2

The New King and His Favourite

In the great hall of Carlisle Castle, Edward II sat in solitary splendour and watched the earls and lords who had attended his father before his death come before him and in order of rank, drop to one knee, kiss his hand, and swear homage and fealty to him as their liege lord. What these men thought of their new king cannot be known. Certainly they knew of his love for Piers Gaveston, almost certainly of his unseemly rustic pursuits, and perhaps felt uneasy about the future. But whatever they, and Edward’s subjects, might have thought of his strange hobbies and his abilities, or lack of them, nobody ever criticised his appearance. He was every inch a king. The contemporary author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi (Life of Edward II), who knew him well and who criticised him far more often than not, described him as ‘tall and strong, a fine figure of a handsome man’. In 1300, aged sixteen, he was said to be ‘of a well-proportioned and handsome person’, and after his accession, ‘handsome in body and great of strength’, ‘physically he was one of the strongest men in his realm’, ‘elegant, of outstanding strength’, and ‘a handsome man, strong of body and limb’.¹ He had a moustache and beard, and fair curly or wavy hair, which he wore parted in the middle, sometimes held in place with a circlet, and falling almost to his shoulders. He must have been about 6 feet or a little more: his father stood 6 feet 2 inches, and his son Edward III’s life-sized death mannequin measured 5 feet 10½ inches. Edward II was probably taller than his son, however, as the author of the Vitaremarked on his height, and the chronicler Thomas Walsingham said that Edward III was ‘not excessively tall’.²

Around 23 July, the new king supervised the departure of his father’s funeral procession as it began its long journey south to Westminster. The procession was led by Anthony Bek, bishop of Durham and the only Englishman in history to hold the title of patriarch of Jerusalem, whom Edward called ‘our entire and certain friend’.³ Edward left Carlisle on 31 July and crossed the Scottish border with his army, or rather his father’s army, to march the 30 miles to Dumfries. Prior to his death, Edward I had intended to hunt down Robert Bruce, defeat him utterly, and execute him with all the considerable brutality the age was capable of. In March 1306, Bruce had had himself crowned king of Scots at Scone Abbey, a few weeks after stabbing his greatest enemy and rival John ‘the Red Comyn’ to death in the Greyfriars church in Dumfries. This act followed a ten-year interregnum in Scotland, and the previous king, John Balliol, removed from the throne in 1296, was still alive in Picardy with his son, another Edward (who had dined with Edward of Caernarfon in 1293). English kings did not claim the throne of Scotland, to which they had no right, but felt entitled to interfere in Scottish affairs and believed that the Scottish kings owed them fealty for their kingdom. Edward I and his son refused to acknowledge Robert Bruce as king of Scots, and neither did the pope, thanks to Bruce’s sacrilegious murder of Comyn in church. After his inauguration as king, Bruce fled to the west of Scotland with his only remaining brother – yet another Edward – and his few supporters; most of Scotland was dominated politically by the powerful Comyn faction, who, understandably, were as keen as Edward I to find and execute him. In England, ‘King Hob’, as Bruce was derisively known, was considered a rebel and a traitor, having previously been an ally of Edward I, and much of Edward II’s reign would be taken up with endless campaigns to defeat Bruce and assume what he considered his rightful position as overlord of Scotland.

On 6 August 1307, Edward granted the earldom of Cornwall to Piers Gaveston, possibly without Gaveston’s prior knowledge, as Edward would later claim to the pope.⁴ Although Edward’s earls later complained bitterly about Gaveston’s advancement, all but one of them, Warwick, put their seals to the charter, and it is not true, as the Annales Paulini claim, that the barons later had the charter burnt: it still exists in the National Archives in Kew.⁵ The earldom of Cornwall was Edward’s own inheritance: the previous earl, Edmund, nephew of Henry III, died in 1300, and as he had no children, nieces or nephews, the earldom passed to his first cousin Edward I as Edmund’s nearest male heir, and thence to Edward II.⁶

