The Plantagenets (49 page)
Authors: Dan Jones
Of course, everything came at a cost. Edward had stamped his mark on Britain by nearly bankrupting the country and by exercising kingship with appalling cruelty and prejudice. He left the Crown with crippling debts of around £200,000. Even by the standards of the age, he could be a violent and coarse individual. England groaned and grumbled beneath the financial constraints he had imposed upon her. The Scots and the Welsh brooded darkly against overlordship stamped on them from above. But it would not be long before England, if not her neighbours, grew bitterly to rue the leopard’s passing.
Age of Violence
(1307–1330)
O calamity! To see men lately clothed in purple and fine linen
appear now in rags and, bound in shackles, shut up in prison!
– THE LIFE OF EDWARD II
‘You bastard son of a bitch! You want to give lands away? You, who never gained any? As the Lord lives, were it not for fear of breaking up the kingdom, you should never enjoy your inheritance!’
These, according to the inventive chronicler Walter of Guisborough, were the words hurled at Edward of Caernarfon by his father, Edward I, during one of their final arguments, in February 1307. According to Guisborough, the younger Edward had approached the king through an intermediary with a request to grant away the county of Ponthieu to his close friend, confidant and fellow knight, Piers Gaveston. Ponthieu had been brought into the Plantagenet family by Eleanor of Castile, young Edward’s much-mourned mother. In fury, the old king had attacked his son, first with words and then with his hands, tearing out clumps of the young man’s hair before throwing him, exhausted, out of the royal presence.
Was this story true? Certainly there were those who were prepared to believe it. Edward of Caernarfon was a curious young man. In some ways he was the image of his father: tall and athletic, a skilled horseman; a good-looking Plantagenet prince who lacked his father’s lisp or his grandfather Henry III’s droopy eye. He was ‘a handsome man and strong in body and limb’, wrote the author of the Anonimalle Chronicle. ‘But he fell short of the qualities and style of his father, for he was concerned not with deeds of chivalry or prowess but only with his own desires.’ Despite his regal good looks, it was clear from the very beginning of his reign until its dramatic conclusion that he was a very poor candidate for kingship.
This was a pity, since when Edward II acceded to the throne he inherited what was potentially a very advantageous set of conditions. His father’s two most troublesome noblemen – the earls of Norfolk and Hereford – had recently died. The greatest remaining earls – Thomas earl of Lancaster and Gilbert earl of Gloucester – were Edward’s cousin and nephew respectively. Archbishop Winchelsea of Canterbury was exiled and Walter Langton, the royal treasurer with whom Edward had clashed in 1305, was swiftly fired, deprived of his lands and imprisoned. There was an imposing debt of around £200,000 hanging over from Edward I’s reign, but a competent king with the goodwill of a new reign would be able to refinance without too much difficulty.
Yet Edward was from his earliest months as king viewed with suspicion and hostility. Every aspect of his life seemed at odds with the office of kingship. This was most obvious from his social habits. In an age when chivalry and martial valour still formed a crucial part of the royal ideal, Edward was constantly portrayed as a degenerate. Many of the most poisonous chroniclers’ pen-portraits of him date from a time when disaster had struck his reign, but it was nevertheless commonly and contemptuously said that he was obsessed with peasant activities such as swimming, rowing, ditching and thatching.
Edward was accused by the chronicler Ranulph Higden of preferring the company of ‘jesters, singers, actors, carriage drivers, diggers, oarsmen, [and] sailors’ to fraternizing with nobles and knights, and indeed, sailors, bargemasters and carpenters were recorded dining in the king’s chamber at times during the reign. ‘If only he had given to arms the attention that he expended on rustic pursuits he would have raised England on high,’ bemoaned the anonymous author of
The Life of Edward II
, a contemporary history of the king’s reign. A royal messenger once said that the king preferred thatching and ditching to hearing the mass. Although there is other evidence to say that Edward was conventionally pious and could hold his own in battle, his reputation for frivolity and lowly sports preceded him. He did not enjoy or hold tournaments, nor did he sponsor great chivalric occasions such as the Feast of the Swans at which his father had belted him as a
knight. This lack of interest in the proper public conduct of kingship nagged away at his reputation throughout his reign and eventually reduced him to a figure of popular derision.
