The Plantagenets: History of a Dynasty

by J. S. Hamilton

  Less than a year into his reign, in the spring of 1308, Edward appears to have had little support. Lancaster, it is true, remained at least neutral, but the only other earl to support the king in resisting the call for Gaveston’s exile appears to have been Richmond, absent on the Scottish march, and anyway never a powerful political presence. Other than the elder Despenser and a handful of Edward’s household knights, the king stood isolated. Moreover, it seems certain that he could look for no assistance from overseas. A letter concerning a disputed election at Westminster Abbey, written in the spring of 1308, affords some insight into the perceived attitude of the queen and her father. The writer bluntly asserts that ‘whatever in any way concerns Piers [Gaveston] and his followers, the queen and the earls, the pope...the cardinals and the king of France are delighted to hinder’.9 He goes on to advise his reader to ‘let the queen be so informed of all these things, that out of hatred of Piers she may deign to write specially and secretly to the lord king of France her father, to the pope, to the cardinals, and the lord Charles, brother to the said king of France’. Nor was this merely conspiratorial whispering. Philip and his sister Margaret, Edward I’s widow, were said to have sent 40,000 livres to the earls of Lincoln and Pembroke in order to assist them to proceed against Gaveston; and, if perhaps the sum involved is exaggerated, there seems to have been some substance to this claim.

  Under pressure from all sides, on 18 May, Edward II capitulated. He agreed to send Gaveston back into exile by 25 June. If the king softened the blow of exile somewhat, both for himself and his favourite, by appointing Gaveston as king’s lieutenant in Ireland and sending him to Dublin, the magnates nonetheless had achieved their primary objective of separating king and favourite.

  The king immediately bent all of his powers in a single direction, the recall of Gaveston. In the words of the author of the Vita, ‘he bent one after another to his will, with gifts, promises, and blandishments’. Indeed, even before the favourite had actually departed for Ireland, the king had begun his campaign to reverse the sentence. On 16 June, Edward wrote to both Clement V and Philip IV seeking their support in his cause. A supplementary letter to the pope on the same day specifically sought to have the sentence of excommunication against Gaveston revoked. On the same day, the king also wrote to Otto de Grandson, his personal envoy to the papal curia in Avignon, urging him to act on Gaveston’s behalf. Finally, still on 16 June, Edward made a grant of the town and castle of Blanquefort to Bertrand de Got, nephew and namesake of the pope. Valued at 1500 livres chipotois (£300 sterling) per annum, this grant innocently declared that it was made solely ‘on account of the love we bear towards the most holy father in Christ, the supreme pontiff Clement’. The importance that Edward placed on this business is illustrated by the clerk’s notation that all of these letters were drafted, read and sealed in the king’s presence, who then took them and placed them on his own bed. The appeasement of the pope continued in January 1309 when several hundred pounds were spent on jewels for Clement and, in May of that year, when the right of justice in Budos was conceded to Raymond-Guillaume de Budos, another nephew of the pope. During the same period, the king also made political concessions to the pontiff: for instance, he freed the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, along with the bishops of Glasgow and St Andrews.

  Clement V’s response to Edward’s letters of 16 June was embodied in the papal bull Faciens misericordiam, in which the king was enjoined to cooperate, more fully than he had hitherto done, in the suppression of the Templars. Of equal significance, however, were further letters sent the following day exhorting the king and his barons to make peace, and announcing the dispatch of papal negotiators – including Gaveston’s kinsman, Betrand de Caillau – to achieve this goal. The timing of these two letters, as well as their import, seems more than coincidentally linked, and Edward’s gifts to the pope and his nephews are best seen as part of the same initiative that led him to follow papal directives concerning the Templars more closely. His policy of ‘gifts, promises, and blandishments’, bore fruit by the spring of 1309, when Clement V lifted the pending sentence of excommunication against Gaveston, clearing the way for the favourite’s return.

  In England, too, the combination of gifts, promises and blandishments offered to the magnates, frequently including Templar manors, had the desired effect. By the autumn of 1308, many of the most prominent magnates were once again to be found in the king’s company, witnessing charters, often in favour of each other.

  Not only moderates, such as the earl of Gloucester, returned to the royal fold, but even such intransigent opponents of Gaveston as the earls of Lincoln, Hereford and Warwick were frequently found in the king’s presence. There was also a solicitous tone in the king’s political dealings with the magnates. The St Paul’s annalist reports that, at the Northampton parliament, a concord was achieved between the king and his magnates by the agreement to remove six unnamed counsellors from his presence and to be guided by what the earls should ordain at the next parliament. This parliament, held at Westminster in October, was summoned to discuss further matters that had been raised at the parliament held the previous February, whose fuller discussion had been prevented by ‘certain obstacles’. By March 1309, Edward was able to send an embassy to the pope, declaring that he had obtained the consent of the English magnates, both lay and ecclesiastical, to Gaveston’s return.

