4
If it were possible, Piers Gaveston became even more objectionable to the barons after his 1309 return from exile than he had been before it. Secure in the knowledge that Edward had exerted himself for many months on his behalf and adored him as much as ever, he became still more arrogant: ‘Scornfully rolling his upraised eyes in pride and in abuse, he looked down upon all with pompous and supercilious countenance … indeed the superciliousness which he affected would have been unbearable enough in a king’s son.’1The Scalacronica agrees that the ‘great affection’ which Edward bestowed on Gaveston made him ‘haughty and supercilious’ – although the author also calls him ‘very magnificent, liberal and well-bred’ – and Lanercost says that Gaveston ‘had now grown so insolent as to despise all the nobles of the land’.2 King and favourite continued much as they had before the exile, and a great deal of the support Edward had built up over the previous year began to evaporate, especially when Gaveston decided that giving the English earls insulting nicknames would be hilarious. Edward, utterly blind to the damage he and Gaveston were causing, tolerated his friend in this, or perhaps actively encouraged him. The only certainly contemporary nickname is the one Gaveston gave to the earl of Warwick, ‘the Dog’ or ‘the Black Hound of Arden’. The others were not recorded until the reign of Edward’s son or even later: ‘Burst-Belly’ for the (presumably very stout) earl of Lincoln; ‘the Churl’ or ‘the Fiddler’ for Lancaster; and ‘Joseph the Jew’ for Pembroke. Warwick retorted, ‘If he calls me a dog, be sure that I will bite him so soon as I shall perceive my opportunity,’ a warning Edward and Gaveston fatally chose to ignore.3 The most puzzling of Gaveston’s nicknames is filz a puteyne, ‘whoreson’, generally assumed to have been aimed at the earl of Gloucester in a malicious reference to his mother Joan of Acre’s secret marriage to the squire Ralph Monthermer in 1297. It is more likely that it referred to Monthermer himself, as he was apparently illegitimate.4 It seems improbable that Gaveston would insult Edward II’s late sister, his own wife’s mother, in such a public fashion.
Piers Gaveston’s offending men not known for their sense of humour was foolish, and both men failed to appreciate the danger he was courting by antagonising the powerful magnates. However, Gaveston did turn his fabled charm on to some of the earls, at least: his brother-in-law Gloucester – whose association with Gaveston argues against the notion that the king’s favourite had called his mother a whore – Lincoln and Richmond. Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln, who had been a close friend and ally of the old king, seems to have grown uncomfortable with his opposition to the new one, while Richmond’s chaplain, as well as claiming that Gaveston loved Richmond ‘beyond measure’, stated that the two men called each other father and son in their correspondence.5 In addition, John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, very hostile to Gaveston since the tournament at Wallingford in December 1307, now became his ‘inseparable friend and faithful helper’.6 The author of the Vita had a point when he complained, ‘See how often and abruptly great men change their sides … the love of magnates is as a game of dice.’7 The other earls, however, stayed away from Gaveston. Neither this, nor the knowledge that his friend’s ‘name was reviled far and wide’ and that he was thought to be ‘wicked, impious and criminal’ bothered Edward; the more he heard that almost everyone in the country hated Gaveston, the more he loved him.8 According to Lanercost, he cared neither for his own unpopularity nor for Gaveston’s.9