Edward and Piers Gaveston were reunited at Dumfries, sometime in August. This must have been an extremely emotional occasion for Edward, who probably loved Gaveston more than he loved any other person in his life. The flamboyant Piers, whose family took its name from the Béarnais village of Gabaston close to the Pyrenees, was of noble birth, the second of the four sons of Arnaud de Gabaston or Gaveston and Claramonde de Marsan, and far from being the low-born nobody he is often made out to be.⁷ His father and grandfathers were among the leading barons of Béarn. Gaveston’s date of birth is not known, but he was older than Edward, born by July 1283 at the latest and possibly a few years earlier; his parents were married before 30 June 1272.⁸ The first known reference to ‘Perrot Gaveston’ – ‘Perrot’ or ‘Perott’ was his nickname – appears in November 1297, when he was a squire of Edward I’s household.⁹ Edward I sent Gaveston to live in his son’s household in 1300 when Edward was sixteen, though it may be that the two young men had met before.

Odd though it might seem from later events, Edward I placed Gaveston, a courageous and excellent soldier and successful jouster par extraordinaire, in his son’s household with the intention that he should become Edward’s role model, which perhaps indicates that he was indeed several years older than Edward. Gaveston served in the king’s army in 1297 and impressed Edward I with his military ability, which the king probably hoped would rub off on his son. By 1303, Gaveston was described as Edward’s ‘companion’.¹⁰ No likeness or physical description of him exists, and contemporary chroniclers were so unremittingly hostile that it is difficult to form a clear picture of his personality, but he was athletic, charming, courteous but sharp-tongued, irreverent, witty, and boundlessly self-confident, even arrogant. A later chronicler – who in fact never saw him – described him as elegant and agile, sharp-witted, refined and well-practised in military matters.¹¹ Much like Edward himself, Gaveston polarised opinion, and most people hated him. Edward loved him beyond reason, and far beyond sense.

In February 1307, Edward I banished Gaveston from England, a move that, contrary to contemporary chroniclers’ beliefs, was not intended to be punitive. The king set the date of departure two months in advance, after Gaveston had competed in a jousting tournament, gave him a generous financial settlement of a hundred marks a year, and ordered him to await his eventual return.¹² None of this suggests that Edward I was angry with Gaveston personally. At that stage in his life, fierce and irascible, his fury would be very apparent, as he demonstrated around this time by tearing out clumps of his son’s hair and kicking him. It is highly likely that it was Edward of Caernarfon’s own conduct which caused Edward I to order Gaveston out of England, perhaps because Edward had asked his father permission to grant either his county of Ponthieu or the earldom of Cornwall to his friend – though the Scalacronica claims that Gaveston ‘was accused before the king of diverse crime and vices, which rendered him unfit company for the king’s son’.¹³ Edward I was probably troubled by the relationship that had developed between the two men and ‘the undue intimacy which the young Lord Edward had adopted towards’ Gaveston, and deeply concerned that his son’s love for the Gascon would create insurmountable problems and divisions in England when he himself was dead and Edward acceded to the throne – correctly, as it turned out.¹⁴