  Edward’s father-in-law, the king of France, presented the last barrier to his goal of recovering his favourite. Here, too, Edward undertook a campaign of blandishment and gifts. Already, in May 1308, he had granted the counties of Montreuil and Ponthieu to Queen Isabella for her personal expenses. On 16 June, Edward wrote to Philip IV seeking his assistance in settling the discord between the English king and his magnates. Philip responded by sending negotiators, his brother Louis and Guy, bishop of Soissons. By mid-September, Louis was in England, and by late November he had negotiated a necessary, but unpopular, truce with Scotland. By the following spring, Edward was ready to proceed with the recall. At the Westminster parliament in April 1309, the king requested a grant of taxation and permission to bring Gaveston back from Ireland. The first was conditionally granted pending the king’s addressing a petition of grievances presented on the behalf of the ‘community of the realm’, but the second was flatly refused. Another parliament was called to meet at Stamford in July. Here, the king received a grant of a twenty-fifth, and consent was given for the favourite’s recall.

  In fact, Gaveston had already returned and was at the king’s side in Stamford. A papal bull had arrived in England in June, setting aside Archbishop Winchelsey’s excommunication of the favourite, and Edward was able to present his opponents with a fait accompli. The king did, however, address the grievances presented in the earlier petition with the Statute of Stamford, largely a recapitulation of the Articuli super Cartas of 1300, making it clear that abuses of power by royal officials were at the heart of baronial discontent.

  The autumn of 1309 may have provided a brief respite from the tensions that had, up until now, troubled the relations between king and magnates. On the one hand, Gaveston appears to have attempted to effect a reconciliation with at least some of the earls, most notably the venerable earl of Lincoln. He even acted with Lincoln and Gloucester in early December to suspend the collection of the twenty-fifth, as the terms of the Statute of Stamford had not been upheld.

  Gaveston was here (and in several other minor pieces of business at this time) improbably working as a guardian of the baronial reform. Yet, if the chroniclers are to be believed, at the same time the favourite was once again beginning to control the flow of patronage and to add insult to injury by employing demeaning nicknames to refer to his fellow earls: Joseph the Jew for Pembroke, Black Dog of Arden for Warwick, Burstbelly for Lincoln, and Churl or Fiddler for Lancaster. Over the next few months, tensions once again rose to boiling point.

  The earls refused to attend a ‘secretum parliamentum’ at York in October because of Gavest
on’s presence. At the subsequent Westminster parliament in February 1310, they refused to come into the king’s presence if Gaveston was there, fearing for their safety. It was only after the favourite was sent away that parliament met, and the king’s opponents there demanded, and on 16 March 1310 received, a commission to elect a body of prelates, earls and barons to ordain and establish the estate of the king’s household and realm.

  The work of the Lords Ordainer has been variously interpreted by historians to have had greater or lesser constitutional importance. Although it may be going too far to suggest that the Ordinances of 1311 are nothing more than an expression of personal grievances dressed in constitutional garb, neither is it possible to agree that they represent a clash of diametrically opposed theories of government. By and large, the baronial opposition to Edward II did not so much wish to replace the system of government as to replace the personnel of government. Recent studies of the reign have suggested that there were ‘probably as many “baronial policies” as there were barons’, and ‘probably as many points of view as there were Ordainers’.10 Consequently, while making due allowance for baronial, and royal, awareness of the political discourse that led from the Magna Carta through the Provisions of Westminster to the Ordinances, in the end it is the personal element of the various recensions of the Ordinances that remains central to their understanding, and which shaped the increasingly violent political climate of the rest of the reign.

  Regardless of internal divisions or lack of lofty constitutional principles, the Ordainers moved quickly to set the tone for reform. Even before their formal election, on 19 March 1310, a set of six preliminary ordinances was issued. The emphasis in these preliminary articles, predictably, was on the king’s favouritism and his irregular financial policies: the king was prohibited from making gifts without the counsel and assent of the Ordainers; customs were to be paid into the exchequer to Englishmen so that the king would not need to resort to prises; and foreign merchants were to be arrested and their accounts examined. Provision was also made to support the work of the Ordainers, in London, throughout the duration of their commission. These six preliminary ordinances, like the Statute of Stamford, reflect the concerns, and indeed the language, of the barons and reformers since 1297 (but with an additional emphasis on the king’s gifts – that is to say, patronage) and they would form the basis for the first eight articles of the final Ordinances in 1311. Meanwhile, Edward did not confirm the preliminary ordinances until 2 August 1310, and even then he did not honour them. The king continued to make grants to Gaveston and others, and generally sought to undermine the magnates’ work. This very likely had the undesired effect of hardening the Ordainers’ opposition to the king and his close associates even further.

  The Lords Ordainers set about their work at once. It is impossible to say with certainty who took the leading role in drafting the Ordinances. The earl of Lincoln and Archbishop Winchelsey were both respected statesmen and were considered to be influential by contemporary chroniclers. Nevertheless, the well-informed author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi divided the Ordainers into two groups: genuine reformers led by the earl of Warwick; and another group comprised of the earls of Hereford, Lancaster and Pembroke, who were said to be motivated by their hatred for Piers Gaveston. These four earls were consistently present together in London on occasions when the Ordinances were drafted and seem to have been the core element in framing the document. In August 1310, the earls of Arundel, Hereford, Lancaster and Pembroke refused to leave their business in London to attend the king’s council at Northampton. Similarly, none of them served in person with the king in Scotland in 1310–1311. Lincoln, serving as keeper of the realm in London, threatened to resign this position when, on 28 October 1310, the king ordered the removal of the exchequer and the benches to York by the following Easter. The Ordainers, who would thus have been deprived of expert advice, in contravention of the preliminary ordinances, were said to have dispersed to their own districts following the king’s order, but in February 1311, Hereford, Lancaster, Pembroke and Warwick were all together again in London – as they still were in July – and it may have been during this period that revisions were made to an earlier draft of the Ordinances.

