The Plantagenets (51 page)

When Lancaster inherited the Lincoln estates, he was at a stroke created the most powerful nobleman in England. The Lincoln inheritance boosted his income to £11,000 – almost double that of the next most senior earl, Gilbert earl of Gloucester – and gave him lands throughout the kingdom. He could raise vast private armies of retainers, and wield power at both a national and local level.

Like Simon de Montfort, another vastly powerful earl of Lancaster and Plantagenet kinsman, who had tormented Henry III, Thomas earl of Lancaster was an abrasive figure. Proud, spiky and dogmatic, he tended to isolate himself from his peers, and found it difficult to command the loyalty of his inferiors. He was a hugely unpopular
landlord, who frequently broke the law against his tenants. Lancaster did not inspire devotion, and his lack of political judgement was a source of concern as he was elevated to the position of second most powerful man in England.

Throughout his life, Lancaster was the most zealous of the Ordainers, and he was heavily involved in preparing the schedule of the forty-one articles of reform that was presented to Edward at the end of August 1311, and promulgated to the country in November.

The 1311 Ordinances were broad-ranging and exhaustive. They attacked familiar abuses dating back to Edward I’s reign: purveyance and
prise
; the siphoning of customs duties to Italian banks in order to service debt; the king’s right to go to war without consulting parliament. By the command of the Ordainers, Edward was placed under heavy restrictions: he could not grant away his lands without the consent of the barons in parliament until his debts were paid off; revenues were to be paid directly to the exchequer rather than into the king’s household; parliaments should be held once or twice a year with special committees set up to hear complaints against the king’s abuses. Edward’s entire administration, from his chancellor and treasurer to his county sheriffs, were to be appointed by committees.

Here was 1258 all over again. Government was effectively removed from a failing Plantagenet king, and reimposed upon him in a strict and prescriptive way. How the Ordinances were practically to be enforced against the will of a truculent and reluctant king was no clearer in 1311 than at any other time of constitutional crisis, dating back to Magna Carta. Every previous attempt to reform an unwilling Plantagenet had ended inevitably in civil war. Yet there was little option but to try.

One demand could be enforced: the exile of Piers Gaveston. As in 1308, the Ordainers levelled another raft of attacks at Gaveston, who was now seen as a focal point for all the inadequacies of kingship at large. It was stated in the articles of the Ordinances that Gaveston had ‘led the king astray’, that he had ‘persuaded him deceitfully and in many ways to do wrong’, and that he had ‘estrang[ed] the king’s heart from his liege men’.

Gaveston was blamed for taking the country to war without the barons’ permission. He was accused of having blank charters sealed ‘to the deception and disinheritance of the king and crown’, and more generally of behaving ‘craftily, falsely and treacherously to the great disgrace and damage of the kingdom’. For the third time in his life, Edward was faced with an angry demand that his adopted brother and comrade Gaveston should be exiled – this time not only ‘from England but from Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Gascony, and from every land as well beyond the sea … subject to the lordship of the king of England, for ever and without return’.

He left England from Dover on 3 November, and landed in Flanders, intending to seek the hospitality of the duke and duchess of Brabant, to whom Edward had written in advance requesting they look kindly upon his exiled friend. Once again, however, the exile was short. At the end of November a second set of Ordinances was issued, probably on the order of Lancaster and the earl of Warwick. These were aimed solely at purging the king’s household of anyone connected with Gaveston. They backfired. The severity and provocative nature of the new terms succeeded only in making the king defiant. Humiliated and furious, he secretly recalled Gaveston after only a few weeks of exile. In early January 1312 the disgraced earl returned once more to England, arriving in Yorkshire just in time to meet his wife, Margaret, who had given birth to their first child – a daughter named Joan.

Almost immediately Edward began distributing notices to the country saying that he rejected the Ordinances and confirmed that he had recalled Gaveston and restored him to his earldom. In late February Edward and Gaveston celebrated Margaret’s churching. It was the last celebration that they would share.

Manhunt

The village of Deddington in Oxfordshire was arranged around a castle built shortly after the Norman Conquest by Odo, bishop of Bayeux, the brother of King William I. It was familiar territory to Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke, whose wife was staying just twenty-two miles away in the manor of Bampton when the earl arrived in the village on the evening of 9 June 1312.