That Edward II loved Piers Gaveston is beyond all doubt. Precisely how he loved him, however, is a difficult question to answer. There is nothing written by Edward himself that would give us any insight into his feelings for Gaveston, except that, occasionally, he referred to him in official letters as ‘our dear and faithful brother’, the same address he used for his half-brothers. Five chronicles written during or shortly after Edward’s lifetime say that he referred to Gaveston as ‘my brother’ in speech, the Vitacalls Gaveston ‘a great earl whom the king had adopted as brother’, and the Annales Paulini also say he was Edward’s ‘adoptive brother’.¹⁵ For two young men to swear an oath of adoptive brotherhood was usually considered honourable; the problem with Edward naming Gaveston as his brother, as their contemporaries saw it, was the gulf of rank which separated them.¹⁶ Chroniclers also commented on Edward’s immoderate, inordinate and excessive love for Gaveston: ‘I do not remember to have heard that one man so loved another. Jonathan cherished David, Achilles loved Patroclus. But we do not read that they were immoderate. Our king, however, was incapable of moderate favour,’ says the Vita, and other chroniclers wrote much the same thing.¹⁷ Edward’s behaviour in the first five years of his reign bears out this judgement. We also learn that when Edward first saw Gaveston, ‘he fell so much in love that he entered upon an enduring compact with him, and determined to knit an indissoluble bond of affection with him, above all other mortals’.¹⁸ It is important to remember that this did not automatically mean romantic love, as we would understand it. The early fourteenth century was an age when men bandied about declarations of love for other men far more easily than in later eras; the earl of Richmond’s chaplain claimed in 1309, for example, that Piers Gaveston loved Richmond ‘beyond measure’.¹⁹ A few years later, Edward’s cousin the earl of Lancaster, on learning that his friend and confidant Robert Holland had abandoned him during his rebellion against the king, groaned ‘How could he find it in his heart to betray me, when I loved him so much?’²⁰ The usual assumption that Edward and Gaveston’s relationship was sexual and erotic owes far more to Christopher Marlowe’s c. 1592 play Edward II and numerous modern productions of it, including Derek Jarman’s explicit film version of 1991, than to any fourteenth-century evidence. Although Edward definitely loved Gaveston, Gaveston’s feelings for the king are impossible to determine with any certainty. One might be tempted to take a cynical view: Gaveston was a younger son with little chance of inheriting his family’s lands, and besides, his father left Gascony for England in the late 1290s in dire financial straits, and had to support himself by entering Edward I’s service.²¹ Gaveston therefore had few prospects for wealth or advancement in his homeland or in England, and had nothing to lose and everything to gain by courting the favour of the future king. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that Gaveston did genuinely love Edward.

Although Edward II was a man who loved men, we cannot say with any certainty how he loved them, and his sexuality was rather more complex than is often surmised these days. He fathered an illegitimate son, Adam, sometime between 1305 and 1310, when he was in his early to mid-twenties.²² In the fourteenth century, people were almost invariably named after close members of their family, and as none of Edward’s relatives bore the name, this implies that either his son’s mother was the daughter or sister of a man called Adam, or that his son’s godfather was called Adam. Piers Gaveston also fathered an illegitimate daughter, Amie.²³ Despite some modern speculation to the contrary, there is no reason whatsoever to think that Edward did not father his wife Isabella’s children; a comparison of their itineraries proves conclusively that they were together approximately nine months before the births of all their offspring. The true nature of Edward II’s and Piers Gaveston’s relationship is unknown, and forever unknowable. Whether they were lovers, whether their relationship was romantic, or romantic on one side and calculating on the other, or erotic but unconsummated, or based on an oath of adoptive brotherhood, or the deeply affectionate bond of two men who met in adolescence and formed a close and unbreakable friendship, ultimately matters less than the fact that Edward’s excessive favour to Gaveston caused widespread envy and resentment.

At Dumfries, Edward took the homage of the Scottish lords who were loyal to him, and left on 12 August with Gaveston and his army, intending to march north and pursue Robert Bruce. He spent several weeks wandering from Dumfries to Sanquhar and Cumnock, doing and achieving nothing in particular except attending a feast that Gaveston gave on 17 August – where he gave a pound each to the Welsh trumpeters Yevan and Ythel who played for them – and soon gave up the pursuit.²⁴ In late August he retraced his steps to Carlisle, and from there, travelled to Knaresborough Castle in Yorkshire, which now belonged to Gaveston. For the new earl of Cornwall, the huge costs involved in entertaining the king and his retinue for a few days hardly constituted a problem, as Edward had just made him one of the richest men in the country, with an annual income of about £4,000.²⁵

Puzzled by Edward’s unwillingness to chase up hill and down dale in pursuit of a fugitive, albeit royal, Scotsman, three fourteenth-century chronicles claimed that he abandoned the war with Scotland because of his desire to marry his fiancée, Isabella of France, as soon as possible.²⁶ This is extremely unlikely. Isabella was probably only eleven years old in the summer of 1307, and although Edward II had many faults, lusting after prepubescent girls was not one of them. There are no grounds to suppose either that he was desperately keen for his wedding to a girl he had never seen and whom he had to marry for political reasons to go ahead, or that he was trying to get out of it.²⁷ The real reasons for Edward’s departure from Scotland are not hard to find: it was important for him to return south and take over his father’s government, and make arrangements for his coronation and wedding. Edward’s precipitate departure from Scotland, however, where he didn’t return for three years, allowed Robert Bruce the breathing space to consolidate his position and gain allies.

