She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (33 page)

At six, Edward had been presented with a toy castle, lovingly made and painted in intricate detail by a member of his household. But this military plaything did not shape his tastes as his father might have hoped. Though he grew to be physically strong, a good horseman, and no coward in the face of combat (as he proved in more than one of his father’s campaigns), he did not live and breathe the life of a soldier as his father had done. He preferred what the
Vita Edwardi Secundi
despairingly called ‘rustic pursuits’ – rowing, swimming, digging ditches and thatching houses – and the company of ‘mechanicals’ such as the ‘buffoons, singers, actors, carters, ditchers, oarsmen and sailors’ with whom he was accused of fraternising by the unimpressed monastic chronicler Ranulf Higden. These were not the habits of a king – or, at least, not a king who hoped to win the respect of his people and the hearts and minds of his war-and status-obsessed nobility.

Edward was not completely averse to female company, it seems, since he had an illegitimate son, Adam, who was born before his marriage to Isabella. But his preference for the unpretentious camaraderie of working men, rather than the hierarchical formality
of aristocratic society, may nevertheless have been symptomatic of a more profound inability to ‘fit’ the role into which he had been born. For it was abundantly clear that the companionship Edward valued above all was that of one man in particular: a young Gascon named Perrot de Gabaston, or, as he came to be known in England, Piers Gaveston.

Gaveston and Edward first began to spend time together in 1300, when Gaveston joined the sixteen-year-old prince’s household after serving for three years as a soldier under the command of Edward’s father. By 1305 they were sufficiently close that, when Edward quarrelled with his father’s treasurer that summer, the king manifested his displeasure not only by stopping his son’s allowance but by banishing Gaveston (along with a few other members of the prince’s household) from Edward’s side. This separation was brief, however, and in May 1306 Gaveston was knighted by his prince, along with more than 250 other young men, just four days after Edward himself had received the swordbelt and spurs of knighthood from his father.

By then, the favour in which Gaveston stood with young Edward was beginning to attract attention. And attention, to Gaveston himself, was like sunlight. By nature – much more so than Edward, the prince who liked nothing better than to spend his days in the companionable anonymity of physical labour – Gaveston was a peacock, his graceful athleticism constantly on display along with his brittle charisma and his barbed wit. As a result, the deepening of their relationship could not escape public notice, especially since its intensity suggested an affection that went beyond the platonic. ‘I do not remember to have heard that one man so loved another’, observed the author of the
Vita Edwardi Secundi
pointedly. Knights, it was well known, might pledge undying loyalty to one another as brothers in arms, and both biblical and classical tradition offered familiar examples of masculine devotion: ‘Jonathan cherished David, Achilles loved Patroclus,’ noted the
Vita
. ‘But we do not read that they were immoderate.’ Edward, on the other hand, ‘was passionately attached to one particular
person, whom he cherished above all’, Ranulf Higden wrote. And although these chroniclers’ verdicts were delivered with the acuity of hindsight, Edward’s growing obsession with Gaveston does seem to be the most plausible explanation of steps that were taken in 1307 to separate them.

Gaveston had not endeared himself to old King Edward in the winter of 1306 when, with twenty-one other young knights, he deserted the king’s campaign against Robert Bruce to pursue his passion for fighting in the more glamorous arena of the tournament field rather than in the Scottish mud. For that offence he was formally pardoned in January 1307, but only a month later he was banished from England and forbidden to return without the king’s express permission. However, the royal treasury was ordered to pay him a generous allowance ‘for as long as he shall remain in parts beyond the sea during the king’s pleasure and waiting recall’ – and the unmistakable impression is that this was not so much a punishment for Gaveston as an attempt to remove an overwhelming distraction from the life of the heir to the throne.