The earl came to the village with a notorious prisoner in tow. Piers Gaveston was captured. The king’s favourite had been in custody since 19 May, when he had surrendered to Pembroke, the earl of Surrey and two other barons who were besieging him in Scarborough castle. Pembroke held Gaveston prisoner in the name of the political community of England. He affected to take his duties extremely properly: during negotiations with Edward II that had taken place at York, the earl had agreed that he would forfeit all of his property if any harm should come to Gaveston while he was in custody.

The manhunt for Gaveston had been planned and put into action with a remarkable degree of cooperation between the great magnates of England. Within weeks of Gaveston’s arrival back in England the earls had mustered men right across England and Wales during March, under the pretence of organizing tournaments, ‘lest the country be terrified by the sight of arms’, wrote the author of
The Life of Edward II
.

The real reason for raising men was of course to make war upon the king and his loathsome favourite. The prime movers in the plot were Archbishop Winchelsea, who had excommunicated Gaveston,
along with the earls of Lancaster, Pembroke, Hereford, Arundel and Warwick and two lesser barons, Henry Percy and Roger de Clifford. Others, such as the earls of Surrey and Gloucester, were aware of the plot and involved to a lesser degree. Each magnate had been charged with keeping the peace in a different part of the kingdom, while Pembroke and Warwick had formal responsibility for capturing Gaveston himself.

It had eventually been Pembroke, Surrey, Percy and Clifford who plucked Gaveston from his bolt-hole at Scarborough castle on 19 May, after a short siege. Negotiations for Gaveston’s release had immediately begun with Edward, and were set to continue nearer to London during the summer. Pembroke journeyed south with the captured earl, and on a warm June night arrived in Deddington.

In spite of Pembroke’s solemn oath to ensure Gaveston’s safety, the earl made a curious decision that evening, announcing that he was leaving Deddington and going to visit his wife at Bampton. He would be leaving Gaveston to rest under a light guard.

Was this foolishness or treachery? Pembroke would for ever protest the former, but it was naïve to leave the most hated man in England alone overnight, when his enemies abounded. Within hours of Pembroke leaving Deddington, the earl of Warwick had swooped into the village with a large party of men-at-arms. The man that Gaveston had scorned as the Black Dog was here to bite his tormentor. The author of
The Life of Edward II
gave the story a vivid hue:

When the earl of Warwick had learned all that was happening about Piers, he took a strong force and secretly approached the place where he knew Piers to be. Coming to the village very early in the morning one Saturday he entered the gate of the courtyard and surrounded the chamber [where Gaveston was staying].

Then the earl called out in a loud voice: ‘Arise traitor, you are taken.’ And Piers, hearing the earl, also seeing the earl’s superior force and that the guard to which he had been allotted was not resisting, putting on his clothes came down from the chamber. In this fashion Piers is
taken and is led forth not as an earl, but as a thief; and he who used to ride on palfreys is now forced to go on foot.

Warwick marched Gaveston from the village of Deddington in triumph, his retainers blowing trumpets to advertise the victory around the rolling fields of Oxfordshire. Crowds thronged around the parade, bellowing abuse at the fallen favourite. Gaveston was marched all the way to Warwick castle, where he was thrown in prison as a traitor to the realm.

This was no renegade action from a single earl. Within a week of Gaveston’s capture the town of Warwick filled with the earls of Lancaster, Hereford and Arundel and their retinues, along with lesser barons involved in the plot. Pembroke, now showing genuine horror at his contemporaries’ ruthlessness, approached and protested that his vow to protect Gaveston was being torn up in front of him. He was dismissed with the advice that he ought in future to make his promises with greater care.

Lancaster, a royal earl, a Plantagenet and the most senior man present, from this point took overall responsibility and risk for the fate of Gaveston. The prisoner was tried before a court assembled under Lancaster and Warwick’s authority, accused of breaching the terms of the Ordinances, which called for his exile. Clearly he was guilty: here was a man brought before a court assembled especially for his condemnation, operating under a law drafted specifically for his destruction.

