Edward II: The Unconventional King (4 page)

Little more than a year later, Edward I was dead. Soon after recalling Piers Gaveston on hearing the news of his father’s death on 11 July 1307, Edward II set out from London, and reached Burgh-by-Sands in eight days. There, he viewed the embalmed body of his father, and supposedly wept for him.
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At about the same time, a letter announcing Gaveston’s return to England reached him.
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This was breakneck speed considering that Edward’s messenger had to cross the Channel and find Gaveston, busily covering himself with glory on the jousting fields of the Continent. No doubt he cut a fine figure with the outfits Edward had sent him, one of which was of green velvet decorated with pearls, gold and silver piping, and gold aiguillettes. He was certainly not short of money, as Edward had recently sent him the enormous sum of £260.
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Edward’s weeping is merely a conventional expression, and it may be that he did not grieve much for Edward I. In 1305, the two men quarrelled, and the king refused to allow his wayward son to enter his presence for much of that summer. Not long before his death, Edward I tore out handfuls of Edward’s hair, called him an ‘ill-born son of a whore’, and perhaps even threw him to the ground, during another dreadful quarrel.
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On the other hand, disputes between the king and his heir were common in the Middle Ages – as Edward’s biographer Professor Seymour Phillips points out, Edward I himself clashed with his father Henry III on occasion – and there is no real reason to suppose that Edward I found his heir particularly disappointing or unpromising; the notion that he did is based on hindsight after Edward’s failed reign.
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Neither, apparently, did anyone else, and the author of the
Vita Edwardi Secundi
comments that Edward as prince of Wales showed considerable promise and raised his future subjects’ hopes (but dashed them when he became king).
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It can hardly be doubted, though, that in many ways Edward II’s character and behaviour were utterly unconventional by the standards of his time and position. Most eccentrically of all, ‘from his youth he devoted himself in private to the art of rowing and driving carts, of digging ditches and thatching houses, as was commonly said, and also with his companions at night to various works of ingenuity and skill, and to other pointless trivial occupations unsuitable for the son of a king’.
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As well as digging, thatching and driving carts, Edward loved building walls, swimming, hedging, working with wrought iron and shoeing horses, and not only did he enjoy such hobbies, he did them well: he was ‘very skilful in what he delighted to employ his hands upon’.
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The contradictory king, ‘bountiful and splendid in living’, spent vast sums on clothes and jewels and took delight in dressing lavishly, yet was equally happy to go out into the fields or shimmy up a roof, which he would hardly have done while wearing all his court finery.
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How Edward came to take part in and enjoy such hobbies is not known, but perhaps his interest arose during his childhood at Langley.

Edward revelled in his own enormous strength and excellent health, and was devoted to the outdoors and exacting physical exercise. But whereas nowadays he would no doubt be seen as an excellent role model for a nation with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, in the fourteenth century Edward’s love of rustic pursuits met with a total lack of comprehension from his contemporaries, who entirely failed to see the appeal. Worse, his hobbies attracted scathing contempt from the magnates, chroniclers, his own household and even the pope, in an era when knights and nobles did knightly and noble things like jousting, hunting and fighting, and peasants did peasant things like digging, building and thatching, and never the twain should meet. Edward’s great-grandfather Count Raymond-Berenger V of Provence had even passed laws prohibiting the knightly class from undertaking the tasks of villeins.
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The king’s willingness to ‘give himself up always to improper works and occupations’ was deemed important enough to be mentioned many years later at his deposition as one of the reasons for his unsuitability to be king, not only because such occupations were considered incompatible with his royal dignity, but because they led him ‘to neglect the business of his kingdom’.
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Edward did not only appreciate the pursuits of the lowborn, he also enjoyed their company, and whereas a king with the common touch would be applauded today, the fourteenth-century mind found this fact abhorrent. ‘He forsook the company of lords, and fraternised with harlots, singers, actors, carters, ditchers, oarsmen, sailors, and others who practise the mechanical arts,’ sniffed the chronicler Ranulph Higden.
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Edward’s enjoyment of the company of his lowborn subjects is almost certainly indirect evidence that he could speak English, as such people would not have spoken French, the language of the elite.

On 20 July 1307, Edward II was proclaimed king of England and lord of Ireland at Carlisle Castle, ‘by descent and heritage’, and added two more titles to the four he already held.
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He may not yet have realised it, but his father had left him an extraordinarily difficult legacy: empty coffers, an unwinnable war in Scotland, unfriendly relations with France, dissatisfied, restless magnates.
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Even a man more suited to the role he had been born into might have struggled to fulfil this position adequately, and Edward II, as he would soon demonstrate, was not suited to the role of king.