It was this – the all-consuming nature of Edward’s fascination with Gaveston – that caused such alarm about the prince’s conduct, rather than the bare fact that questions might now be raised about his sexuality. Certainly, homosexuality was condemned as sinful by the Church, but so were all sexual acts outside the marriage bed, and some within it, if they were performed for pleasure rather than procreation. Contemporaries might well see some forms of ‘sodomy’ (a word which could be used as a general term for all such sinful sex, as well as in its more specific sense) as more unnatural than others, but then again Edward was not the first of England’s rulers to show signs of sexual interest in men as well as women. The Conqueror’s son and successor, William Rufus, neither married nor fathered any illegitimate children, and was lambasted by monastic chroniclers for his extravagantly foppish dress, his louche habits and his irreligiosity. But his stature as a king, in contemporary opinion and that of posterity, was determined not by the fact that his ‘intimate companions’ were male, nor by what
the monks saw as the effeminate fashions of his court, but by his considerable judgement as a soldier and a leader.

The problem for Edward, therefore, was a pattern that emerged clearly for the first time with Gaveston’s exile in 1307. The fact was that, with Gaveston by his side, Edward was incapable of sustained concentration on government or on war, or on any of the weighty matters that should occupy a king’s attention; it was reported that he could scarcely conduct a conversation with anyone else if Gaveston was in the room. ‘Our king’, the
Vita
later lamented, ‘was incapable of moderate favour, and on account of Piers was said to forget himself …’ The solution, thought his father and his magnates, was simple: remove Gaveston, and all would be well. But Edward’s obsession was such that separation left him in the grip of a single mania: to secure Gaveston’s return.

That much was clear when Edward I died on 7 July 1307 on his way north to Scotland. By the time the new king arrived from London to receive the homage of his magnates at Carlisle Castle on 20 July, messengers had already departed to recall Gaveston from his exile (and he was much nearer at hand to receive them than might have been the case, since he had taken up residence not in Gascony as the old king had stipulated, but just across the Channel in the county of Ponthieu, which the younger Edward had inherited from his mother in 1290). While the old king’s body made its stately way south to Westminster Abbey, the new king rode north into Scotland to show his strength and appoint lieutenants there before his return to London for his father’s funeral; and on this journey, at Dumfries on 6 August, Edward declared that Piers Gaveston was to be elevated to the highest rank of the peerage as earl of Cornwall, a title and vast estate which had long been held by members of the king’s immediate family. Not only that, but Gaveston would make a royal marriage: Edward gave him as his bride his young niece, fifteen-year-old Margaret de Clare, daughter of his sister Joan and the late earl of Gloucester.

This glamorous wedding took place only five days after the old king’s burial – indecent haste, perhaps, but then again the speed
with which Edward had already dismissed his father’s treasurer, and promoted others with whom the old king had been at loggerheads, suggests that defiance rather than deference was uppermost in the new king’s attitude toward his father’s memory. Edward himself was guest of honour at Berkhamsted Castle to witness the ceremony, and among his personal gifts to the couple were the hundreds of silver pennies with which the groom and his young bride were glitteringly showered as they entered the church.

Less than two months later, in the gloom of a Boulogne January, it was Edward’s turn to be married. His even younger bride, the dainty French princess Isabella, did not have to contend with Gaveston’s presence among the cathedral’s blue-blooded congregation as she made her vows, since the newly created earl had not sailed from Dover with the king. But even
in absentia
Gaveston cast a long shadow. All those members of the wedding party, French and English, who concerned themselves with politics knew that he had remained in London as ‘keeper of the realm’ – in effect, regent of England. In just six months, this younger son of an obscure Gascon lord had come a disconcertingly long way.

If Isabella had been shielded from any public display of her husband’s devotion to Gaveston during the ceremony that made her a wife, the same could not be said of the ritual that made her a queen. A month to the day after their wedding, Edward and Isabella walked in magnificent procession from the palace of Westminster to the neighbouring abbey for their joint coronation. Beneath their feet was a woollen carpet strewn with flowers, and above their heads an embroidered canopy carried aloft on decorated poles by the barons of the Cinque Ports. Before them paced some of the greatest men in England, including the earls of Lancaster, Warwick, Hereford and Lincoln, carrying the priceless regalia – swords, sceptres, spurs and robes – with which Edward would shortly be invested. But occupying the position of greatest honour immediately in front of the royal couple – in full view of a crowd so pressingly large that one knight was crushed to death when a wall gave way in the abbey – was Piers Gaveston, ‘so
decked out’, noted an eyewitness from nearby St Paul’s, ‘that he more resembled the god Mars than an ordinary mortal’.

