Iron Lady
1295–1358
It was a cold day in Boulogne, 25 January 1308, when two of Eleanor’s descendants met in the cathedral church of Our Lady to exchange their wedding vows.
The bridegroom, King Edward II of England, great-grandson of Eleanor’s son John, was a tall and handsome figure, powerfully built and gorgeously dressed. He was a young man, still not quite twenty-four; but his bride, at half his age, was little more than a child. Like Eleanor’s granddaughter Blanca, from whom she could trace her descent, this twelve-year-old princess stood before the altar with her royal husband as the living embodiment of an Anglo-French alliance. Isabella of France was the only daughter of the French king Philippe IV, known to his subjects as ‘le Bel ’ – the Fair – for his statuesque good looks. Despite her youth, it was already clear that Isabella had inherited her father’s beauty, and her slight frame was made luminous in the candlelight by a jewelled robe of blue and gold and a crimson mantle lined with yellow.
They were a golden couple, young and strong enough, it seemed, to bear the hopes and expectations that weighed on this marriage. The match had first been proposed a decade earlier, when Isabella was still in the nursery, as a means of bringing peace to yet another conflict over the king of England’s rights to Aquitaine and his duty to his predatory overlord, the king of France.
Edward’s father, the first King Edward, had harboured ambitions for his role across the Channel worthy of his Norman and Angevin forebears, but the territories he ruled there constituted only a fraction of the empire over which Eleanor’s husband and sons had once fought so bitterly. John’s loss of Normandy, Anjou and Poitou had never been reversed, and King Edward, as duke of Aquitaine, found himself in possession only of the duchy’s southwestern province of Gascony, stretching along the Atlantic coast from the great city of Bordeaux to the southerly port of Bayonne.
This first Edward had been a mighty warrior, but fortune had cast military opportunity his way to the west and the north of his kingdom rather than southward across the sea to France. When the native princes of Wales tried to throw off English overlordship, he responded with a full-blown war of conquest, pinning down the principality with a chain of awe-inspiring castles, from Harlech’s monolithic grandeur to Caernarfon’s polygonal towers, designed in homage to the walls of Constantinople. Meanwhile, in the independent kingdom of Scotland an unexpected succession crisis gave Edward – a wolf invited through the door as arbiter between the rival claims of Robert Bruce and John Balliol – the chance to decide that the Scots too deserved the benefit of forcibly imposed English rule. With his energies fully occupied elsewhere, Edward’s relations with France remained civil and uncontroversial – until in 1294 Philippe IV seized his moment to occupy Gascony and declare the duchy of Aquitaine forfeit to the French crown.
For three years, England and France fought an unhappy war. The cost to both sides was high in men, money, and, for Edward, political as well as financial capital, since he was simultaneously fighting at full stretch to suppress rebellion in Wales and tenacious resistance in Scotland. Peace, when it came in 1297, was a relief; and it was confirmed in 1299 with the celebration of one wedding – when Edward, at sixty, took Philippe’s seventeen-year-old sister Marguerite as his second wife – and the promise of another, through the betrothal of little Isabella to the young prince who was heir to the English throne.
Now, in January 1308, that prince was a king. Edward I, indefatigable to the end, had died five months earlier on his way to fight once again in Scotland, leaving his son to succeed him as Edward II. And Isabella was at last old enough to become a wife and a queen. As they stood in the hushed cathedral, it seemed that a new dawn was breaking with the accession of a monarch whom ‘God had endowed’ (said the well-informed anonymous author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi, a contemporary Latin account of Edward’s life) ‘with every gift’ – including, now, the hand in marriage of the French king’s exquisite daughter.
All, however, was not as it seemed. For those who cared to look, there were signs aplenty that the dazzling ceremony at Boulogne glittered with empty artifice rather than political promise. Edward shared his father’s name – an unusual Anglo-Saxon throwback, thanks to his grandfather’s reverence for the saintly eleventh-century king Edward the Confessor – but in other ways he resembled him little. He was the last-born of his parents’ fourteen children, and three older brothers – John, Henry and Alfonso – had died in turn before they had had a chance to try their hand at the business of ruling. Edward alone was left to shoulder responsibility for England’s future. And already, before his father’s death, he had begun to disappoint.
At six, Edward had been presented with a toy castle, lovingly made and painted in intricate detail by a member of his household. But this military plaything did not shape his tastes as his father might have hoped. Though he grew to be physically strong, a good horseman, and no coward in the face of combat (as he proved in more than one of his father’s campaigns), he did not live and breathe the life of a soldier as his father had done. He preferred what the Vita Edwardi Secundi despairingly called ‘rustic pursuits’ – rowing, swimming, digging ditches and thatching houses – and the company of ‘mechanicals’ such as the ‘buffoons, singers, actors, carters, ditchers, oarsmen and sailors’ with whom he was accused of fraternising by the unimpressed monastic chronicler Ranulf Higden. These were not the habits of a king – or, at least, not a king who hoped to win the respect of his people and the hearts and minds of his war-and status-obsessed nobility.
