Edward II: The Unconventional King (12 page)

Edward exchanged letters with his cousin and enemy, the earl of Lancaster, in late January. The content of these letters is unknown, but they are unlikely to have been amicable. Probably Lancaster had demanded Gaveston’s surrender or immediate return to exile, which, of course, Edward refused.
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He gave a pound each to three minstrels for their performance on 29 January, and sent Queen Isabella the expenses for her journey north in early February.
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Around the same time, the Ordainers gathered at St Paul’s in London to discuss their next moves. Despite their anger with the king, they were reluctant to wage war on him, a thing not lightly done.
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Five of the earls, Lancaster, Warwick, Hereford, Pembroke and Arundel, bound themselves by oath to capture Piers.
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In York on 20 February, after Margaret’s churching – the purification ceremony forty days after childbirth – Edward and the proud parents the Gavestons celebrated the birth of Joan, Edward’s great-niece. Edward paid the huge sum of forty marks to celebrate Margaret’s purification, and the guests were entertained by his minstrel ‘King Robert’.
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A few days earlier, Edward had given Robert a pound to buy himself a ‘targe’ or shield, to use in a dance involving swords and shields, and paid two pounds to a minstrel sent to him by Queen Isabella’s eldest brother Louis, king of Navarre, who performed for him.
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Edward took minstrels with him everywhere he went and paid them handsomely, giving his singer Master William Milly two shillings a day, as much as a knight earned.
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He had in 1305/06 spent the wildly excessive amount of £1,268 on minstrels and buying palfrey horses, a sum of money which reveals much of Edward’s extravagance.
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Meanwhile, Isabella made her way north, remaining in frequent contact with Edward via her messenger John Moigne and sending him a basket of lampreys. Her 200-mile journey took almost three weeks, which indicates how painfully slow medieval travel could be.
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Shortly after Isabella’s arrival in York, she and Edward conceived their first child, the future Edward III, who was born on Monday 13 November 1312. Counting back thirty-eight weeks, roughly the length of a full-term pregnancy from the time of conception, brings us to 21 February (1312 was a leap year). On this date, Isabella’s Household Book shows her to have been at Bishopthorpe, just south of York, and she probably arrived in the city later that day, or early the following day.
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There is no doubt whatsoever that Edward was the father of Edward III, and we may assume that the boy was conceived within a few days of Isabella’s arrival in York. The king and queen remained together in the city until early April, so even if Edward III arrived prematurely, there is no reason to think that Edward was not his biological father. Easter Sunday fell on 26 March in 1312, so Edward and Isabella, now twenty-seven and sixteen respectively, must have conceived their son during Lent, when intercourse was forbidden. This hardly lends credence to the notion that Edward slept with his wife unwillingly; Lent gave him the perfect excuse not to have sex with Isabella, if he didn’t want to.

No record of the fourteenth century gives even the slightest hint that anyone believed Isabella had taken a lover and that Edward was not his son’s real father. It is impossible that the sixteen-year-old queen of England could have conducted an affair and kept it secret. Although Isabella did have a relationship with Roger Mortimer many years later, this occurred when she was in France and beyond Edward’s influence, after their marriage had broken down and long after she had borne her four children by Edward. This cannot be taken to mean that Mortimer, or anyone else, had been her lover years before. It is impossible for Mortimer to have fathered Edward III, as he was in Ireland in 1312. He was also in Ireland when Edward and Isabella conceived their next two children in 1315 and 1317, and away from court in 1320 when their youngest was conceived.
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It was only in the late twentieth century that speculations about Edward III’s paternity arose, because Edward II has become widely seen as a gay icon and it is therefore sometimes assumed that he must have been incapable of sexual relations with women. However, the existence of Edward’s illegitimate son Adam demonstrates that he wasn’t repelled by intercourse with women, and he may have enjoyed it enormously, for all we know. No one in the fourteenth century doubted that he fathered Isabella’s children, and there is no reason at all for us to doubt it.

