CHAPTER 10
‘Dame Marguerite, good withouten lack’
Marguerite, Edward I’s second wife, was the first French queen of England. Her marriage, like that of her predecessor, Eleanor of Castile, was largely determined upon as a consequence of the continued insecurity of the English position in Gascony, though the sixty-year-old King’s decision to take a much younger wife may well have been influenced by the need to provide additional heirs, as despite the fecundity of his union with Eleanor, Edward of Carnarvon was their only surviving son. Marguerite was one of four children of Philip III of France, the second of his second queen, Marie of Brabant. She probably remembered little of her father, who had died in 1285, when she was only three. She was brought up at the court of her brother, Philip IV, under the guidance of her mother and Philip’s queen, Jeanne of Navarre, both of whom were involved in the negotiation of the double betrothal of two French princesses, to Edward I and his heir respectively, which was ratified by the treaty of Montreuil in 1299.
In 1296, King Philip had successfully invaded Gascony, which, naturally, the English were desperate to recover, but Edward’s determination to subdue Scotland in a campaign that had been ongoing since 1290 had greatly depleted his military resources, and a diplomatic solution to Gascony seemed preferable to a war he was unlikely to win. In 1298, Pope Boniface VIII suggested the double marriage of Edward senior to Marguerite and his heir to Isabella, Philip’s three-year-old daughter, and in May the Earl of Lincoln was sent to open talks with the French. By the spring of the next year, after the conditions had been discussed by Parliament, Lincoln, accompanied by the Earl of Warwick and Amadeus of Savoy, returned to conduct the proxy betrothals. Amadeus reported back to Edward that seventeen-year-old Marguerite was possessed of the obligatory qualities of beauty, piety and virtue, though it is not known how he responded to Edward’s more intimate inquiries about the span of her waist and the size of her feet. Under the treaty of Montreuil (signed by the English and French monarchs respectively in July and October 1299), Marguerite was to have a dowry of 15,000 livres. This offer of a cash sum, rather than lands, set a precedent for a policy that Charles V would cement by ordinanace in the next century as a way of preserving the French royal dominions intact. In return, Edward would give Marguerite the lands held by his first queen, Eleanor, in dower. These estates represented only a portion of the vast holdings Eleanor had obtained through royal grants and her unscrupulous acquisitions, but they were nevertheless worth 4,500 pounds per year and included land, farms and forest in Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, Dorset, Essex, Hampshire, Huntingdon, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Somerset, Suffolk, Wiltshire and Yorkshire, as well as the towns of Bristol, Lincoln, Grimsby, Tickhill and Heddon. The value of Marguerite’s dower lands was similar to that of the two previous English queens, and this sum was accepted as the rate for a queen’s dower throughout the fourteenth century, though Marguerite was exceptional in that the dower was decided quite precisely at her marriage, there being no queen dowager already in possession of it. These lands, the ‘terre regine,’ formed the backbone of royal dower assignments into the next century.
The background to Marguerite’s married life was always to be the rhythm of the Scots campaign. In 1296, Edward had taken Berwick, captured John Balliol, originally his own candidate for the Scottish throne, removed the sacred Stone of Scone and conquered the country to the north of Aberdeen. After defeating the rebel Scots leader William Wallace at Falkirk in 1298, Edward did not campaign in the year of his marriage, but in 1301 he wintered at Linlithgow after taking Bothwell. In 1302 Robert the Bruce negotiated a truce with England. The celebrated hero of Scottish nationalism campaigned effectively for the English in 1303-4, and after the siege of Stirling that summer, Edward was able to return to England. Wallace was surrendered in 1305, but a disgruntled Bruce turned back to Scotland in 1306 so that year and the next Edward was again leading his army in the north.