Another man who must have been less than thrilled to hear of Piers Gaveston’s return to England was Philip IV; on 13 April, Edward had asked his father-in-law to ‘suspend his anger’ with the Gascon.10 Probably motivated by the cool relations between himself and the king of France, and casting about for allies, Edward sent a letter to his ‘dearest cousin’ King Fernando IV of Castile, great-grandson of Edward’s grandfather Fernando III, asking him to continue his alliance and friendship with England.11Unfortunately, although Edward enjoyed amicable relations with Castile, the country was too far away to be of much use to him politically, and the alliance did not help him during the many crises of his reign. In December 1306, a papal nuncio named Pedro, Castilian by birth and cardinal-bishop of Santa Sabina, had visited England. According to a contemporary newsletter, Pedro had entered into an indenture with the magnates of Castile that Edward, as the son of King Fernando III’s daughter Eleanor, would succeed as king of Castile should Fernando IV die without a male heir.12 Fernando finally fathered a son in 1311 after ten years of marriage and thus spared Castile the trauma of Edward’s governance (assuming the story is true). Edward I remarked to Cardinal Pedro that ‘he should have a special affection for our dear son Edward, as he is of Spanish descent’; with Mary Tudor, daughter of Katherine of Aragon, Edward is one of only two English monarchs in history with a Spanish parent. Edward added two castles, the symbol of Castile, to his great seal in honour of his mother and his Castilian ancestry, and the author of the Vita deemed his kinship with the kings of Castile to be one of his greatest assets.13 Edward’s uncle Enrique, one of Queen Eleanor’s many brothers, had proposed Fernando IV’s sister Isabel as a bride for Edward in 1303, but Edward I was forced to reject the offer, as his son’s betrothal to Isabella of France could not be broken without England losing Gascony.14
On 30 July 1309, Edward summoned the earl of Gloucester and 174 others to muster at Newcastle ‘to proceed with the king’s army against the Scots’.15 The campaign was later cancelled, as in 1308.16 Edward still had no interest in fighting in Scotland, either because he had no stomach for war, or because he was distracted with Gaveston, or for some other reason – and this despite the fact that Clement V had absolved him from future ‘homicides committed in time of war’, thus giving Edward carte blanche to kill as many Scotsmen as he liked with the Church’s blessing.17 Philip IV sent envoys to attend Robert Bruce’s first parliament in 1309, and even acknowledged Bruce as king of Scotland. Edward only called him ‘earl of Carrick’, his title before his accession, or, considerably less courteously, ‘traitor and rebel’.18 On 3 August, Edward wrote to complain to Philip IV about letters shown to him, in which Philip called Bruce ‘king of Scotland’ in the letter addressed to Bruce himself, but only ‘earl of Carrick’ in the letter to Edward. Edward’s annoyance is very apparent, especially as Philip’s envoy Sir Mahen de Varennes had hidden the letter acknowledging Bruce as king in the breeches of the messenger he sent to Scotland. (One wonders how Edward’s men who found the letter happened to come across it.) Edward’s letters to Philip usually begin ‘To the very excellent and very noble prince, our very dear and beloved father, greetings and very dear affection’, whereas this one opens abruptly with ‘To the king of France, greetings’. Edward goes on to say brusquely, ‘Kindly have regard for your own honour and ours,’ and that he finds Philip’s motives and Varennes’ behaviour suspicious. The letter ends equally abruptly with no closing line at all.19 Addressing Philip in rather less than courteous terms was as far as Edward dared go against the powerful king of France, though he was less reluctant to take out his anger on others on occasion; the later chronicle Polychronicon says – although no other source confirms it – that he ‘smite men that were about him for little trespass’.20 Edward had a vile temper, which he had inherited from his father: not only did Edward I pull out handfuls of his son’s hair during their 1305 quarrel, he tore the coronet from his daughter Elizabeth’s head and threw it on the fire in 1297, and had to pay compensation to a servant whom he hit with a rod and injured at his daughter Margaret’s wedding in 1290.21 For all Edward II’s displeasure with his father-in-law, however, he himself was not averse to offering to recognise Bruce as rightful king when it served Piers Gaveston’s interests, as he would demonstrate some years later.
