Edward II: The Unconventional King (7 page)

After the wedding, Isabella shared Edward’s accommodation, and although it is possible that they consummated their marriage, to make it valid and binding, it is unlikely that they began regular sexual relations. Although Edward needed a son and heir, like all kings, he waited until his wife was old enough to endure pregnancy and childbirth without causing damage to her developing body, and they conceived their first child four years later, when Isabella was sixteen.

Philip IV took the opportunity to present Edward with a list of his grievances concerning Gascony, which Edward ignored. Soon after, he sent the wedding gifts Philip had given him to Piers Gaveston, an act often seen as the first of many examples of Edward’s mistreatment of his wife. Most probably, however, he simply sent them to his friend, whom he trusted more than anyone and who was regent of his kingdom in his absence, to store in a safe place. Sending the gifts to Gaveston does not necessarily imply that Edward intended Gaveston to keep them; the
Annales Paulini
say that Philip IV ‘gave’ (
dedit
in the Latin original) the gifts to Edward, who ‘sent’ (
misit
) them to Gaveston. Although a scene where Gaveston flaunts himself in jewels rightfully belonging to the queen has become a staple of novels featuring Edward II, and much modern non-fiction repeats the tall tale that Edward heartlessly gave away his wife’s jewellery to his lover, the
Annales Paulini
specify that Philip gave the gifts later sent to Gaveston in England only to Edward, not to Isabella, not even to them jointly.
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There is of course no possible reason why Philip would have given his daughter warhorses, and the
Annales Paulini
do not even mention her or her possessions at this point. Edward giving his wife’s jewels to Gaveston is a modern invention which melts away into nothing in the face of evidence.

While in France, a group of English nobles, including the earls of Pembroke, Lincoln, Surrey and Hereford, put their seals to the Boulogne Agreement or Boulogne Declaration. This document attempted to separate the two sides of kingship: the king as a person, and the Crown, and stated that the barons’ loyalty was due less to the current king than to the Crown itself. This theory was to rear its head again during Edward’s reign. The Agreement probably demonstrates the enormous concern over Edward’s reliance on Piers Gaveston, though it also reflects the conflicts which arose between the king and the barons at the end of Edward I’s reign, and Gaveston was not in fact mentioned. Neither does the document show any hostility towards Edward II personally.
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Roger Mortimer, the man who many years later became Queen Isabella’s favourite and invaded Edward’s kingdom, was not one of the men who set his seal to the Agreement.
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Mortimer was then twenty, a long-term and loyal companion of the king and Gaveston, and it speaks volumes about Edward II that he later became the king’s most dangerous enemy. The earl of Warwick was another attendee who did not sign the Boulogne Agreement, perhaps rather oddly, as he was shortly to become an enemy of Edward and Gaveston, and had refused to sign the charter granting the earldom of Cornwall to the Gascon.

Edward and Isabella left Boulogne on 3 February and arrived at Dover in mid-afternoon on the 7th, when Isabella got her first look at the country that would be her home for the next half a century.
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(She never had the chance to meet William Wallace, as shown in
Braveheart
, as he had been executed two and a half years previously on 23 August 1305.) A group of noble men and women was waiting for them, including Edward’s sisters Mary the nun and Elizabeth, countess of Hereford; Alicia, dowager countess of Norfolk, whose niece Philippa of Hainault would marry Edward and Isabella’s son in 1328; and Earl Thomas of Lancaster’s brother Henry, the king’s first cousin.
¹³
The Lancasters were also Isabella’s uncles, younger half-brothers of her mother Queen Joan. She had other relatives in England: the dowager queen Marguerite was her aunt, Edward’s young half-brothers Thomas and Edmund her first cousins, and the earl of Richmond another cousin.
¹⁴

When Edward saw Piers Gaveston, he behaved as though the pair had been apart for many months. In front of everybody, Edward demonstrated his ‘improper familiarity’ with Gaveston, and is reported to have ‘run to Piers among them, giving him kisses and repeated embraces; he was adored with a singular familiarity. Which special familiarity, already known to the magnates, furnished fuel to their jealousy.’
¹⁵
Edward and Isabella did not travel together, but came ashore separately: ‘the king touched at Dover in his barge … and the queen a little afterward touched here with certain ladies accompanying her,’ so it seems unlikely that Isabella saw her new husband’s enthusiastic greeting of Gaveston, despite the numerous modern novels depicting her shock and horror at the sight.
¹⁶
It was not the kissing and embracing themselves that were the problem – the early fourteenth century was a tactile age and kissing on the lips was a common way even for two men to greet each other, with no necessary implications of sexual desire – but that Edward singled Gaveston out for special attention and kissed and embraced his friend more than he kissed and embraced the other barons.
¹⁷

