She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (35 page)

Edward and Gaveston, meanwhile, remained for several weeks at York, where Isabella joined them in the second half of February. The length of their stay was occasioned not only by the need to co-ordinate military preparations but also by the fact that Gaveston’s wife, the earl of Gloucester’s sister Margaret de Clare, had given birth to a daughter, Joan, on 12 January. It was not until 20 February that the countess’s churching took place – the ritual of purification that marked her re-emergence into the world after her confinement – and was followed a few days later by the baby’s christening, a sumptuous affair on which the king spent lavishly. By then, though she could not yet have known it, Isabella too was pregnant.

The timing may simply have been fortuitous. At sixteen, the queen was now mature enough for the prospect of childbirth to be merely commonly, rather than uncommonly, dangerous. If, as seems likely, a decision had been taken at the time of her wedding that she was too young to consummate the marriage, such restraint was no longer physically necessary. But, given the specific circumstances of Isabella’s married life, it is also possible that the start of her sexual relationship with Edward, and the pregnancy that resulted, were politically inspired. Certainly, the imminent threat of civil war is likely to have focused the minds of both Edward and Gaveston, his fellow first-time father, on the advantages of acquiring a legitimate heir.

Advantageous the news may have been, but it did nothing to stop the conflict. As the earls rode north (claiming, and convincing no
one, that the men they were mustering were gathering to take part in tournaments), Edward, Gaveston and Isabella moved ahead of them to the north-east, Isabella often travelling separately from her husband, and more slowly, perhaps impeded by the early stages of her pregnancy as well as by the proprieties of queenly travel on rutted roads amid a large household entourage. Certainly, though, the pressures of their unhappy situation were becoming more intense. At the end of April Isabella caught up with her husband and Gaveston at the fortress of Newcastle, before pushing on another eight miles without them to the comforting security of Tynemouth Priory, a Benedictine community nestled within a newly built and massively fortified curtain wall on a rocky headland overlooking the North Sea. But both comfort and security vanished in an instant on 4 May, when Edward and Gaveston arrived with a small retinue at the Priory’s gate, sweating and breathless from their sudden flight. The earl of Lancaster’s army had appeared with terrifying speed outside Newcastle’s walls, and the king had left almost everything behind – weapons, horses, jewels – in his desperation to evade his cousin’s grasp.

They could not rest for long. The next day Edward and Gaveston put to sea, heading eighty miles down the coast to Scarborough. For Gaveston, who had recently been ill, this bleak five-day voyage was a necessary evil to escape the implacable hostility of his enemies. For Isabella, however, the calculation of risk was very different: her sex, her station and her pregnancy would protect her from harm at the hands of the earls, while the danger that she might become their hostage weighed less heavily than the threat to the king’s unborn heir posed by the North Sea’s unpredictable currents. She therefore hurried south by road, abandoning rich bundles of baggage under guard on the Northumbrian coast to be retrieved at a more propitious moment.

At York she was reunited with her husband, who had left Gaveston safe behind the impregnable walls of Scarborough Castle and ridden west to join her. Unassailable Scarborough’s fortifications certainly were, looming as they did from a clifftop three
hundred feet above the harbour. But Edward’s hopes for Gaveston’s safety were soon scattered to the winds. The Ordainers’ army, under the command of Pembroke and Surrey, moved swiftly to isolate the headland on which the castle stood, a cordon which in a matter of days formed a stranglehold. True, the besiegers could not reach Gaveston and his men inside the walls, but neither could supplies of food or arms or any other kind of help from his devoted king. In despair, Gaveston agreed terms for his own surrender on 19 May. Pembroke and Surrey solemnly swore that they would guarantee their prisoner’s safety until 1 August. By then, the agreement stipulated, either a peace settlement would be agreed between the king and all his magnates, or Gaveston would be returned to Scarborough, a castle that would be neither re-garrisoned nor re-provisioned in the meantime, to take his chances under renewed siege as if the negotiations had never happened. Edward, who was consulted at York, had no option but to give his assent, and Gaveston began his journey south as a prisoner in the custody of the earl of Pembroke, Aymer de Valence.