Edward and Marguerite were married at Canterbury on 10 September 1299. Though Edward had been a handsome man in his youth, Marguerite had high standards when it came to looks -her brother Philip was so exceptionally attractive he was nicknamed ‘the Fair’ – and it is rare for seventeen to look kindly on sixty. Still, both parties evidently did their duty, as Marguerite became pregnant almost immediately. Perhaps they were temperamentally suited. Edward ordered two crowns for his new bride, a plain gold circlet for £22 10s and a grand, bejewelled state piece from the goldsmith Thomas de Frowick for over 400 pounds, but he was so keen to get back to his northern campaign that there was deemed to be no time for a coronation and, despite her condition, Marguerite gamely accompanied him. That she too was energetic and had no truck with physical weakness is demonstrated by the fact that she continued hunting until late in her pregnancy. Indeed, she was riding to hounds in Wharfedale, Yorkshire when her labour pains began, and just managed to get to nearby Brotherton for the safe delivery of her first son. The boy was named in honour of Thomas à Becket, to whom Marguerite had prayed during the delivery, and was known as Thomas of Brotherton for his last-minute birthplace. Edward was so delighted that he rushed ‘like a falcon’ to his wife’s side and baby Thomas was presented with two cradles, one in scarlet and one in blue, each draped with thirteen ells of cloth. Edward personally ordered striped draperies for his room and gilded hangings decorated with heraldic devices. The King was an old hand at fatherhood but, like many men who have children late in life, he seems to have found a new pleasure in the role, and when Marguerite’s second boy, Edmund, was born at Woodstock the following August, the purveyors were so rapacious in their pursuit of goods for her that merchants were known to avoid being in the vicinity of her household.
Edward and Marguerite were united by their interest in their children and surviving information about the household set up for little Thomas and Edmund (a third child, politely named Eleanor, lived with them in 1305, but died young) gives an unusually intimate picture of medieval royal childhood. The boys were attended by a ‘family’ of fifty to seventy people, at a cost of approximately 1,300 pounds per year. The ‘family’ was overseen by a couple, Sir Stephen and his wife Lady Eveline, who supervised the female servants, among them chambermaids, washerwomen, Thomas’s wet nurse Mabille and Edmund’s cradle-rocker Perrette. Lady Eveline, Mabille and Perrette were given presents of money by Marguerite in 1305, and the two nurses remained six years in the household, until the boys were ready for more masculine instruction. William de Lorri was appointed chaplain in 1301, and the children’s religious education was managed strictly. They were expected to sit patiently through high Mass from a young age -in September 1302 Edward ordered that the boys hear divine service at Canterbury and make an offering of seven shillings apiece and the keeper of their wardrobe, John de Weston, was briefed to report back to the King on the conduct of the toddlers. At Easter, offerings of clothes, shoes and money were made to the poor on the princes’ behalf. Queen Marguerite had a particular love for the Franciscan order, and was one of the main benefactresses of the new Franciscan foundation at Newgate in London. Regular payments to Franciscan friars show that she encouraged this association in her boys.
Like their parents, Thomas and Edmund played chess and also enjoyed ‘tables’. Skilled riding was a necessity, not a leisure activity, and they were each provided with a palfreyman to attend to their horses. Yet there was also time for fun. Marguerite, who was fond of music and employed her own minstrel, Guy de Psaltery, also hired musicians to entertain her sons on the zither, viola and trumpet. The boys made their own musical efforts, playing the drum of their minstrel Martinet with such enthusiasm that it had to be repaired in 1305. Music was part of the hospitality laid on for visitors, too, and as Thomas and Edmund, like their parents, journeyed between royal houses, they received noblemen, clergy and their rakish half-sister Mary, who had been enclosed at the Amesbury convent with their grandmother Eleanor of Provence, but who seemed to relish any opportunity to escape.
In common with other royal mothers, Marguerite was obliged to spend time away from her children, often on campaign with Edward in the north, but the details of the boys’ accounts indicate that she took a precise interest in their wellbeing. She was informed as to their diet, which was very healthy by medieval standards and included fresh fruit and vegetables as well as the usual quantities of meat and fish spiced with saffron, ginger, cinnamon and pepper. Treats included almonds, dates, figs and twisted candy sticks of spun sugar. Stephen the tailor made their clothes, always styled to reflect their royal rank. They had silk and wool cloaks, mantles and tabards, galoshes for wet weather and fur-lined robes with silver buttons and beaverskin hats for travelling in the cold. There is a tenderness to such touches as the broken drum and silver buttons that suggests Marguerite had both an intimate and a joyful relationship with her sons, and that this contributed to the happiness of her marriage to Edward.