Edward was not completely averse to female company, it seems, since he had an illegitimate son, Adam, who was born before his marriage to Isabella. But his preference for the unpretentious camaraderie of working men, rather than the hierarchical formality of aristocratic society, may nevertheless have been symptomatic of a more profound inability to ‘fit’ the role into which he had been born. For it was abundantly clear that the companionship Edward valued above all was that of one man in particular: a young Gascon named Perrot de Gabaston, or, as he came to be known in England, Piers Gaveston.
Gaveston and Edward first began to spend time together in 1300, when Gaveston joined the sixteen-year-old prince’s household after serving for three years as a soldier under the command of Edward’s father. By 1305 they were sufficiently close that, when Edward quarrelled with his father’s treasurer that summer, the king manifested his displeasure not only by stopping his son’s allowance but by banishing Gaveston (along with a few other members of the prince’s household) from Edward’s side. This separation was brief, however, and in May 1306 Gaveston was knighted by his prince, along with more than 250 other young men, just four days after Edward himself had received the swordbelt and spurs of knighthood from his father.
By then, the favour in which Gaveston stood with young Edward was beginning to attract attention. And attention, to Gaveston himself, was like sunlight. By nature – much more so than Edward, the prince who liked nothing better than to spend his days in the companionable anonymity of physical labour – Gaveston was a peacock, his graceful athleticism constantly on display along with his brittle charisma and his barbed wit. As a result, the deepening of their relationship could not escape public notice, especially since its intensity suggested an affection that went beyond the platonic. ‘I do not remember to have heard that one man so loved another’, observed the author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi pointedly. Knights, it was well known, might pledge undying loyalty to one another as brothers in arms, and both biblical and classical tradition offered familiar examples of masculine devotion: ‘Jonathan cherished David, Achilles loved Patroclus,’ noted the Vita. ‘But we do not read that they were immoderate.’ Edward, on the other hand, ‘was passionately attached to one particular person, whom he cherished above all’, Ranulf Higden wrote. And although these chroniclers’ verdicts were delivered with the acuity of hindsight, Edward’s growing obsession with Gaveston does seem to be the most plausible explanation of steps that were taken in 1307 to separate them.
Gaveston had not endeared himself to old King Edward in the winter of 1306 when, with twenty-one other young knights, he deserted the king’s campaign against Robert Bruce to pursue his passion for fighting in the more glamorous arena of the tournament field rather than in the Scottish mud. For that offence he was formally pardoned in January 1307, but only a month later he was banished from England and forbidden to return without the king’s express permission. However, the royal treasury was ordered to pay him a generous allowance ‘for as long as he shall remain in parts beyond the sea during the king’s pleasure and waiting recall’ – and the unmistakable impression is that this was not so much a punishment for Gaveston as an attempt to remove an overwhelming distraction from the life of the heir to the throne.
It was this – the all-consuming nature of Edward’s fascination with Gaveston – that caused such alarm about the prince’s conduct, rather than the bare fact that questions might now be raised about his sexuality. Certainly, homosexuality was condemned as sinful by the Church, but so were all sexual acts outside the marriage bed, and some within it, if they were performed for pleasure rather than procreation. Contemporaries might well see some forms of ‘sodomy’ (a word which could be used as a general term for all such sinful sex, as well as in its more specific sense) as more unnatural than others, but then again Edward was not the first of England’s rulers to show signs of sexual interest in men as well as women. The Conqueror’s son and successor, William Rufus, neither married nor fathered any illegitimate children, and was lambasted by monastic chroniclers for his extravagantly foppish dress, his louche habits and his irreligiosity. But his stature as a king, in contemporary opinion and that of posterity, was determined not by the fact that his ‘intimate companions’ were male, nor by what the monks saw as the effeminate fashions of his court, but by his considerable judgement as a soldier and a leader.
The problem for Edward, therefore, was a pattern that emerged clearly for the first time with Gaveston’s exile in 1307. The fact was that, with Gaveston by his side, Edward was incapable of sustained concentration on government or on war, or on any of the weighty matters that should occupy a king’s attention; it was reported that he could scarcely conduct a conversation with anyone else if Gaveston was in the room. ‘Our king’, the Vita later lamented, ‘was incapable of moderate favour, and on account of Piers was said to forget himself …’ The solution, thought his father and his magnates, was simple: remove Gaveston, and all would be well. But Edward’s obsession was such that separation left him in the grip of a single mania: to secure Gaveston’s return.
That much was clear when Edward I died on 7 July 1307 on his way north to Scotland. By the time the new king arrived from London to receive the homage of his magnates at Carlisle Castle on 20 July, messengers had already departed to recall Gaveston from his exile (and he was much nearer at hand to receive them than might have been the case, since he had taken up residence not in Gascony as the old king had stipulated, but just across the Channel in the county of Ponthieu, which the younger Edward had inherited from his mother in 1290). While the old king’s body made its stately way south to Westminster Abbey, the new king rode north into Scotland to show his strength and appoint lieutenants there before his return to London for his father’s funeral; and on this journey, at Dumfries on 6 August, Edward declared that Piers Gaveston was to be elevated to the highest rank of the peerage as earl of Cornwall, a title and vast estate which had long been held by members of the king’s immediate family. Not only that, but Gaveston would make a royal marriage: Edward gave him as his bride his young niece, fifteen-year-old Margaret de Clare, daughter of his sister Joan and the late earl of Gloucester.