Edward around this time ordered the arrest of Walter Langton, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, possibly at Piers Gaveston’s instigation.²⁸ In 1305, Edward and Gaveston had entered Langton’s lands and stolen his deer, and Edward insulted him with ‘certain gross and harsh words’, the main cause of his quarrel with his father which ended with the old king refusing to allow his son anywhere near him.²⁹ Langton remained in prison, accused, among other things, of consorting with the devil and, rather more conventionally, of misappropriating public funds. However, he would be reconciled with the king by early 1312, and served him faithfully until his death in 1321. Edward also asked the pope to restore Robert Winchelsey to the archbishopric of Canterbury, from which he had been suspended the year before at the request of Edward I.³⁰ Winchelsey returned to England in March 1308, and repaid Edward by becoming one of his and Gaveston’s most intractable enemies, a stance he maintained until his death. Edward’s dislike of a future ally and trust of a future enemy provide early evidence of his inept judgement of character.

In the early months of his reign, Edward communicated with Philip IV of France about his wedding to Philip’s daughter Isabella, which was to go ahead in January 1308 in Boulogne, and set about making arrangements for his trip to France.³¹ Edward and Isabella, his fourth fiancée, had been betrothed since 1299, when he was fifteen and she three or four. The reason for their betrothal lay in the rich province of Gascony. Edward’s great-great-grandmother Eleanor had brought the duchy of Aquitaine to the English Crown in 1152 on her marriage to the future Henry II. In 1259, in an attempt to end the decades of military conflict between England and France over the vast French territories ruled by England, Henry III and Louis IX signed the Treaty of Paris, which stated that the English king could keep Gascony of the original inheritance, but held it as a vassal of the king of France.³² This meant that the English kings owed homage to the French king as their feudal overlord, which caused great friction between the two countries. Every time a new king of either country acceded to the throne, the English king had to travel to France and kneel to its king, a situation they found intolerably demeaning and tried to delay as long as possible. The French kings for their part hated that the English Crown ruled such a large area of France. These tensions would erupt into war between England and France in 1294, 1324 and, most notably, the Hundred Years War in 1337. If a vassal did not pay homage within a certain time limit, his overlord had the right to confiscate his estates. Therefore, paying homage to the king of France was a duty Edward II had no means of escaping, and he was particularly unfortunate that no fewer than four kings ruled France during his comparatively short reign. Philip IV seized an opportunity to confiscate Gascony from Edward I in 1294, and the price of regaining it was a marriage alliance: Edward I would marry Philip’s half-sister Marguerite, and his son would marry Philip’s daughter, Isabella.

After enjoying Gaveston’s hospitality at Knaresborough, Edward travelled to Nottingham, where he spent a week in early September supervising alterations to the castle and paid a pound to his harper Robert Clough for playing for him.³³ He moved on to Northampton, and opened his first parliament on 16 October. Parliament sat for a mere three days, its objectives only to discuss the late king’s funeral arrangements and the new king’s nuptials and coronation, and to grant Edward expenses for them. At Northampton Edward sent a letter to Oljeitu, ‘illustrious king of the Tartars’, who was the ruler of the Ilkhanate, part of the Mongol Empire covering much of modern-day Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey, and ordered his falcons and dogs brought to him.³⁴ His enjoyment of hawking and hunting, far more conventional than his other hobbies, aroused no ire or incomprehension among his contemporaries, though it is notable that unlike his son Edward III he never competed personally in a joust, that sport so beloved of medieval royal and noble men. Perhaps he was simply not interested, or perhaps his father, concerned for the future of his dynasty, forbade it (the earl of Surrey’s son and Duke John I of Brabant were killed jousting in 1286 and 1294 during Edward’s childhood; it was a dangerous activity).