At almost forty, Pembroke was a careful, measured man who had proved a loyal servant to Edward I and to his son, although his loyalty by now was of a kind that Edward II was too short-sighted to recognise. It had been with obvious reluctance that he had been driven to stand against his king – he had even been prepared to argue Edward’s case for Gaveston’s recall from an earlier exile, in his capacity as an envoy to the pope in the spring of 1309 – but a year later his disenchantment with the failings of Edward’s rule led him to take his place among his peers as one of the Lords Ordainer. But, as befitted a man who had been intended for a career in the Church until the early death of his elder brother, his newly sworn pledge to ensure Gaveston’s safety was for Pembroke a matter of both personal honour and sacred duty, and he treated his prisoner with grace and respect.

On 9 June the two earls, captor and captive, arrived at the village of Deddington in Oxfordshire, where Pembroke found Gaveston comfortable lodgings at the rectory and left him under
guard while he rode on another twenty miles to visit his wife at his manor of Bampton. But Pembroke was not the only one of the Lords Ordainer who knew Gaveston’s whereabouts on this stately progress southward, and not all of his fellow earls shared Pembroke’s serene sense of obligation about the honourable treatment their prisoner was currently enjoying. For some, Gaveston was a renegade who had already made fools of them too often. Was it not obvious that, in order to secure Gaveston’s freedom, the king would agree to anything they asked, and then go back on his word as he had done so many times before? The ordinances had already decreed that, if Gaveston breached the terms of his exile, he should be treated ‘as an enemy of the king and of the kingdom and of his people’. And a peace process that set aside this prescription could mean only that the merry-go-round would continue to turn.

Among the earls unhappy with the genteel handling of their prisoner was Guy Beauchamp, the forty-year-old earl of Warwick. Like Pembroke, he had served Edward I faithfully; unlike Pembroke, he had been quick to voice his opposition to Edward II’s failings and Gaveston’s role in fostering them. The old king had granted Warwick extensive lands in Scotland as a reward for his military service there, which gave a particularly sharp edge to Warwick’s resentment of Edward’s disastrous neglect of the English campaign north of the border. He had also been at the old king’s bedside when he died, and may have been instructed to resist Gaveston’s return from that first, long-ago exile. Certainly, he had been utterly consistent in his determination to remove Gaveston and the provocative distraction he represented. Warwick was a cultured and discriminating man, but something of his tenacious forcefulness is apparent in Gaveston’s choice of nickname for him: ‘Warwick the Dog’, the
Vita
reports – an epithet elaborated by later tradition into ‘the Black Hound of Arden’.

In June 1312 Warwick passionately believed that the critical state of English politics demanded more forceful action than the cautious Pembroke had so far shown any sign of undertaking. Hearing that Gaveston had been left, lightly guarded, at Deddington,
the earl assembled his retainers in force and rode the twenty-five miles across country from his castle at Warwick. Early in the morning of Saturday 10 June, his men surrounded the rectory where Gaveston was staying, and when they saw how overwhelmingly they were outnumbered, Pembroke’s soldiers simply abandoned their arms. ‘Get up, traitor – you are taken!’ the
Vita
has Warwick shout outside Gaveston’s window. And Gaveston had no choice but to comply.

‘Led forth not as an earl but as a thief ’, Gaveston was escorted out of Deddington, at first on foot, and then roughly bundled onto a packhorse quite unlike the fine palfreys to which he was accustomed. When they reached Warwick Castle, towering over the town that shared its name, he was cast into a prison cell within the walls of the fortress. Pembroke had treated him with the dignity of a peer; Warwick with all the niceties due to a traitor.

That did not, however, mean that Warwick was confident of his next move. This was the moment at which the unity of the lords would be tested to destruction. They had done so much in the name of the crown against the will of their king – forced reform on his government, issued ordinances in his name, expelled his favourite from England’s shores. But could those ordinances now justify the use of lethal force against a man who was not only a peer of the realm, but dearer to the king than the kingdom itself? Could such an execution be lawful, when the king himself, the lawgiver whose responsibility it was to bring justice to his people, would never accept it? Edward had already declared Gaveston’s exile unlawful; how then could his punishment for breaching its terms be justified? And if an earl could be killed without the sanction of the law, where then lay safety for his killers?