Edward spent much of August and September 1309 at Langley, the place where he always felt most comfortable, with Isabella, Gaveston and, perhaps, Margaret, Gaveston’s wife and Edward’s niece. In early August, Edward wrote to King Haakon V of Norway, to whose niece Margaret the ‘Maid of Norway’ he had been betrothed as a child, informing him that he would be happy to renew the ancient bonds of friendship between the two countries, again making an effort to reach out to fellow kings in a bid for allies.22Edward summoned parliament at York, in October 1309 and again in February 1310, but most of his earls refused to attend, because ‘as long as their chief enemy [Gaveston], who had set the baronage and the realm in an uproar, was lurking in the king’s chamber, their approach would be unsafe’.23 Little had changed since Gaveston’s return from exile, and most of the magnates hated the favourite as much as ever. Edward continued to grant him lands and favours, although Queen Isabella and the loyal earl of Surrey were also the recipients of his generosity.24 Edward, though, remained wilfully blind to political realities. An example of his indulgence towards Gaveston occurs in February 1310, when he pardoned his friend for the ‘trespasses committed by him in hunting in the king’s forests and parks and fishing in his ponds’, then immediately granted him a ‘licence to hunt in the king’s forests and parks and to fish in his ponds’.25
The king spent a few days in November 1309 at Burstwick, a royal manor near Hull. Robert Bruce’s wife Elizabeth de Burgh had been taken there in September 1306, after she and other members of Bruce’s family were captured in Tain by the earl of Ross and sent to Edward I. Fortunately for Elizabeth, she was the daughter of Edward I’s ally the earl of Ulster, and was sentenced to a far less harsh fate than Bruce’s sister Mary and Isabel MacDuff, who crowned Bruce king and was claimed by some English chroniclers to be his mistress: they were incarcerated in cages at Berwick-on-Tweed and Roxburgh castles.26 At an unknown date, Queen Elizabeth sent Edward II a letter asking him to grant her more money, as she didn’t have sufficient clothes, headdresses or bed linen for herself or her attendants. She signed herself ‘Elizabeth Bruce’, not ‘Queen Elizabeth’, having told her husband at their crowning at Scone that he might be a summer king, but would never be a winter one – for which humiliation Bruce supposedly tried to kill her with his sword, but bystanders prevented him.27 Edward improved her living conditions, granting her a household of two damsels, two squires and two valets, and gave her two pounds a week for their expenses.28
Edward and Piers Gaveston spent Christmas 1309 at Langley, probably glad to escape from the seething cauldron of tension they themselves were mostly responsible for, and passed the time ‘making up for former absence by their long wished-for sessions of daily and intimate conversation’.29 It would have been more sensible for Edward and Gaveston to discuss how they could stop offending the great magnates, as the new year of 1310 saw no improvement in relations between Edward and his barons. On 19 January, the king banned a jousting tournament, as he frequently did when he felt threatened.30 The earls of Lancaster, Warwick, Pembroke, Hereford and Arundel came to parliament in February 1310 armed, and Edward was forced to send Gaveston away ‘to a very safe place’.31 Once again, relations between Edward and his earls see-sawed, and he now viewed his brother-in-law Hereford as a threat. Edward’s cousin Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke, was usually one of his most reliable and loyal allies, and why he came to parliament armed at this time is unclear.
At parliament, the barons presented to Edward a petition that was a harsh indictment of his rule, and expanded on the grievances presented to him the previous year.32 They claimed that Edward was misled by evil counsel and had wasted the treasury. He could not maintain his own household, and his officials extorted goods from poor people. He had lost Scotland, which they claimed had been left to him ‘in good peace’ by his father. His lands in England and Ireland were seriously dismembered, the people sorely grieved, and Edward had brought great shame on his country. The petition ended with a plea that Edward might redress these grievances.33
Therefore, in March 1310, Edward was forced to consent to the formation of a group who came to be known as the Lords Ordainer, to reform his household. Edward claimed that he consented to the reforms of his own free will, a face-saving measure, when in fact he was deeply humiliated and furious, and the magnates told him that if he refused, ‘they would not have him for king, nor keep the fealty that they had sworn to him’.34 This was the first time, though certainly not the last, that the barons held the possibility of deposition over Edward. At this time, however, the threat was almost certainly an empty one. Edward’s heir was Thomas of Brotherton, the elder of his half-brothers, a child of only nine. Edward’s disastrous reign had not yet reached the point where the Ordainers were willing to replace the king with a young boy. Still, Edward could not ignore the potent threat.