  The king did his best to ignore the implications of the reform commission. He busied himself with a necessary, but ultimately futile, Scottish campaign. In March 1310, Robert Bruce had been able to hold a parliament in St Andrews, at which his right to the Scottish throne was affirmed. Moreover, the Scots were in communication with Edward’s disaffected father-in-law, Philip IV, who was attempting to organize a new crusade. Despite the lack of attendance at a parliament at Northampton in August, the king set a muster date for September in Berwick.

  Among the earls, only Gaveston, Gloucester and Warenne performed their service in person. No significant action took place before the king went into winter quarters, although negotiations with Bruce seem to have been undertaken.

  In February, while still in winter quarters at Berwick, Edward received word that the earl of Lincoln had died. This was a serious blow for the king, for although Lincoln was associated with the reform movement, he was also respected and trusted by both Edward and the magnates. Moreover, his death greatly enhanced both the power and prestige of his son-in-law, Thomas of Lancaster, who was now endowed with a total of five earldoms and quickly emerged as the leading figure in opposition to the king. Although Lancaster travelled north to swear fealty to his cousin for his new lands and titles, he is reported to have refused to cross the Tweed in order to do so.

  Lancaster’s symbolic refusal to endorse Edward’s Scottish campaign, and in some sense his kingship, was a sign of greater conflict to come. Although the king finally crossed the Tweed himself, receiving Lancaster’s fealty at Haggerston, the earl is said to have refused to acknowledge the presence of Gaveston, thereby causing the king and favourite great offence. Although the latter continued to lead fruitless military operations against the Scots from Perth until May, by the spring of 1311 the king’s efforts in Scotland had proved costly and ineffectual. Moreover, his position in London had been weakened both by the death of Lincoln and the dispatch of Gloucester there as custos. In the end, he had no real choice but to return south to face his critics.

  On 3 August 1311, a draft of the Ordinances was sent to the king and, on 16 August, parliament met, the mayor of London having taken steps to safeguard the Ordainers in the city. The Ordinances were finally published on 27 September 1311, just 2 days before their commission was to expire, in the presence of the earls of Arundel, Hereford, Lancaster, Oxford, Pembroke and Warwick. Two weeks later, sealed with the king’s great seal, they were sent to the sheriffs for publication. The primary thrust of the reforms was aimed at the king and his household, but there was also a noteworthy emphasis on the role of parliament, which from now on was to oversee a variety of governmental appointments and functions. There were also articles that called for the abolition of prises and new customs, and for restrictions on royal pardons. Nevertheless, of greatest interest to contemporary chroniclers and presumably the general populace, were the personal clauses, which called for the removal of evil counsellors such as the king’s Italian bankers, the Frescobaldi, French courtiers, the Beaumonts and, of course, Gaveston. The Vita Edwardi Secundi claims that ‘there was one of those Ordinances that more than the rest distressed the king, to wit the expulsion of Piers Gaveston and his exile’. One might argue that it was also most important to the magnates, as in late November 1311 a supplementary set of ordinances, often referred to as the ‘Household Ordinances’, was issued, which specifically named 27 persons to be excluded from the king’s household. Of these, no fewer than 18, two-thirds of those named, had links with the favourite. This supplement is generally thought to have been the work of the earls of Lancaster and Warwick alone, from now on the most stalwart supporters of the Ordinances, and it is eloquent testimony to the limited nature of their reforming vision.

  Edward II vigorously res
isted the implementation of the Ordinances, although they dominated political thought and activity in the next decade. As early as 12 January 1312, the king issued a proclamation that the Ordinances should be observed only in so far as they were not prejudicial to himself. Later in the year, Edward sent a delegation to the pope at the Council of Vienne asking for the Ordinances to be annulled should they prove prejudicial to the crown. Similar embassies were also sent to the King of France. In the protracted negotiations between the king and his magnates following Gaveston’s death, which stretched through to November 1313, Edward II determinedly avoided confirmation of the Ordinances. This policy, however, proved impracticable after the disaster at Bannockburn (24 June 1314) and, with both his Scottish and domestic policy in disarray, the king was forced to allow the baronial reforms to go forward.

  For Edward II, in the autumn of 1312, the most immediate consequence of the Ordinances was that Gaveston was exiled once again, departing the realm from Dover on 4 November. On the strength of their past experience, the magnates had insisted that Gaveston be exiled from all English territories including Ireland, Gascony and Ponthieu. Although the evidence is uncertain, it seems likely that Gaveston, unwelcome and unsafe in France, made his way to Flanders.