This glamorous wedding took place only five days after the old king’s burial – indecent haste, perhaps, but then again the speed with which Edward had already dismissed his father’s treasurer, and promoted others with whom the old king had been at loggerheads, suggests that defiance rather than deference was uppermost in the new king’s attitude toward his father’s memory. Edward himself was guest of honour at Berkhamsted Castle to witness the ceremony, and among his personal gifts to the couple were the hundreds of silver pennies with which the groom and his young bride were glitteringly showered as they entered the church.
Less than two months later, in the gloom of a Boulogne January, it was Edward’s turn to be married. His even younger bride, the dainty French princess Isabella, did not have to contend with Gaveston’s presence among the cathedral’s blue-blooded congregation as she made her vows, since the newly created earl had not sailed from Dover with the king. But even in absentia Gaveston cast a long shadow. All those members of the wedding party, French and English, who concerned themselves with politics knew that he had remained in London as ‘keeper of the realm’ – in effect, regent of England. In just six months, this younger son of an obscure Gascon lord had come a disconcertingly long way.
If Isabella had been shielded from any public display of her husband’s devotion to Gaveston during the ceremony that made her a wife, the same could not be said of the ritual that made her a queen. A month to the day after their wedding, Edward and Isabella walked in magnificent procession from the palace of Westminster to the neighbouring abbey for their joint coronation. Beneath their feet was a woollen carpet strewn with flowers, and above their heads an embroidered canopy carried aloft on decorated poles by the barons of the Cinque Ports. Before them paced some of the greatest men in England, including the earls of Lancaster, Warwick, Hereford and Lincoln, carrying the priceless regalia – swords, sceptres, spurs and robes – with which Edward would shortly be invested. But occupying the position of greatest honour immediately in front of the royal couple – in full view of a crowd so pressingly large that one knight was crushed to death when a wall gave way in the abbey – was Piers Gaveston, ‘so decked out’, noted an eyewitness from nearby St Paul’s, ‘that he more resembled the god Mars than an ordinary mortal’.
The symbolism of Gaveston’s role in this most sacred ceremony of kingmaking was as plain to Edward’s young queen as it was to every other spectator. It was Gaveston who carried into the church the golden crown of St Edward the Confessor, a holy relic as well as the physical emblem of the king’s authority. Once Edward and Isabella had been anointed, enthroned and crowned and the shouts of acclamation had rung out, it was Gaveston who held the Confessor’s Sword of Mercy as the royal couple re-emerged into the wintry afternoon light. At the coronation feast, Gaveston appeared ‘more splendidly dressed than the king himself ’, according to the St Paul’s annalist, in silk of imperial purple embroidered with pearls (as opposed to the mere cloth of gold worn by his fellow earls). And he, not Isabella, sat at Edward’s side beneath hanging tapestries that had been specially commissioned for the occasion to depict the heraldic blazons of the happy couple: not the emblems of Edward and Isabella, but ‘the arms of the king and of Piers Gaveston, earl of Cornwall’.
There could be no mistaking that the king did not stand alone, in either his public or his private life, and that his inseparable companion was not the young woman to whom he had so recently made his vows. No royal bride, playing her part in international diplomacy, would be so naïve as to expect her marriage to be founded on romantic love, or to assume that she would be the only recipient of her husband’s attentions. But the unique dignity of her role as the king’s anointed consort was a different matter. That, she would take for granted. And, even at twelve years old, Isabella was politically aware enough to object to her public displacement by the man to whom her husband was so slavishly devoted.
Certainly, the little queen’s royal uncles who had escorted her to England for the coronation, Louis of Evreux and Charles of Valois, were incensed at her treatment. Offence was piled upon offence: Edward had still not made proper provision for the income and estates Isabella should receive as queen in order that she could support herself and her household with appropriate grandeur; agreement had not been reached about the inheritances her future children would receive; most egregiously insulting of all, Edward had given the wedding presents that he and Isabella had received from her father, including jewels and great war horses, to Gaveston. Louis and Charles walked out of the coronation banquet in disgust and returned to France in a fury, ‘seeing’, the St Paul’s annalist said archly, ‘that the king frequented Piers’s couch more than the queen’s’.
They were not alone in their objections. By the spring of 1308, Gaveston’s place at Edward’s side was causing uproar in England as well as at the court of the French king. The nobles had been prepared to tolerate his elevation to their ranks as earl of Cornwall, but since then their forbearance had been severely tested not only by his place in the limelight at the coronation, but also by the breathtaking arrogance with which he conducted himself among his new peers. At a tournament held at Wallingford in December 1307, Gaveston and his knights had won the day against a company including the earls of Arundel, Hereford and Surrey. There was no grace in Gaveston’s victory, no magnanimity in his physical prowess. Instead, his crowing and condescension made personal enemies of the men he had defeated. ‘Piers, now earl of Cornwall, did not wish to remember that he had once been Piers the humble esquire,’ noted the perceptive author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi. ‘For Piers accounted no one his fellow, no one his peer, save the king alone … His arrogance was intolerable to the barons, and a prime cause of hatred and rancour.’