Of the eleven earls, eight – Pembroke, Lincoln, Lancaster, Hereford, Warwick, Arundel, Richmond, and Gloucester – were elected as Ordainers in the Painted Chamber at Westminster. The three absentees were Cornwall (Gaveston), Oxford, a political nonentity, and Surrey. The archbishop of Canterbury, six bishops and six barons completed the group.35 Edward did everything he could to obstruct the Ordainers, and his behaviour at this time shows how exasperating he could be. Robert Winchelsey, archbishop of Canterbury, arranged a meeting with Edward, to discuss a letter the pope had sent, at Westminster at the end of February 1310. Edward announced that he needed more time to think about it, and postponed the meeting until 15 March. Although he was also at Westminster, he failed to summon Winchelsey to him for the meeting, and the archbishop, forced to wait on the king’s pleasure, pressed him for an answer. The king sent his confessor to say that he was still unable to give one. Finally, at the end of March, he told Winchelsey that he would write to the pope directly and had no need to meet him after all. He had kept the archbishop waiting around fruitlessly for an entire month.36
In the summer of 1310, Edward finally decided to campaign in Scotland, after an absence of three years. His main aim was to avoid the Ordainers, who would remain in the south, working on their reforms of his government and household. Another important reason was that defeating Robert Bruce would strengthen his position enormously, and put an end to the claims that he had lost Scotland. Of the English earls, only three accompanied the king: Gaveston, Edward’s nephew Gloucester, and his nephew-in-law Surrey. Edward pardoned Gaveston and six of his retainers for the death of one Thomas de Walkyngham of Yorkshire in early September 1310, though for what reason Gaveston had killed him – an accident, an unprovoked attack, self-defence – is obscure. Gaveston was also pardoned for ‘all other felonies and trespasses with which he has been charged’.37
Edward travelled north throughout August 1310, accompanied by Queen Isabella. His wardrobe account records a payment of a pound to a woman he drank with on the way – a large sum, at least a few months’ wages for her.38 It is interesting to speculate on what they talked about as they drank together, and on where they drank, and why. Edward, described by fourteenth-century chroniclers as ‘prodigal in giving’ and ‘liberal in giving’, enjoyed being generous, and frequently handed out large sums of money to people who pleased him.39 He once paid his painter Jack of St Albans, who ‘made him laugh very greatly’ by dancing on a table, two and a half pounds or about a year’s wages by his own hands ‘in aid of Jack, his wife and his children’. On one occasion when Edward was stag-hunting in Walmer, he gave a pound to his cook Morys, who ‘rode before the king and fell often from his horse, at which the king laughed greatly’, and the same year gave another pound to a servant named Will Muleward, who spent time with him at a wedding and also made him laugh hard.40 Whatever Edward’s faults, he didn’t lack a sense of humour or the ability to laugh.
The campaign in Scotland, unsurprisingly, proved futile.41 In late November 1310, Edward decided to spend the winter in Scotland, still trying to avoid the Ordainers, and he and Isabella spent the next few months at Berwick-on-Tweed, then on the Scottish side of the border. Isabella, clearly a fan of healthy eating, paid a total of fourteen pounds and seven shillings for 5,000 pieces of fruit on 16 November, 1,000 pears and 300 apples in early December, and 7,500 apples and 2,300 pears in the early months of 1311, while Edward spent over forty-six pounds on fish and ‘lard and grease’ during Lent.42 The king’s removal of the Exchequer and King’s Bench from London to York ‘much disturbed and outraged’ the Ordainers, and ‘many fear evil’, according to an anonymous letter-writer.43 The Ordainers realised the difficulty of curbing a king, especially one like Edward, who did exactly what he wanted, promised much and delivered little, and stood on his regal rights while elevating another man almost to the status of his co-ruler.
