Edward II: The Unconventional King (5 page)

Although Edward II was a man who loved men, we cannot say with any certainty how he loved them, and his sexuality was rather more complex than is often surmised these days. He fathered an illegitimate son, Adam, sometime between 1305 and 1310, when he was in his early to mid-twenties.
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In the fourteenth century, people were almost invariably named after close members of their family, and as none of Edward’s relatives bore the name, this implies that either his son’s mother was the daughter or sister of a man called Adam, or that his son’s godfather was called Adam. Piers Gaveston also fathered an illegitimate daughter, Amie.
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Despite some modern speculation to the contrary, there is no reason whatsoever to think that Edward did not father his wife Isabella’s children; a comparison of their itineraries proves conclusively that they were together approximately nine months before the births of all their offspring. The true nature of Edward II’s and Piers Gaveston’s relationship is unknown, and forever unknowable. Whether they were lovers, whether their relationship was romantic, or romantic on one side and calculating on the other, or erotic but unconsummated, or based on an oath of adoptive brotherhood, or the deeply affectionate bond of two men who met in adolescence and formed a close and unbreakable friendship, ultimately matters less than the fact that Edward’s excessive favour to Gaveston caused widespread envy and resentment.

At Dumfries, Edward took the homage of the Scottish lords who were loyal to him, and left on 12 August with Gaveston and his army, intending to march north and pursue Robert Bruce. He spent several weeks wandering from Dumfries to Sanquhar and Cumnock, doing and achieving nothing in particular except attending a feast that Gaveston gave on 17 August – where he gave a pound each to the Welsh trumpeters Yevan and Ythel who played for them – and soon gave up the pursuit.
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In late August he retraced his steps to Carlisle, and from there, travelled to Knaresborough Castle in Yorkshire, which now belonged to Gaveston. For the new earl of Cornwall, the huge costs involved in entertaining the king and his retinue for a few days hardly constituted a problem, as Edward had just made him one of the richest men in the country, with an annual income of about £4,000.
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Puzzled by Edward’s unwillingness to chase up hill and down dale in pursuit of a fugitive, albeit royal, Scotsman, three fourteenth-century chronicles claimed that he abandoned the war with Scotland because of his desire to marry his fiancée, Isabella of France, as soon as possible.
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This is extremely unlikely. Isabella was probably only eleven years old in the summer of 1307, and although Edward II had many faults, lusting after prepubescent girls was not one of them. There are no grounds to suppose either that he was desperately keen for his wedding to a girl he had never seen and whom he had to marry for political reasons to go ahead, or that he was trying to get out of it.
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The real reasons for Edward’s departure from Scotland are not hard to find: it was important for him to return south and take over his father’s government, and make arrangements for his coronation and wedding. Edward’s precipitate departure from Scotland, however, where he didn’t return for three years, allowed Robert Bruce the breathing space to consolidate his position and gain allies.

Edward around this time ordered the arrest of Walter Langton, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, possibly at Piers Gaveston’s instigation.
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In 1305, Edward and Gaveston had entered Langton’s lands and stolen his deer, and Edward insulted him with ‘certain gross and harsh words’, the main cause of his quarrel with his father which ended with the old king refusing to allow his son anywhere near him.
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Langton remained in prison, accused, among other things, of consorting with the devil and, rather more conventionally, of misappropriating public funds. However, he would be reconciled with the king by early 1312, and served him faithfully until his death in 1321. Edward also asked the pope to restore Robert Winchelsey to the archbishopric of Canterbury, from which he had been suspended the year before at the request of Edward I.
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Winchelsey returned to England in March 1308, and repaid Edward by becoming one of his and Gaveston’s most intractable enemies, a stance he maintained until his death. Edward’s dislike of a future ally and trust of a future enemy provide early evidence of his inept judgement of character.

