Edward II: The Unconventional King (8 page)

Parliament opened at Westminster three days after the coronation. Edward’s antics had strengthened the already strong opposition to his favourite, and ‘almost all of the earls and barons of England rose against Piers Gaveston, binding themselves by a mutual oath never to cease from what they had begun until Piers had left the land of England’.
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Edward’s only allies at this parliament were Thomas, earl of Lancaster, his cousin and Isabella’s uncle, and Hugh Despenser the Elder. Despenser was the brother-in-law of the earl of Warwick, and is known as ‘the Elder’ to distinguish him from his son of the same name, who would become Edward II’s great favourite in the late 1310s. Despenser the Elder was twenty-three years older than Edward but a close friend, and the only nobleman to remain completely loyal to Edward from the beginning to the end of his reign. Almost all the other earls and magnates demanded Gaveston’s exile; he had ‘aroused the hatred of nearly all the great lords of England, because the new king loved him excessively and irrationally, and supported him totally’.
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The situation deteriorated rapidly. Edward was almost friendless, but determined to keep Gaveston at his side, and determined also to challenge the right of his nobles to impose conditions on him against his will. This was typical of Edward, who loved going out into the fields and digging ditches or building walls, chatting with craftsmen and villeins, yet the next minute stood on all his royal rights and dignity.

Edward spent Easter preparing for war. Afraid that his magnates might seize Gaveston, he fortified Windsor Castle as a stronghold where the favourite could remain in safety, and as a further precaution ordered the nearby bridges at Staines and Kingston to be dismantled, which must have annoyed the locals. At the end of April 1308, Edward returned to parliament, where he faced fresh demands to exile Gaveston. Emotionally reliant on his friend to a very great extent and unable to imagine life without him, Edward continued to refuse. Within a few months of his accession, he had brought his country to the brink of civil war over his emotional reliance on the arrogant Gaveston, who ‘lorded it over them [the barons] like a second king, to whom all were subject and none equal’.
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Edward’s behaviour became the talk of the kingdom, and his popularity plummeted, according to
Lanercost
: ‘The murmurs increased from day to day, and engrossed the lips and ears of all men, nor was there one who had a good word either for the king or for Piers.’
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The
Vita
stated that ‘the seditious quarrel between the lord king and the barons spread far and wide through England, and the whole land was much desolated by such a tumult … it was held for certain that the quarrel once begun could not be settled without great destruction’. A letter written at this time agreed: ‘Very evil are the times in England now; and there are many who fear that worse times are still in store for us.’
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The writer was correct, and the pattern of impending civil war would repeat itself over and over for the next few years, as Edward lurched from one crisis to the next, crises almost entirely of his own making.

The barons had a useful ally on their side: the king of France. A newsletter of 14 May claimed that unless Piers Gaveston left England, Philip IV ‘will pursue as his mortal enemies all who support the said Piers’.
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Lanercost
says that Philip ‘cordially detested’ Gaveston, ‘because, as was commonly said, the king of England, having married his daughter, loved her indifferently because of the aforesaid Piers’, and the
Polychronicon
also says that Edward neglected Isabella for Gaveston.
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Both these chronicles, however, were written with many years’ hindsight, after Edward’s later favourite Hugh Despenser (the Younger) had succeeded in driving Isabella from her husband’s presence in the 1320s, and it may be that the authors confused Gaveston with Despenser. Edward’s supposed and frequently exaggerated neglect of Isabella was probably not the main reason for Philip’s hostility; Gaveston’s father Arnaud had escaped from Philip’s custody when the French king was (legitimately) holding him as a hostage, and Gaveston himself had fought against Philip’s forces in Flanders in 1297.
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Whatever the reason for Philip’s animosity to Gaveston, it was shared by his half-sister Marguerite, Edward’s stepmother, and the French royals were said to have sent £40,000 to the English earls to fund their opposition to the royal favourite.
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Even if this means
livres tournois
, the equivalent of £10,000 sterling, it still seems a ludicrous exaggeration. Whatever the correct amount of money, Edward retaliated by taking Marguerite’s castles of Marlborough and Devizes into his own hands.
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For the remaining ten years that she was alive, Marguerite played little if any role in Edward’s life, and seems mostly to have stayed away from court, her relations with her stepson perhaps soured by her actions and Edward’s anger with her.

Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Edward granted his county of Ponthieu, which yielded revenues of about £1,300 a year, to his young wife on 14 May, the day the newsletter was written.
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It is probably significant, and a sign of Edward’s good faith towards Isabella and her father, that he granted her Ponthieu, as in 1306 he had intended to give the county to Piers Gaveston. His friend spent his brief exile there in 1307 at Edward’s order, rather than in Gascony, as originally commanded by Edward I.
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Isabella’s role as leader of the opposition to Piers Gaveston is often overstated. At twelve, she was hardly in a position to play a significant role in politics, and the poor girl was thrust into a tense and difficult situation a grown woman might have struggled with. Her aunt the dowager queen, who could have helped her, withdrew from court, leaving her alone and vulnerable in a foreign country with a husband who made it clear that Piers Gaveston was his main priority, even above herself. However, although Edward and Isabella’s marriage began and ended badly, for most of their relationship, there was genuine affection between the couple. Few of their personal letters survive, but one in which Edward called Isabella his ‘dear heart’ is still extant, as is one of Isabella’s, in which she addressed Edward as ‘my very sweet heart’ five times.
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Although often depicted as a neglectful husband, Edward frequently demonstrated great concern for Isabella’s well-being, and for many years she supported him with notable loyalty.

At parliament in late April and early May 1308, Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln and leader of the formidable coalition opposed to Edward and Gaveston, demanded once again the favourite’s exile. Only a handful of barons and knights remained loyal to Edward at this time. One was his cousin the earl of Lancaster, who seems, however, not to have offered Edward any practical help, and another was John of Brittany, earl of Richmond, who was rather insignificant politically. Richmond was in his early forties and a first cousin of Edward II and Lancaster, his mother Beatrice being the sister of Edward I, and was the brother of the duke of Brittany. Other loyal allies were Guy Ferre, son of Edward’s former tutor of the same name, and John Cromwell, Roger Mortimer and Hugh Despenser the Elder.
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On 18 May, having held out for many weeks, and faced with civil war, Edward finally gave in and agreed to exile his friend.
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As a sop, and at Edward’s insistence, Gaveston was allowed to keep his title of earl of Cornwall, but all his lands reverted to the Crown. In compensation, Edward granted him £2,000 worth of lands in his homeland of Gascony, including the city of Bayonne and the island of Oléron, and lands worth another £2,000 in England jointly to Gaveston and his wife Margaret, so he suffered no loss of income.
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Robert Winchelsey, archbishop of Canterbury, threatened to excommunicate Gaveston if he didn’t leave the country by 25 June. Anyone who impeded his departure or aided his return, except the king and queen, would face the same penalty.
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Gaveston’s fourteen-year-old wife was not included in her husband’s exile, and was to be granted £2,000 a year from the revenues of Cornwall for her sustenance if she remained in England. However, Margaret accompanied Gaveston to Ireland, either on her husband’s orders or her uncle’s.
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On 16 June 1308, Edward hit on the idea of making Gaveston lord lieutenant of Ireland, a position he had granted to the earl of Ulster only the day before, thus ensuring that Gaveston left the country in triumph, not in disgrace.
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Edward went to Bristol with his niece and nephew-in-law to see them off, and gave them a staggeringly generous gift of £1,180.
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The Gavestons sailed on 28 June, three days after the deadline imposed by the archbishop of Canterbury. A distraught and furious Edward travelled to Windsor to be reunited with his queen.

Within a year of his accession, Edward managed to annoy his barons beyond bearing, offend the king of France, face civil war, act as though another person were his co-ruler, and give his barons little option but to force his beloved friend out of the country for the second time. His infatuation with Gaveston was almost entirely to blame. Edward was incapable of moderation, as his contemporaries remarked; if he had been more even-handed with his favour, his relationship with his friend would not have been such an issue. However, in his great love for Gaveston, he elevated him almost to the status of joint king. It is impossible to say how Edward felt about the hatred and resentment that his relationship with Gaveston and his friend’s consequent domination of his favour engendered, whether he was even aware of it, or merely indifferent. His love for his friend blinded him to reality and to the foolishness of his actions.

