The Demon's Brood

by Desmond Seward

  Sir William Wallace was caught near Glasgow in August 1305, betrayed by a fellow Scot. A giant, taller than Edward, his appearance was ideally suited for a show trial at Westminster Hall, during which he was made to wear a laurel crown and not allowed to reply to such charges as making English captives of both sexes strip naked and sing before they were tortured to death. Hanged, drawn and quartered three weeks after his capture, as savagely as possible, his quarters were sent for display in Scotland while his head was set up over London Bridge.

  Edward’s dream was wrecked by Robert the Bruce, Earl of Carrick (grandson of John Balliol’s competitor for the Scots crown), whom the king had failed to reward adequately. In February 1306, before the high altar of the Franciscan church at Dumfries, Robert knifed John Comyn of Badenoch, the former Guardian of Scotland who might have stopped him from claiming the throne. Then he had himself crowned King of Scots at Scone on 25 March by his mistress Isabel, Countess of Buchan, sister to the Earl of Fife – the hereditary enthroner. At first, his cause seemed hopeless, the English calling him ‘Hob in the Moors’.

  Any nobleman who supported Bruce was executed horribly if he was caught by Edward, while rank and file troops taken prisoner were hanged or beheaded on the spot. Nor did ladies escape. Robert’s sister Mary Bruce and the Countess of Buchan, who had crowned him, were imprisoned in wooden cages hung from towers, although they were fed regularly and provided with privies.

  The heir

  Bruce’s decision to claim the throne of Scotland was based on the calculation that Edward could not live long, and on a low opinion of his heir – whom Bruce must have met at the siege of Stirling. The Anglo-Scots regime had no chance of surviving without a strong man.

  In 1301 the seventeen-year-old Prince Edward had been proclaimed Prince of Wales at Caernarfon. The king did his best to train the youth, who accompanied him on the Scottish campaigns. When he was knighted at Whitsun 1306, his father gave a Feast of the Swans at Westminster, when two swans with gilded feathers were brought in, escorted by trumpeters. The king, who had come to the palace in a litter, rose and swore by God and the swans never to rest until he had defeated the crowned traitor and the perjured nation (Bruce and the Scots), after which he would go on Crusade. Then his son rose too, swearing never to sleep twice in the same place before avenging his father’s wrongs.

  The king had no illusions about his successor. In 1305, when the treasurer Langton complained that Prince Edward had hunted unlawfully in his woods, using abusive language, the king forbade the prince to come within 30 miles of court and stopped his allowance; for six months the young man and his household starved, until the queen intervened. Early in 1307 he asked Langton to ask his father to make his friend Piers Gaveston Count of Ponthieu. Summoning him, the king shouted, ‘Why do you want to give land away when you never get hold of any for yourself, you misbegotten son of a whore? As there’s a God, if it wasn’t that I might wreck the kingdom, you’d never inherit anything from me!’ Grabbing Edward’s hair with both hands, he tore out as much as he could until he was exhausted, then threw him out of the room.27

  The last campaign

  By his mid-sixties Edward was slowing down. Referring to his return from campaigning in Scotland towards the end of the reign, the chronicler Langtoft chides him for ‘long morning’s sleep, delight in luxury and surfeit in the evenings’.28 He suffered from insomnia, stating in a statute of 1306 that he could not sleep, ‘tossed about by the waves of various thoughts’ in worrying over what was best for his subjects.29 Nonetheless, he insisted on going to Scotland that autumn after Aymer de Valence’s victory over Bruce at Methven. However, he collapsed at Lanercost Priory in Cumberland where, joined by Queen Margaret, he was forced to spend the winter – glass windows being fitted to their apartments. Despite difficulty in walking, in March 1307 he managed to hold a parliament at Carlisle.

  On 3 July, despite suffering from dysentery, King Edward set out to crush the Scots, riding at the head of his troops instead of in a litter. Had the king lived another year, Bruce would have been a dead man – but he could only cover 2 miles a day, and died in his servants’ arms at a hamlet in the marshes near Burgh-by-Sands, not far from the Solway Firth, on 7 July. There is a story that on his deathbed he ordered his son to have the flesh boiled off his bones and buried, and then to carry the bones into battle against the Scots.

