Edward II was crowned at Westminster on 25 February 1308. The great ceremony was attended by the combined nobility of England and France. All packed together into Westminster Abbey to witness the anointing of a new king, accompanied by his twelve-year-old queen, Isabella, whom Edward had married in Boulogne a month previously, in a shimmering ceremony attended by five kings and three queens.
Westminster heaved with bodies. The abbey church and the streets around were packed with participants and onlookers. (The crush was so intense that a knight and former seneschal of Ponthieu, Sir John Bakewell, was killed when a wall collapsed.) Inside the church the assembled nobility literally glittered in cloth of gold. The French had sent a magnificent delegation, including the counts of Valois and Evreux, Isabella’s brother Charles (the future Charles IV of France), John, duke of Brabant, with his wife Margaret, Edward II’s sister; Henry, count of Luxembourg (soon to become the Emperor Henry VII), and many more besides. The English earls, barons and knights of the shire packed alongside them in the abbey church, to witness the most important political ceremony of all.
Silent, but also present, were the remains of the old king. Edward I’s newly constructed tomb was a smooth and austere box of black Purbeck marble, inscribed with the words EDWARDUS PRIMUS SCOTTORUM MALLEUS HIC EST. PACTUM SERVA. (This is Edward the First, Hammer of the Scots. Honour the vow.) It was a cool reminder that kingship brought military responsibility – and all who had sworn to see out the vision of a reunited, Arthurian Britain were held to their responsibility and the oath that had been sworn at the Feast of the Swans.
All eyes anticipated the new king. He entered the abbey church wearing a green robe with black hose, walking barefoot along a carpet of flowers with his young bride beside him. Above the royal couple was held a great embroidered canopy, and in front of them processed the magnates and prelates of England.
There was strict protocol to the order of procession, which invariably caused arguments at coronations. Each earl at the ceremony had a certain role to fulfil. At Edward’s coronation the earls of Lancaster, Warwick and Lincoln carried great swords; the king’s cousin Henry of Lancaster carried the royal sceptre; four other barons – Hugh Despenser the elder, Roger Mortimer of Chirk, Thomas de Vere, son of the earl of Oxford, and Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel – bore a board on which the heavy and luxurious royal coronation robes were placed.
Yet among all these great men walked Piers Gaveston, proceeding in pride of place directly before Edward and Isabella. According to the Annalist of St Paul’s, he was decked out like ‘the God Mars’. Gaveston, ludicrously, trumped the assembled nobles in their cloth of gold by wearing silks of royal purple, decorated with pearls. He carried the crown of Edward the Confessor – the most sacred item among all the royal regalia.
It was a grave and unmistakable sign of Gaveston’s role in the new regime, and could not have been construed by the assembled nobles as anything but a vile insult against their lineage and status. This was exactly as Edward and Gaveston intended. For months before the ceremony, the new king had been imagining his public declaration of the new royal partnership: his brotherhood with Gaveston.
Before the stunned congregation, Edward swore his coronation oaths in French, rather than the traditional Latin. In a development of the coronation oath, the king promised to uphold both the laws of St Edward the Confessor and also ‘the laws and rightful customs which the community of the realm shall have chosen’. Under the king’s father, parliaments had been held frequently and were used as the forum for political dissent, discussion, debate and negotiation. By including in the sacred coronation vows a nod to the developing role of the political community, pageantry reflected the new political reality.
Yet it was Gaveston, and not the new coronation oath, that occupied everyone’s attention. At every juncture his presence offended the other nobles present. When the time came for the ceremonial fixing of the king’s boots, Gaveston shared duties with the count of Valois and the earl of Pembroke, fixing the left spur to the king’s heel. After Edward and Isabella had been anointed, and the king had sat on the throne containing the Stone of Scone to receive homage from his magnates, Gaveston led the outward procession carrying the royal sword Curtana, which had been carried by the earl of Lancaster on the procession into the abbey.