In the great hall of Carlisle Castle, Edward II sat in solitary splendour and watched the earls and lords who had attended his father before his death come before him and in order of rank, drop to one knee, kiss his hand, and swear homage and fealty to him as their liege lord. What these men thought of their new king cannot be known. Certainly they knew of his love for Piers Gaveston, almost certainly of his unseemly rustic pursuits, and perhaps felt uneasy about the future. But whatever they, and Edward’s subjects, might have thought of his strange hobbies and his abilities, or lack of them, nobody ever criticised his appearance. He was every inch a king. The contemporary author of the
Vita Edwardi Secundi
(Life of Edward II), who knew him well and who criticised him far more often than not, described him as ‘tall and strong, a fine figure of a handsome man’. In 1300, aged sixteen, he was said to be ‘of a well-proportioned and handsome person’, and after his accession, ‘handsome in body and great of strength’, ‘physically he was one of the strongest men in his realm’, ‘elegant, of outstanding strength’, and ‘a handsome man, strong of body and limb’.
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He had a moustache and beard, and fair curly or wavy hair, which he wore parted in the middle, sometimes held in place with a circlet, and falling almost to his shoulders. He must have been about 6 feet or a little more: his father stood 6 feet 2 inches, and his son Edward III’s life-sized death mannequin measured 5 feet 10½ inches. Edward II was probably taller than his son, however, as the author of the
Vita
remarked on his height, and the chronicler Thomas Walsingham said that Edward III was ‘not excessively tall’.
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Around 23 July, the new king supervised the departure of his father’s funeral procession as it began its long journey south to Westminster. The procession was led by Anthony Bek, bishop of Durham and the only Englishman in history to hold the title of patriarch of Jerusalem, whom Edward called ‘our entire and certain friend’.
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Edward left Carlisle on 31 July and crossed the Scottish border with his army, or rather his father’s army, to march the 30 miles to Dumfries. Prior to his death, Edward I had intended to hunt down Robert Bruce, defeat him utterly, and execute him with all the considerable brutality the age was capable of. In March 1306, Bruce had had himself crowned king of Scots at Scone Abbey, a few weeks after stabbing his greatest enemy and rival John ‘the Red Comyn’ to death in the Greyfriars church in Dumfries. This act followed a ten-year interregnum in Scotland, and the previous king, John Balliol, removed from the throne in 1296, was still alive in Picardy with his son, another Edward (who had dined with Edward of Caernarfon in 1293). English kings did not claim the throne of Scotland, to which they had no right, but felt entitled to interfere in Scottish affairs and believed that the Scottish kings owed them fealty for their kingdom. Edward I and his son refused to acknowledge Robert Bruce as king of Scots, and neither did the pope, thanks to Bruce’s sacrilegious murder of Comyn in church. After his inauguration as king, Bruce fled to the west of Scotland with his only remaining brother – yet another Edward – and his few supporters; most of Scotland was dominated politically by the powerful Comyn faction, who, understandably, were as keen as Edward I to find and execute him. In England, ‘King Hob’, as Bruce was derisively known, was considered a rebel and a traitor, having previously been an ally of Edward I, and much of Edward II’s reign would be taken up with endless campaigns to defeat Bruce and assume what he considered his rightful position as overlord of Scotland.

On 6 August 1307, Edward granted the earldom of Cornwall to Piers Gaveston, possibly without Gaveston’s prior knowledge, as Edward would later claim to the pope.
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Although Edward’s earls later complained bitterly about Gaveston’s advancement, all but one of them, Warwick, put their seals to the charter, and it is not true, as the
Annales Paulini
claim, that the barons later had the charter burnt: it still exists in the National Archives in Kew.
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The earldom of Cornwall was Edward’s own inheritance: the previous earl, Edmund, nephew of Henry III, died in 1300, and as he had no children, nieces or nephews, the earldom passed to his first cousin Edward I as Edmund’s nearest male heir, and thence to Edward II.
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Edward and Piers Gaveston were reunited at Dumfries, sometime in August. This must have been an extremely emotional occasion for Edward, who probably loved Gaveston more than he loved any other person in his life. The flamboyant Piers, whose family took its name from the Béarnais village of Gabaston close to the Pyrenees, was of noble birth, the second of the four sons of Arnaud de Gabaston or Gaveston and Claramonde de Marsan, and far from being the low-born nobody he is often made out to be.
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His father and grandfathers were among the leading barons of Béarn. Gaveston’s date of birth is not known, but he was older than Edward, born by July 1283 at the latest and possibly a few years earlier; his parents were married before 30 June 1272.
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The first known reference to ‘Perrot Gaveston’ – ‘Perrot’ or ‘Perott’ was his nickname – appears in November 1297, when he was a squire of Edward I’s household.
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Edward I sent Gaveston to live in his son’s household in 1300 when Edward was sixteen, though it may be that the two young men had met before.