It was not that Gaveston was trying to take the reins of government from Edward’s hands. His aims were no more and no less than his own wealth and glory. The weeks he spent as ‘keeper of the realm’ during Edward’s absence in France, for example, were not marked by any attempt to pursue a political agenda beyond that of his own self-aggrandisement. That was plenty irritating enough, of course, to generate huge personal animus against this pretentious upstart. But what united the nobles in public defiance of Edward’s will was the sense that their king was incapable of addressing the needs of his realm with clear-sighted consistency while his field of vision was obscured by the presence of his favourite. In particular, the English position in Scotland, on which so many lives and so much money had been expended, was in danger of being abandoned without a fight: Edward was showing no signs of interest in pursuing his father’s war against Robert Bruce, who was making good use of the free hand he had thereby been given to establish himself as king of Scots in fact as well as in name.
When the English lords assembled for a meeting of parliament at Westminster Abbey in April 1308, their dissatisfaction took concrete form for the first time. For several weeks, both king and barons had been making hurried attempts to arm themselves ahead of the coming storm. And now Henry Lacy, earl of Lincoln, an old soldier of fifty-eight who had been one of Edward I’s right-hand men, stepped forward on behalf of his peers to confront the king. ‘Homage and the oath of allegiance are more in respect of the crown than in respect of the king’s person’, argued the document he presented to Edward. ‘If ’, therefore, ‘it should befall that the king is not guided by reason,’ then his subjects had a duty to act ‘to reinstate the king in the dignity of the crown’ – by force, if necessary. And in this case, of course, the dignity of the crown could only be restored if Gaveston were removed.
If Edward had believed he could hold out against the complaints of his lords, his hopes were dashed when envoys arrived from his wife’s father to demand Gaveston’s banishment, since the king of France now considered him a mortal enemy. Faced with the double threat of rebellion among the ranks of the English nobility and armed intervention from France, Edward was forced to capitulate. On 14 May 1308 he sought to mollify his father-in-law by endowing his queen, at last, with the northern French counties of Ponthieu and Montreuil. And on 18 May he put his seal to an order that Gaveston should leave England within five weeks, on pain, the archbishop of Canterbury announced the following day, of excommunication.
For Isabella, this moment shone a rare shaft of light across a landscape of wrecked expectations. Life as England’s queen had not, so far, offered much reassurance to a girl raised in one of Europe’s most sophisticated courts with a profound sense of the dignity of her station. Like Matilda and Eleanor before her, Isabella had had to embrace the prospect of a new life in an alien land at an age when the comforts of the nursery were not far behind her. Unlike them, she had rapidly discovered that she could depend on her new husband for neither love nor respect. She had been sidelined at her own coronation by a man with whom her husband was publicly and humiliatingly infatuated. Concern for her youth might well have kept Edward away from her bed for some time after their wedding, whatever the circumstances, but his attentions were so ostentatiously engaged elsewhere that he could claim little credit for any such consideration. While Gaveston preened in silks and jewels lavished upon him by the king, Isabella had scarcely been able to maintain her entourage in the state to which she had been accustomed as princess of France, let alone as the anointed queen of England. Now, at last, it seemed as though the way was clear for this proud young woman to take her rightful place beside her king – perhaps even to advise and support him, as revered royal wives had done before her.
There was hope, then, for the queen, even as the king’s desolation at the loss of his soulmate was plain for all to see. Edward was with Gaveston until the moment he took ship at Bristol for Ireland, his exile having been finagled by the king into an appointment as royal lieutenant there. The last time Gaveston had been forced to leave England by Edward’s father, Edward had showered him with gifts including two tourneying outfits in green emblazoned with Gaveston’s arms, one in fine linen, the other in velvet embroidered with pearls and piping of silver and gold. This time, his presents were less immediately tangible but infinitely more valuable. Under the terms of his banishment Gaveston had lost his lands as earl of Cornwall, but Edward insisted that he should keep the title at least, and before he set sail the king granted him estates in England and Gascony on a scale to rival those of which he had been deprived.
His departure left Edward in misery that was equalled only by the relief of his lords and his young queen. But Gaveston’s removal did not prove to be the panacea for which they had hoped. True, Edward did now turn his energies to building bridges with his nobles and talking of the urgent need to counter the resurgent Scots – and the earls responded with alacrity to these overtures, desperate as they were for active and purposeful leadership. But by the summer of 1309 it was becoming apparent that these were tactics born of Edward’s monomania, not the beginnings of newly focused kingship. Securing the collaboration of his magnates was not the prelude to the Scottish campaign for which they hoped, despite costly preparations now put in train. Instead, it served to lay the groundwork for Gaveston’s return – at first in secret when he slipped quietly into Chester in June, and then in August when he was publicly, if reluctantly, acknowledged by the nobles in parliament.
That the lords were uneasy in their acquiescence was obvious from the grievances about the financial oppressions of his government that they laid before the king as the price of Gaveston’s recall. Did the speed with which Edward waved the reforms through suggest that he and his favourite had learned lessons from their separation? The lords must have hoped that it did; but instead Gaveston’s reinstatement as earl of Cornwall proved to be the cue for yet another turn of the merry-go-round. Gaveston himself was not chastened but triumphant at his political resurrection, and his mockery of the serious-minded earls who had tried to expel him from their ranks became still more outrageously insolent. Laughingly, he gave them derisive nicknames – the earl of Warwick was ‘Warwick the Dog’, the Vita reports, with later chroniclers adding ‘Burst-Belly’ for the ageing earl of Lincoln, ‘Churl’ for the earl of Lancaster, and ‘Joseph the Jew’ for the earl of Pembroke, ‘because he was pale and tall’. And all the while Edward’s officials continued to exact money from his people for a military campaign in Scotland that showed no sign of taking place.