  Retrospect

  Edward I died on the edge of an abyss.30 Scotland still refused to accept his rule, Wales only did so under compulsion and Gascony remained at risk, while tax demands had alienated barons and clergy without raising enough money – by 1307 he was £200,000 in debt. Even so, he almost succeeded in unifying Britain and was unrivalled as a lawmaker. It is not easy to warm to a ruler who added hanging, drawing and quartering to the penal code, yet England never had a greater man on the throne.

  7

  The Changeling – Edward II

  One of the best examples of the brutal and brainless athlete established on a throne

  Thomas Frederick Tout1

  The Battle of Old Byland, 1322

  In August 1322 Edward II invaded Scotland to avenge Bannockburn, to find Robert the Bruce had withdrawn behind the Forth, taking everything edible with him. Starving, the English king and his troops retreated with their loot – a single, lame cow. Recuperating at Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire, he suddenly learned that Robert was at the top of Sutton Bank, a few miles away. The Earl of Richmond confronted the Scots on high ground above the abbey, at Old Byland, but the English were so frightened that they ran ‘like hares chased by greyhounds’ and the earl was captured.2 Leaving behind his jewels, Edward fled to Bridlington from where a boat took him to safety. A contemporary comments that the king had always been ‘chicken hearted and prone to disaster in war, having already run in terror before them [the Scots] in Scotland’.3

  A defeat on English soil, Old Byland was even more humiliating than Bannockburn and confirmed what the king’s subjects had suspected: he was not up to his job. It also fuelled a suspicion that he was a changeling, not even a Plantagenet.

  ‘a perverted weakling’

  Winston Churchill’s cruel verdict on Edward II derived from the Victorians. ‘He is the first king since the Conquest who was not a man of business’, thundered Stubbs, ‘his tastes at the best are those of the athlete and the artisan; vulgar pomp, heartless extravagance, lavish improvidence, selfish indolence . . . there is nothing in Edward, miserable as his fate is, that invites or deserves sympathy.’4 Tout was kinder. ‘It was not so much the king’s vices as his idleness and incompetence which his subjects complained of’, he argued. ‘If he did not like work, he was not very vicious; he stuck loyally to his friends and was fairly harmless, being nobody’s enemy so much as his own.’ Yet in essence Tout agreed with Stubbs.5

  Modern scholarship has unearthed nothing that might temper the Victorian view. Edward was incapable of facing the world without a strong man at his side, invariably someone whom everybody else detested. Reliance on unsuitable favourites caused constant crises, while his later years resembled a dress rehearsal for the Wars of the Roses. In his most recent biographer’s words, Edward was ‘a lamentable character, his reign a shambles’.6

  Early years

  Edward was born in Caernarfon Castle on 25 April 1284, the youngest of fourteen, including four elder brothers who died young. He thus became heir to the throne when a few months old. Growing up in the shadow of a terrifying father did little for his self-confidence. When he was thirteen, the king gave him a companion of his own age, whom it was hoped might be a good influence. This was a clever, athletic boy of knightly family from Béarn called Piers de Gabaston – anglicized to ‘Gaveston’.

  Edward II was in Scotland when his father died. Within weeks he withdrew the army, after reinforcing the Perth and Stirling garrisons, and appointing Aymer de Valence as guardian. Then he sent a message for Piers to come to him at once. In October he buried his father at Westminster Abbey in a
massive tomb of grey Purbeck marble that lacked any inscription until the sixteenth century when words in Latin were carved on it:

  Edward the First, Hammer of the Scots. Keep Troth

  There was no effigy. The omission has been explained as a tribute to the late king’s austere dignity or an attempt to copy St Louis’s sepulchre at Saint-Denis. But the suspicion remains that Edward wanted to forget a nightmarish parent. He settled another grudge by sending Bishop Langton, the treasurer with whom he had quarrelled, to the Tower.