Odd though it might seem from later events, Edward I placed Gaveston, a courageous and excellent soldier and successful jouster
par extraordinaire
, in his son’s household with the intention that he should become Edward’s role model, which perhaps indicates that he was indeed several years older than Edward. Gaveston served in the king’s army in 1297 and impressed Edward I with his military ability, which the king probably hoped would rub off on his son. By 1303, Gaveston was described as Edward’s ‘companion’.
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No likeness or physical description of him exists, and contemporary chroniclers were so unremittingly hostile that it is difficult to form a clear picture of his personality, but he was athletic, charming, courteous but sharp-tongued, irreverent, witty, and boundlessly self-confident, even arrogant. A later chronicler – who in fact never saw him – described him as elegant and agile, sharp-witted, refined and well-practised in military matters.
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Much like Edward himself, Gaveston polarised opinion, and most people hated him. Edward loved him beyond reason, and far beyond sense.

In February 1307, Edward I banished Gaveston from England, a move that, contrary to contemporary chroniclers’ beliefs, was not intended to be punitive. The king set the date of departure two months in advance, after Gaveston had competed in a jousting tournament, gave him a generous financial settlement of a hundred marks a year, and ordered him to await his eventual return.
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None of this suggests that Edward I was angry with Gaveston personally. At that stage in his life, fierce and irascible, his fury would be very apparent, as he demonstrated around this time by tearing out clumps of his son’s hair and kicking him. It is highly likely that it was Edward of Caernarfon’s own conduct which caused Edward I to order Gaveston out of England, perhaps because Edward had asked his father permission to grant either his county of Ponthieu or the earldom of Cornwall to his friend – though the
Scalacronica
claims that Gaveston ‘was accused before the king of diverse crime and vices, which rendered him unfit company for the king’s son’.
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Edward I was probably troubled by the relationship that had developed between the two men and ‘the undue intimacy which the young Lord Edward had adopted towards’ Gaveston, and deeply concerned that his son’s love for the Gascon would create insurmountable problems and divisions in England when he himself was dead and Edward acceded to the throne – correctly, as it turned out.
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That Edward II loved Piers Gaveston is beyond all doubt. Precisely how he loved him, however, is a difficult question to answer. There is nothing written by Edward himself that would give us any insight into his feelings for Gaveston, except that, occasionally, he referred to him in official letters as ‘our dear and faithful brother’, the same address he used for his half-brothers. Five chronicles written during or shortly after Edward’s lifetime say that he referred to Gaveston as ‘my brother’ in speech, the
Vita
calls Gaveston ‘a great earl whom the king had adopted as brother’, and the
Annales Paulini
also say he was Edward’s ‘adoptive brother’.
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For two young men to swear an oath of adoptive brotherhood was usually considered honourable; the problem with Edward naming Gaveston as his brother, as their contemporaries saw it, was the gulf of rank which separated them.
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Chroniclers also commented on Edward’s immoderate, inordinate and excessive love for Gaveston: ‘I do not remember to have heard that one man so loved another. Jonathan cherished David, Achilles loved Patroclus. But we do not read that they were immoderate. Our king, however, was incapable of moderate favour,’ says the
Vita
, and other chroniclers wrote much the same thing.
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Edward’s behaviour in the first five years of his reign bears out this judgement. We also learn that when Edward first saw Gaveston, ‘he fell so much in love that he entered upon an enduring compact with him, and determined to knit an indissoluble bond of affection with him, above all other mortals’.
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It is important to remember that this did not automatically mean romantic love, as we would understand it. The early fourteenth century was an age when men bandied about declarations of love for other men far more easily than in later eras; the earl of Richmond’s chaplain claimed in 1309, for example, that Piers Gaveston loved Richmond ‘beyond measure’.
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A few years later, Edward’s cousin the earl of Lancaster, on learning that his friend and confidant Robert Holland had abandoned him during his rebellion against the king, groaned ‘How could he find it in his heart to betray me, when I loved him so much?’
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The usual assumption that Edward and Gaveston’s relationship was sexual and erotic owes far more to Christopher Marlowe’s
c
. 1592 play
Edward II
and numerous modern productions of it, including Derek Jarman’s explicit film version of 1991, than to any fourteenth-century evidence. Although Edward definitely loved Gaveston, Gaveston’s feelings for the king are impossible to determine with any certainty. One might be tempted to take a cynical view: Gaveston was a younger son with little chance of inheriting his family’s lands, and besides, his father left Gascony for England in the late 1290s in dire financial straits, and had to support himself by entering Edward I’s service.
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Gaveston therefore had few prospects for wealth or advancement in his homeland or in England, and had nothing to lose and everything to gain by courting the favour of the future king. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that Gaveston did genuinely love Edward.