Edward sent Gaveston and the earl of Gloucester to parley with Bruce just before Christmas 1310.44 Of Edward’s personal courage in battle there is no doubt, but he was no general, and preferred negotiation to combat wherever possible. Contemporaries must have expected Edward, son of the man who conquered North Wales and grandson of the remarkable Castilian king who played an enormous and vital role in the Spanish Reconquista, to be a great warrior. Fernando III’s most notable achievement was the conquest of Seville in 1248 after almost five and a half centuries of Muslim rule, and he made a triumphal procession into the city on 22 December that year; it is likely that Edward’s mother Eleanor, then aged seven, was present, and possible that Edward heard about his grandfather’s achievements from her or his older sisters. (Fernando is now the patron saint of Seville.) Unfortunately, what Edward’s subjects got what was a man who closely resembled his other grandfather, Henry III, whose fifty-six-year-reign was a long history of baronial insurrections, failed military expeditions and lavish expenditure on foreign relatives and favourites. That Edward preferred hedging, ditching and digging to jousting and fighting did not endear him to his contemporaries, either: ‘If only he had given to arms the labour that he expended on rustic pursuits, he would have raised England aloft; his name would have resounded through the land’, laments the Vita.45
Meanwhile, in the south, the Ordainers prepared their reforms of government and Edward’s household. One of the Ordainers, the earl of Lincoln, died at the age of sixty in early February 1311. Lincoln had been regent of England in Edward’s absence, and the king sent his nephew Gloucester south to replace him, a great responsibility for the young man, not yet twenty.46 The earl’s death was a blow for Edward on two counts: firstly, Lincoln was a moderate and a royalist, despite his actions against Gaveston in 1308 and his role as an Ordainer, and secondly, Earl Thomas of Lancaster inherited his lands by right of his wife, Lincoln’s daughter and heir Alice. Thomas of Lancaster now held five earldoms, Lancaster, Leicester, Derby, Lincoln and Salisbury, and had a gross annual income of £11,000, which made him by far the richest and most influential man in the country. Edward had even greater cause to rue the loss of his former ally. Lancaster had to pay homage to Edward for his new lands, but refused to cross the Tweed into Scotland to do so. Edward refused to return to England to accept the homage. Lancaster threatened to take a hundred knights to forcibly enter his lands, and once again, civil war loomed.47 Eventually Edward caved in and agreed to meet his turbulent cousin at Haggerston, on the English side of the river, perhaps to save any future legal difficulties because Lancaster hadn’t paid homage to him in England. The two men ‘saluted each other amicably and exchanged frequent kisses’, each concealing his antipathy for the other, and Edward hiding his annoyance that he had been forced to travel to meet Lancaster when etiquette demanded that his subjects should come to him. Supposedly Piers Gaveston accompanied Edward, but Lancaster ‘would neither kiss him, nor even salute him, whereat Piers was offended beyond measure’.48 Gaveston was not well at this time: an anonymous letter written at Berwick on 4 April announced that ‘a secret illness troubles him much, compelling him to take short journeys’, but that when he visited Edward and Isabella at Berwick, he found them both well.49 Edward may have attended the funeral of his friend Bishop Anthony Bek at Durham Cathedral on 3 May 1311. He took over Bek’s stud of 240 horses and bought his gold plate from his executors at a cost of £1,383.50 The king was probably encouraged by the disunity among the Ordainers; relations between the earls of Lancaster and Gloucester were so bad that an anonymous letter-writer said that he feared a riot when the two men arrived in London.51 On the other hand, a feud between the richest men of the kingdom increased the already sky-high tension in England, and London was already suffering unrest. Despite the efforts of the mayor, Richer de Refham, the city annalist writes of the ‘rifflers and ruffians’ terrorising the streets.52
Edward spent almost a year in the north and achieved nothing except infuriating his magnates still further, and failed even to engage Robert Bruce in battle, let alone defeat him. He finally bowed to the inevitable and summoned parliament, to begin in London on 8 August 1311, but didn’t arrive until 13 August. He stayed at the house of the Dominicans, and paid Janin the Bagpiper two pounds for performing for him there.53 The Vita says that Edward went on pilgrimage to Canterbury as a way of putting off the moment of reckoning at parliament, though looking at his itinerary it is hard to see when.54 Piers Gaveston remained in the north, at the stronghold of Bamburgh, but kept in close contact with Edward.55 Around this time Edward heard the sad news that his five-year-old half-sister Eleanor had died at Amesbury Priory, and he paid £113 for her funeral at Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire.56
To Edward’s horror, the forty-one Ordinances or reforms of his household presented to him at parliament limited his royal powers severely, and he protested that ‘some things were disadvantageous to him, some fabricated out of spite, and he argued and pleaded that he was not bound to give his consent to these’.57 But the Ordinance that caused him greatest consternation was the twentieth: ‘Piers Gaveston, as a public enemy of the king and of the kingdom, shall be utterly cast out and exiled … forever and without return.’ Edward was so desperate to save Gaveston that he finally agreed to accept all the Ordinances if the lords would only revoke the twentieth. He said, ‘Whatever has been ordained or decided upon, however much they may redound to my private disadvantage, shall be established at your request and remain in force for ever. But you shall stop persecuting my brother Piers, and allow him to have the earldom of Cornwall.’ This, however, the Ordainers refused to do. Edward refused to accept his friend’s banishment, and, anguished at the thought of his being forced into exile yet again, gave vent to his emotions. He alternated between shouting insults and threats at the Ordainers and trying to cajole them with flattery and promises of favours, but to no avail. They warned him that if he did not consent to Gaveston’s banishment, he ‘might through imprudence be deprived of his throne and his kingdom’.