Edward I’s funeral took place at Westminster Abbey three and a half months after his death on 27 October, and he was buried in a simple tomb near his first wife Eleanor of Castile and his father Henry III in the chapel of St Edward the Confessor. A story told much later in the fourteenth century claims that the old king had ordered that his flesh be boiled down and removed and his bones carried before an army to Scotland, but this is unlikely to be true, and even if he had, his son took no notice.³⁵ Edward II spent £100 on horses for knights to ride in the procession, and gave 100 marks to be distributed to the poor and £2 to William Attefenne, sumpter-man, ‘for the great labour he sustained in providing torches and leather for the body of the deceased king’; he spent £453 altogether.³⁶ His filial duty done, Edward issued an edict ordering everyone to refer to Gaveston by his title, earl of Cornwall, rather than by his name.³⁷ This probably reflects Edward’s determination that Gaveston, only a minor noble by birth, should not be disparaged by the great magnates, rather than being a statement on the formality or otherwise of his court.

Edward was determined that his ‘brother Piers’ should become a member of the royal family, and arranged a marriage for his friend. Unfortunately, the three of Edward’s numerous sisters who were still alive were unavailable: twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth was married to the earl of Hereford; twenty-eight-year-old Mary was a nun; and thirty-two-year-old Margaret was married to the duke of Brabant. There remained his little half-sister Eleanor, Edward I’s youngest child, but she was only eighteen months old in the autumn of 1307. Edward, therefore, was forced to make Gaveston his nephew by marriage rather than his brother, by marrying him to one of his nieces. A few of them were already unavailable. His eldest niece, fifteen-year-old Eleanor de Clare, had married Hugh Despenser in May 1306. Eleven-year-old Joan of Bar was married to John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, and ten-year-old Mary Monthermer was betrothed to Duncan MacDuff, earl of Fife. Joan Monthermer was promised to the priory of Amesbury, and Eleanor de Bohun was only three, which left Edward’s other Clare nieces, thirteen-year-old Margaret and twelve-year-old Elizabeth. Because sisters usually –though not always – married in birth order, it fell to Margaret, second of the five daughters of Edward’s sister Joan of Acre (who had died in April), to marry her uncle’s Gascon favourite. Evidently Edward had been planning a Clare-Gaveston match for months; the charter granting his friend the earldom of Cornwall in August 1307 was decorated with the Clare arms as well as Gaveston’s own.³⁸

On 1 November 1307, only five days after her grandfather Edward I’s funeral, Margaret married Gaveston at Berkhamsted Castle, 30 miles from London. Presumably it was attended by Margaret’s brother Gilbert de Clare, recently granted his earldoms of Gloucester and Hertford at the age of sixteen, five years before he could normally have expected to inherit.³⁹ Possibly, Edward offered him this as a sweetener to accept his sister’s marriage to Gaveston, but also, an earl was far more use to him politically than an underage ward. Gloucester didn’t complain; he now had an annual income of £6,000, which made him one of the richest men in the country, even wealthier than his new brother-in-law. He was Edward’s eldest nephew, only seven years younger than the king, and fifteen years older than his aunt, Edward I’s youngest child Eleanor.⁴⁰ Edward II’s stepmother Marguerite of France, dowager queen of England, also attended the wedding. Before his accession, Edward had been on good terms with the stepmother who wasn’t much older than he was, and often asked her to intercede with his father on his behalf. Forty years younger than her husband, Marguerite had nevertheless enjoyed a good relationship with him, though she was never crowned as queen. Edward gave jewels worth thirty pounds to the bride and groom, a roan-coloured palfrey horse worth twenty pounds to Margaret de Clare and expensive cloth worked with gold and pearls to her ladies, and provided the generous amount of seven pounds, ten shillings and six pence in pennies to be thrown over the heads of the bride and groom at the door of the chapel.⁴¹ His almoner collected the money, which would comfortably have fed several families for a year, and distributed it to the poor. The king spent an enormous twenty pounds on the minstrels, and evidently it was quite a celebration, as he gave five shillings in compensation to a local resident for ‘damage done by the king’s party’ to his property.⁴² Edward also spent fifty-two pounds on two warhorses for himself on 4 November, one a bay and the other ‘white spotted’.⁴³

