Edward II: The Unconventional King (6 page)

On 4 December 1307, Edward wrote to the kings of Sicily, Castile, Portugal and Aragon, the first three of whom were his cousins, telling them that he believed the charges against the Templars were nothing more than ‘the slanders of ill-natured men, who are animated … with a spirit of cupidity and envy’, a very daring way to refer to the king of France and his counsellors, asking them to remember the Templars’ devotion, honesty and long service to the Christian faith, and saying that belief in the accusations was ‘hardly to be entertained’. Edward also sent a letter to the pope on 10 December, saying he had heard ‘a rumour of infamy, a rumour indeed full of bitterness, terrible to think of, horrible to hear, and detestable in wickedness’ and that ‘we are unable to believe in suspicious stories of this kind until we know with greater certainty about these things’.
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On 14 December, however, Edward received the papal bull
Pastoralis praeeminentiae
, which ordered all Christian rulers of Europe to arrest the Templars and seize their lands, in the name of the papacy.
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A papal bull was next to impossible to ignore, and therefore, he issued an order for the Templars to be arrested on 10 January 1308, a few weeks in advance; in France, they had been given no warning.
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Edward did his best to protect the Templars, and ordered his sheriffs to see that they were honourably housed and ‘not to place them in hard and vile prison, and to find them sustenance’.
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This was a kindness in an age when prisons had no obligation to feed their prisoners. A year later, he ordered the sheriffs to pay the Templars their wages, four pence a day, with arrears from the first day of their imprisonment.
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It is easy to criticise Edward for caving in to pressure and betraying his principles, but he was young, inexperienced, not yet crowned, and facing the two most powerful men in Europe. Other European rulers also ordered the Templars in their countries to be arrested, despite initial reluctance. In March 1312, Pope Clement V finally disbanded the order.
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Edward found time to remember the Welsh woman, Mary or Mariota Maunsel, who had nursed him for a few weeks after he was born, and granted her seventy-three acres of land at Caernarfon rent-free for life. Some years later, he gave her an income of five pounds a year – a generous amount for a woman of her status – and paid for her to travel from Caernarfon to visit him.
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He sent letters on behalf of the bishop of Lidda to his ‘dearest friend’ the king of Armenia – not named but either Leo III or his successor Oshin – and Oljeitu, ruler of the Ilkhanate, upgraded in the letter from ‘king of the Tartars’ to ‘emperor’ and also not named, presumably because Edward and his advisers were uncertain of the current political situation in distant countries.
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While Edward dealt with Templars, Tartars and Welsh nurses, Piers Gaveston held a jousting tournament at his castle of Wallingford near Oxford in honour of his young bride Margaret. Edward encouraged him to hold the tournament, though evidently didn’t attend himself, as his itinerary places him at Langley, 45 miles away, and at Reading, 25 miles away, on 2 December.
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Gaveston and his team of knights defeated the earls of Surrey, Arundel and Hereford, and destroyed their dignity by knocking them off their horses into the mud, to their great humiliation and anger. Indignant commentators said that Gaveston ‘most vilely trod under foot’ the opposition, and accused him of fielding 200 knights instead of the agreed sixty.
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Not only did Gaveston dominate Edward’s favour to an incredible degree, the earls could match him neither in wit nor in military prowess, and their hostility to him increased as a result of the tournament.
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Gaveston, secure in Edward’s love and favour, cocked a snook at the high and mighty earls, and they found him aggravating and arrogant to an incredible degree: ‘his countenance exacted greater deference than that of the king. His arrogance was intolerable to the barons and a prime cause of hatred and rancour’. The earls and other barons did have very good reason to be concerned. Gaveston monopolised Edward’s presence; no one could see him without Gaveston’s being there, and Edward rudely ignored his barons and talked only to his friend.
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Chronicler Adam Murimuth wrote that Edward ‘was ruled by Piers’ counsel, despising the counsel of the other nobles’.
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Edward’s obsession with Gaveston is shown in the numerous favours, lands and gifts of money granted to him and his adherents, to the detriment of others, who believed – correctly – that they had more right than the Gascon to wield so much influence over the king. It was said that Gaveston was ‘almost a king’, that two kings ruled England, one in name and one in deed, and that Edward did Gaveston great reverence and worshipped him, as though his friend were a god.
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Although the
Annales Paulini
claim that Edward and Gaveston spent Christmas together at Wye in Kent, in fact Edward didn’t reach Wye until 3 January 1308, and spent the festive season at Westminster, presumably with Gaveston and perhaps with Gaveston’s wife Margaret.
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On 26 December, the king took the extraordinary step of appointing his friend
custos regni
, keeper of the realm, while he travelled to France to marry Isabella.
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The author of the
Vita
spoke for many when he exclaimed ‘An astonishing thing, that he who had lately been an exile and outcast from England should now be made ruler and guardian of the realm’.
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It would have been far more tactful and acceptable to appoint one of his little half-brothers Thomas or Edmund as regent, a nominal one at least, though they were only six and seven years old. Gaveston, in fact, did little controversial during his regency, and although he was criticised for making the earls kneel to him and for his customary tactlessness, this seems to be insecurity rather than arrogance; he was unsure of himself without the king, and out of his depth.
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Edward left London and Piers Gaveston in late December and travelled through Kent towards Dover, which he reached on 13 January 1308, having already ordered numerous provisions, including vast amounts of wood and charcoal and ‘ten good leaden cauldrons’, to be laid in against his arrival. He also ordered the mayor and sheriffs of London to provide and deliver a ship for his tents for his retinue to sleep in once they reached France, sent his baker ahead to Boulogne ‘to make preparations for the reception of the king’, and ordered William le Portour to find ‘300 boards of the longest to be found for making tables’.
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Edward spent his last few days as a single man at the priory of St Martin with some of the men who were to accompany him to France, including his cousin the earl of Pembroke, brother-in-law the earl of Hereford, nephew-in-law the earl of Surrey, and his friend Anthony Bek, bishop of Durham and patriarch of Jerusalem.

