She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (34 page)

When the English lords assembled for a meeting of parliament at Westminster Abbey in April 1308, their dissatisfaction took concrete form for the first time. For several weeks, both king and barons had been making hurried attempts to arm themselves ahead of the coming storm. And now Henry Lacy, earl of Lincoln, an old soldier of fifty-eight who had been one of Edward I’s right-hand men, stepped forward on behalf of his peers to confront the king. ‘Homage and the oath of allegiance are more in respect of the crown than in respect of the king’s person’, argued the document he presented to Edward. ‘If ’, therefore, ‘it should befall that the king is not guided by reason,’ then his subjects had a duty to act ‘to reinstate the king in the dignity of the crown’ – by force, if necessary. And in this case, of course, the dignity of the crown could only be restored if Gaveston were removed.

If Edward had believed he could hold out against the complaints of his lords, his hopes were dashed when envoys arrived from his wife’s father to demand Gaveston’s banishment, since the king of France now considered him a mortal enemy. Faced with the double threat of rebellion among the ranks of the English nobility and armed intervention from France, Edward was forced to capitulate. On 14 May 1308 he sought to mollify his father-in-law by endowing his queen, at last, with the northern French counties of Ponthieu and Montreuil. And on 18 May he put his seal to an order that Gaveston should leave England within five weeks, on pain, the archbishop of Canterbury announced the following day, of excommunication.

For Isabella, this moment shone a rare shaft of light across a landscape of wrecked expectations. Life as England’s queen had not, so far, offered much reassurance to a girl raised in one of Europe’s most sophisticated courts with a profound sense of the dignity of her station. Like Matilda and Eleanor before her, Isabella had had to embrace the prospect of a new life in an alien land at an age when the comforts of the nursery were not far behind her. Unlike them, she had rapidly discovered that she could depend on her new husband for neither love nor respect. She had been sidelined at her own coronation by a man with whom her husband was publicly and humiliatingly infatuated. Concern for her youth might well have kept Edward away from her bed for some time after their wedding, whatever the circumstances, but his attentions were so ostentatiously engaged elsewhere that he could claim little credit for any such consideration. While Gaveston preened in silks and jewels lavished upon him by the king, Isabella had scarcely been able to maintain her entourage in the state to which she had been accustomed as princess of France, let alone as the anointed queen of England. Now, at last, it seemed as though the way was clear for this proud young woman to take her rightful place beside her king – perhaps even to advise and support him, as revered royal wives had done before her.

There was hope, then, for the queen, even as the king’s desolation at the loss of his soulmate was plain for all to see. Edward was with Gaveston until the moment he took ship at Bristol for Ireland, his exile having been finagled by the king into an appointment as royal lieutenant there. The last time Gaveston had been forced to leave England by Edward’s father, Edward had showered him with gifts including two tourneying outfits in green emblazoned with Gaveston’s arms, one in fine linen, the other in velvet embroidered with pearls and piping of silver and gold. This time, his presents were less immediately tangible but infinitely more valuable. Under the terms of his banishment Gaveston had lost his lands as earl of Cornwall, but Edward insisted that he should keep the title at least, and before he set sail the king granted him
estates in England and Gascony on a scale to rival those of which he had been deprived.

His departure left Edward in misery that was equalled only by the relief of his lords and his young queen. But Gaveston’s removal did not prove to be the panacea for which they had hoped. True, Edward did now turn his energies to building bridges with his nobles and talking of the urgent need to counter the resurgent Scots – and the earls responded with alacrity to these overtures, desperate as they were for active and purposeful leadership. But by the summer of 1309 it was becoming apparent that these were tactics born of Edward’s monomania, not the beginnings of newly focused kingship. Securing the collaboration of his magnates was not the prelude to the Scottish campaign for which they hoped, despite costly preparations now put in train. Instead, it served to lay the groundwork for Gaveston’s return – at first in secret when he slipped quietly into Chester in June, and then in August when he was publicly, if reluctantly, acknowledged by the nobles in parliament.