In a society ordered by hierarchy and sacred belief, these were grave offences against protocol, and as the Gaveston pantomime unfolded there were unseemly shouts of protest from among the congregation. But worse was to follow.
Gaveston organized the feast that followed the coronation, and he made it a vulgar bid to award himself further glory. The walls of the banqueting hall were arrayed with rich tapestries. They were decorated not with the arms of Edward and Isabella, but with those of Edward and Gaveston. For the new queen to be sidelined in so blatant a fashion was offensive to her visiting family, and the insult was deepened when Edward spent the entire banquet – at which the food was late and virtually inedible – talking and laughing with Gaveston, while neglecting his bride. Even before the ceremony the young queen had written to her father complaining that she was kept in poverty and treated with dishonour. Here was a public demonstration of her ill-treatment. To make things even worse, it later transpired that Edward had given the best of the queen’s jewels and wedding presents to his favourite.
The coronation was a disaster. It confirmed to the entire English political community, as well as to Isabella’s family, that the king was dangerously obsessed with Piers Gaveston, in a fashion that was not only unbecoming, but was likely to bring a political upheaval to the realm. Edward could scarcely have found a better way to upset and alienate all who sought to support him.
It took mere days for the anger engendered by the coronation, combined with Gaveston’s contemptuous treatment of his fellow earls and barons, to spark a political crisis. With a parliament due to be held in April, there were rumblings from the magnates of coming in arms, seeking to visit retribution on Gaveston for his behaviour. In anticipation of trouble, the bridges over the river Thames were broken at the end of March, and the king took refuge in Windsor castle. Within less than a year of acceding to the throne, and mere days of his coronation, Edward had expended every ounce of political capital and goodwill that a new reign customarily brought. He was forced to prepare himself for armed insurrection by England’s barons.
When a parliament met in April 1308, a group of magnates led by Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln, produced a series of three articles of shattering constitutional importance. ‘Homage and the oath of allegiance are more in respect of the crown than in respect of the king’s person,’ they declared, drawing for the first time an explicit distinction between the king and the office he held. The magnates also demanded that Gaveston be exiled from the kingdom and stripped of his earldom, writing that ‘he disinherits the crown and … impoverishes it … and puts discord between the king and his people’.
This was no manifesto from a disaffected minority party, but a clear signal of constitutional opposition, presented by virtually the entire English barony. The earls of Lancaster, Pembroke, Warwick, Hereford and Surrey all supported Lincoln, and made a show of armed aggression in Westminster to make it clear how serious they were. Archbishop Winchelsea, who had been absent from the realm during the coronation, was recalled to England by the king. As soon as he arrived he sided with the barons, threatening to excommunicate Gaveston unless he left England by the end of June. Only one baron, Sir Hugh Despenser the elder, adhered to the king. Despenser was a trusted diplomat and an ardent loyalist who had paid a fortune – £2,000 – to marry his only son, known as Hugh Despenser the younger, to the earl of Gloucester’s sister in 1306. He would stick close to the king in years to come.
Despite such a slim show of support for his kingship, Edward wriggled. It was obvious that Gaveston had to go, and that he could not retain his earldom. But rather than comply directly with his opponents and send his favourite away, Edward appointed Gaveston to the position of King’s Lieutenant in Ireland and awarded him castles and manors in England and Gascony with which to support himself. He accompanied Gaveston to Bristol and saw him off from England’s shores with the utmost dignity.
Here, already, was an image of a king who completely failed to understand his obligations. Everything demonstrated by his father’s career ought to have taught Edward II that the politics of English kingship were based on consensus and compromise. Barons were not naturally troublesome or opposed to royal authority, but they were exceptionally sensitive to the inadequate or inequitable operation of kingship and would act to take a grip on government if they felt that the king was failing in his task.
Alas, Edward was unable to perceive this. He saw Gaveston’s exile as a personal attack on a man he loved, rather than a political act undertaken for the good of the realm. Thus in 1308 he was concerned with nothing more than negotiating the return of his favourite. It would be a familiar pattern established over the following four years – and one that would bring England once more to the brink of civil war.