  What we know about Edward comes from chroniclers who did not admire him. They include two secular priests, Adam of Murimuth and Geoffrey le Baker, and a Benedictine, Robert of Reading, who loathed him. Another Benedictine, John Trokelowe of St Albans, took a kinder view. The best source is the Life, wrongly attributed to a monk of Malmesbury, written by an unidentified, well-informed, baronial bureaucrat, who tried to be fair despite a bias in favour of the magnates.7

  Gaveston

  Less than a month after Edward’s accession, Piers Gaveston was made Earl of Cornwall, a gift to a squire of an earldom intended by the late king for one of his younger sons. This outraged the magnates. In November Piers married the king’s niece, sister of the Earl of Gloucester, who was England’s richest magnate. Encouraged by Edward, he then arranged a tournament at Wallingford, hiring champion jousters from all over England to fight for him, so that the other team, including several earls and barons, were quickly knocked out of their saddles. Had he behaved deferentially, the magnates might have accepted him, but he treated no one as an equal except the king. On 20 December, before leaving for his wedding in France, Edward appointed the new earl guardian of the kingdom.

  Wedding and coronation

  The king’s marriage to the twelve-year-old Isabella of France at Boulogne on 25 January 1308 was attended by her father Philip IV, who was no less alarming than Edward I. When his son-in-law asked what dowry he proposed to give his daughter, Philip replied that it had been given when he returned Gascony. But Isabella was welcome in England, for re-establishing the link between the two dynasties and making less likely another war across the Channel.

  Met by Gaveston at Dover on 7 February, Edward embraced him again and again, giving him all his wedding presents. Since Archbishop Winchelsey was in exile, Edward and his child bride were crowned by the Bishop of Winchester at Westminster on 25 February. He swore his coronation oaths in French because of his poor Latin, making a new promise, to maintain laws chosen by the community of the realm.

  Piers carried the crown, annoying the magnates still further. At the coronation banquet he dressed in purple sewn with pearls, as if to belittle other lords in cloth of gold. He had been entrusted with organizing the banquet, which was badly cooked and badly served. ‘Seeing the king prefer sitting next to Piers rather than the queen, made her two uncles so angry that they went home to France’, says a London chronicler, who adds, ‘As a result, rumours circulated that the king was more in love with this artful and malevolent man than his bride, that truly elegant lady, who is a most beautiful woman.’8

  The man

  Tall and well built, Edward had a weak little face hiding behind a beard. Naturally indolent, his priority was enjoying himself. What his nobles disliked so much were his amusements and his friends. He preferred farm work to jousting – thatching, digging and hedging, shoeing horses, besides rowing and running races. Another pastime was play acting – the third-rate Bishop of Worcester, Walter Reynolds, owed his promotion to Canterbury to thespian skills. ‘Instead of lords and ladies, whose company he avoided, he mixed with harlots, singers and jesters, with carters, diggers and ditchers, with rowers, sailors and boatmen, and went in for heavy drinking’, says the chronicler Ranulph Higden, adding that the king was dangerously indiscreet and petty minded, losing his temper with those around him for the least fault.9 His liking for low society may have been due to mental derangement.10

  Tout’s description of Edward as brutal and brainless has been questioned, but the more one learns the apter it seems. His brutality showed in a cruel streak, his lack of brains in an absence of any understanding of business or politics, and an inability to read the Latin needed for administration. Uninterested in beautiful things other than jewels, his one talent was a flair for verse in Norman French, rarely displayed. Low self-esteem and a paralysing lack of confidence explains his dependence on strong-minded favourites.

  Despite having four children by his queen and another by a mistress, he has gone down to history as a homosexual, largely because of Christopher Marlowe’s play Edward the Second, which is based on an imaginative reading of Holinshed’s Chronicles. Most modern historians disagree with this assessment.11 When the author of the Vita compared the king’s affection for Piers to that of David for Jonathan, he was not thinking of sodomy. A more plausible reason for Gaveston’s dominance is the power of a strong mind over a weak one and the support he gave to a man who suffered from panic attacks – not unlike the reassurance given by an understanding male nurse to a mental defective.

