The Plantagenets (50 page)

Before the stunned congregation, Edward swore his coronation oaths in French, rather than the traditional Latin. In a development of the coronation oath, the king promised to uphold both the laws of St Edward the Confessor and also ‘the laws and rightful customs which the community of the realm shall have chosen’. Under the
king’s father, parliaments had been held frequently and were used as the forum for political dissent, discussion, debate and negotiation. By including in the sacred coronation vows a nod to the developing role of the political community, pageantry reflected the new political reality.

Yet it was Gaveston, and not the new coronation oath, that occupied everyone’s attention. At every juncture his presence offended the other nobles present. When the time came for the ceremonial fixing of the king’s boots, Gaveston shared duties with the count of Valois and the earl of Pembroke, fixing the left spur to the king’s heel. After Edward and Isabella had been anointed, and the king had sat on the throne containing the Stone of Scone to receive homage from his magnates, Gaveston led the outward procession carrying the royal sword Curtana, which had been carried by the earl of Lancaster on the procession into the abbey.

In a society ordered by hierarchy and sacred belief, these were grave offences against protocol, and as the Gaveston pantomime unfolded there were unseemly shouts of protest from among the congregation. But worse was to follow.

Gaveston organized the feast that followed the coronation, and he made it a vulgar bid to award himself further glory. The walls of the banqueting hall were arrayed with rich tapestries. They were decorated not with the arms of Edward and Isabella, but with those of Edward and Gaveston. For the new queen to be sidelined in so blatant a fashion was offensive to her visiting family, and the insult was deepened when Edward spent the entire banquet – at which the food was late and virtually inedible – talking and laughing with Gaveston, while neglecting his bride. Even before the ceremony the young queen had written to her father complaining that she was kept in poverty and treated with dishonour. Here was a public demonstration of her ill-treatment. To make things even worse, it later transpired that Edward had given the best of the queen’s jewels and wedding presents to his favourite.

The coronation was a disaster. It confirmed to the entire English political community, as well as to Isabella’s family, that the king was dangerously obsessed with Piers Gaveston, in a fashion that was not
only unbecoming, but was likely to bring a political upheaval to the realm. Edward could scarcely have found a better way to upset and alienate all who sought to support him.

It took mere days for the anger engendered by the coronation, combined with Gaveston’s contemptuous treatment of his fellow earls and barons, to spark a political crisis. With a parliament due to be held in April, there were rumblings from the magnates of coming in arms, seeking to visit retribution on Gaveston for his behaviour. In anticipation of trouble, the bridges over the river Thames were broken at the end of March, and the king took refuge in Windsor castle. Within less than a year of acceding to the throne, and mere days of his coronation, Edward had expended every ounce of political capital and goodwill that a new reign customarily brought. He was forced to prepare himself for armed insurrection by England’s barons.

When a parliament met in April 1308, a group of magnates led by Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln, produced a series of three articles of shattering constitutional importance. ‘Homage and the oath of allegiance are more in respect of the crown than in respect of the king’s person,’ they declared, drawing for the first time an explicit distinction between the king and the office he held. The magnates also demanded that Gaveston be exiled from the kingdom and stripped of his earldom, writing that ‘he disinherits the crown and … impoverishes it … and puts discord between the king and his people’.

This was no manifesto from a disaffected minority party, but a clear signal of constitutional opposition, presented by virtually the entire English barony. The earls of Lancaster, Pembroke, Warwick, Hereford and Surrey all supported Lincoln, and made a show of armed aggression in Westminster to make it clear how serious they were. Archbishop Winchelsea, who had been absent from the realm during the coronation, was recalled to England by the king. As soon as he arrived he sided with the barons, threatening to excommunicate Gaveston unless he left England by the end of June. Only one baron, Sir Hugh Despenser the elder, adhered to the king. Despenser was a trusted diplomat and an ardent loyalist who had paid a fortune – £2,000 – to marry his only son, known as Hugh Despenser the
younger, to the earl of Gloucester’s sister in 1306. He would stick close to the king in years to come.

