had been carried by the earl of Lancaster on the procession into the abbey.

  In a society ordered by hierarchy and sacred belief, these were grave offences against protocol, and as the Gaveston pantomime unfolded there were unseemly shouts of protest from among the congregation. But worse was to follow.

  Gaveston organized the feast that followed the coronation, and he made it a vulgar bid to award himself further glory. The walls of the banqueting hall were arrayed with rich tapestries. They were decorated not with the arms of Edward and Isabella, but with those of Edward and Gaveston. For the new queen to be sidelined in so blatant a fashion was offensive to her visiting family, and the insult was deepened when Edward spent the entire banquet – at which the food was late and virtually inedible – talking and laughing with Gaveston, while neglecting his bride. Even before the ceremony the young queen had written to her father complaining that she was kept in poverty and treated with dishonour. Here was a public demonstration of her ill-treatment. To make things even worse, it later transpired that Edward had given the best of the queen’s jewels and wedding presents to his favourite.

  The coronation was a disaster. It confirmed to the entire English political community, as well as to Isabella’s family, that the king was dangerously obsessed with Piers Gaveston, in a fashion that was not only unbecoming, but was likely to bring a political upheaval to the realm. Edward could scarcely have found a better way to upset and alienate all who sought to support him.

  It took mere days for the anger engendered by the coronation, combined with Gaveston’s contemptuous treatment of his fellow earls and barons, to spark a political crisis. With a parliament due to be held in April, there were rumblings from the magnates of coming in arms, seeking to visit retribution on Gaveston for his behaviour. In anticipation of trouble, the bridges over the river Thames were broken at the end of March, and the king took refuge in Windsor castle. Within less than a year of acceding to the throne, and mere days of his coronation, Edward had expended every ounce of political capital and goodwill that a new reign customarily brought. He was forced to prepare himself for armed insurrection by England’s barons.

  When a parliament met in April 1308, a group of magnates led by Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln, produced a series of three articles of shattering constitutional importance. ‘Homage and the oath of allegiance are more in respect of the crown than in respect of the king’s person,’ they declared, drawing for the first time an explicit distinction between the king and the office he held. The magnates also demanded that Gaveston be exiled from the kingdom and stripped of his earldom, writing that ‘he disinherits the crown and … impoverishes it … and puts discord between the king and his people’.

  This was no manifesto from a disaffected minority party, but a clear signal of constitutional opposition, presented by virtually the entire English barony. The earls of Lancaster, Pembroke, Warwick, Hereford and Surrey all supported Lincoln, and made a show of armed aggression in Westminster to make it clear how serious they were. Archbishop Winchelsea, who had been absent from the realm during the coronation, was recalled to England by the king. As soon as he arrived he sided with the barons, threatening to excommunicate Gaveston unless he left England by the end of June. Only one baron, Sir Hugh Despenser the elder, adhered to the king. Despenser was a trusted diplomat and an ardent loyalist who had paid a fortune – £2,000 – to marry his only son, known as Hugh Despenser the younger, to the earl of Gloucester’s sister in 1306. He would stick close to the king in years to come.

  Despite such a slim show of support for his kingship, Edward wriggled. It was obvious that Gaveston had to go, and that he could not retain his earldom. But rather than comply directly with his opponents and send his favourite away, Edward appointed Gaveston to the position of King’s Lieutenant in Ireland and awarded him castles and manors in England and Gascony with which to support himself. He accompanied Gaveston to Bristol and saw him off from England’s shores with the utmost dignity.

  Here, already, was an image of a king who completely failed to understand his obligations. Everything demonstrated by his father’s career ought to have taught Edward II that the politics of English kingship were based on consensus and compromise. Barons were not naturally troublesome or opposed to royal authority, but they were exceptionally sensitive to the inadequate or inequitable operation of kingship and would act to take a grip on gove
rnment if they felt that the king was failing in his task.

  Alas, Edward was unable to perceive this. He saw Gaveston’s exile as a personal attack on a man he loved, rather than a political act undertaken for the good of the realm. Thus in 1308 he was concerned with nothing more than negotiating the return of his favourite. It would be a familiar pattern established over the following four years – and one that would bring England once more to the brink of civil war.

  Emergency

  It is impossible to understate the hatred that flared against Gaveston in the aftermath of the embarrassing coronation. To Edward, much of it must have seemed unfounded. He seems genuinely to have considered Gaveston his brother, and rewarded him accordingly with the lavish gifts and deep emotional bond that his feelings called for. The queen, naturally, came a poor third in the relationship, to the intense chagrin of the French; but she was after all a child of twelve, barely ready to be either a sexual partner or a meaningful political figure.

  Edward, however, failed entirely to discern his opponents’ points of view. Instead of following Gaveston’s banishment to Ireland with a resolute effort to mend his ways and address the urgent needs of government, he bent his energies to the task of rescinding his favourite’s sentence of exile, and petitioning the pope to annul Archbishop Winchelsea’s suspended sentence of excommunication.

  Edward was not a stupid man, and he realized that Gaveston could not be recalled without a charm offensive levelled at his magnates. A concerted drive to regain the favour of the leading earls and bishops was built around a reform programme. Statutes were issued at Stamford in July 1309 dealing with purveyance – the forced purchase of provisions for the royal army – and the excessive powers of royal officials in the shires. In return, Gaveston was allowed back into England, and was regranted his earldom of Cornwall in August. The grant was witnessed by many of the most powerful men in England: the bishops of Durham, Chichester, Worcester and London and the earls of Gloucester, Lincoln, Surrey, Pembroke, Hereford and Warwick. However, the king’s cousin, Thomas earl of Lancaster, the earl of Arundel and Archbishop Winchelsea were absent.