Edward II: The Unconventional King (9 page)

In September 1308, the king spent some time at Byfleet in Surrey, one of Piers Gaveston’s manors, where Edward had accommodation, and entertained the earls of Lancaster and Surrey.
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At the end of the month, he attended a double wedding at Waltham Abbey in Essex: his seventeen-year-old nephew Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, married Maud de Burgh, and Gloucester’s sister Elizabeth, just two weeks past her thirteenth birthday, married Maud’s brother John de Burgh, eldest son and heir of the earl of Ulster. Many of the magnates had planned to hold a Round Table jousting tournament at the wedding, ‘but some of them were afraid of being beset, and dreaded treachery, so that the plans came to nought’.
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Edward himself attempted to hold a ‘King of the Greenwood’ tournament at Kennington, which also came to nothing when the barons refused to attend.
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While Edward was manipulating his earls to return to his side, his cousin Lancaster bucked the trend and left court, in November 1308. Until then, he had been in more or less continuous attendance on Edward, and what happened at this time is uncertain, but Lancaster gradually moved into the position of opposition to Edward that he would maintain for the remainder of his life, and the two men came to loathe each other. It is unlikely that Piers Gaveston was the cause of the breakdown in the cousins’ relationship, as he was in Ireland, and Lancaster had always supported the pair, if in a rather lukewarm manner. There seems to have been no sudden, violent rift between the men, and possibly, Lancaster’s departure arose from a trivial matter, and he was too stubborn or too proud to return to Edward afterwards.
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Edward and Lancaster were very alike in some ways, both of them unable to set aside their own personal likes and dislikes in the interests of policy. The men had been close before Edward’s accession: a letter written by Edward in 1305, in response to one sent by Lancaster apologising that he could not attend Edward owing to illness, stated that he would come to visit Lancaster instead, ‘to see and to comfort you’.
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Lancaster was about five or six years older than his cousin, son of the dowager queen Blanche of Navarre, grandson of Henry III, uncle of the queen of England, brother-in-law of the king of France. He was already the proud owner of three earldoms, Lancaster, Leicester and Derby, and in due course would inherit his father-in-law the earl of Lincoln’s two as well. His vast wealth and landholdings made him enormously influential, and the loss of his support was a severe blow to the king.

On 20 December 1308, Edward founded and generously endowed the Dominican priory at Langley in Hertfordshire where he would bury Piers Gaveston a few years later, ‘in fulfilment of a vow made by the king in peril’, whenever that might have been – probably on one of his sea crossings or on campaign in Scotland.
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Edward, like his mother Eleanor of Castile, was a patron of the Dominicans, the Friars Preacher or Black Friars, and all his confessors were Dominican; the mutual affection of the king and the Dominicans lasted for many years.
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Edward spent Christmas and New Year at Windsor with Queen Isabella, though he stayed at his favourite residence of Langley, where he often retired at times of stress and where he had spent much time with Gaveston, for most of December and the first few months of 1309. He might have seen the total eclipse of the sun on 1 February, which the Sempringham annalist claims, implausibly, to have lasted from midday until five in the afternoon, and presumably met the archbishop of Nazareth when he visited England in late January.
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In February 1309, a whale supposedly eighty feet long was caught in the Thames, to the excitement of the St Paul’s and London annalists.
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Edward began to treat his young wife with increasing respect, and in March and April 1309 gave her a cash grant of £1,122 and lands in Cheshire and North Wales, with the revenues backdated to the previous September.
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On 4 March, Edward wrote to Philip IV, telling him that Isabella was in good health and ‘will, God willing, be fruitful’.
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Over time, Isabella became one of the great landowners of the realm, although the lands normally granted to the queen were still held by her aunt, the dowager queen Marguerite. In 1309, Edward continued to work on his earls, consumed with the need to bring Gaveston back from his Irish exile, where he was excelling in his role as lord lieutenant.
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By June, he could count, more or less, on the support of a majority of his earls. In March 1309, Edward sent the bishops of Worcester and Norwich, and the earls of Pembroke and Richmond, to Avignon to speak to the pope on Gaveston’s behalf.
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In late March or early April 1309, many of Edward’s earls and barons met at a jousting tournament at Dunstable, apparently as a cover to discuss their complaints against the king.
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Help soon came from another quarter, however: Pope Clement V gave Edward a pleasant twenty-fifth birthday present on 25 April 1309, when he agreed to nullify Winchelsey’s threat to excommunicate Piers Gaveston.
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Clement granted the absolution because Edward had finally been able to convince him, rather stretching the truth, that the dispute between the magnates and himself was settled. Parliament opened at Westminster two days later, although Edward didn’t deign to appear until the beginning of May. Perhaps he knew that his barons intended to present a list of eleven grievances against his rule, which they worked out while supposedly jousting at Dunstable.
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The grievances concerned escheators, purveyance, writs, petitions and the like, and included the statement that Edward had lost Scotland. Although this was somewhat inaccurate, as Scotland had never exactly been ‘won’, Edward’s father had been acknowledged as overlord of the country in the early 1290s, while his own chances of imposing any kind of dominance over Scotland and Robert Bruce were receding ever further into the distance.