Gaveston was sentenced to death. On 19 June he was taken from his cell and brought before Lancaster. Chroniclers described a pitiable scene in which the prisoner wailed for mercy. Instead of clemency, Gaveston was handed over to armed guards, who dragged him two miles north of Warwick to Blacklow Hill. At the top of the hill he was passed on to two Welshmen. Each dealt a deadly blow: one ran him through the body, and the other hacked off his head.

Lancaster was shown Gaveston’s severed head as proof that the ghastly deed was done. But the body lay on the ground where it fell, until some Dominican friars collected the remains, sewed the head
back onto the body and took it to Oxford. For two and a half years the corpse lay embalmed and dressed in cloth of gold in the Dominican house. That was as much as charity would bear: Gaveston died excommunicate and could not be buried on holy land.

Even given Gaveston’s insolence and his irresponsible career, this was a shocking way for him to die. And it had profound implications for the future. Edward, when he discovered the fate of his adopted brother, was distraught. Rather than counting his errors, he became ever more determined to resist the Ordinances. He would never forgive his cousin Lancaster for his act of arrogant brutality, and a blood feud would boil between the two for the best part of the next decade.

And far from uniting England, Gaveston’s death had divided the political community. A permanent split was created among the barons: those responsible for Gaveston’s murder were now permanently isolated from royal favour, while Pembroke and Surrey, who felt that they had been at some level deceived by Lancaster and Warwick, became unwavering loyalists to Edward.

But far more deadly than all this was the line that had been crossed when Gaveston was tried under a court whose quasi-judicial authority stemmed from the earl of Lancaster and the Ordinances he championed. For all his transgressions, Gaveston’s death could not possibly be a just sentence under the laws of the realm. Rather, when he was run through and beheaded on Blacklow Hill, Piers Gaveston – an earl, whether his peers liked it or not – was murdered. And his murder was political.

For more than 150 years the Plantagenets had reigned in England by rule of law. Only in the most severe instances had great men died in the course of political and constitutional disputes: Thomas Becket by misadventure; Simon de Montfort on the battlefield; Arthur of Brittany in cold blood in his prison cell. Now a king’s closest companion had been killed in calculated fashion on the order of one of the most senior Plantagenets in the realm.

Kidnap, violence and murder were commonplace in medieval society, but they were not an acceptable part of the ordinary course of
royal government except under the severest circumstances. Now, however, violence had become a political tool in England. Pandora’s box was open. As Edward and Lancaster moved towards implacable hatred, the Plantagenet family was in danger of tearing itself apart – and taking England with it.

Summer of Promise

To be in Paris during the summer of 1313 was to know the high delights of medieval France. At the beginning of June the whole population flocked in the city streets, and lodgings were crammed with countless noblemen, young knights, the aristocratic young ladies of Europe and dignified visitors from foreign lands. Great crowds watched public performances, ceremonies and processions. Colourful fabrics decked the streets, while the city bourgeois provided a fountain that sprayed wine into the air, decorated with fabulous creatures: mermaids, lions, leopards and mythical beasts. In a covered market in one part of the city an enclosed wood was built and filled with rabbits, so that revellers could amuse themselves by chasing tame animals. Open-air theatrical performances and musical recitals delighted the population. The French chroniclers averred that this was the most spectacular festival ever seen in France. It was a summer of great pageantry and celebration. King Edward II of England and Queen Isabella were at the heart of it all.

The king and queen of England had arrived in France on a state visit at the end of May, travelling with the earls of Pembroke and Richmond and other loyalists including Hugh Despenser the elder and Henry Beaumont. They had been invited to France to enjoy the honour of witnessing Edward’s father-in-law, King Philip IV, knight nearly 200 young men, including his sons Louis, king of Navarre, Philip and Charles. The ceremony had echoes of the great Feast of the Swans held by Edward I on the eve of his final Scottish invasion in 1306, at which Edward and all his new knights swore first to conquer
Scotland, and then to win back the Holy Land. But as in all matters, the French Crown determined to make the ceremony greater than anything before it: an occasion of unsurpassed glory and magnificence.