For his part, the King’s satisfaction with his wife was evident from his unfashionable fidelity, and from his interest in the minutiae of her life. Marguerite was accused of extravagance by the St Albans chronicler, and apparently loved fashion: in 1302 she owed 1,000 pounds to Balliardi of Lucca for fabrics, not to mention 3,000 pounds-worth of other debts. Edward provided for their payment through grants of wardships and marriages, and managed to do so without attracting undue criticism of Marguerite. He was concerned about her health, corresponding with her doctor on her recovery from measles and recommending bloodletting. The man who told Charles of Anjou that sons could always be got may be glimpsed in his clumsily kind-hearted advice to Marguerite’s confessor on the death of her sister Blanche. The priest, Edward suggested, should break the news to the Queen as gently as possible, but if she became very upset he was to say that she mustn’t mind as Blanche, who had married the Duke of Austria, had been as good as dead for a long while.
Contentment and warmth between the couple is also evident in Marguerite’s success not only as a provider of heirs but in another essential of the queenly dynamic: intercession. Though the queen’s role as ‘peace-weaver’ was to some extent becoming ritualised (as will be seen in the case of Philippa of Hainault in the reign of Edward III), it was still effective, as Marguerite proved when she pleaded that the citizens of Winchester be pardoned for having allowed an important hostage to escape, or in the case of Geoffrey de Coigners, a goldsmith who had had the temerity to manufacture a crown for Edward’s sometime arch-enemy, Robert the Bruce, King of the Scots, and who was pardoned only through Edward’s love of his ‘dearest’ wife. Marguerite also attempted to intercede for the Earl of Atholl, who had been taken prisoner while guarding the Scottish royal ladies at Kildrimny Castle in 1306. Edward responded harshly that Atholl would only be hanged higher than the rest. The siege of the same castle provoked Edward to the exceptionally ungallant punishment of two high-ranking ladies, Bruce’s sister Mary and the Countess of Buchan, who were imprisoned in cages within their chambers and permitted only English attendants and a niggardly fourpence per day for their maintenance.
Perhaps Marguerite’s most important intercessionary initiatives were directed at keeping the peace between her husband and his heir, since 1301 the Prince of Wales, Edward of Carnarvon. Of Edward’s living children, as well as Mary, Joan, now Countess of Gloucester, and Elizabeth, the wife of Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, were still in England. Edward had lost his mother at the age of six, and though Marguerite was only a few years his senior, she seems to have developed a maternal relationship with him and he wrote to her on at least eight occasions in 1305, frequently requesting her intercession with his father. Usually this was on relatively small matters, such as a prebend for his clerk, Walter Reynolds, or a settlement of land rights near Westminster Abbey for his cousin Henry de Beaumont. In September, however, Edward wrote to her of ‘business’, sending Sir Robert de Clifford to the Queen in advance of his letter to explain it and listen to her advice, and asking Clifford to convey any requests Marguerite wished to make of him. The frequency of Edward’s letters and his respect for Marguerite’s opinion point to a strong relationship touched by gratitude on the prince’s side. And it was to Marguerite that the future King Edward II made one of the most revealing emotional statements of his troubled life: a plea for the return of his favourite, and some said his lover, Piers Gaveston.
The question of the supposed homosexuality of Edward II is far more vexing than that of Richard I. That he ‘loved’ Piers Gaveston is beyond doubt, but the nature of that love has exercised generations of scholars. Such efforts have been deemed ‘both anachronistic and futile: anachronistic because medieval attitudes to sexuality were so different from our own and futile because the nature of the evidence makes it impossible to tell what Edward actually did’.1 What Edward got up to with Gaveston is actually less important than what his contemporaries thought he did, and the implications this held for their understanding of his failed kingship.