Edward, always willing to compromise himself in Piers Gaveston’s interests, tried to turn baronial dissatisfaction to his own advantage, and promised that he would address the complaints in the next parliament if his barons consented to Gaveston’s return. Despite his best efforts, most of the earls refused. However, Clement V’s bull nullifying Gaveston’s excommunication soon arrived, and on 11 June 1309, a triumphant Edward read it out. Three days later, levels of tension high, Edward ordered another ban on jousting tournaments, naming the earls of Lancaster, Gloucester, Surrey, Arundel and Warwick, but not Hereford, Lincoln, Richmond or Pembroke.
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The abrupt changes in relations between Edward and his earls can be dizzying, and precisely why he feared the intentions of his nephew Gloucester and nephew-in-law Surrey at this time is not clear, as they had supported him for most of the previous year.

With the threat of excommunication gone, Edward boldly recalled Piers Gaveston without baronial consent. On 27 June, a year almost to the day since he had left, the favourite returned to England, jubilant at his accomplishments in Ireland and at his return. Edward travelled to Chester to meet him, delighted at the success of his strategy and to be reunited with his beloved. ‘Very thankfully receiving him with honour as his brother’, Edward greeted him as ‘one returning from a long pilgrimage, [and] passed pleasant days with him’.
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Parliament opened again on 27 July 1309 at Stamford in Lincolnshire, Edward appearing with Gaveston at his side, to the dismay of many. On 5 August, Gaveston was restored to the lands of his earldom of Cornwall.
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Two chroniclers say that the magnates grudgingly agreed to Gaveston’s restoration on condition that he behave well towards them in the future.
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On the other hand, the
Vita
says that ‘none of the barons now dared to raise a finger against him [Gaveston] or to lay any complaint about his return. Their ranks wavered, and their party, divided against itself, broke up. So he who had twice been condemned to exile returned exulting and in state.’
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The king now had to keep his promise to address the baronial grievances, codified as the Statute of Stamford, but, Edward being Edward, he thought he could wriggle out of it. Promises he made under duress, or while he was trying to recall his male favourites on the many occasions when they were banished from England, meant little to him.

Edward had done it. The previous year had shown him capable of great energy, persistence, diplomacy, and adeptness at playing off his barons, binding them to him by giving them lands and favours, and breaking up their formidable alliance. It was a shame for his realm that he didn’t use his undoubted abilities more often, and actually govern his country, but he usually acted only when his friends and therefore his personal feelings were involved. The rest of the time, he hardly bothered, which his subjects must have found intensely frustrating.

Piers Gaveston was back from exile. Neither he nor Edward II had learned a thing from the experience, and they spent the next couple of years proving that they had no political sense whatsoever.