Edward and Isabella travelled through Kent towards London, spending five days at Edward’s palace of Eltham on the way, which Bishop Anthony Bek had given to him in 1305 and which he later granted to Isabella. Edward’s treasurer had ordered lampreys from Gloucester for the king to enjoy on his return to England.
¹⁸
According to the
Annales Paulini
, Piers Gaveston held a jousting tournament at Faversham to celebrate the king’s marriage; whether Edward himself attended is unclear, though his route from Dover and Canterbury to London did take him past or through Faversham.
¹⁹
On 21 February, the mayor and aldermen of London rode out to greet the new king and queen, and in great procession, cheered by a crowd of thousands, Edward and Isabella rode through the city to the Tower. London was rather less filthy than usual and the streets had been lavishly decorated, so that the city annalist wrote with pride and enormous exaggeration that it resembled ‘a new Jerusalem’.
²⁰

On 24 February, Edward and Isabella rode to Westminster for their coronation, which should have taken place on the 18th, but was delayed by a week. Some of the barons had already demanded that Gaveston be exiled from England, and threatened to impede the coronation if he were not, forcing a delay.
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Edward’s coronation differed from its predecessors in several respects. Firstly, the wives of peers attended for the first time. Secondly, Edward took his oath in French, not Latin, as his ancestors had done – a fact often unfairly used to condemn him as stupid, lazy and uneducated by some historians.
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This conveniently ignores the fact that Edward, even if he knew no Latin, which is most unlikely, could easily have learnt the short responses by heart, and that French was the native language of just about everyone who attended the coronation and he surely only intended that everyone present understood what was being said. Thirdly, a fourth and new clause was added to the coronation oath, whereby Edward swore to ‘observe the just laws and customs that the community of your realm shall determine’.
²³

On the morning of Sunday 25 February 1308, Edward, barefoot and wearing a green robe and black hose, walked from Westminster Hall to the Abbey with Isabella, along a cloth strewn with flowers. Owing to the enormous crush of spectators, the king and queen had to be led into the abbey by a back door. Above them, the barons of the Cinque Ports carried an embroidered canopy, and before them proceeded the prelates and the barons, six men carrying Edward’s gilt spurs, the royal sceptre, the royal rod, and the three royal swords. Roger Frowyk, goldsmith of London, had been paid twenty pounds in late January for repairing the sceptre.
²⁴
Then came four men carrying a board covered with checked cloth, on which the royal robes were placed. They were Hugh Despenser the Elder, Roger Mortimer, Thomas de Vere, son of the earl of Oxford, and Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel. Eighteen years later, one of these men would order the execution of two of the others. Following Despenser and the others came Edward’s treasurer Walter Reynolds, bishop of Worcester and later archbishop of Canterbury, carrying the paten of the chalice of St Edward the Confessor. Behind him came the chancellor of England, carrying the chalice of St Edward itself. And finally and controversially, Piers Gaveston, just before the king and queen and therefore in prime position, carrying the royal crown. Gaveston was described as ‘so decked out that he more resembled the god Mars than an ordinary mortal’.
²⁵
The other earls wore cloth-of-gold (material shot through with gold thread), as they were entitled to do in the king’s presence, but Gaveston, never one to hide his light under a bushel, wore royal purple, of silk, encrusted with pearls. The
Annales Paulini
complained that Gaveston ‘sought his own glory rather than the king’s’ and was ‘more splendidly dressed than the king’.
²⁶
Evidently, Edward didn’t mind. On the day of his coronation, he banned a jousting tournament at Stepney supposedly at the bidding of Piers Gaveston, who feared for his life if it went ahead.
²⁷