And so a thirteen-year-old girl married a man in his mid-twenties or older, who was involved in an intense relationship with her uncle. To modern sensibilities this seems callous, but nobody at the time complained about it in such terms. They did, however, protest that the old king’s granddaughter was being disparaged, and that her marriage should be used to further English interests instead. Edward, predictably, ignored them. Given Margaret’s youth, it is unlikely that she and Gaveston began cohabiting after the wedding, and Gaveston’s marriage made little difference to his relationship with Edward.

After the wedding, Edward returned to his favourite residence of Langley in Hertfordshire, where he had to deal with a difficult situation that had recently arisen: the Knights Templar. The Templars were a military monastic order, extremely rich, and Edward’s second cousin and future father-in-law Philip IV of France itched to get his hands on their money. On Friday 13 October 1307, he ordered all the Templars in France to be arrested, accusing them of sodomy, heresy, idolatry and urinating and spitting on the cross. He and Pope Clement V, who resided at Avignon, not Rome, pressed Edward to arrest the Templars in England. Edward refused, telling Philip he found the accusations ‘more than it is possible to believe’.⁴⁴ This infuriated Philip, who had no mind to allow the young man to defy him and to make him look foolish in the eyes of Europe. Edward’s refusal to arrest the Templars speaks well of him, as it was an easy opportunity for him to seize their goods, lands and money, to pay off some of the enormous debts his father had bequeathed him.

On 4 December 1307, Edward wrote to the kings of Sicily, Castile, Portugal and Aragon, the first three of whom were his cousins, telling them that he believed the charges against the Templars were nothing more than ‘the slanders of ill-natured men, who are animated … with a spirit of cupidity and envy’, a very daring way to refer to the king of France and his counsellors, asking them to remember the Templars’ devotion, honesty and long service to the Christian faith, and saying that belief in the accusations was ‘hardly to be entertained’. Edward also sent a letter to the pope on 10 December, saying he had heard ‘a rumour of infamy, a rumour indeed full of bitterness, terrible to think of, horrible to hear, and detestable in wickedness’ and that ‘we are unable to believe in suspicious stories of this kind until we know with greater certainty about these things’.⁴⁵

On 14 December, however, Edward received the papal bull Pastoralis praeeminentiae, which ordered all Christian rulers of Europe to arrest the Templars and seize their lands, in the name of the papacy.⁴⁶ A papal bull was next to impossible to ignore, and therefore, he issued an order for the Templars to be arrested on 10 January 1308, a few weeks in advance; in France, they had been given no warning.⁴⁷ Edward did his best to protect the Templars, and ordered his sheriffs to see that they were honourably housed and ‘not to place them in hard and vile prison, and to find them sustenance’.⁴⁸ This was a kindness in an age when prisons had no obligation to feed their prisoners. A year later, he ordered the sheriffs to pay the Templars their wages, four pence a day, with arrears from the first day of their imprisonment.⁴⁹ It is easy to criticise Edward for caving in to pressure and betraying his principles, but he was young, inexperienced, not yet crowned, and facing the two most powerful men in Europe. Other European rulers also ordered the Templars in their countries to be arrested, despite initial reluctance. In March 1312, Pope Clement V finally disbanded the order.⁵⁰

Edward found time to remember the Welsh woman, Mary or Mariota Maunsel, who had nursed him for a few weeks after he was born, and granted her seventy-three acres of land at Caernarfon rent-free for life. Some years later, he gave her an income of five pounds a year – a generous amount for a woman of her status – and paid for her to travel from Caernarfon to visit him.⁵¹ He sent letters on behalf of the bishop of Lidda to his ‘dearest friend’ the king of Armenia – not named but either Leo III or his successor Oshin – and Oljeitu, ruler of the Ilkhanate, upgraded in the letter from ‘king of the Tartars’ to ‘emperor’ and also not named, presumably because Edward and his advisers were uncertain of the current political situation in distant countries.⁵²