That the Prince was passionately involved with Gaveston was apparent from their first meeting in 1300, when Gaveston was appointed a member of his household, one of ten young men selected by the King to provide his heir with knightly companionship. Gaveston was clearly capable of making an impression, as this son of minor Gascon gentry was chosen despite having no claim to nobility. It was generally agreed that he was good-looking, intelligent and proficient on the battlefield – indeed, he distinguished himself on one of the Scottish campaigns in 1303 — but he was also arrogant, conceited and made spiteful use of his wit. His lack of respect for the King’s values was demonstrated in 1305 when he casually left the Scottish battlelines for a tournament in France, and his contempt for authority when he, Edward and a gang of friends ravaged the estates of the bishop of Chester, driving off his game. The King was so disgusted by Edward’s impertinent response to his remonstrances that he disbanded his household, forbade him to see Gaveston and sent him to Windsor Castle with a single manservant. It was at this point that Edward sought the Queen’s intercession, and in August he wrote to thank her for the restoration of the majority of his household: ‘We know well that this was done at your request, for which we are dearly grateful to you, as you know.’ He continued to plead for her good offices, asking her to petition for the return of his cousin Gilbert de Clare and the disgraced Gaveston himself. ‘But truly, my lady, if we should add those two to the others, we would feel much comfort and alleviation of the anguish we have endured and continue to suffer, by the ordinance of our aforementioned lord and father. My lady, will you please take this business to heart, and pursue it in the most gracious manner you may, so dearly as you love us.’2
The Prince of Wales clearly felt he could trust his stepmother with this intimate declaration, and his trust in her power to sway his father was well-judged, for by Whitsun 1306 Gaveston was back in favour and being knighted at Westminster alongside his dear friend. By February 1307, however, the King was so anxious about the ‘inordinate affection’3 between Gaveston and his son that he banished the knight to Gascony. In fact, he went only as far as Eleanor of Castile’s county of Ponthieu where, in the summer, he received the news that the man who called him ‘brother’4was now King of England.
Marguerite had accompanied King Edward north once more for the now-customary summer campaign. Usually, she would remain at Tynemouth, on English soil, for her own protection, but this time she was with her husband at Burgh-on-Sands, because the King had become so ill he could not rise from his bed. On 7 July, he died.
The very first act of the new King was to summon Gaveston. At this point, the grieving Marguerite could not have imagined she had anything to fear from the favourite’s return. She and Edward had a strong relationship and he was in her debt for her positive efforts on Gaveston’s behalf. But suddenly her own interests appeared to be threatened. In early August, before Gaveston had even set foot in the kingdom, Edward made him Earl of Cornwall. This was both undutiful and, frankly, stupid, and it immediately provoked the anger of the magnates and the enmity of the Dowager Queen. Cornwall was a royal earldom, and Edward’s right to bestow it was dubious; moreover, Marguerite had understood it to be intended for one of her own sons. Edward was also foolish and insensitive in the semi-royal marriage he arranged for Gaveston a few months after his return to England. Gaveston’s bride was Margaret de Clare, the daughter of the King’s sister Joan of Acre and her husband Gilbert de Clare, the Earl of Gloucester. Joan had been mocked for marrying beneath her station for love, but she was still a royal lady and Margaret was the King’s own niece. Despite Gaveston’s new title, this marriage, too, was ‘disparaging’, one of the offences to the social order the medieval nobility found so threatening. Gaveston made matters worse by insulting his brother-in-law, calling him ‘whoreson’ in reference to Joan’s disparaging match. As a French princess and Margaret’s relative, Marguerite would have been highly sensitive to the insult to the royal family, and King Edward compounded it by insisting that the marriage was held at Berkhamsted Castle, one of Marguerite’s properties.
Edward had also failed to respect his father’s wishes for his funeral. The story was put about that the late King had left instructions for the flesh to be boiled from his body so that his bones, at least, could head a victorious army into Scotland. This tale is most likely a product of the ever-fertile imagination of the chronicler Froissart, but it supposedly caused Robert the Bruce to remark with some accuracy that there was more to fear from the dead Edward’s bones than the living Edward’s sword. In any event, Edward I was buried, intact, at Westminster on 27 October, and the Scottish campaign was apparently forgotten. A month later, Edward, who took no more than a token interest in tournaments, organised a great joust at Wallingford as an opportunity for his favourite to display his skills. Gaveston’s party carried the day, to the great resentment of the older magnates, and
from these and other incidents, hatred mounted day by day, for Piers was very proud and haughty in bearing. All those whom the custom of the realm made equal to him he regarded as lowly and abject, nor could anyone, he thought, equal him in valour. On the other hand, the earls and barons of England looked down on Piers, because, as a foreigner and formerly a mere man at arms raised to such distinction and eminence, he was unmindful of his former rank. Thus he was an object of mockery to almost everyone in the kingdom.5
It may have given Marguerite some satisfaction that Edward was obliged to issue orders reminding the court to style Gaveston with his proper title of Earl of Cornwall, but she had to contend with the fact that the favourite she had herself protected was now dangerously powerful. The award of the earldom, the Clare marriage and the funeral showed that Edward had no respect for his father’s memory. Would this neglect extend to Marguerite? Such fears were confirmed when Edward gave Berkhamsted to Gaveston. Marguerite was till only twenty-five, and at this point she might have made a second marriage, or even have returned to France. That she did not do so suggests both a genuine love for her husband and a need to protect her interests under the new regime, interests which were now allied to those of her niece, Isabella, the twelve-year-old girl who was about to become the next queen of England.