In February 1310, the lords once again came to a parliament armed and angry, to demand that action be taken to deal with the failings of Edward’s regime. The king had already sent Gaveston away from court for his own safety while the earls gathered in force, and now Edward had no choice but to give in to their insistence that he appoint a body of twenty-one lords, temporal and spiritual, ‘to ordain and establish the estate of our household and of our realm’. These ‘Ordainers’, as they came to be known, were to rule on Edward’s behalf for the next eighteen months, and, although the document to which Edward set his seal asserted that he gave them authority ‘of our free will’, the Vita had no doubt of the nature of that freedom: the lords had made it clear that ‘unless the king granted their demands they would not have him for king, nor keep the fealty that they had sworn to him’.
As the Ordainers set to work, Edward embarked on a bold strategy of misdirection. While his lords usurped his government, he would show his worth as king by dealing at last with the catastrophic military situation in Scotland. This plan, it seemed to the beleaguered king, had multiple advantages. He was doing what his subjects had repeatedly demanded, thereby demonstrating that he was capable of defending the realm and its interests as he was required to do by the crown he wore. He was also extracting himself from the shackles the Ordainers had placed upon his authority in London; they might meddle with his administration, but no one, surely, could countermand a king at the head of his troops. Lastly, and most importantly for Edward, he was removing Gaveston from immediate danger. Extraordinary though it might seem, a Scottish battlefield was now a safer prospect for the graceful earl of Cornwall, able fighter that he was, than an assembly of English peers. For Isabella – who was now fifteen, and having to resign herself once more, with icy restraint, to playing second fiddle in her own marriage – Edward’s strategy meant the dubious pleasure of a first visit to the far north of her adopted country in the company of an army led by her husband and his flamboyant lover.
It was an ingenious tactic, but it did not work. It was too late for the king to convince his lords that he intended to emulate his father by hammering the Scots – and, even if he could have persuaded them of his seriousness of purpose, almost none of them were willing to join an army with Gaveston as well as Edward at its head (the only exceptions being the twenty-year-old earl of Gloucester, Gaveston’s brother-in-law, and John de Warenne, earl of Surrey). A campaign without the military might of the earls at its back was never likely to succeed, and it soon emerged that Robert Bruce and his men would not meet Edward’s troops on open ground, but harried them with raids and ambushes amid a ravaged landscape, laid waste by the Scots themselves in order to threaten the English with starvation.
After a fruitless eight months based at the frontier town of Berwick at the mouth of the river Tweed, Edward and Isabella rode south in July 1311, leaving Gaveston, newly named as the king’s lieutenant in Scotland, holed up in the Northumbrian fortress of Bamburgh. Back in London at the beginning of August – as Bruce and his soldiers launched devastating raids into northern England, in brutal demonstration of Edward’s military failure – the king was confronted by the reforms that had been painstakingly drawn up by the Lords Ordainer. These forty-one ordinances provided for the detailed supervision of Edward’s government – especially the ways in which he raised money from his subjects, and the ways in which he chose to spend it – by his nobles, in their capacity as representatives of the realm. And among these stipulations, to no one’s surprise, was the demand that Piers Gaveston should be exiled from England once more, this time for ever.
Edward may not have been surprised, but he was aghast and enraged at the corner in which he now found himself. He railed against the appalling presumption of his subjects in seeking to constrain his sovereignty. But to no effect: and while the Ordainers stood firm, Edward – with the utter lack of insight that had characterised everything he had done since he inherited his crown – gave the clearest demonstration yet of why his lords had been driven to oppose him. ‘To satisfy the barons he offered these terms’, explained the Vita:
whatever has been ordained or decided upon, he said, however much it 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. The king sought this, time and again, now coaxing them with flattery, now hurling threats …
What Edward did not see, was incapable of seeing, was that all but one of the ordinances were concerned not with his ‘private disadvantage’ but with his public duty as king. Had he only recognised that fact, had he shown any inkling of the responsibilities as well as the rights of the crown, then the single provision that should have been a private matter – the one concerning his relationship with Gaveston – need never have been drafted.
But there was no moment of realisation. Instead, confronted with the reality of civil war as the only possible consequence of his continued resistance, Edward had no option but to concede. The ordinances were proclaimed throughout England, and excommunication instituted as the penalty for anyone who violated them. And on 3 November, Gaveston again sailed into exile.
This time, however, there was nothing strategic about the king’s response. He was driven by fury, declaring that his nobles were treating him as though he were an idiot whose household had to be managed by others because of his incapacity. Once again he moved north as soon as he could, to escape the constraints on his freedom of action in London, and as soon as he was free he sent word to Flanders to summon Gaveston back to his side. By the middle of January 1312 they were together again at York, where Edward proclaimed Gaveston’s restoration to the earldom of Cornwall, and denounced his exile as unlawful. Now, the king was preparing in earnest for war.