Sometime in March 1312, the archbishop of Canterbury ‘seized his sword and struck Piers with anathema’; that is, he excommunicated Gaveston.
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By mid-March, the anathematised Gascon had left York and gone to Scarborough, and Edward gave Gaveston’s messenger the remarkable sum of fifty pounds, the equivalent of many years’ salary, for bringing him ‘good news’ of his friend, whatever that might have been – perhaps that Gaveston had decided to stay in England.
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At Easter, Edward continued a pleasant tradition of his father’s: if the king was caught in bed on Easter Monday, his ‘captors’ had the right to drag him out, and he had to pay them a large ransom to free himself. Catching Edward still asleep was a far from difficult task, as he was a late riser, and in 1311 he had paid twenty pounds to three of his household knights who dragged him out of bed.
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Some kind of ceremony was performed at night-time: later in his reign Edward gave gifts of one pound and two pounds respectively to the chamber valets Jack Coppehouse and Jack Pyk for ‘what he did when the king went to bed’, and five pounds to Sir Giles Beauchamp and ten marks (six pounds sixty-six pence) to Sir Richard Lovel ‘for what he did in the king’s chamber when he went to bed’.
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At Easter 1312, Edward paid Isabella’s ladies and damsels forty marks as their ransom for the pleasant custom of ‘capturing’ him in bed. One of the damsels was Alice Leygrave, Edward’s former wet nurse, called ‘the king’s mother, who suckled him in his youth’.
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By the end of March 1312, Gaveston was back at York, and on 1 April, Edward told his father-in-law Philip IV that he had to hasten to Berwick-on-Tweed, as Robert Bruce was besieging the town.
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However, he had no intention of going there. Piers Gaveston was far more important to Edward than his enemy seizing such a vital port, and besides, his own men were holding the Scottish border against him to prevent him sending Gaveston to Robert Bruce for protection. On 5 April, the two men left for Newcastle, perhaps because it was much further north and they felt safer there. Queen Isabella had joined them by 22 April, but soon moved on the nine miles to Tynemouth Priory, probably because Gaveston was ill: two men were paid ten marks each for looking after him.
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Edward celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday on 25 April, and borrowed forty pounds from the Genoese merchant Antonio di Pessagno to buy ‘large, white pearls’ for Isabella, probably his response to the news of her pregnancy.
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That the king felt himself to be in danger in his own realm is demonstrated by his grant to Gaveston of the custody of Scarborough Castle in early April: he ordered Gaveston to deliver the castle to no one but himself, except ‘if it shall happen that the king is brought there a prisoner’.
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On the day he departed for Newcastle, Edward (unrealistically) ordered his vassals the counts of Foix and Armagnac and the lord of Albret – the three greatest territorial lords in the south of France – and another 120 Gascon viscounts and barons to bring themselves and armed men and horses to him, to aid him in the conflict against his barons, which he knew was inevitable. Three days later, he excused himself from a council of French peers in Paris, which he was eligible to attend as duke of Aquitaine and count of Ponthieu.
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Meanwhile, the earl of Lancaster was slowly making his way north with the intention of capturing Gaveston, holding jousting tournaments on the way as an excuse to assemble armed men. On 3 May, Edward and Gaveston learned of his imminent arrival at Newcastle, which took them completely by surprise. They fled the few miles to Tynemouth to join Isabella, escaping Lancaster by only a few hours, leaving most of Edward’s household behind.
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On 5 May they left by sea, to the secure and fortified castle of Scarborough. Knowing that he and Gaveston would have to spend a few days in a small boat bobbing about on the North Sea, a rough and bleak prospect even in May, Edward sent Isabella by land instead, and they arranged to meet again at York. Isabella was in the first trimester of pregnancy, when the risk of miscarriage is high, and either she or the king decided that travelling by land would be a safer option for her.

The
Trokelowe
chronicle, written at St Albans (270 miles from Tynemouth) sometime after 1330, claims that Isabella begged Edward in tears not to leave her, but he callously abandoned her anyway despite her pregnancy, concerned only with Gaveston.
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This is extremely improbable and no other source mentions the story. It is highly likely that
Trokelowe
confused this event with another occasion when the queen was at Tynemouth and this time truly in danger, ten years later.
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It took Edward and Gaveston a full five days to sail down the coast from Tynemouth to Scarborough, a long and dreadfully uncomfortable journey, especially for a pregnant woman.
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King and favourite arrived at Scarborough on 10 May. Edward left Gaveston there and set out for Knaresborough, where he spent several days at Gaveston’s castle and where some of his household joined him after travelling to the town by land. The king then went on to York, where he met Isabella on the 14th, only nine days after he had supposedly abandoned her at Tynemouth.
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Clearly their meeting there was a prior arrangement, and Edward paid the queen’s controller twenty pounds for the expenses of her journey on 16 May.
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Isabella was so anxious to be reunited with her husband that she left most of her belongings behind at South Shields, and ignored a letter sent to her by her uncle the earl of Lancaster, promising that he would rid her of Gaveston’s presence.
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Nothing indicates that Isabella thought her husband had abandoned her or that she was angry with him for doing so, or that she wanted to stay away from him, or that she had any interest in acting against him, or that she disliked him, or even that she particularly desired Piers Gaveston’s removal from her life. Records of Isabella’s pregnancy in 1312 with the future King Edward III of England are sadly missing, though entries from Edward II’s accounts of 1316 when she was pregnant with their second child show that he bought cushions for her carriage so that she could travel in greater comfort, and he is hardly likely to have been less concerned with her welfare in 1312 during a more important pregnancy. Given that Edward had bought his wife expensive pearls in late April, it would be very odd if he carelessly abandoned her to danger only a few days later.