The terms of the treaty of Montreuil were fulfilled on 25 January 1308, when Isabella and Edward were married at Our Lady of Boulogne. For Queen Marguerite, the ceremonies, which lasted nine days, were a chance to see her brother and her mother, Marie, once more. She may have been hopeful that, as well as affording her the pleasure of a family reunion, the wedding would encourage her stepson to assume his proper role and diminish Gaveston’s influence. A silver casket engraved with Marguerite and Isabella’s arms, now in the British Museum, may have been a gift for the bride from Marguerite, intended to emphasise their potential alliance. When the English party returned to Dover on 3 February, however, it was soon clear that Edward still had eyes only for Gaveston.
For twelve-year-old Isabella, the first weeks in England were confusing. All her life she had expected to become queen of England, and her impeccable lineage (she was royal on both sides, her mother Jeanne having been Queen of Navarre in her own right), her magnificent 18,000-pound dowry and the splendour of her wedding, which was attended by five kings and three queens, led her to assume she would be treated with every honour. Yet supervising the ladies who would form her retinue, she found this Gaveston, a nobody, who very shortly was seen peacocking about in Isabella’s own jewellery. As Marguerite was still in possession of the Queen’s dower lands, Edward was supposed to make separate provision for his wife, but despite pressure from King Philip, he refused to declare his terms, and Isabella discovered that she had nothing with which to maintain herself. Even before she was crowned, his furious bride was writing to her father to complain of her impoverished and ‘wretched’ position.
Thanks to Gaveston, even the coronation was in danger of collapsing into farce. According to the Annales Paulini, one magnate was so enraged by the indignity of the proceedings that he had to restrain himself from challenging Gaveston in Westminster Abbey itself. With the blindness characteristic of his favourite, Edward had put him in charge of the coronation ceremonies. From the start, the assembled nobility were incandescent when Gaveston appeared in purple robes, a colour only the King had the right to wear, and a deliberate insult to the earls in their own carefully ranked cloth-of-gold. Worse still, he carried the sacred crown of Edward the Confessor, an honour to which he had so little right it was almost sacrilegious. Perhaps, in fairness to Gaveston, it should be recalled that coronation disasters were practically an English tradition, hard to avoid when huge numbers of people were crammed into limited space; on this occasion the joint coronation was marred by the death of a knight under a tumbling wall. Nevertheless, it was Gaveston’s fault that the banquet at Westminster Hall was served so late and was so poorly prepared that the guests could hardly eat it. The representatives of the French royal family were disgusted not only by the food, but by the fact that Edward sat next to Gaveston, not Isabella, and that it was Gaveston’s arms that were displayed next to the King’s on the tapestries decorating the chamber.
Marguerite decided to retire to her castle at Marlborough after the coronation. If, in effect, she abandoned her lonely and bewildered niece, she may well have done so for political reasons. Resentment of Gaveston had risen to such a degree that ‘it was held for certain that the quarrel once begun could not be settled without great destruction’.6 Many magnates had united in a vow to depose the favourite, and when Parliament met on 28 April, having been postponed from 3 March, the assembled lords arrived in arms. They accused Gaveston of embezzling crown revenues and alienating the King from those who ought to have been his closest counsellors, and demanded that he be exiled. Three chronicles suggest that Isabella’s father, King Philip, angered not only by the reports of Gaveston’s ascendancy but by the continuing uncertainty over his daughter’s income, was conspiring with the English lords to bring him down, and Marguerite was also named in connection with the plan. According to Robert of Reading, Edward, desperately playing for time, was informed in mid-May that Philip and Marguerite had sent 40,000 pounds to the earls of Lincoln and Pembroke, who were among Gaveston’s most vocal opponents, to fund his deposition.
Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, was a grandson of John’s queen, Isabelle of Angoulême, the son of Henry III’s Lusignan half-brother William. He had been a close friend of Edward I and also enjoyed a warm relationship with Marguerite. In 1303, Pembroke had asked Marguerite to write to the then chancellor, William Greenfield, to petition for a postponement of the trial of two men accused of trespass in her parks, as at the time they had both been absent on campaign in Scotland. In her letter, Marguerite refers to Pembroke as her ‘dear cousin’, and wrote again to Greenfield a month later, mercifully requesting that since one of the men, Robert Parker, had paid his fine, he should be ‘quit of all manner of exigencies and other demands’. Marguerite’s closeness to Pembroke is demonstrated by her bequest of Hertford Castle, a significant enough portion of the Queen’s dower lands for Isabella of France to repossess it from Pembroke’s widow in 1327.
That Marguerite should have been able personally to raise even half the huge sum quoted by Robert of Reading seems implausible, but if she was in correspondence with Philip about the treatment of her niece and the vicious influence of Gaveston, she may well have been a conduit from the French King to Pembroke for his support of the anti-Gaveston party. Rumours abounded that Philip had sent envoys to declare his commitment to Gaveston’s banishment. It has been suggested that Isabella was conspiring against Gaveston, and certainly the magnates used her as a sort of figurehead, but given her immaturity and impecuniousness, if the earls did have a female ally in one of the French queens of England, it is far more likely to have been Marguerite. In response to the report of his stepmother’s involvement, Edward declared the same day that Isabella should be dowered with the counties of Ponthieu and Montreuil and be ‘honourably and decently’7 provided with the necessities to set up her household. If Philip was mollified by this, the English earls remained adamant, and on 18 May, Edward was forced to order that on pain of excommunication, Gaveston would leave England on 24 June.
Gaveston’s exile was, however, short-lived. Edward made him Lieutenant of Ireland, where he stayed for just a year, appropriating the Crown revenues for his own enrichment, until the King’s wheedling lobbying of the Pope, the barons and even his father-in-law produced a bull quashing the sentence of excommunication. Gaveston returned triumphantly in June 1309, and Edward received him joyfully at Chester. They kept Christmas together that year at Edward’s favourite manor of Langley in Hertfordshire, with Queen Isabella an awkward third. For his own protection, Gaveston went north when Parliament met in February 1310, while Isabella accompanied Edward to Westminster. By the end of March, Edward had been forced to accept the election of twenty-one ‘Lords Ordainers’, Pembroke among them, whose job would be to reform the government. It was particularly galling for Edward that a prominent member of this group was his cousin Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, the most powerful magnate in the country and, until the Gaveston debacle, a firm supporter. The barons declared that if the King refused to accept their new rules, they would consider themselves free of the oath of loyalty they had sworn at his coronation. Edward announced his intention of resuming the Scottish campaign, in order to both reunite the barons and give him an opportunity to create a base of support in the north, but soon after he and Isabella arrived to join Gaveston at Berwick on 18 September, it became clear that hatred of Gaveston had superseded even the magnates’ pleasure in Scot-hunting and, humiliatingly, only three earls turned out to fight for Edward. Bruce commanded far more impressively than the English King, and his guerrilla tactics left the Scottish lowlands stripped of resources, forcing the invaders back over the border.
Edward and Isabella remained in the north until the following July, but all the Scottish campaign yielded was an opportunity for the Ordainers to consolidate their position. When Edward eventually appeared at Westminster on 13 August 1311,he was presented with a list of forty-one injunctions. As with the Provisions of Oxford in Henry III’s reign, it was announced at the public proclamation of the injunctions on 27 September that disloyalty would be punished with excommunication. Isabella, unlike Eleanor of Provence, was not obliged to swear to the ordinances, confirming that her contemporaries at this juncture saw her political influence as minimal. The Queen was in communication with Marguerite, who was on a tour of her properties in Devizes, and a letter of 4 September suggests that she was keeping her aunt informed of events in London. Not surprisingly, one of the principal demands of the Ordainers was the removal, again, of Gaveston, whom they declared ‘a public enemy of the king and the kingdom’.8 Gaveston duly left the country in early November, but Edward clearly had no intention of keeping his promise. It is notable that at this point Edward restored Berkhamsted Castle to Marguerite, who kept Christmas there that year. Perhaps he hoped to enlist her support for Gaveston’s return, as he had done in the past.