And he was not the only one. Here, the temperaments and the individual judgements of Edward’s most powerful subjects – the men whose foibles Gaveston had so mercilessly mocked – came into play in decisive fashion. Extraordinarily tense though the political world had been ever since Edward’s accession, it had been relatively easy until now for the earls to stand united in their demand that the king should expel his favourite and reform his government. But once it became clear that Edward would defy them, the question was no longer what the magnates wanted, but whether they were prepared to take arms against their anointed king to get it. One among the earls was spared this fateful decision. Henry Lacy, earl of Lincoln and the regime’s elder statesman, had died at his London home, Lincoln’s Inn in Holborn, on 5 February 1311. His fidelity to the crown and his cultured dignity were a grievous loss in such troubled times; and his death helped to bestow the mantle of leadership on the man who inherited his earldom – his son-in-law, Thomas of Lancaster.
Lancaster, at thirty-four, was a very different proposition from his respected father-in-law. He was acutely conscious of his own pre-eminent position among the English nobility, set apart as he was from his peers both by birth and by the scale of his wealth and power. He was the son of Edmund of Lancaster, Edward I’s younger brother, and Blanche of Artois, widow of the king of Navarre and granddaughter of Louis VIII of France – a lineage which made him, uniquely, both the cousin of Edward II and the maternal uncle of the young queen, Isabella. Also uniquely, he held a grand total of five earldoms with lands stretching across England: those of Lancaster, Leicester and Derby he had inherited from his father, to which his marriage to the heiress Alice Lacy now added the titles and estates of Lincoln and Salisbury. But he did not have the personal stature to match this extraordinary political standing. He was always more aware of his entitlement to demand loyalty than of the qualities needed to inspire it, and his instincts as a loner, aloof and haughty, competed for supremacy with his fierce ambition as a leader.
For now, however, the fact that open conflict could focus on the despised person of Gaveston was enough to hold a tense coalition of magnates together. The Lords Ordainer, with Lancaster now taking a prominent role among them, made arrangements for the security of southern England while despatching troops northward under the command not only of the intransigent Lancaster himself but also the earls of Pembroke and Surrey, both of whom had previously shown themselves willing to contemplate a more politic engagement with the king and his lover. It was a measure of the extreme caution made necessary by this threatening situation that the task of arresting Gaveston was committed specifically to their careful hands.
Edward and Gaveston, meanwhile, remained for several weeks at York, where Isabella joined them in the second half of February. The length of their stay was occasioned not only by the need to co-ordinate military preparations but also by the fact that Gaveston’s wife, the earl of Gloucester’s sister Margaret de Clare, had given birth to a daughter, Joan, on 12 January. It was not until 20 February that the countess’s churching took place – the ritual of purification that marked her re-emergence into the world after her confinement – and was followed a few days later by the baby’s christening, a sumptuous affair on which the king spent lavishly. By then, though she could not yet have known it, Isabella too was pregnant.
The timing may simply have been fortuitous. At sixteen, the queen was now mature enough for the prospect of childbirth to be merely commonly, rather than uncommonly, dangerous. If, as seems likely, a decision had been taken at the time of her wedding that she was too young to consummate the marriage, such restraint was no longer physically necessary. But, given the specific circumstances of Isabella’s married life, it is also possible that the start of her sexual relationship with Edward, and the pregnancy that resulted, were politically inspired. Certainly, the imminent threat of civil war is likely to have focused the minds of both Edward and Gaveston, his fellow first-time father, on the advantages of acquiring a legitimate heir.
Advantageous the news may have been, but it did nothing to stop the conflict. As the earls rode north (claiming, and convincing no one, that the men they were mustering were gathering to take part in tournaments), Edward, Gaveston and Isabella moved ahead of them to the north-east, Isabella often travelling separately from her husband, and more slowly, perhaps impeded by the early stages of her pregnancy as well as by the proprieties of queenly travel on rutted roads amid a large household entourage. Certainly, though, the pressures of their unhappy situation were becoming more intense. At the end of April Isabella caught up with her husband and Gaveston at the fortress of Newcastle, before pushing on another eight miles without them to the comforting security of Tynemouth Priory, a Benedictine community nestled within a newly built and massively fortified curtain wall on a rocky headland overlooking the North Sea. But both comfort and security vanished in an instant on 4 May, when Edward and Gaveston arrived with a small retinue at the Priory’s gate, sweating and breathless from their sudden flight. The earl of Lancaster’s army had appeared with terrifying speed outside Newcastle’s walls, and the king had left almost everything behind – weapons, horses, jewels – in his desperation to evade his cousin’s grasp.
They could not rest for long. The next day Edward and Gaveston put to sea, heading eighty miles down the coast to Scarborough. For Gaveston, who had recently been ill, this bleak five-day voyage was a necessary evil to escape the implacable hostility of his enemies. For Isabella, however, the calculation of risk was very different: her sex, her station and her pregnancy would protect her from harm at the hands of the earls, while the danger that she might become their hostage weighed less heavily than the threat to the king’s unborn heir posed by the North Sea’s unpredictable currents. She therefore hurried south by road, abandoning rich bundles of baggage under guard on the Northumbrian coast to be retrieved at a more propitious moment.
