The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Almost as soon as Gaveston was back, his intemperate behaviour resumed. According to several chroniclers, he came up with offensive nicknames for a number of the other English earls. He called the earl of Warwick ‘the black dog of Arden’, Gloucester was known as ‘whoreson’, Lincoln as ‘burst belly’, Lancaster as ‘churl’ and Pembroke as ‘Joseph the Jew’. Gaveston also upset the earl of Lancaster by having a Lancastrian retainer replaced in a royal office by one of his own men. His influence over the king remained powerful and extremely disturbing, not least as the country was supposed to be readying itself for a return to war with the Scots.

  As 1309 unfolded, tensions grew. An army ordered to muster for Scotland in September did not materialize. Yet Edward’s officials continued to exercise the rights to prises and purveyance, using the food and supplies they seized from the country to supply royal garrisons in the north. A tax of a twenty-fifth was also taken. The burdens on the country were considered so severe that rumours of an impending peasants’ revolt began to circulate.

  Popular anger was focused through the magnates at a parliament in early 1310. There was a general refusal to attend Westminster unless Gaveston was dismissed from the king’s presence. When Edward acceded to this request, The Life of Edward II records that parliament made urgent complaints that ‘the state of the king and the kingdom had much deteriorated since the death of the elder King Edward … and the whole kingdom had been not a little injured …’

  Their complaints were summed up in a petition. Its authors pointed out that since 1307 Edward had been guided by evil counsellors, and that he had impoverished the Crown to such a degree that his ministers were forced to break Magna Carta by extorting goods and money from the people and the Church. Edward was accused of losing Scotland by his negligence and diminishing the royal possessions in England and Ireland.

  This was a damning indictment, and in the main a fair one. To blame the dire Scottish situation on Edward II overlooked the fact that the overstretched military position derived in large part from his father. But otherwise, the complaints were justified.

  To remedy the broken state, the petitioners in parliament demanded that ‘twelve discreet and powerful men of good reputation should be elected, by whose judgement and decree the situation should be reformed and settled; and if anything should be found a burden on the kingdom, their ordinance should destroy it …’ This was a bold and urgent step to take when a reign was still only in its third year. And it shows the concern with which the whole political community viewed Edward’s leadership. The barons were not unreasonable men, driven by ambition and a desire to encroach upon royal power. In the main they simply wanted a strong, fair king. In that sense, their hatred of Gaveston and the misrule for which they blamed him was constitutional as well as political.

  If Edward was unconvinced at the beginning of the parliament, he was soon shown how seriously his magnates took the situation. The Life of Edward II records that they accused the king of breaking his coronation oath and threatened him with deposition if he failed to heed their demands: ‘The united barons … [said] that unless the king granted their requests they would not have him for king, nor keep the fealty that they had sworn to him, especially since he himself was not keeping the oath he had taken at his coronation.’

  This was a deadly situation, and Edward realized that he had no choice but to bow to the popular demands. On 20 March 1310, a group of twenty-one Ordainers – as the lords who were responsible for carrying out the Ordinances became known – was elected and sworn in. It was a balanced panel of loyalists and reformers, which included the archbishop of Canterbury and many of the English bishops, along with every English earl except for Oxford, Surrey and – unsurprisingly – Piers Gaveston, earl of Cornwall. They agreed to publish their Ordinances for the reform of the realm in September 1311.

  The Ordinances

  Edward arrived in the Scottish borders in September 1310, to occupy himself with campaigning and keep his distance from the Ordainers in Westminster, who were busily – and to his mind impertinently – putting together a plan to reform his kingship. He stayed until July 1311. He had nothing like the cohorts of soldiers that his father had taken north during the mighty campaigns of the previous decade, but an army of 3,000 or so infantry and 1,700 cavalry was still a sizeable force.