During the ceremony, Edward allowed Gaveston to put on his right spur, angering many, as these duties were of profound ritual significance, and Edward was publicly placing Gaveston above the rest of the nobility. In the procession back to the palace at the end of the ceremony, Gaveston carried the sword of mercy, which caused more mutterings, or rather shouts, of discontent. Everyone then proceeded to Westminster Hall for a banquet, which Gaveston had organised. Forty ovens were specially constructed and large quantities of wine ordered from Bordeaux, while London merchants supplied ale, ‘large cattle and boars’, sheep and pigs, three fishmongers received £170 for ‘large fish’ and pike, and one John le Discher provided salt-cellars, plates and dishes at a cost of twenty pounds.
²⁸
A temporary timber hall at least 500 feet long was built along the river wall by Westminster palace, with fourteen smaller halls crammed in and taking up almost all the space as far as the palace gate, and underground pipes supplied red and white wine and a spiced drink to a fountain which flowed day and night.
²⁹
The parlous state of Edward’s finances – his father had left him massive debts of about £200,000 – meant that, despite the money parliament had granted him the previous autumn, he had to pay for the coronation with loans from Italian bankers, the Frescobaldi.
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Unfortunately, the banquet was a fiasco. It was long after dark when it finally got underway, and although there was a vast amount of food, it was badly cooked, badly served and close to inedible. (One wonders if the French had expected anything else of English food.) Edward had ordered tapestries bearing the royal arms, three leopards, and the arms of Piers Gaveston, six eaglets, to adorn the walls of the hall – a very visual sign of the significant position his friend held in his life.
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Even by Edward’s standards, pinning up Gaveston’s arms on the walls in place of the royal arms of France, for his wife, was astonishingly tactless. He made matters worse by sitting next to Gaveston and ignoring everyone else, including Isabella, talking and laughing with his friend. Isabella’s two uncles the counts of Valois and Evreux were grievously offended, although it is doubtful that they walked out of the banquet, as has sometimes been stated – which would have been a gross and unforgivable insult to Edward – while one of the English earls had to be restrained from physically assaulting Gaveston. Although it is understandable that a man in his twenties would prefer to talk to a friend he had known for many years than to a twelve-year-old he barely knew, there is no doubt that Edward’s behaviour was extremely insulting to his wife, the French and the French king. Whether he intended to be rude, or just didn’t care, is not certain, but offending his powerful father-in-law was incredibly foolish behaviour. Many illustrious guests visited the coronation and banquet, and thus witnessed Edward’s discourteous conduct. Edward’s sister Margaret and his brother-in-law John II, duke and duchess of Brabant, Isabella’s uncles Charles of Valois and Louis of Evreux, and her brother, the future King Charles IV, attended. The king’s cousin Arthur, duke of Brittany – like Edward, a grandson of Henry III – was there, with his brother-in-law, Guy, count of St Pol. Arthur had succeeded his father as duke of Brittany in 1305, when the unfortunate John II was killed in possibly the most extraordinary freak accident of the era: a wall collapsed on him as he led Pope Clement V’s horse around Avignon. Edward’s sister Mary the nun, their young half-brothers Thomas and Edmund, Count Amadeus V of Savoy, Count Gaston I of Foix and Henry of Luxembourg, future Holy Roman Emperor, brought up the rear of distinguished guests.
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After the banquet, the counts of Valois and Evreux returned to France and complained to Philip IV that Edward ‘frequented Piers’ couch more than the queen’s’.
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According to the much later chronicler Thomas Walsingham, Isabella herself wrote to her father declaring that her husband was ‘an entire stranger to my bed’, called herself ‘the most wretched of wives’, and accused Gaveston of being the cause of all her troubles, by alienating Edward’s affection from her and leading him into improper company.
³⁴
Isabella’s letters from this period do not survive, however, and the story cannot be corroborated; Walsingham, writing many decades later, had no access to the queen of England’s private correspondence to her father in 1308. The
Annales Paulini
reported the widespread rumour that Edward ‘loved an evil male sorcerer more than he did his wife, a most handsome lady and a very beautiful woman’, and the
Vita
said that ‘Piers was accounted a sorcerer’, as Edward was ‘incapable of moderate favour, and on account of Piers was said to forget himself’.
³⁵
Edward’s lack of attention towards Isabella – who at twelve was hardly a woman yet – is unlikely to have stemmed from callousness, or a desire to be cruel to her. As she was too young to be his wife in anything more than name or to be of any use to him politically, he seems barely to have thought of her at all. It is difficult, however, to condemn Edward for shunning the bed of a girl of only twelve. Even in the fourteenth century, it was extremely rare for girls to become pregnant at a very young age.
³⁶
Edward’s three de Clare nieces all married at thirteen, but didn’t bear their first children until they were sixteen or seventeen. His sister Margaret married at fifteen, was still living apart from her husband three years later and bore her only child when she was twenty-five, and other sisters, Eleanor and Joan, didn’t marry until they were twenty-four and eighteen respectively. Edward’s grandmother Eleanor of Provence married Henry III in early 1236 when she was twelve or thirteen, and bore her first child three and a half years later. Still, Edward could have treated Isabella with far more respect and consideration than he did. Despite her youth, she was his wife and his queen.