At York she was reunited with her husband, who had left Gaveston safe behind the impregnable walls of Scarborough Castle and ridden west to join her. Unassailable Scarborough’s fortifications certainly were, looming as they did from a clifftop three hundred feet above the harbour. But Edward’s hopes for Gaveston’s safety were soon scattered to the winds. The Ordainers’ army, under the command of Pembroke and Surrey, moved swiftly to isolate the headland on which the castle stood, a cordon which in a matter of days formed a stranglehold. True, the besiegers could not reach Gaveston and his men inside the walls, but neither could supplies of food or arms or any other kind of help from his devoted king. In despair, Gaveston agreed terms for his own surrender on 19 May. Pembroke and Surrey solemnly swore that they would guarantee their prisoner’s safety until 1 August. By then, the agreement stipulated, either a peace settlement would be agreed between the king and all his magnates, or Gaveston would be returned to Scarborough, a castle that would be neither re-garrisoned nor re-provisioned in the meantime, to take his chances under renewed siege as if the negotiations had never happened. Edward, who was consulted at York, had no option but to give his assent, and Gaveston began his journey south as a prisoner in the custody of the earl of Pembroke, Aymer de Valence.
At almost forty, Pembroke was a careful, measured man who had proved a loyal servant to Edward I and to his son, although his loyalty by now was of a kind that Edward II was too short-sighted to recognise. It had been with obvious reluctance that he had been driven to stand against his king – he had even been prepared to argue Edward’s case for Gaveston’s recall from an earlier exile, in his capacity as an envoy to the pope in the spring of 1309 – but a year later his disenchantment with the failings of Edward’s rule led him to take his place among his peers as one of the Lords Ordainer. But, as befitted a man who had been intended for a career in the Church until the early death of his elder brother, his newly sworn pledge to ensure Gaveston’s safety was for Pembroke a matter of both personal honour and sacred duty, and he treated his prisoner with grace and respect.
On 9 June the two earls, captor and captive, arrived at the village of Deddington in Oxfordshire, where Pembroke found Gaveston comfortable lodgings at the rectory and left him under guard while he rode on another twenty miles to visit his wife at his manor of Bampton. But Pembroke was not the only one of the Lords Ordainer who knew Gaveston’s whereabouts on this stately progress southward, and not all of his fellow earls shared Pembroke’s serene sense of obligation about the honourable treatment their prisoner was currently enjoying. For some, Gaveston was a renegade who had already made fools of them too often. Was it not obvious that, in order to secure Gaveston’s freedom, the king would agree to anything they asked, and then go back on his word as he had done so many times before? The ordinances had already decreed that, if Gaveston breached the terms of his exile, he should be treated ‘as an enemy of the king and of the kingdom and of his people’. And a peace process that set aside this prescription could mean only that the merry-go-round would continue to turn.
Among the earls unhappy with the genteel handling of their prisoner was Guy Beauchamp, the forty-year-old earl of Warwick. Like Pembroke, he had served Edward I faithfully; unlike Pembroke, he had been quick to voice his opposition to Edward II’s failings and Gaveston’s role in fostering them. The old king had granted Warwick extensive lands in Scotland as a reward for his military service there, which gave a particularly sharp edge to Warwick’s resentment of Edward’s disastrous neglect of the English campaign north of the border. He had also been at the old king’s bedside when he died, and may have been instructed to resist Gaveston’s return from that first, long-ago exile. Certainly, he had been utterly consistent in his determination to remove Gaveston and the provocative distraction he represented. Warwick was a cultured and discriminating man, but something of his tenacious forcefulness is apparent in Gaveston’s choice of nickname for him: ‘Warwick the Dog’, the Vita reports – an epithet elaborated by later tradition into ‘the Black Hound of Arden’.
In June 1312 Warwick passionately believed that the critical state of English politics demanded more forceful action than the cautious Pembroke had so far shown any sign of undertaking. Hearing that Gaveston had been left, lightly guarded, at Deddington, the earl assembled his retainers in force and rode the twenty-five miles across country from his castle at Warwick. Early in the morning of Saturday 10 June, his men surrounded the rectory where Gaveston was staying, and when they saw how overwhelmingly they were outnumbered, Pembroke’s soldiers simply abandoned their arms. ‘Get up, traitor – you are taken!’ the Vita has Warwick shout outside Gaveston’s window. And Gaveston had no choice but to comply.
‘Led forth not as an earl but as a thief ’, Gaveston was escorted out of Deddington, at first on foot, and then roughly bundled onto a packhorse quite unlike the fine palfreys to which he was accustomed. When they reached Warwick Castle, towering over the town that shared its name, he was cast into a prison cell within the walls of the fortress. Pembroke had treated him with the dignity of a peer; Warwick with all the niceties due to a traitor.
That did not, however, mean that Warwick was confident of his next move. This was the moment at which the unity of the lords would be tested to destruction. They had done so much in the name of the crown against the will of their king – forced reform on his government, issued ordinances in his name, expelled his favourite from England’s shores. But could those ordinances now justify the use of lethal force against a man who was not only a peer of the realm, but dearer to the king than the kingdom itself? Could such an execution be lawful, when the king himself, the lawgiver whose responsibility it was to bring justice to his people, would never accept it? Edward had already declared Gaveston’s exile unlawful; how then could his punishment for breaching its terms be justified? And if an earl could be killed without the sanction of the law, where then lay safety for his killers?