The symbolism of Gaveston’s role in this most sacred ceremony of kingmaking was as plain to Edward’s young queen as it was to every other spectator. It was Gaveston who carried into the church the golden crown of St Edward the Confessor, a holy relic as well as the physical emblem of the king’s authority. Once Edward and Isabella had been anointed, enthroned and crowned and the shouts of acclamation had rung out, it was Gaveston who held the Confessor’s Sword of Mercy as the royal couple re-emerged into the wintry afternoon light. At the coronation feast, Gaveston appeared ‘more splendidly dressed than the king himself ’, according to the St Paul’s annalist, in silk of imperial purple embroidered with pearls (as opposed to the mere cloth of gold worn by his fellow earls). And he, not Isabella, sat at Edward’s side beneath hanging tapestries that had been specially commissioned for the occasion to depict the heraldic blazons of the happy couple: not the emblems of Edward and Isabella, but ‘the arms of the king and of Piers Gaveston, earl of Cornwall’.

There could be no mistaking that the king did not stand alone, in either his public or his private life, and that his inseparable companion was not the young woman to whom he had so recently made his vows. No royal bride, playing her part in international diplomacy, would be so naïve as to expect her marriage to be founded on romantic love, or to assume that she would be the only recipient of her husband’s attentions. But the unique dignity of her role as the king’s anointed consort was a different matter. That, she would take for granted. And, even at twelve years old, Isabella was politically aware enough to object to her public displacement by the man to whom her husband was so slavishly devoted.

Certainly, the little queen’s royal uncles who had escorted her to England for the coronation, Louis of Evreux and Charles of Valois, were incensed at her treatment. Offence was piled upon offence: Edward had still not made proper provision for the income and estates Isabella should receive as queen in order that she could
support herself and her household with appropriate grandeur; agreement had not been reached about the inheritances her future children would receive; most egregiously insulting of all, Edward had given the wedding presents that he and Isabella had received from her father, including jewels and great war horses, to Gaveston. Louis and Charles walked out of the coronation banquet in disgust and returned to France in a fury, ‘seeing’, the St Paul’s annalist said archly, ‘that the king frequented Piers’s couch more than the queen’s’.

They were not alone in their objections. By the spring of 1308, Gaveston’s place at Edward’s side was causing uproar in England as well as at the court of the French king. The nobles had been prepared to tolerate his elevation to their ranks as earl of Cornwall, but since then their forbearance had been severely tested not only by his place in the limelight at the coronation, but also by the breathtaking arrogance with which he conducted himself among his new peers. At a tournament held at Wallingford in December 1307, Gaveston and his knights had won the day against a company including the earls of Arundel, Hereford and Surrey. There was no grace in Gaveston’s victory, no magnanimity in his physical prowess. Instead, his crowing and condescension made personal enemies of the men he had defeated. ‘Piers, now earl of Cornwall, did not wish to remember that he had once been Piers the humble esquire,’ noted the perceptive author of the
Vita Edwardi Secundi
. ‘For Piers accounted no one his fellow, no one his peer, save the king alone … His arrogance was intolerable to the barons, and a prime cause of hatred and rancour.’

It was not that Gaveston was trying to take the reins of government from Edward’s hands. His aims were no more and no less than his own wealth and glory. The weeks he spent as ‘keeper of the realm’ during Edward’s absence in France, for example, were not marked by any attempt to pursue a political agenda beyond that of his own self-aggrandisement. That was plenty irritating enough, of course, to generate huge personal animus against this pretentious upstart. But what united the nobles in public defiance
of Edward’s will was the sense that their king was incapable of addressing the needs of his realm with clear-sighted consistency while his field of vision was obscured by the presence of his favourite. In particular, the English position in Scotland, on which so many lives and so much money had been expended, was in danger of being abandoned without a fight: Edward was showing no signs of interest in pursuing his father’s war against Robert Bruce, who was making good use of the free hand he had thereby been given to establish himself as king of Scots in fact as well as in name.