Pembroke was clear in his answer. His own honour and integrity depended on fulfilling his guarantee that Gaveston would be kept safe from harm while a settlement was negotiated with the king, and he frantically sought to recover his prisoner. But Warwick, knowing full well the dangers of action, still could not bear to contemplate the risk of inaction: that Edward would yet again
put Gaveston’s baneful influence before the needs of his country. Collective responsibility – the earls’ claim to speak for the ‘community of the realm’ – had so far provided a means by which to restrain the king. Perhaps collective responsibility could now justify Gaveston’s death.

More earls on caparisoned warhorses clattered through Warwick Castle’s great gates in the days that followed: thirty-six-year-old Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and Essex and husband of Edward’s sister Elizabeth, twenty-seven-year-old Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, and, most powerful of all, Thomas of Lancaster, holder of five earldoms and arbiter, it now seemed, of England’s destiny. For days, these lords deliberated while Gaveston waited in the cold and gloom of his cell. They sealed documents promising one another protection from any repercussions that might befall them should Gaveston be executed. Two judges were called in to sentence him to death according to the terms of the ordinances – a legal gloss which could not mask the facts of a case in which the accused had had no properly constituted trial. And the death knell finally sounded when Lancaster at last stepped forward to play out the role of leadership for which his inheritance and his ambition had fitted him. ‘It was necessary for him to be great who should defend such a deed,’ explained the
Vita
solemnly. ‘Hence Thomas, earl of Lancaster, being of higher birth and more powerful than the rest, took upon himself the peril of the business …’

On Monday 19 June Gaveston was brought from his prison, blinking and bound in the early morning light, and handed over to the earl of Lancaster’s men. His ‘martial glory’ gone, he was dragged two miles north to Blacklow Hill, which belonged to the estates of Lancaster’s nearby castle of Kenilworth. While Warwick remained within the walls of his own fortress, Lancaster, Hereford and Arundel followed some way behind the procession, the earls’ unease made manifest in their physical distance from an execution that bore the hallmarks not of judicial process but of a lynching. A messenger was on hand to relay Lancaster’s orders, and at his word a
soldier stepped forward and drove his sword into Gaveston’s abdomen. Gaveston fell, bleeding, as another man unsheathed a blade to sever his head from his body. Lancaster waited and watched until he saw the head lifted into the air – no trophy, but proof of a job done. Then he turned his horse, and rode away.

Gaveston, the preening peacock, was gone at last, his glittering colours faded to black, his mocking voice silenced. But his capacity to make trouble was far from over. The earls had hoped that his removal would free Edward to turn his attention to government, to the war in Scotland and to the advice of his lords about the needs of his people. Lancaster had been prepared, in the end, to remove him by violence, as a desperate resolution to an intractable problem. But the problem had not gone away. Instead, it had changed in form.

Death did not end Edward’s devotion to Gaveston. His mutilated corpse had been left lying on the bloody grass at Blacklow, the embarrassing detritus of a dangerous political act, until it was rescued by a group of Dominican friars and taken to Oxford where it lay in state at the king’s command, embalmed and dressed in cloth of gold, to await burial (since Gaveston, excommunicated by the archbishop of Canterbury for his breach of the ordinances, could not be interred in consecrated ground until the anathema was revoked). Meanwhile, Edward’s response to his loss was as clear to the author of the
Vita
as it was to the perpetrators of Gaveston’s death: ‘they knew that when the matter came to the king’s notice, he would, if he could, proceed to take vengeance’.

The earls had begun this conflict united in search of a king who would take responsibility for his realm and offer them leadership. Their unity was now irretrievably fractured: Pembroke was back at the king’s side, raging at his former allies who had swept aside his personal promise of safe conduct to Gaveston (not to mention the possessions he had pledged as a guarantee of his oath). And the consequences of this division ran frighteningly deep. The lords who had Gaveston’s blood on their hands – principally Lancaster, the king’s cousin and the greatest magnate in England – could
not now afford to see their sovereign restored to untrammelled power, however magisterial his rule might conceivably be without the distraction of Gaveston’s presence, because Edward, as the
Vita
coolly explains, ‘had already decided to destroy those who killed Piers’. And the manner of that killing – no trial, no hearing before his peers in open court, just a brutal blow on a sunny hillside – had handed the king enough rope to hang them with. No one knew what the future would bring: but there could be little doubt that the scene was set for more turmoil, more violence and more bloodshed.