Despite such a slim show of support for his kingship, Edward wriggled. It was obvious that Gaveston had to go, and that he could not retain his earldom. But rather than comply directly with his opponents and send his favourite away, Edward appointed Gaveston to the position of King’s Lieutenant in Ireland and awarded him castles and manors in England and Gascony with which to support himself. He accompanied Gaveston to Bristol and saw him off from England’s shores with the utmost dignity.

Here, already, was an image of a king who completely failed to understand his obligations. Everything demonstrated by his father’s career ought to have taught Edward II that the politics of English kingship were based on consensus and compromise. Barons were not naturally troublesome or opposed to royal authority, but they were exceptionally sensitive to the inadequate or inequitable operation of kingship and would act to take a grip on government if they felt that the king was failing in his task.

Alas, Edward was unable to perceive this. He saw Gaveston’s exile as a personal attack on a man he loved, rather than a political act undertaken for the good of the realm. Thus in 1308 he was concerned with nothing more than negotiating the return of his favourite. It would be a familiar pattern established over the following four years – and one that would bring England once more to the brink of civil war.

Emergency

It is impossible to understate the hatred that flared against Gaveston in the aftermath of the embarrassing coronation. To Edward, much of it must have seemed unfounded. He seems genuinely to have considered Gaveston his brother, and rewarded him accordingly with the lavish gifts and deep emotional bond that his feelings called for. The queen, naturally, came a poor third in the relationship, to the intense chagrin of the French; but she was after all a child of twelve, barely ready to be either a sexual partner or a meaningful political figure.

Edward, however, failed entirely to discern his opponents’ points of view. Instead of following Gaveston’s banishment to Ireland with a resolute effort to mend his ways and address the urgent needs of government, he bent his energies to the task of rescinding his favourite’s sentence of exile, and petitioning the pope to annul Archbishop Winchelsea’s suspended sentence of excommunication.

Edward was not a stupid man, and he realized that Gaveston could not be recalled without a charm offensive levelled at his magnates. A concerted drive to regain the favour of the leading earls and bishops was built around a reform programme. Statutes were issued at Stamford in July 1309 dealing with purveyance – the forced purchase of provisions for the royal army – and the excessive powers of royal officials in the shires. In return, Gaveston was allowed back into England, and was regranted his earldom of Cornwall in August. The grant was witnessed by many of the most powerful men in England: the bishops of Durham, Chichester, Worcester and London and the
earls of Gloucester, Lincoln, Surrey, Pembroke, Hereford and Warwick. However, the king’s cousin, Thomas earl of Lancaster, the earl of Arundel and Archbishop Winchelsea were absent.

Almost as soon as Gaveston was back, his intemperate behaviour resumed. According to several chroniclers, he came up with offensive nicknames for a number of the other English earls. He called the earl of Warwick ‘the black dog of Arden’, Gloucester was known as ‘whoreson’, Lincoln as ‘burst belly’, Lancaster as ‘churl’ and Pembroke as ‘Joseph the Jew’. Gaveston also upset the earl of Lancaster by having a Lancastrian retainer replaced in a royal office by one of his own men. His influence over the king remained powerful and extremely disturbing, not least as the country was supposed to be readying itself for a return to war with the Scots.

As 1309 unfolded, tensions grew. An army ordered to muster for Scotland in September did not materialize. Yet Edward’s officials continued to exercise the rights to
prises
and purveyance, using the food and supplies they seized from the country to supply royal garrisons in the north. A tax of a twenty-fifth was also taken. The burdens on the country were considered so severe that rumours of an impending peasants’ revolt began to circulate.

Popular anger was focused through the magnates at a parliament in early 1310. There was a general refusal to attend Westminster unless Gaveston was dismissed from the king’s presence. When Edward acceded to this request,
The Life of Edward II
records that parliament made urgent complaints that ‘the state of the king and the kingdom had much deteriorated since the death of the elder King Edward … and the whole kingdom had been not a little injured …’

Their complaints were summed up in a petition. Its authors pointed out that since 1307 Edward had been guided by evil counsellors, and that he had impoverished the Crown to such a degree that his ministers were forced to break Magna Carta by extorting goods and money from the people and the Church. Edward was accused of losing Scotland by his negligence and diminishing the royal possessions in England and Ireland.