Edward also had a reputation for favouritism, and this was a great deal more damaging. He spent his entire adult life under the shadow of cronies with whom he fostered unhealthy obsessions. ‘The king dishonoured the good people of his land and honoured its enemies, such as flatterers, false counsellors and wrongdoers, who gave him advice contrary to his royal estates and the common profit of the land, and he held them very dear,’ wrote the Anonimalle chronicler. There were several such favourites during Edward’s lifetime, but one for whom his passion ran highest of all. From as early as 1300, Edward was dominated by one notorious individual in particular: Gaveston.
Gaveston was a Gascon knight. He was slightly older than Edward, and was probably placed in his household by Edward I following good service rendered on campaign with the old king in Flanders in 1297 and Scotland in 1300. According to the chronicler Geoffrey Baker, Gaveston was ‘graceful and agile in body, sharp-witted, refined in manners, … [and] well versed in military matters’. He must have struck the elder Edward as a perfect model of knightly chivalry for his eldest son to follow.
It would quickly prove otherwise. Whatever strange relationship developed between Gaveston and Edward, it was clear from very early in their acquaintance that they shared a bond of unhealthy closeness, in which the pliable Edward was led by the nose wherever the clever, ambitious and grasping Gaveston would take him. Gaveston was a highly charismatic individual, but insufferably arrogant, a trait that the author of
The Life of Edward II
called ‘intolerable to the barons and the main cause of both the hatred and the anger’. But Gaveston’s puffed-up pride delighted the king as much as it infuriated his contemporaries. ‘If an earl or baron entered [Edward’s] chamber … while Piers was there, [Edward] addressed no one except Piers alone,’ wrote the same chronicler, who also suggested that ‘Piers was regarded as a sorcerer’.
We will never know if Edward II and Piers Gaveston were lovers, whether in the sense we would understand such a relationship now or on any other terms. It seems likely that they shared some bond of adoptive brotherhood, modelled perhaps on that of Jonathan and David in the Old Testament, in which ‘Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself.’ Every major chronicler of the reign noted that Edward treated Gaveston as a brother, and the king referred to his friend as such in official documents. Perhaps there was a sexual dimension to the relationship as well, but if there was, it was not known at the beginning of the reign when Edward was betrothed to Philip IV of France’s daughter Isabella. A fiercely conventional king such as Philip would never have allowed his daughter to marry a sodomite and a heretic.
But there was nevertheless an intimacy to Gaveston and Edward’s relationship that scandalized their contemporaries, and it fell into a wider pattern of behaviour that Edward’s subjects and contemporaries thought of and characterized as abominable and unkingly.
This first became a matter of national importance in 1305, when Gaveston was banished from the young Edward’s company as part of the prince’s punishment for a bitter argument with Edward I’s treasurer, Walter Langton. Although he was readmitted and knighted in the great ceremony that preceded Edward I’s final Scottish invasion the following year, Gaveston absconded from the campaign with twenty-one other knights and disappeared overseas to take part in tournaments. For this indiscretion he was exiled from England on a pension of 100 marks per year.
When Edward of Caernarfon learned that his father had died in Burgh-by-Sands, and that he was now Edward II, king of England, his first act was to recall Gaveston from exile, grant him the earldom of Cornwall and award him marriage to Margaret de Clare, the daughter of Gilbert earl of Gloucester and Joan of Acre, Edward’s own sister.
This was an inordinately lavish promotion for a knight. Indeed, it was one rightly fit only for a kinsman of the king. The earldom of Cornwall was one of the great Plantagenet titles. It had most famously been held by Henry III’s brother Richard, who in his day had been one
of the senior noblemen in Europe, king of Germany and count of Poitou. It brought with it lands not just in the south-west, but in Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Yorkshire. The annual income was around £4,000. It was both a royal, fraternal title, and an award of enormous and significant power. To bestow it on a mere household companion like Gaveston was not merely overly generous: it was politically very dangerous.