There was no chance that Edward would tolerate Piers Gaveston’s absence for long, and everyone must have realised it. Over the following year, Edward made strenuous and adroit efforts to get his friend back. Nine days before Gaveston even left England, Edward wrote to Pope Clement V and King Philip IV, giving a rather questionable version of the whole affair. He claimed that the earldom of Cornwall had been granted to Gaveston without Gaveston’s prior knowledge, and at the urging of the barons.
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This second point, at least, was not true. Edward also wrote that his magnates ‘rose up against us in grave fashion, that they had no qualms to present themselves to us many times as enemies and complainers; and from this, one truly fears scandals and even graver dangers could arise in the kingdom and these lands’.
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On the same day he wrote this, Edward granted the castle and town of Blanquefort in Gascony to the pope’s nephew and namesake, Bertrand de Got.
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Candidly, Edward explained that he hoped the grant would inspire the pope to regard his affairs more favourably, and asked him to lift the conditional sentence of excommunication on Gaveston.

Meanwhile, Edward’s infatuation with his friend and subsequent lack of interest in Scotland were greatly aiding Robert Bruce in his campaign to make himself king in more than name only. In the spring of 1308, Bruce inflicted a heavy defeat on his greatest enemy John Comyn, earl of Buchan, a relative of John ‘the Red Comyn’ whom Bruce had killed in 1306. Buchan fled to England, where Edward welcomed him, though he died before 27 November 1308.
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The remnant of the Comyn faction, which had dominated Scottish politics for decades, also removed themselves to England, including the young children of the Red Comyn. Edward lost the support in 1308 of another Scottish earl, William of Ross, who had previously been so anti-Bruce that he captured Bruce’s womenfolk in September 1306 and sent them to Edward I to be imprisoned. Geographically isolated by Buchan’s defeat, pressed hard by Bruce and his army, Ross sent pleas to Edward to assist him, writing, ‘May help come from you, our lord, if it please you, for in you, Sire, is all our hope and trust.’
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Placing all one’s military hope and trust in Edward II was a bad idea, and Edward did nothing to help. Ross had little choice but to submit to Bruce and remained totally loyal to him for the rest of his life, a reminder of Edward’s failure to retain a useful ally. The earl of Dunbar and lord of Argyll, who stayed in Scotland, were loyal to Edward, and so were other Scottish lords, including the eighteen-year-old earl of Fife Duncan MacDuff, now Edward’s nephew-in-law as the husband of Mary Monthermer, one of Joan of Acre’s daughters. The earls of Atholl, Angus and Strathearn lived in England by choice, and the young earl of Mar, Robert Bruce’s nephew Donald, remained in prison at Bristol Castle. However, Bruce’s campaign to make himself true king and ruler of Scotland was gaining rapid momentum. More and more men flocked to his banner.

In June 1308, Edward ordered a muster of his army at Carlisle for 22 August, to march into Scotland.
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But he cancelled the campaign and signed a truce, after Philip IV sent his brother the count of Evreux and the bishop of Soissons to negotiate peace between the countries.
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War in Scotland was part of Edward II’s inheritance from his father, an unwinnable war which gobbled up his treasury and which he had no choice but to continue, willingly or not. Edward was far more interested in trying to bring Gaveston back to England than campaigning in Scotland. Over the next few months, he used a policy of ‘divide and conquer’ among his barons; he ‘tried to break up their confederacy and draw over the more powerful to his side’. Edward also used his powers of patronage to reconcile them, granting them lands, favours and positions, with the aim of persuading them to agree to Gaveston’s return; he ‘bent one after another to his will, with gifts, promises and blandishments’, which eventually had the desired result.
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The natural loyalty of the magnates to the king helped him here. With Gaveston gone, there was little reason for most of them to continue opposing him.