That the lords were uneasy in their acquiescence was obvious from the grievances about the financial oppressions of his government that they laid before the king as the price of Gaveston’s recall. Did the speed with which Edward waved the reforms through suggest that he and his favourite had learned lessons from their separation? The lords must have hoped that it did; but instead Gaveston’s reinstatement as earl of Cornwall proved to be the cue for yet another turn of the merry-go-round. Gaveston himself was not chastened but triumphant at his political resurrection, and his mockery of the serious-minded earls who had tried to expel him from their ranks became still more outrageously insolent. Laughingly, he gave them derisive nicknames – the earl of Warwick was ‘Warwick the Dog’, the
Vita
reports, with later chroniclers adding ‘Burst-Belly’ for the ageing earl of Lincoln, ‘Churl’ for the earl of Lancaster, and ‘Joseph the Jew’ for the earl of Pembroke, ‘because he was pale and tall’. And all the while Edward’s officials continued to exact money from his people for a military campaign in Scotland that showed no sign of taking place.

In February 1310, the lords once again came to a parliament armed and angry, to demand that action be taken to deal with the failings of Edward’s regime. The king had already sent Gaveston away from court for his own safety while the earls gathered in force, and now Edward had no choice but to give in to their insistence that he appoint a body of twenty-one lords, temporal and spiritual, ‘to ordain and establish the estate of our household and of our realm’. These ‘Ordainers’, as they came to be known, were to rule on Edward’s behalf for the next eighteen months, and, although the document to which Edward set his seal asserted that he gave them authority ‘of our free will’, the
Vita
had no doubt of the nature of that freedom: the lords had made it clear that ‘unless the king granted their demands they would not have him for king, nor keep the fealty that they had sworn to him’.

As the Ordainers set to work, Edward embarked on a bold strategy of misdirection. While his lords usurped his government, he would show his worth as king by dealing at last with the catastrophic military situation in Scotland. This plan, it seemed to the beleaguered king, had multiple advantages. He was doing what his subjects had repeatedly demanded, thereby demonstrating that he was capable of defending the realm and its interests as he was required to do by the crown he wore. He was also extracting himself from the shackles the Ordainers had placed upon his authority in London; they might meddle with his administration, but no one, surely, could countermand a king at the head of his troops. Lastly, and most importantly for Edward, he was removing Gaveston from immediate danger. Extraordinary though it might seem, a Scottish battlefield was now a safer prospect for the graceful earl of Cornwall, able fighter that he was, than an assembly of English peers. For Isabella – who was now fifteen, and having to resign herself once more, with icy restraint, to playing second fiddle in her own marriage – Edward’s strategy meant the dubious pleasure of a first visit to the far north of her adopted country in the company of an army led by her husband and his flamboyant lover.

It was an ingenious tactic, but it did not work. It was too late for the king to convince his lords that he intended to emulate his father by hammering the Scots – and, even if he could have persuaded them of his seriousness of purpose, almost none of them were willing to join an army with Gaveston as well as Edward at its head (the only exceptions being the twenty-year-old earl of Gloucester, Gaveston’s brother-in-law, and John de Warenne, earl of Surrey). A campaign without the military might of the earls at its back was never likely to succeed, and it soon emerged that Robert Bruce and his men would not meet Edward’s troops on open ground, but harried them with raids and ambushes amid a ravaged landscape, laid waste by the Scots themselves in order to threaten the English with starvation.

After a fruitless eight months based at the frontier town of Berwick at the mouth of the river Tweed, Edward and Isabella rode south in July 1311, leaving Gaveston, newly named as the king’s lieutenant in Scotland, holed up in the Northumbrian fortress of Bamburgh. Back in London at the beginning of August – as Bruce and his soldiers launched devastating raids into northern England, in brutal demonstration of Edward’s military failure – the king was confronted by the reforms that had been painstakingly drawn up by the Lords Ordainer. These forty-one ordinances provided for the detailed supervision of Edward’s government – especially the ways in which he raised money from his subjects, and the ways in which he chose to spend it – by his nobles, in their capacity as representatives of the realm. And among these stipulations, to no one’s surprise, was the demand that Piers Gaveston should be exiled from England once more, this time for ever.