The list of people who might be offended by Gaveston’s promotion was long. Chief among them was Margaret of France, the dowager queen, who had understood from the late King Edward I that the earldom would go to one of her sons, Edward II’s half-brothers Thomas of Brotherton and Edmund of Woodstock, born in 1300 and 1301 respectively, towards the end of the old king’s reign. Despite their youth, either of these might have been expected to be placed in nominal charge of England’s government when Edward went to France to marry Philip IV’s daughter Isabella. But they were not: that honour fell to Gaveston.
From the beginning of his reign Edward made clear that Gaveston was not merely a court favourite, but that he intended him to play a role as quasi-king. When Edward left England in January 1308 to be married and do homage for Gascony, he left Gaveston as regent of England with extraordinary, unprecedented powers backed up by a new royal seal of absence.
That the office of regent was one that traditionally fell to a senior royal official, a member of the royal family or the queen did not trouble Edward. Yet it troubled all around him. Gaveston, elevated to that title, was manifestly not a Plantagenet. Nor was he a justiciar, a chancellor or an archbishop. ‘Yesterday’s exile and outcast has been made governor and keeper of the land,’ wrote the author of
The Life of Edward II
, in disbelief. But regent was not the zenith of Gaveston’s rise, as the king’s coronation set out to prove.
Edward II was crowned at Westminster on 25 February 1308. The great ceremony was attended by the combined nobility of England and France. All packed together into Westminster Abbey to witness the anointing of a new king, accompanied by his twelve-year-old queen, Isabella, whom Edward had married in Boulogne a month previously, in a shimmering ceremony attended by five kings and three queens.
Westminster heaved with bodies. The abbey church and the streets around were packed with participants and onlookers. (The crush was so intense that a knight and former seneschal of Ponthieu, Sir John Bakewell, was killed when a wall collapsed.) Inside the church the assembled nobility literally glittered in cloth of gold. The French had sent a magnificent delegation, including the counts of Valois and Evreux, Isabella’s brother Charles (the future Charles IV of France), John, duke of Brabant, with his wife Margaret, Edward II’s sister; Henry, count of Luxembourg (soon to become the Emperor Henry VII), and many more besides. The English earls, barons and knights of the shire packed alongside them in the abbey church, to witness the most important political ceremony of all.
Silent, but also present, were the remains of the old king. Edward I’s newly constructed tomb was a smooth and austere box of black Purbeck marble, inscribed with the words EDWARDUS PRIMUS SCOTTORUM MALLEUS HIC EST. PACTUM SERVA. (This is Edward the First, Hammer of the Scots. Honour the vow.) It was a cool reminder that kingship brought military responsibility – and all
who had sworn to see out the vision of a reunited, Arthurian Britain were held to their responsibility and the oath that had been sworn at the Feast of the Swans.
All eyes anticipated the new king. He entered the abbey church wearing a green robe with black hose, walking barefoot along a carpet of flowers with his young bride beside him. Above the royal couple was held a great embroidered canopy, and in front of them processed the magnates and prelates of England.
There was strict protocol to the order of procession, which invariably caused arguments at coronations. Each earl at the ceremony had a certain role to fulfil. At Edward’s coronation the earls of Lancaster, Warwick and Lincoln carried great swords; the king’s cousin Henry of Lancaster carried the royal sceptre; four other barons – Hugh Despenser the elder, Roger Mortimer of Chirk, Thomas de Vere, son of the earl of Oxford, and Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel – bore a board on which the heavy and luxurious royal coronation robes were placed.
Yet among all these great men walked Piers Gaveston, proceeding in pride of place directly before Edward and Isabella. According to the Annalist of St Paul’s, he was decked out like ‘the God Mars’. Gaveston, ludicrously, trumped the assembled nobles in their cloth of gold by wearing silks of royal purple, decorated with pearls. He carried the crown of Edward the Confessor – the most sacred item among all the royal regalia.
It was a grave and unmistakable sign of Gaveston’s role in the new regime, and could not have been construed by the assembled nobles as anything but a vile insult against their lineage and status. This was exactly as Edward and Gaveston intended. For months before the ceremony, the new king had been imagining his public declaration of the new royal partnership: his brotherhood with Gaveston.