By Christmas, Gaveston was back at Westminster. Interestingly, Queen Isabella now took a conciliatory attitude to him. Her New Year gifts diplomatically included presents of game to leading Ordainers, but she also sent a Brie cheese to Isabella de Vescy, whose husband Henry de Beaumont had been dismissed from court as a Gaveston supporter, and other delicacies to Margaret de Clare, Gaveston’s wife, who was expecting a child. If Isabella was naïvely hoping for some sort of reconciliation, even Edward appreciated that Gaveston’s presence in the capital was impolitic, and in January, followed by Isabella, he removed himself, with Gaveston in tow, to York. It was here that Margaret de Clare gave birth to her child - her churching was celebrated by ‘King Robert’s’ minstrels, who received forty marks – and despite the fact that Isabella’s husband was behaving with insane carelessness, this York court was a happy time for the Queen, too. She was able to write to Marguerite with the news that after four years she had become pregnant.
But the Ordainers were arming themselves in the south. Edward’s blatant defiance in recalling Gaveston was essentially a declaration of war, and by April the King was forced to move on to Newcastle, with an army commanded by the Earl of Lancaster in pursuit, so hurriedly that many of Isabella’s possessions were left behind. Edward’s lack of consideration for his wife’s condition was shown when, just two days after her arrival in Newcastle, she was obliged to move again, to Tynemouth Priory on the coast, ostensibly for her own safety. Lancaster’s men were in Newcastle on 4 May, and the King and the favourite made a scrabbling, undignified retreat to Tynemouth, but a few days later, despite Isabella’s tearful pleas, they departed for Scarborough, leaving the Queen alone again (poor Margaret de Clare and her new baby having been left to fend for themselves in Newcastle). Entrusting the castle at Scarborough to Gaveston, Edward returned to York, where he summoned Isabella. But the favourite who had incurred such loathing with his boasts of military prowess surrendered to Pembroke on 19 May.
Gaveston’s good time was over. Pembroke accompanied him to Deddington in Oxfordshire. He swore that Gaveston would be treated honourably, on the pain of forfeiting his own estates, but the Earl of Warwick was less moderate. While Pembroke was absent on a visit to his wife, he abducted Gaveston and took him to Warwick, where the prisoner was forced to walk barefoot to the castle. ‘Blaring trumpets followed Piers, and the horrid cry of the populace. They had taken off his belt of knighthood, and as a thief and a traitor he was taken to Warwick.’9 On 19 June, Gaveston was beheaded on Blacklow Hill, saved from the full horror of a traitor’s death by his family connection to the Earl of Gloucester. The body was left in the dirt until a group of Dominican friars found it, sewed the head back and embalmed it. They carried the corpse to Oxford, but were chary of giving it burial because Gaveston was excommunicated as a consequence of defying the ordinances. The writer of the Vita Edwardi Secundi declared: ‘I may assert with confidence that the death of one man . . . had never before been so acceptable to so many.’
Both Isabella and Marguerite had a part to play in the aftermath of Gaveston’s execution. Despite the satisfaction felt by many at the news of the favourite’s death, the magnates were divided over the legality of the killing and Pembroke, in particular, was furious that Warwick had caused him to break his word. He now returned to Edward’s party and pressured the King to take up arms against Warwick and Lancaster. After corresponding with Marguerite and meeting Pembroke in France, King Philip, mindful that Isabella was carrying an heir of his blood, tried to settle the dispute. The Queen entertained Philip’s envoy, her uncle the Comte d’Evreux, on 15 September, before he met the bishops and the Earl of Gloucester, who was also acting as a mediator. By December, a fragile, face-saving settlement had been reached, with the assassins formally requesting a royal pardon and Gaveston’s treasury, which had been captured at Newcastle, to be handed over to the King. Edward and Lancaster dined together in public, but Edward was still aching for revenge and Lancaster had no intention of abandoning the ordinances.
For the royal women, the birth of an heir to the throne on 13 November 1312 could not have been better timed. Edward experienced a surge in popularity, Isabella was finally confirmed in her role as Queen and the treaty of Montreuil had achieved its purpose. Isabella had moved to Windsor soon after her meeting with Evreux, and she remained there for the rest of her pregnancy, along with her aunt. Marguerite assisted at the birth of Prince Edward, and attended the christening in the chapel of St Edward on 17 November. After Isabella’s churching at Isleworth on Christmas Eve, the royal family kept Christmas at Windsor, removing to Westminster in late January. Londoners had already enjoyed a week of celebrations when the prince was born, but for the return of their Queen they organised a number of ceremonies, including a pageant by the Guild of Fishmongers, who contrived a fully fitted-out ship, which ‘sailed’, presumably on wheels, from Cheapside to Westminster, attended by the guild members in their finery.