Faced with the possibility of losing his throne – the second time this threat was used – Edward had little choice but to accept the Ordinances, and they were published on 27 September 1311.58 It had taken him six weeks to agree. This was a common feature of Edward’s reign; he stubbornly dug in his heels and refused to do what his magnates wanted, yet inevitably was forced to bow to pressure in the end. In the four years since his accession, Edward had brought his kingdom to the brink of civil war numerous times, and for the remaining years of his reign, this terrible cycle would continue. Edward would not, or could not, be the king his subjects needed him to be. He persisted in his unconventional ways, flaunted his affection for Piers Gaveston, and utterly refused to modify his behaviour and attitudes.
On 8 October, Edward granted Piers Gaveston a safe-conduct to come to London.59 The following day, he wrote to his kinsman Fernando IV of Castile, who had asked him to donate money for a crusade, informing him that ‘he has been so engaged with the war in Scotland and other matters that he is unable to accede to this request’.60 He also wrote to his sister and brother-in-law the duke and duchess of Brabant asking them to receive Piers Gaveston, and informed his father-in-law Philip IV that he was anxious to have a personal interview with him, presumably to ask him to help or protect Gaveston.61 Unsurprisingly, this letter opened with flowery declarations of Philip’s high and mightiness and Edward’s enormous affection for his beloved ‘father’. Queen Isabella also sent letters to Philip in November 1311, although the content of them is unfortunately unknown.62 Gaveston himself, meanwhile, sent an Italian merchant named Blasius of Siena to Brabant and elsewhere to make financial arrangements on his behalf in early October.63
Gaveston was now exiled from England for the third time, probably an all-time record, and was ordered to ‘leave and utterly depart from the realm of England and every lordship of the king’ by 1 November 1311, from Dover, and nowhere else. If he did not leave, he would ‘thereafter be treated as an enemy of the kingdom, the king, and the people’.64 The Ordinances also mandated the removal of other people from Edward’s court, most notably his French cousins Henry Beaumont and Beaumont’s sister Isabella, Lady Vescy. Beaumont and Lady Vescy, like Edward, were great-grandchildren of Queen Berenguela of Castile and King Alfonso IX of Leon. In 1304, Edward I had appointed Lady Vescy as lifetime custodian of Bamburgh Castle, a rare honour for a woman, and Edward II, very fond of his mother’s relatives, confirmed the appointment at the beginning of his reign.65
Gaveston departed into exile later than ordered, on 3 or 4 November, and not from Dover as instructed but from London or somewhere along the Thames.66 It is not clear whether Edward was there to see him off, though it seems not, as his court, household and privy seal were at Windsor, 30 miles away, where government business continued.67 If he did not go to say farewell to Gaveston, this is probably because he couldn’t bear yet another parting from his beloved friend. He must have been distraught, though whether he realised that he himself was mostly to blame is hard to say. Had he learned his lesson from Gaveston’s previous exile and behaved with circumspection, Gaveston might not have been banished yet again. Gaveston may have expected his exile to be permanent, or at least for some years, as on 22 October he was given letters of protection for five years, and appointed four attorneys for the same length of time.68 His wife Margaret did not accompany him abroad this time, for the simple reason that she was six or seven months pregnant. Gaveston’s earldom of Cornwall was revoked, but financial arrangements were made for Margaret, and she was allowed to keep Wallingford Castle.