  But Edward made no progress. Robert Bruce continued to evade meeting English troops in open battle, preferring to skirmish and retreat. There were diplomatic exchanges between the Scottish and English kings, and Gaveston took a strong force to Perth with the intention of winning some support through his military endeavour. But nothing was achieved. Eventually Edward ran short of money and supplies, failed to raise further troops either in Ireland or in England, and returned south in the summer of 1311 having overseen a failed expedition. Bruce invaded the north of England as soon as he had left, causing much misery and damage.

  On his return to Westminster Edward found a full programme of political reform in action and his enemies strengthened in dangerous ways.

  While he was in Scotland several important men had died. Anthony Bek, the bishop of Durham, was one; more important for the rest of the reign was the death of Henry Lacy, earl of Lincoln. Lincoln, who also held the earldom of Salisbury, was in many ways the elder statesman among the magnates. He was well known, vastly experienced and respected. His death robbed English politics of an influential figure. It also altered the delicate balance of English aristocratic power.

  Lincoln’s daughter Alice was married to Thomas, earl of Lancaster, the king’s first cousin. It was therefore Lancaster who inherited Lincoln’s two earldoms when the old man died. This gave Lancaster a vast power bloc, which he would not hesitate to exploit.

  Even before Lincoln’s death, the 33-year-old Lancaster was a formidable figure. He already held three earldoms: Lancaster, Leicester and Derby. His father was Edward I’s brother Edmund; his mother had been a queen consort through her marriage to Henry I of Navarre; his half-sister Joan of Navarre was queen of France. Lancaster was thus directly descended both from Henry III and Louis VIII of France. Plantagenet and Capetian blood ran in his veins. He was around six years older than the king. The two had been close companions during their youth and Lancaster had supported the king through the tribulations of his early reign; but like so many of the other English barons, he had been forced into a reformist position by the behaviour of Gaveston and the manifest abuses that were obvious in government – particularly the onerous practice of purveyance. Lancaster had drifted out of the king’s circle during the winter of 1308–9, and was usually to be found far from Westminster on his northern estates, where he could play the role of the region’s most powerful Englishman to his heart’s content.

  When Lancaster inherited the Lincoln estates, he was at a stroke created the most powerful nobleman in England. The Lincoln inheritance boosted his income to £11,000 – almost double that of the next most senior earl, Gilbert earl of Gloucester – and gave him lands throughout the kingdom. He could raise vast private armies of retainers, and wield power at both a national and local level.

  Like Simon de Montfort, another vastly powerful earl of Lancaster and Plantagenet kinsman, who had tormented Henry III, Thomas earl of Lancaster was an abrasive figure. Proud, spiky and dogmatic, he tended to isolate himself from his peers, and found it difficult to command the loyalty of his inferiors. He was a hugely unpopular landlord, who frequently broke the law against his tenants. Lancaster did not inspire devotion, and his lack of political judgement was a source of concern as he was elevated to the position of second most powerful man in England.

  Throughout his life, Lancaster was the most zealous of the Ordainers, and he was heavily involved in preparing the schedule of the forty-one articles of reform that was presented to Edward at the end of August 1311, and promulgated to the country in November.

  The 1311 Ordinances were broad-ranging and exhaustive. They attacked familiar abuses dating back to Edward I’s reign: pu
rveyance and prise; the siphoning of customs duties to Italian banks in order to service debt; the king’s right to go to war without consulting parliament. By the command of the Ordainers, Edward was placed under heavy restrictions: he could not grant away his lands without the consent of the barons in parliament until his debts were paid off; revenues were to be paid directly to the exchequer rather than into the king’s household; parliaments should be held once or twice a year with special committees set up to hear complaints against the king’s abuses. Edward’s entire administration, from his chancellor and treasurer to his county sheriffs, were to be appointed by committees.

  Here was 1258 all over again. Government was effectively removed from a failing Plantagenet king, and reimposed upon him in a strict and prescriptive way. How the Ordinances were practically to be enforced against the will of a truculent and reluctant king was no clearer in 1311 than at any other time of constitutional crisis, dating back to Magna Carta. Every previous attempt to reform an unwilling Plantagenet had ended inevitably in civil war. Yet there was little option but to try.