Pembroke was clear in his answer. His own honour and integrity depended on fulfilling his guarantee that Gaveston would be kept safe from harm while a settlement was negotiated with the king, and he frantically sought to recover his prisoner. But Warwick, knowing full well the dangers of action, still could not bear to contemplate the risk of inaction: that Edward would yet again put Gaveston’s baneful influence before the needs of his country. Collective responsibility – the earls’ claim to speak for the ‘community of the realm’ – had so far provided a means by which to restrain the king. Perhaps collective responsibility could now justify Gaveston’s death.
More earls on caparisoned warhorses clattered through Warwick Castle’s great gates in the days that followed: thirty-six-year-old Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and Essex and husband of Edward’s sister Elizabeth, twenty-seven-year-old Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, and, most powerful of all, Thomas of Lancaster, holder of five earldoms and arbiter, it now seemed, of England’s destiny. For days, these lords deliberated while Gaveston waited in the cold and gloom of his cell. They sealed documents promising one another protection from any repercussions that might befall them should Gaveston be executed. Two judges were called in to sentence him to death according to the terms of the ordinances – a legal gloss which could not mask the facts of a case in which the accused had had no properly constituted trial. And the death knell finally sounded when Lancaster at last stepped forward to play out the role of leadership for which his inheritance and his ambition had fitted him. ‘It was necessary for him to be great who should defend such a deed,’ explained the Vita solemnly. ‘Hence Thomas, earl of Lancaster, being of higher birth and more powerful than the rest, took upon himself the peril of the business …’
On Monday 19 June Gaveston was brought from his prison, blinking and bound in the early morning light, and handed over to the earl of Lancaster’s men. His ‘martial glory’ gone, he was dragged two miles north to Blacklow Hill, which belonged to the estates of Lancaster’s nearby castle of Kenilworth. While Warwick remained within the walls of his own fortress, Lancaster, Hereford and Arundel followed some way behind the procession, the earls’ unease made manifest in their physical distance from an execution that bore the hallmarks not of judicial process but of a lynching. A messenger was on hand to relay Lancaster’s orders, and at his word a soldier stepped forward and drove his sword into Gaveston’s abdomen. Gaveston fell, bleeding, as another man unsheathed a blade to sever his head from his body. Lancaster waited and watched until he saw the head lifted into the air – no trophy, but proof of a job done. Then he turned his horse, and rode away.
Gaveston, the preening peacock, was gone at last, his glittering colours faded to black, his mocking voice silenced. But his capacity to make trouble was far from over. The earls had hoped that his removal would free Edward to turn his attention to government, to the war in Scotland and to the advice of his lords about the needs of his people. Lancaster had been prepared, in the end, to remove him by violence, as a desperate resolution to an intractable problem. But the problem had not gone away. Instead, it had changed in form.
Death did not end Edward’s devotion to Gaveston. His mutilated corpse had been left lying on the bloody grass at Blacklow, the embarrassing detritus of a dangerous political act, until it was rescued by a group of Dominican friars and taken to Oxford where it lay in state at the king’s command, embalmed and dressed in cloth of gold, to await burial (since Gaveston, excommunicated by the archbishop of Canterbury for his breach of the ordinances, could not be interred in consecrated ground until the anathema was revoked). Meanwhile, Edward’s response to his loss was as clear to the author of the Vita as it was to the perpetrators of Gaveston’s death: ‘they knew that when the matter came to the king’s notice, he would, if he could, proceed to take vengeance’.
The earls had begun this conflict united in search of a king who would take responsibility for his realm and offer them leadership. Their unity was now irretrievably fractured: Pembroke was back at the king’s side, raging at his former allies who had swept aside his personal promise of safe conduct to Gaveston (not to mention the possessions he had pledged as a guarantee of his oath). And the consequences of this division ran frighteningly deep. The lords who had Gaveston’s blood on their hands – principally Lancaster, the king’s cousin and the greatest magnate in England – could not now afford to see their sovereign restored to untrammelled power, however magisterial his rule might conceivably be without the distraction of Gaveston’s presence, because Edward, as the Vitacoolly explains, ‘had already decided to destroy those who killed Piers’. And the manner of that killing – no trial, no hearing before his peers in open court, just a brutal blow on a sunny hillside – had handed the king enough rope to hang them with. No one knew what the future would bring: but there could be little doubt that the scene was set for more turmoil, more violence and more bloodshed.
One more player remained in the wings, watching and waiting, while she enacted a private drama of her own. On Sunday 12 November, in her brilliantly painted chamber at Windsor Castle – golden stars dancing on green as the Wise and Foolish Virgins played out their parable in the finest pigments – Isabella went into labour. Shortly before six the next morning, she gave birth to a boy. The seventeen-year-old queen had kept her own counsel since the bitter complaints her uncles had relayed to her father in the first unhappy months of her marriage. She had maintained a cool dignity throughout the months and years of following Edward as he followed Gaveston in the fruitless search for sanctuary in his own kingdom. But, in her silence, she had learned a great deal: that her husband had much passion and little judgement; that his understanding of politics was sometimes wilfully obtuse, sometimes hopelessly naïve; and that his nobles were men to be reckoned with. Isabella was still young, but she had a shrewd intellect and a forceful will of her own. And now, with her son in her arms, she held the key that would transform her power as queen.