Queen Isabella was unique among her predecessors in having a close family member near to her who had also been queen. There is simply not enough evidence to justify claiming that Marguerite’s queenship had a formative influence on the early years of Isabella’s, but both women’s households and practices were shaped by those of previous queens and their experiences of daily life were similar in many respects. Some details from Isabella’s surviving ‘household book’ give a sense of their routines as they moved between the twenty-five royal residences, many of which had been improved under Henry III and Edward I. Life was not necessarily entirely comfortable, but the innovations provided for the southern queens Eleanor of Provence and Eleanor of Castile had certainly made it more pleasant than once it had been. Two fires had destroyed many of the renovations at Westminster, and on her marriage Marguerite had been obliged to stay at York Place instead of in the queen’s apartments, afterwards occupying Eleanor of Provence’s apartments at the Tower when she was in London.
Edward II began restoring the Westminster rooms in 1307 in anticipation of Isabella’s arrival, rebuilding Eleanor of Castile’s garden, pool and aviary and adding two white chambers for himself and his wife. The lavatory system at Westminster had been updated with plumbing, while at Woodstock double doors were fitted to the privies, though private conveniences would have to wait until the reign of Richard II at the end of the century. One of the few attractive aspects of King John’s character was his fondness for baths (he took the remarkable number of eight in the first six months of 1209 and travelled with his own bathrobe), while Eleanor of Castile had been a staunch adherent of the dubious foreign habit of bathing regularly. Isabella’s book records the transport of tubs and linen for the Queen’s bath, and other legacies from Eleanor were carpets and fruit trees in the Queen’s gardens. Marguerite and Isabella both slept in beds draped with dimity, and Isabella’s tailor, John de Falaise, made scarlet hangings for her bed as well as cushions for her chambers and cloths for her chapel. Isabella kept John extremely busy and, like Marguerite, had a fondness for prized Lucca silks. In 1311 and 1312, John produced one Lucca tunic, fifteen gowns, thirty pairs of stockings, four cloaks, six bodices and thirty-six pairs of shoes for Isabella. Many of Eleanor of Castile’s personal possessions had been sold on her death, though some of her jewellery remained and gifts of this were made to both Marguerite and Isabella. Both women also ordered new jewels in extravagant quantities – a girdle worn by Isabella for the wedding of one of her ladies in 1311 featured 300 rubies and 1,800 pearls. The French queens took their duty to display their magnificence seriously. When they rode through the countryside in chariots draped with gold tissue, wrapped in furs and jewel-coloured Lucca silks, they must have seemed to the grubbing labourers in the fields like creatures from another world.
Dress was a state matter, but Marguerite and Isabella also shared spiritual interests. Their mutual ancestor Blanche of Artois, the second wife of Eleanor of Provence’s son Edmund, had introduced the order of the Poor Clares, the sisters of the Franciscan friars, to England, and both women were patrons of the Franciscans, as Eleanor of Provence had been. Marguerite sponsored the altar of the Greyfriars church founded by Edmund at Newgate and Isabella presented three advowsons and two pounds for food supplies to the Poor Clares at Aldgate in 1358. They both chose to be buried in the Franciscan church, in the habits of the third order, to which they were admitted before they died. For lay members, the third order stressed penitence as well as a certain ascetism, and though Isabella was to have considerably more to repent of than her aunt, both of these women who had lived so luxuriously seem to have been attracted at the end of their lives to the Franciscan’s dynamic new message of simplicity and poverty.
Marguerite died in retirement at Marlborough on 14 February 1318. She did not achieve a great deal as Queen, and her reputation has been obscured by the notoriety of her niece, yet she was not irrelevant. Her interventions had been important in maintaining some degree of civility between her husband and his heir in the years before Edward I’s death. In 1301, he had relied on her judgement to advise the treasurer, Walter Langdon, of any amendments required in the letters of authority for truce with the Scots. Her co-operation with Pembroke shows that she was capable of drawing on her natal connections to try to guide her stepson away from controversy. And her own sons, Thomas and Edmund, had significant and tragic roles to play in the career of their mother’s successor. Edward I’s famed uxoriousness was immortalised by his opulent memorialisation of his first queen, Eleanor of Castile, but although Marguerite had to accept a secondary role in his life and reputation, that role appears to have been both happy and productive.