Edward found time on 24 October 1311 to remember the Dominican priory at Langley he had founded three years earlier, and granted the house fifty pounds a year on top of the hundred pounds annually he had already given them.69 In late October and early November, he gave Queen Isabella the palace of Eltham and lands in Kent and Lincolnshire; Isabella set off for Eltham immediately, accompanied by her husband’s niece Eleanor Despenser (née de Clare), and wrote to Edward on 28 and 29 October.70 Perhaps Edward was expressing his gratitude for her support of Gaveston: on 29 October, Isabella sent a letter to the receiver of Ponthieu ‘concerning the affairs of the earl of Cornwall’.71 Apparently she had agreed to help Gaveston in his exile, at least financially; perhaps in the naming of him as ‘earl of Cornwall’, which title had been stripped from him, we may see some sympathy on Isabella’s part to her husband’s favourite. Other than the period soon after her wedding, when the queen may have complained to her father about Gaveston and his relationship with her husband, there is little indication that she hated him, or resented his presence.
Piers Gaveston seems to have gone to Flanders.72 There were rumours by late November 1311, however, that he had already returned to England, or perhaps had never left, and on 30 November two Ordainers were despatched to search for him in the West Country, where he was thought to be ‘wandering from place to place’.73 There were also rumours that Gaveston had returned to his castle at Wallingford, or to Tintagel in Cornwall, or was ‘lurking now in the king’s apartments’.74 Edward fumed. And grieved. And, almost certainly, plotted to bring Gaveston back. It is likely that around this time, he wrote to the abbot of Glastonbury – and probably other churchmen, though the letters have not survived – asking him to search through his chronicles for information about people exiled from England during the reigns of his ancestors ‘and for what reasons and at what time, and by whom, and how, they had been recalled’. Evidently, he was searching for a precedent by which he could bring Gaveston back from his banishment. The abbot of Glastonbury received Edward’s letter on 2 January and replied two days later, enclosing a few extracts from his chronicles, which dated from 1210 to 1289. One of the precedents he found concerned William de Valence, half-brother of Henry III and father of the earl of Pembroke of Edward’s reign, exiled from England in 1258 and allowed to return in 1261.75
Although Gaveston was gone from England, the tension had not: on 11 and 16 November, the king banned a jousting tournament at Northampton, and on the 28th he forbade the earls of Gloucester, Lancaster, Hereford, Pembroke, Warwick and Arundel from coming to parliament armed.76 The earl of Surrey is the only notable absentee from the list, and remained very loyal to Edward at this time. Edward was, however, attempting to maintain amicable relations with his powerful kinsman Lancaster, who was seriously ill or had injured himself. The king wrote to Lancaster’s adherent Sir Robert Holland on 20 November that ‘we are very joyous and pleased about the good news we have heard concerning the improvement in our dear cousin and faithful subject Thomas, earl of Lancaster, and that he will soon be able to ride in comfort’.77
Further Ordinances were issued in late November, removing many of Gaveston’s adherents from Edward’s household, ‘lest they should stir up the king to recall Piers once more’. Edward fumed again, declaring that the Ordainers were treating him like an idiot, and that he could not believe that ‘the ordering of his whole house should depend upon the will of another’.78 The king spent the festive season of 1311 at Westminster, probably playing dice on Christmas night, a tradition of his, when he spent up to five pounds.79Queen Isabella accompanied him.
The author of the Vita makes one of his rare mistakes when he says that Gaveston spent Christmas with Edward, but wherever Gaveston was, he was not with the king, as on 23 December, Edward gave Gaveston’s messenger a pound for carrying letters between them.80 What happened next is rather murky and confused, and the only certain thing is that Piers Gaveston returned to England in early 1312. Why he returned, when he had previously made arrangements for a long exile, is not known. Perhaps he only intended to slip into England for a little while and see his wife and the birth of his child, or perhaps Edward, in a fit of pique and hatred of the Ordainers, had ordered him back. According to the Vita, Edward, swore on God’s soul – his favourite oath – that ‘he would freely use his own judgement’, and recalled Gaveston.81 Unfortunately, Edward II had no judgement whatsoever, and his recall of Gaveston led to inevitable tragedy.