Edward may not have been surprised, but he was aghast and enraged at the corner in which he now found himself. He railed against the appalling presumption of his subjects in seeking to constrain his sovereignty. But to no effect: and while the Ordainers stood firm, Edward – with the utter lack of insight that had characterised everything he had done since he inherited his crown – gave the clearest demonstration yet of why his lords had been
driven to oppose him. ‘To satisfy the barons he offered these terms’, explained the
Vita
:

What Edward did not see, was incapable of seeing, was that all but one of the ordinances were concerned not with his ‘private disadvantage’ but with his public duty as king. Had he only recognised that fact, had he shown any inkling of the responsibilities as well as the rights of the crown, then the single provision that should have been a private matter – the one concerning his relationship with Gaveston – need never have been drafted.

But there was no moment of realisation. Instead, confronted with the reality of civil war as the only possible consequence of his continued resistance, Edward had no option but to concede. The ordinances were proclaimed throughout England, and excommunication instituted as the penalty for anyone who violated them. And on 3 November, Gaveston again sailed into exile.

This time, however, there was nothing strategic about the king’s response. He was driven by fury, declaring that his nobles were treating him as though he were an idiot whose household had to be managed by others because of his incapacity. Once again he moved north as soon as he could, to escape the constraints on his freedom of action in London, and as soon as he was free he sent word to Flanders to summon Gaveston back to his side. By the middle of January 1312 they were together again at York, where Edward proclaimed Gaveston’s restoration to the earldom of Cornwall, and denounced his exile as unlawful. Now, the king was preparing in earnest for war.

And he was not the only one. Here, the temperaments and the individual judgements of Edward’s most powerful subjects – the
men whose foibles Gaveston had so mercilessly mocked – came into play in decisive fashion. Extraordinarily tense though the political world had been ever since Edward’s accession, it had been relatively easy until now for the earls to stand united in their demand that the king should expel his favourite and reform his government. But once it became clear that Edward would defy them, the question was no longer what the magnates wanted, but whether they were prepared to take arms against their anointed king to get it. One among the earls was spared this fateful decision. Henry Lacy, earl of Lincoln and the regime’s elder statesman, had died at his London home, Lincoln’s Inn in Holborn, on 5 February 1311. His fidelity to the crown and his cultured dignity were a grievous loss in such troubled times; and his death helped to bestow the mantle of leadership on the man who inherited his earldom – his son-in-law, Thomas of Lancaster.

Lancaster, at thirty-four, was a very different proposition from his respected father-in-law. He was acutely conscious of his own pre-eminent position among the English nobility, set apart as he was from his peers both by birth and by the scale of his wealth and power. He was the son of Edmund of Lancaster, Edward I’s younger brother, and Blanche of Artois, widow of the king of Navarre and granddaughter of Louis VIII of France – a lineage which made him, uniquely, both the cousin of Edward II and the maternal uncle of the young queen, Isabella. Also uniquely, he held a grand total of five earldoms with lands stretching across England: those of Lancaster, Leicester and Derby he had inherited from his father, to which his marriage to the heiress Alice Lacy now added the titles and estates of Lincoln and Salisbury. But he did not have the personal stature to match this extraordinary political standing. He was always more aware of his entitlement to demand loyalty than of the qualities needed to inspire it, and his instincts as a loner, aloof and haughty, competed for supremacy with his fierce ambition as a leader.

For now, however, the fact that open conflict could focus on the despised person of Gaveston was enough to hold a tense coalition
of magnates together. The Lords Ordainer, with Lancaster now taking a prominent role among them, made arrangements for the security of southern England while despatching troops northward under the command not only of the intransigent Lancaster himself but also the earls of Pembroke and Surrey, both of whom had previously shown themselves willing to contemplate a more politic engagement with the king and his lover. It was a measure of the extreme caution made necessary by this threatening situation that the task of arresting Gaveston was committed specifically to their careful hands.