This was a damning indictment, and in the main a fair one. To blame the dire Scottish situation on Edward II overlooked the fact that the overstretched military position derived in large part from his father. But otherwise, the complaints were justified.

To remedy the broken state, the petitioners in parliament demanded that ‘twelve discreet and powerful men of good reputation should be elected, by whose judgement and decree the situation should be reformed and settled; and if anything should be found a burden on the kingdom, their ordinance should destroy it …’ This was a bold and urgent step to take when a reign was still only in its third year. And it shows the concern with which the whole political community viewed Edward’s leadership. The barons were not unreasonable men, driven by ambition and a desire to encroach upon royal power. In the main they simply wanted a strong, fair king. In that sense, their hatred of Gaveston and the misrule for which they blamed him was constitutional as well as political.

If Edward was unconvinced at the beginning of the parliament, he was soon shown how seriously his magnates took the situation.
The Life of Edward II
records that they accused the king of breaking his coronation oath and threatened him with deposition if he failed to heed their demands: ‘The united barons … [said] that unless the king granted their requests they would not have him for king, nor keep the fealty that they had sworn to him, especially since he himself was not keeping the oath he had taken at his coronation.’

This was a deadly situation, and Edward realized that he had no choice but to bow to the popular demands. On 20 March 1310, a group of twenty-one Ordainers – as the lords who were responsible for carrying out the Ordinances became known – was elected and sworn in. It was a balanced panel of loyalists and reformers, which included the archbishop of Canterbury and many of the English bishops, along with every English earl except for Oxford, Surrey and – unsurprisingly – Piers Gaveston, earl of Cornwall. They agreed to publish their Ordinances for the reform of the realm in September 1311.

The Ordinances

Edward arrived in the Scottish borders in September 1310, to occupy himself with campaigning and keep his distance from the Ordainers in Westminster, who were busily – and to his mind impertinently – putting together a plan to reform his kingship. He stayed until July 1311. He had nothing like the cohorts of soldiers that his father had taken north during the mighty campaigns of the previous decade, but an army of 3,000 or so infantry and 1,700 cavalry was still a sizeable force.

But Edward made no progress. Robert Bruce continued to evade meeting English troops in open battle, preferring to skirmish and retreat. There were diplomatic exchanges between the Scottish and English kings, and Gaveston took a strong force to Perth with the intention of winning some support through his military endeavour. But nothing was achieved. Eventually Edward ran short of money and supplies, failed to raise further troops either in Ireland or in England, and returned south in the summer of 1311 having overseen a failed expedition. Bruce invaded the north of England as soon as he had left, causing much misery and damage.

On his return to Westminster Edward found a full programme of political reform in action and his enemies strengthened in dangerous ways.

While he was in Scotland several important men had died. Anthony Bek, the bishop of Durham, was one; more important for the rest of the reign was the death of Henry Lacy, earl of Lincoln. Lincoln, who also held the earldom of Salisbury, was in many ways the elder
statesman among the magnates. He was well known, vastly experienced and respected. His death robbed English politics of an influential figure. It also altered the delicate balance of English aristocratic power.

Lincoln’s daughter Alice was married to Thomas, earl of Lancaster, the king’s first cousin. It was therefore Lancaster who inherited Lincoln’s two earldoms when the old man died. This gave Lancaster a vast power bloc, which he would not hesitate to exploit.

Even before Lincoln’s death, the 33-year-old Lancaster was a formidable figure. He already held three earldoms: Lancaster, Leicester and Derby. His father was Edward I’s brother Edmund; his mother had been a queen consort through her marriage to Henry I of Navarre; his half-sister Joan of Navarre was queen of France. Lancaster was thus directly descended both from Henry III and Louis VIII of France. Plantagenet and Capetian blood ran in his veins. He was around six years older than the king. The two had been close companions during their youth and Lancaster had supported the king through the tribulations of his early reign; but like so many of the other English barons, he had been forced into a reformist position by the behaviour of Gaveston and the manifest abuses that were obvious in government – particularly the onerous practice of purveyance. Lancaster had drifted out of the king’s circle during the winter of 1308–9, and was usually to be found far from Westminster on his northern estates, where he could play the role of the region’s most powerful Englishman to his heart’s content.