  Among his few personal tastes, other than ‘peasant amusements’, was a fondness for two small palaces. One was King’s Langley in Hertfordshire, given to him by his father in 1302, where he later founded a Dominican priory. The other was Burstwick near Hull, which after belonging briefly to Gaveston became the king’s main residence in the North. ‘Langley and Burstwick stood to Edward II as Osborne and Balmoral to Queen Victoria’, comments Tout.12

  Conventionally pious, he did not inherit the family cult of the Confessor, but showed a marked devotion to St Thomas, making pilgrimages to Canterbury. He also often visited the abbey of St Albans, to which he gave timber for new choir stalls.

  The Ordainers

  The leaders of what became an opposition were mediocrities. ‘Five earldoms and close kinship with the two greatest monarchs in the west gave neither dignity, policy, patriotism nor common sense to that most impossible of all medieval politicians, earl Thomas of Lancaster’, says Tout, who adds he was ‘sulky, vindictive, self-seeking, brutal and vicious’.13 John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, was a disreputable nonentity, while the bookish Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick was treacherous. On the other hand, Aylmer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, was impeccably honourable as well as eminently sane. So too was the aged Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, who had been among the late king’s most trusted ministers.

  Gaveston’s worst sin was depriving them of their role as the monarch’s advisers. Jointly, they took an oath to make him leave the country and surrender his earldom, arriving in London for the parliament of spring 1308 with armed retainers. Their spokesman was Lincoln, who had tried to make Piers behave sensibly but had been rebuffed. Complaining that the favourite was squandering the Crown’s revenues, he insisted on his banishment. Edward dared not refuse. Giving up his earldom, Piers went to Ireland as lieutenant. Archbishop Winchelsey, who had returned to England more pugnacious than ever, announced he would excommunicate him should he dare to come back.

  Even so, Edward secured Gaveston’s return next year, by promising parliament to satisfy grievances such as failure to hear petitions and to improve the currency, disarming Lincoln, Hereford and Warwick with flattery. Philip IV, who had paid two of the earls to plot against Piers after complaints from Queen Isabella, withdrew his opposition when she was given the county of Ponthieu, while in exchange for more rigorous persecution of the Templars, the pope blocked Winchelsey’s threat of excommunication. In July 1309 Gaveston rejoined the king, who met him when he landed at Chester, regranting his earldom and estates.

  He made himself more disliked than ever, giving his fellow earls nicknames that circulated widely. Lancaster was the ‘Churl’, the ‘Rangy Pig’ or the ‘Fiddler’, Warwick the ‘Black Dog of Arden’ (from foaming at the mouth when in a rage), Pembroke ‘Joseph the Jew’ and Lincoln ‘Burst Belly’, while Gloucester, the only one who tolerated him, was ‘Whoreson’ – an unkind allusion to the dowager countess’s hasty second marriag
e. Nobody saw Edward without Gaveston’s approval and he had a stranglehold on patronage. People suspected he was a warlock – there were rumours of his mother having been burned as a witch.

  In the autumn he had a Lancaster retainer sacked from the royal household. ‘Watch out, Piers’, warns the Vita. ‘The earl of Lancaster will pay you back.’14 At Christmas the earls refused to come to court if he was present, telling Edward that while Piers was in the royal chamber they did not feel safe. They attended parliament in March 1310 on condition he stayed away. When it met, they declared the realm had fallen into a perilous condition since the late king’s death and could only be saved by an elected council. The king reluctantly agreed to the election of ‘Ordainers’, who included Archbishop Winchelsey and Lancaster with some of Edward I’s old ministers. Then, on Gaveston’s advice, Edward tried to distract them with a campaign in Scotland.

  In September 1311 the Ordainers demanded that the king ‘live of his own’ and observe the charters, and that royal gifts and appointments to high office should be controlled by a twice yearly parliament. His household was purged of unpopular officials, while foreign merchants collecting the customs were arrested – a measure aimed at the royal banker, Amerigo de Frescobaldi, who was ruined. What hurt Edward most was the ordinance against Gaveston, accused of estranging the king from his natural advisers, unlawfully accepting estates and protecting criminals. He was exiled as a public enemy.

  The end of Gaveston