The earl of Lancaster seized the baggage train of Edward and Gaveston, which they had been forced to leave behind at Tynemouth, and which included a gold ring with an enormous ruby called ‘the Cherry’ and a gold cup studded with jewels bequeathed to the king by Queen Eleanor, either his mother Eleanor of Castile or grandmother Eleanor of Provence. Lancaster took possession of sixty-three horses, including a bay and a black rouncy with stars on their foreheads, an iron-grey war-horse and a black horse from Edward’s stud at Woodstock.
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Edward seethed over the loss of his many valuable possessions, and pointed out a few months later that ‘if any lesser man had done it, he could be found guilty of theft and rightly condemned by a verdict of robbery with violence’.
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By leaving Gaveston at Scarborough, Edward made a bad mistake: although the castle was well-fortified, it was not provisioned for a siege. Four men arrived to besiege Gaveston in the castle. One was John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, the only earl loyal to Edward the previous year, but recently persuaded by the archbishop of Canterbury to join the pursuit of the hated favourite. Another was Henry Percy, whose descendants became earls of Northumberland later in the fourteenth century. The third was Edward’s cousin Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke, and the fourth Robert, Lord Clifford. Edward desperately tried to raise an army in York, with a conspicuous lack of success, but, just in case, the earl of Lancaster sat with his army between Scarborough and York to prevent the king relieving the siege.
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Gaveston’s sister was in the castle with him when the siege began on 10 May, the day Edward left him there.
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A week later, the king ineffectually ordered Surrey, Pembroke, Percy and Clifford ‘to desist from besieging Scarborough Castle’, although he managed to keep in touch with Gaveston via letters.
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On 19 May, however, with little other choice, Gaveston surrendered. He had few provisions, the castle was under constant assault by siege engines, and he must have known how little support he had and how futile his resistance was.
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Certainly, he also knew that Edward would not be able to come to his rescue, and came out of the castle to negotiate terms. They were surprisingly lenient, so much so that the hostile author of the
Flores
assumed Edward must have bribed Pembroke.
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Another source described the arrangement as the barons submitting to Gaveston, not vice versa.
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Gaveston would be held under house arrest at his own castle of Wallingford until he appeared before parliament to account for his actions, and was to be kept safely at all times. If he or the king disputed the terms of the truce, he would be free to return to Scarborough Castle. The deadline given for parliament to decide his fate was 1 August, and if this date passed with no decision, Gaveston would again be free to return to Scarborough.
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Edward himself played a large role in this agreement, and the
Vita
states that ‘the matter had been put forward by his own counsel’.
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He surely hoped to come to some arrangement by that date, and free Gaveston. It was even said that he was prepared to grant the king of France custody of Gascony, if he and the pope would help Edward to protect Gaveston.
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For Edward even to consider this, and to acknowledge Bruce as king of Scotland is proof of his deep love for Piers Gaveston, and his willingness to do just about anything to keep his friend safe. One wonders why he didn’t just hand over the keys of his kingdom to the barons while he was at it. From around 26 to 28 May 1312, the earls of Pembroke and Surrey, and Henry Percy, met Edward at St Mary’s Abbey. Whether Piers Gaveston was with them is not certain, as he is not mentioned. It is also not clear if he and Edward saw each other at this time; it is possible that Gaveston was under guard, and kept away from the king.
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If they did not see each other, then 10 May 1312, the day Edward left Gaveston at Scarborough, was the last time the two men ever met.