In the early months of his reign, Edward communicated with Philip IV of France about his wedding to Philip’s daughter Isabella, which was to go ahead in January 1308 in Boulogne, and set about making arrangements for his trip to France.
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Edward and Isabella, his fourth fiancée, had been betrothed since 1299, when he was fifteen and she three or four. The reason for their betrothal lay in the rich province of Gascony. Edward’s great-great-grandmother Eleanor had brought the duchy of Aquitaine to the English Crown in 1152 on her marriage to the future Henry II. In 1259, in an attempt to end the decades of military conflict between England and France over the vast French territories ruled by England, Henry III and Louis IX signed the Treaty of Paris, which stated that the English king could keep Gascony of the original inheritance, but held it as a vassal of the king of France.
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This meant that the English kings owed homage to the French king as their feudal overlord, which caused great friction between the two countries. Every time a new king of either country acceded to the throne, the English king had to travel to France and kneel to its king, a situation they found intolerably demeaning and tried to delay as long as possible. The French kings for their part hated that the English Crown ruled such a large area of France. These tensions would erupt into war between England and France in 1294, 1324 and, most notably, the Hundred Years War in 1337. If a vassal did not pay homage within a certain time limit, his overlord had the right to confiscate his estates. Therefore, paying homage to the king of France was a duty Edward II had no means of escaping, and he was particularly unfortunate that no fewer than four kings ruled France during his comparatively short reign. Philip IV seized an opportunity to confiscate Gascony from Edward I in 1294, and the price of regaining it was a marriage alliance: Edward I would marry Philip’s half-sister Marguerite, and his son would marry Philip’s daughter, Isabella.

After enjoying Gaveston’s hospitality at Knaresborough, Edward travelled to Nottingham, where he spent a week in early September supervising alterations to the castle and paid a pound to his harper Robert Clough for playing for him.
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He moved on to Northampton, and opened his first parliament on 16 October. Parliament sat for a mere three days, its objectives only to discuss the late king’s funeral arrangements and the new king’s nuptials and coronation, and to grant Edward expenses for them. At Northampton Edward sent a letter to Oljeitu, ‘illustrious king of the Tartars’, who was the ruler of the Ilkhanate, part of the Mongol Empire covering much of modern-day Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey, and ordered his falcons and dogs brought to him.
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His enjoyment of hawking and hunting, far more conventional than his other hobbies, aroused no ire or incomprehension among his contemporaries, though it is notable that unlike his son Edward III he never competed personally in a joust, that sport so beloved of medieval royal and noble men. Perhaps he was simply not interested, or perhaps his father, concerned for the future of his dynasty, forbade it (the earl of Surrey’s son and Duke John I of Brabant were killed jousting in 1286 and 1294 during Edward’s childhood; it was a dangerous activity).

Edward I’s funeral took place at Westminster Abbey three and a half months after his death on 27 October, and he was buried in a simple tomb near his first wife Eleanor of Castile and his father Henry III in the chapel of St Edward the Confessor. A story told much later in the fourteenth century claims that the old king had ordered that his flesh be boiled down and removed and his bones carried before an army to Scotland, but this is unlikely to be true, and even if he had, his son took no notice.
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Edward II spent £100 on horses for knights to ride in the procession, and gave 100 marks to be distributed to the poor and £2 to William Attefenne, sumpter-man, ‘for the great labour he sustained in providing torches and leather for the body of the deceased king’; he spent £453 altogether.
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His filial duty done, Edward issued an edict ordering everyone to refer to Gaveston by his title, earl of Cornwall, rather than by his name.
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This probably reflects Edward’s determination that Gaveston, only a minor noble by birth, should not be disparaged by the great magnates, rather than being a statement on the formality or otherwise of his court.