While Edward dealt with Templars, Tartars and Welsh nurses, Piers Gaveston held a jousting tournament at his castle of Wallingford near Oxford in honour of his young bride Margaret. Edward encouraged him to hold the tournament, though evidently didn’t attend himself, as his itinerary places him at Langley, 45 miles away, and at Reading, 25 miles away, on 2 December.⁵³ Gaveston and his team of knights defeated the earls of Surrey, Arundel and Hereford, and destroyed their dignity by knocking them off their horses into the mud, to their great humiliation and anger. Indignant commentators said that Gaveston ‘most vilely trod under foot’ the opposition, and accused him of fielding 200 knights instead of the agreed sixty.⁵⁴ Not only did Gaveston dominate Edward’s favour to an incredible degree, the earls could match him neither in wit nor in military prowess, and their hostility to him increased as a result of the tournament.⁵⁵ Gaveston, secure in Edward’s love and favour, cocked a snook at the high and mighty earls, and they found him aggravating and arrogant to an incredible degree: ‘his countenance exacted greater deference than that of the king. His arrogance was intolerable to the barons and a prime cause of hatred and rancour’. The earls and other barons did have very good reason to be concerned. Gaveston monopolised Edward’s presence; no one could see him without Gaveston’s being there, and Edward rudely ignored his barons and talked only to his friend.⁵⁶ Chronicler Adam Murimuth wrote that Edward ‘was ruled by Piers’ counsel, despising the counsel of the other nobles’.⁵⁷ Edward’s obsession with Gaveston is shown in the numerous favours, lands and gifts of money granted to him and his adherents, to the detriment of others, who believed – correctly – that they had more right than the Gascon to wield so much influence over the king. It was said that Gaveston was ‘almost a king’, that two kings ruled England, one in name and one in deed, and that Edward did Gaveston great reverence and worshipped him, as though his friend were a god.⁵⁸

Although the Annales Paulini claim that Edward and Gaveston spent Christmas together at Wye in Kent, in fact Edward didn’t reach Wye until 3 January 1308, and spent the festive season at Westminster, presumably with Gaveston and perhaps with Gaveston’s wife Margaret.⁵⁹ On 26 December, the king took the extraordinary step of appointing his friend custos regni, keeper of the realm, while he travelled to France to marry Isabella.⁶⁰ The author of the Vita spoke for many when he exclaimed ‘An astonishing thing, that he who had lately been an exile and outcast from England should now be made ruler and guardian of the realm’.⁶¹ It would have been far more tactful and acceptable to appoint one of his little half-brothers Thomas or Edmund as regent, a nominal one at least, though they were only six and seven years old. Gaveston, in fact, did little controversial during his regency, and although he was criticised for making the earls kneel to him and for his customary tactlessness, this seems to be insecurity rather than arrogance; he was unsure of himself without the king, and out of his depth.⁶²

Edward left London and Piers Gaveston in late December and travelled through Kent towards Dover, which he reached on 13 January 1308, having already ordered numerous provisions, including vast amounts of wood and charcoal and ‘ten good leaden cauldrons’, to be laid in against his arrival. He also ordered the mayor and sheriffs of London to provide and deliver a ship for his tents for his retinue to sleep in once they reached France, sent his baker ahead to Boulogne ‘to make preparations for the reception of the king’, and ordered William le Portour to find ‘300 boards of the longest to be found for making tables’.⁶³ Edward spent his last few days as a single man at the priory of St Martin with some of the men who were to accompany him to France, including his cousin the earl of Pembroke, brother-in-law the earl of Hereford, nephew-in-law the earl of Surrey, and his friend Anthony Bek, bishop of Durham and patriarch of Jerusalem.

All the barons could do was hope that Edward’s impending marriage would distract his attention from Gaveston, and that he would start to rule as a king should. Unfortunately, their hopes were to be dashed. Edward II had neither the ability nor the temperament to fill his difficult role, and in 1308 the unpromising beginning of his reign deteriorated almost to the point of civil war.