If it were possible, Piers Gaveston became even more objectionable to the barons after his 1309 return from exile than he had been before it. Secure in the knowledge that Edward had exerted himself for many months on his behalf and adored him as much as ever, he became still more arrogant: ‘Scornfully rolling his upraised eyes in pride and in abuse, he looked down upon all with pompous and supercilious countenance … indeed the superciliousness which he affected would have been unbearable enough in a king’s son.’
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The
Scalacronica
agrees that the ‘great affection’ which Edward bestowed on Gaveston made him ‘haughty and supercilious’ – although the author also calls him ‘very magnificent, liberal and well-bred’ – and
Lanercost
says that Gaveston ‘had now grown so insolent as to despise all the nobles of the land’.
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King and favourite continued much as they had before the exile, and a great deal of the support Edward had built up over the previous year began to evaporate, especially when Gaveston decided that giving the English earls insulting nicknames would be hilarious. Edward, utterly blind to the damage he and Gaveston were causing, tolerated his friend in this, or perhaps actively encouraged him. The only certainly contemporary nickname is the one Gaveston gave to the earl of Warwick, ‘the Dog’ or ‘the Black Hound of Arden’. The others were not recorded until the reign of Edward’s son or even later: ‘Burst-Belly’ for the (presumably very stout) earl of Lincoln; ‘the Churl’ or ‘the Fiddler’ for Lancaster; and ‘Joseph the Jew’ for Pembroke. Warwick retorted, ‘If he calls me a dog, be sure that I will bite him so soon as I shall perceive my opportunity,’ a warning Edward and Gaveston fatally chose to ignore.
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The most puzzling of Gaveston’s nicknames is
filz a puteyne
, ‘whoreson’, generally assumed to have been aimed at the earl of Gloucester in a malicious reference to his mother Joan of Acre’s secret marriage to the squire Ralph Monthermer in 1297. It is more likely that it referred to Monthermer himself, as he was apparently illegitimate.
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It seems improbable that Gaveston would insult Edward II’s late sister, his own wife’s mother, in such a public fashion.

Piers Gaveston’s offending men not known for their sense of humour was foolish, and both men failed to appreciate the danger he was courting by antagonising the powerful magnates. However, Gaveston did turn his fabled charm on to some of the earls, at least: his brother-in-law Gloucester – whose association with Gaveston argues against the notion that the king’s favourite had called his mother a whore – Lincoln and Richmond. Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln, who had been a close friend and ally of the old king, seems to have grown uncomfortable with his opposition to the new one, while Richmond’s chaplain, as well as claiming that Gaveston loved Richmond ‘beyond measure’, stated that the two men called each other father and son in their correspondence.
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In addition, John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, very hostile to Gaveston since the tournament at Wallingford in December 1307, now became his ‘inseparable friend and faithful helper’.
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The author of the
Vita
had a point when he complained, ‘See how often and abruptly great men change their sides … the love of magnates is as a game of dice.’
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The other earls, however, stayed away from Gaveston. Neither this, nor the knowledge that his friend’s ‘name was reviled far and wide’ and that he was thought to be ‘wicked, impious and criminal’ bothered Edward; the more he heard that almost everyone in the country hated Gaveston, the more he loved him.
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According to
Lanercost
, he cared neither for his own unpopularity nor for Gaveston’s.
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Another man who must have been less than thrilled to hear of Piers Gaveston’s return to England was Philip IV; on 13 April, Edward had asked his father-in-law to ‘suspend his anger’ with the Gascon.
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Probably motivated by the cool relations between himself and the king of France, and casting about for allies, Edward sent a letter to his ‘dearest cousin’ King Fernando IV of Castile, great-grandson of Edward’s grandfather Fernando III, asking him to continue his alliance and friendship with England.
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Unfortunately, although Edward enjoyed amicable relations with Castile, the country was too far away to be of much use to him politically, and the alliance did not help him during the many crises of his reign. In December 1306, a papal nuncio named Pedro, Castilian by birth and cardinal-bishop of Santa Sabina, had visited England. According to a contemporary newsletter, Pedro had entered into an indenture with the magnates of Castile that Edward, as the son of King Fernando III’s daughter Eleanor, would succeed as king of Castile should Fernando IV die without a male heir.
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Fernando finally fathered a son in 1311 after ten years of marriage and thus spared Castile the trauma of Edward’s governance (assuming the story is true). Edward I remarked to Cardinal Pedro that ‘he should have a special affection for our dear son Edward, as he is of Spanish descent’; with Mary Tudor, daughter of Katherine of Aragon, Edward is one of only two English monarchs in history with a Spanish parent. Edward added two castles, the symbol of Castile, to his great seal in honour of his mother and his Castilian ancestry, and the author of the
Vita
deemed his kinship with the kings of Castile to be one of his greatest assets.
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Edward’s uncle Enrique, one of Queen Eleanor’s many brothers, had proposed Fernando IV’s sister Isabel as a bride for Edward in 1303, but Edward I was forced to reject the offer, as his son’s betrothal to Isabella of France could not be broken without England losing Gascony.
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