  One demand could be enforced: the exile of Piers Gaveston. As in 1308, the Ordainers levelled another raft of attacks at Gaveston, who was now seen as a focal point for all the inadequacies of kingship at large. It was stated in the articles of the Ordinances that Gaveston had ‘led the king astray’, that he had ‘persuaded him deceitfully and in many ways to do wrong’, and that he had ‘estrang[ed] the king’s heart from his liege men’.

  Gaveston was blamed for taking the country to war without the barons’ permission. He was accused of having blank charters sealed ‘to the deception and disinheritance of the king and crown’, and more generally of behaving ‘craftily, falsely and treacherously to the great disgrace and damage of the kingdom’. For the third time in his life, Edward was faced with an angry demand that his adopted brother and comrade Gaveston should be exiled – this time not only ‘from England but from Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Gascony, and from every land as well beyond the sea … subject to the lordship of the king of England, for ever and without return’.

  He left England from Dover on 3 November, and landed in Flanders, intending to seek the hospitality of the duke and duchess of Brabant, to whom Edward had written in advance requesting they look kindly upon his exiled friend. Once again, however, the exile was short. At the end of November a second set of Ordinances was issued, probably on the order of Lancaster and the earl of Warwick. These were aimed solely at purging the king’s household of anyone connected with Gaveston. They backfired. The severity and provocative nature of the new terms succeeded only in making the king defiant. Humiliated and furious, he secretly recalled Gaveston after only a few weeks of exile. In early January 1312 the disgraced earl returned once more to England, arriving in Yorkshire just in time to meet his wife, Margaret, who had given birth to their first child – a daughter named Joan.

  Almost immediately Edward began distributing notices to the country saying that he rejected the Ordinances and confirmed that he had recalled Gaveston and restored him to his earldom. In late February Edward and Gaveston celebrated Margaret’s churching. It was the last celebration that they would share.

  Manhunt

  The village of Deddington in Oxfordshire was arranged around a castle built shortly after the Norman Conquest by Odo, bishop of Bayeux, the brother of King William I. It was familiar territory to Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke, whose wife was staying just twenty-two miles away in the manor of Bampton when the earl arrived in the village on the evening of 9 June 1312.

  The earl came to the village with a notorious prisoner in tow. Piers Gaveston was captured. The king’s favourite had been in custody since 19 May, when he had surrendered to Pembroke, the earl of Surrey and two other barons who were besieging him in Scarborough castle. Pembroke held Gaveston prisoner in the name of the political community of England. He affected to take his duties extremely properly: during negotiations with Edward II that had taken place at York, the earl had agreed that he would forfeit all of his property if any harm should come to Gaveston while he was in custody.

  The manhunt for Gaveston had been planned and put into action with a remarkable degree of cooperation between the great magnates of England. Within weeks of Gaveston’s arrival back in England the earls had mustered men right across England and Wales during March, under the pretence of organizing tournaments, ‘lest the country be terrified by the sight of arms’, wrote the author of The Life of Edward II.

  The real reason for raising men was of course to make war upon the king and his loathsome favourite. The prime movers in the plot were Archbishop Winchelsea, who had excommunicated Gaveston, along with the earls of Lancaster, Pembroke, Hereford, Arundel and Warwick and two lesser barons, Henry Percy and Roger de Clifford. Others, such as the earls of Surrey and Gloucester, were aware of the plot and involved to a lesser degree. Each magnate had been charged with keeping the peace in a different part of the kingdom, while Pembroke and Warwick had formal responsibility for capturing Gaveston himself.

  It had eventually been Pembroke, Surrey, Percy and Clifford who plucked Gaveston from his bolt-hole at Scarborough castle on 19 May, after a short siege. Negotiations for Gaveston’s release had immediately begun with Edward, and were set to continue nearer to London during the summer. Pembroke journeyed south with the captured earl, and on a warm June night arrived in Deddington.