All the barons could do was hope that Edward’s impending marriage would distract his attention from Gaveston, and that he would start to rule as a king should. Unfortunately, their hopes were to be dashed. Edward II had neither the ability nor the temperament to fill his difficult role, and in 1308 the unpromising beginning of his reign deteriorated almost to the point of civil war.

Having scandalised his kingdom by appointing Piers Gaveston as regent, Edward left Dover at dawn on 22 January 1308 and arrived in Boulogne on the 24th, where the French king and his retinue were waiting for him. He arrived three days later than he had arranged with Philip, most probably because of bad weather in the Channel.
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In winter the crossing was particularly treacherous, and could take several days. The following day, Thursday 25 January, Edward saw his long-term fiancée for the first time, when they married before the door of Notre Dame in Boulogne. Isabella, sixth of the seven children of Philip IV and Joan, queen of Navarre in her own right, was probably born in late 1295, so was over eleven years younger than Edward and only twelve at the time of the wedding.
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Her elder sisters Marguerite and Blanche died very young, in or before 1295; one of them might have married Edward instead if she had lived. Her elder brothers Louis, Philip and Charles all reigned as kings of France, her younger brother Robert died a few months after she married Edward, and her mother Queen Joan I of Navarre had died in 1305 in her early thirties. Isabella was named after her paternal grandmother Isabel of Aragon, the first queen of Philip III of France. Her maternal grandfather King Enrique I of Navarre was said to have suffocated in his own fat in 1274, and her maternal grandmother Blanche of Artois, queen of Navarre and countess of Lancaster, was, in a typically confusing example of royal inter-relations, also Edward II’s aunt by marriage.
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Edward and Isabella were fairly closely related: Edward’s grandmother Eleanor of Provence was the younger sister of Isabella’s great-grandmother Marguerite, queen of Louis IX, making them second cousins once removed. Isabella had been betrothed to Edward since the Treaty of Montreuil in June 1299 when she was probably three years old, and thus for as long as she could consciously remember would have known that it was her destiny to marry him.