Edward was determined that his ‘brother Piers’ should become a member of the royal family, and arranged a marriage for his friend. Unfortunately, the three of Edward’s numerous sisters who were still alive were unavailable: twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth was married to the earl of Hereford; twenty-eight-year-old Mary was a nun; and thirty-two-year-old Margaret was married to the duke of Brabant. There remained his little half-sister Eleanor, Edward I’s youngest child, but she was only eighteen months old in the autumn of 1307. Edward, therefore, was forced to make Gaveston his nephew by marriage rather than his brother, by marrying him to one of his nieces. A few of them were already unavailable. His eldest niece, fifteen-year-old Eleanor de Clare, had married Hugh Despenser in May 1306. Eleven-year-old Joan of Bar was married to John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, and ten-year-old Mary Monthermer was betrothed to Duncan MacDuff, earl of Fife. Joan Monthermer was promised to the priory of Amesbury, and Eleanor de Bohun was only three, which left Edward’s other Clare nieces, thirteen-year-old Margaret and twelve-year-old Elizabeth. Because sisters usually –though not always – married in birth order, it fell to Margaret, second of the five daughters of Edward’s sister Joan of Acre (who had died in April), to marry her uncle’s Gascon favourite. Evidently Edward had been planning a Clare-Gaveston match for months; the charter granting his friend the earldom of Cornwall in August 1307 was decorated with the Clare arms as well as Gaveston’s own.
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On 1 November 1307, only five days after her grandfather Edward I’s funeral, Margaret married Gaveston at Berkhamsted Castle, 30 miles from London. Presumably it was attended by Margaret’s brother Gilbert de Clare, recently granted his earldoms of Gloucester and Hertford at the age of sixteen, five years before he could normally have expected to inherit.
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Possibly, Edward offered him this as a sweetener to accept his sister’s marriage to Gaveston, but also, an earl was far more use to him politically than an underage ward. Gloucester didn’t complain; he now had an annual income of £6,000, which made him one of the richest men in the country, even wealthier than his new brother-in-law. He was Edward’s eldest nephew, only seven years younger than the king, and fifteen years older than his aunt, Edward I’s youngest child Eleanor.
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Edward II’s stepmother Marguerite of France, dowager queen of England, also attended the wedding. Before his accession, Edward had been on good terms with the stepmother who wasn’t much older than he was, and often asked her to intercede with his father on his behalf. Forty years younger than her husband, Marguerite had nevertheless enjoyed a good relationship with him, though she was never crowned as queen. Edward gave jewels worth thirty pounds to the bride and groom, a roan-coloured palfrey horse worth twenty pounds to Margaret de Clare and expensive cloth worked with gold and pearls to her ladies, and provided the generous amount of seven pounds, ten shillings and six pence in pennies to be thrown over the heads of the bride and groom at the door of the chapel.
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His almoner collected the money, which would comfortably have fed several families for a year, and distributed it to the poor. The king spent an enormous twenty pounds on the minstrels, and evidently it was quite a celebration, as he gave five shillings in compensation to a local resident for ‘damage done by the king’s party’ to his property.
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Edward also spent fifty-two pounds on two warhorses for himself on 4 November, one a bay and the other ‘white spotted’.
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And so a thirteen-year-old girl married a man in his mid-twenties or older, who was involved in an intense relationship with her uncle. To modern sensibilities this seems callous, but nobody at the time complained about it in such terms. They did, however, protest that the old king’s granddaughter was being disparaged, and that her marriage should be used to further English interests instead. Edward, predictably, ignored them. Given Margaret’s youth, it is unlikely that she and Gaveston began cohabiting after the wedding, and Gaveston’s marriage made little difference to his relationship with Edward.

After the wedding, Edward returned to his favourite residence of Langley in Hertfordshire, where he had to deal with a difficult situation that had recently arisen: the Knights Templar. The Templars were a military monastic order, extremely rich, and Edward’s second cousin and future father-in-law Philip IV of France itched to get his hands on their money. On Friday 13 October 1307, he ordered all the Templars in France to be arrested, accusing them of sodomy, heresy, idolatry and urinating and spitting on the cross. He and Pope Clement V, who resided at Avignon, not Rome, pressed Edward to arrest the Templars in England. Edward refused, telling Philip he found the accusations ‘more than it is possible to believe’.
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This infuriated Philip, who had no mind to allow the young man to defy him and to make him look foolish in the eyes of Europe. Edward’s refusal to arrest the Templars speaks well of him, as it was an easy opportunity for him to seize their goods, lands and money, to pay off some of the enormous debts his father had bequeathed him.