  In spite of Pembroke’s solemn oath to ensure Gaveston’s safety, the earl made a curious decision that evening, announcing that he was leaving Deddington and going to visit his wife at Bampton. He would be leaving Gaveston to rest under a light guard.

  Was this foolishness or treachery? Pembroke would for ever protest the former, but it was naïve to leave the most hated man in England alone overnight, when his enemies abounded. Within hours of Pembroke leaving Deddington, the earl of Warwick had swooped into the village with a large party of men-at-arms. The man that Gaveston had scorned as the Black Dog was here to bite his tormentor. The author of The Life of Edward II gave the story a vivid hue:

  When the earl of Warwick had learned all that was happening about Piers, he took a strong force and secretly approached the place where he knew Piers to be. Coming to the village very early in the morning one Saturday he entered the gate of the courtyard and surrounded the chamber [where Gaveston was staying].

  Then the earl called out in a loud voice: ‘Arise traitor, you are taken.’ And Piers, hearing the earl, also seeing the earl’s superior force and that the guard to which he had been allotted was not resisting, putting on his clothes came down from the chamber. In this fashion Piers is taken and is led forth not as an earl, but as a thief; and he who used to ride on palfreys is now forced to go on foot.

  Warwick marched Gaveston from the village of Deddington in triumph, his retainers blowing trumpets to advertise the victory around the rolling fields of Oxfordshire. Crowds thronged around the parade, bellowing abuse at the fallen favourite. Gaveston was marched all the way to Warwick castle, where he was thrown in prison as a traitor to the realm.

  This was no renegade action from a single earl. Within a week of Gaveston’s capture the town of Warwick filled with the earls of Lancaster, Hereford and Arundel and their retinues, along with lesser barons involved in the plot. Pembroke, now showing genuine horror at his contemporaries’ ruthlessness, approached and protested that his vow to protect Gaveston was being torn up in front of him. He was dismissed with the advice that he ought in future to make his promises with greater care.

  Lancaster, a royal earl, a Plantagenet and the most senior man present, from this point took overall responsibility and risk for the fate of Gaveston. The prisoner was tried before a court assembled under Lancaster and Warwick’s authority, accused of breaching the terms of the Ordinances, which called for his exile. Clearly he was guilty: here was a man brought before a court assembled especially for his condemnation, operating under a law drafted specifically for his destruction.

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p; Gaveston was sentenced to death. On 19 June he was taken from his cell and brought before Lancaster. Chroniclers described a pitiable scene in which the prisoner wailed for mercy. Instead of clemency, Gaveston was handed over to armed guards, who dragged him two miles north of Warwick to Blacklow Hill. At the top of the hill he was passed on to two Welshmen. Each dealt a deadly blow: one ran him through the body, and the other hacked off his head.

  Lancaster was shown Gaveston’s severed head as proof that the ghastly deed was done. But the body lay on the ground where it fell, until some Dominican friars collected the remains, sewed the head back onto the body and took it to Oxford. For two and a half years the corpse lay embalmed and dressed in cloth of gold in the Dominican house. That was as much as charity would bear: Gaveston died excommunicate and could not be buried on holy land.

  Even given Gaveston’s insolence and his irresponsible career, this was a shocking way for him to die. And it had profound implications for the future. Edward, when he discovered the fate of his adopted brother, was distraught. Rather than counting his errors, he became ever more determined to resist the Ordinances. He would never forgive his cousin Lancaster for his act of arrogant brutality, and a blood feud would boil between the two for the best part of the next decade.

  And far from uniting England, Gaveston’s death had divided the political community. A permanent split was created among the barons: those responsible for Gaveston’s murder were now permanently isolated from royal favour, while Pembroke and Surrey, who felt that they had been at some level deceived by Lancaster and Warwick, became unwavering loyalists to Edward.