Edward’s first reaction to his bride is unrecorded. Isabella was said by several contemporaries to be beautiful, and given that her father and brother Charles were known in their lifetimes as
le Bel
or ‘the Handsome’, she probably was. Perhaps her loveliness impressed her new husband, or perhaps Edward saw only a girl half his age and of no conceivable interest to him. Whether a pubescent girl, beautiful or not, held much appeal for him is an unanswerable question. Isabella has been unjustly vilified down the centuries as ‘the she-wolf of France’, and condemned as wicked and unnatural by writers incensed that a woman could rebel against her lawfully wedded spouse. Nowadays, however, she is more often portrayed as a long-suffering, put-upon victim of her callously neglectful husband who is miraculously transformed into an empowered feminist icon, striking a courageous blow for women everywhere by fighting back against marital oppression and finding an opportunity for self-fulfilment by taking a lover. Depictions of her reflect the way society currently views women who step outside the bounds of conventional behaviour rather than the real Isabella, who was neither a modern feminist and believer in sexual equality transplanted to the Middle Ages, nor an evil unfeminine caricature. Like her husband, Isabella was a complex character with qualities both admirable and not. Avaricious and extravagant to a degree extraordinary even by the standards of fourteenth-century royals, she nevertheless had many fine qualities, including compassion, loyalty, piety and courage. For most of her marriage to Edward, until his behaviour alienated her irrevocably in the 1320s, Isabella was his loyal and supportive companion and ally, and their relationship was far more successful than commonly supposed. This says a great deal about Isabella’s interpersonal skills, as the fiercely emotional and erratic Edward must have been a difficult man to live with.

Whether Isabella had already heard rumours of her new husband’s unsuitable rustic pastimes or about his intense relationship with Piers Gaveston, is not known, and if she had, there was nothing she could do about it. For her wedding, Isabella wore a red cloak lined with yellow sindon, over a gown and tunic in blue and gold; fifty years later, she would be buried with the cloak. Edward wore a satin surcoat and cloak embroidered with jewels, and both wore crowns glittering with precious stones.
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With these sumptuous clothes and the good looks ascribed to both of them by contemporaries, they must have looked magnificent, and the wedding was a splendid occasion. Not counting the couple themselves, four kings and three queens attended: Philip IV; his eldest son, eighteen-year-old Louis, king of Navarre; Charles ‘the Lame’, king of Sicily and Naples and titular king of Jerusalem; Marie of Brabant, dowager queen of France and Philip IV’s stepmother; her daughter Marguerite, dowager queen of England and Edward II’s stepmother; Albrecht of Hapsburg, king of Germany, who attended with his wife Elisabeth of Görz-Tirol and their son Leopold, duke of Austria. Also present were Edward’s sister and brother-in-law the duke and duchess of Brabant and the counts of Flanders, Namur, Hainault, Nevers, St Pol, Dreux and Savoy.
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Edward, as duke of Aquitaine and count of Ponthieu, performed homage for his lands to Philip on 31 January, an unpleasant, albeit essential, duty he hated.

Isabella brought Edward no dowry; Philip IV made it plain that her marriage portion was the duchy of Aquitaine and Edward’s other lands in France, which his father Edward I had forfeited to the French Crown in 1294. The French king was magnanimously returning the lands to his new son-in-law because he hoped one day to see a grandchild of his holding them, he told Edward and his advisors.
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Philip’s wedding presents to Edward included a ‘ring of his realm’ and other jewellery, a bed or couch ‘more beautiful than any other’ and expensive warhorses.
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Philip also presented his daughter with a lavish trousseau to take with her to England, including gold crowns, tapestries and seventy-two headdresses, and the twelve-year-old queen probably received a generous gift from her new husband: an illuminated manuscript now known as the Isabella Psalter and held in a library in Munich.
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Eight days of celebration and feasting followed the wedding ceremony, with the most magnificent banquet of all taking place on 28 January, hosted by Edward. Two days later, he presided over yet another great feast, with his new queen by his side, and the noblemen present also took part in a jousting event. Edward almost certainly didn’t participate. He showed no great interest in jousting unless Piers Gaveston was competing, which probably demonstrates an interest in Gaveston rather than in the sport. Perhaps if the inhabitants of Boulogne had needed a new ditch to be dug, or had horses in desperate need of shoeing, he would have been their man. All in all, however, it was a superbly lavish occasion, as befitted the wedding of the king of England and the king of France’s daughter, though tensions lurked beneath the glittering surface, as they usually did during Edward’s reign.