It is impossible to understate the hatred that flared against Gaveston in the aftermath of the embarrassing coronation. To Edward, much of it must have seemed unfounded. He seems genuinely to have considered Gaveston his brother, and rewarded him accordingly with the lavish gifts and deep emotional bond that his feelings called for. The queen, naturally, came a poor third in the relationship, to the intense chagrin of the French; but she was after all a child of twelve, barely ready to be either a sexual partner or a meaningful political figure.
Edward, however, failed entirely to discern his opponents’ points of view. Instead of following Gaveston’s banishment to Ireland with a resolute effort to mend his ways and address the urgent needs of government, he bent his energies to the task of rescinding his favourite’s sentence of exile, and petitioning the pope to annul Archbishop Winchelsea’s suspended sentence of excommunication.
Edward was not a stupid man, and he realized that Gaveston could not be recalled without a charm offensive levelled at his magnates. A concerted drive to regain the favour of the leading earls and bishops was built around a reform programme. Statutes were issued at Stamford in July 1309 dealing with purveyance – the forced purchase of provisions for the royal army – and the excessive powers of royal officials in the shires. In return, Gaveston was allowed back into England, and was regranted his earldom of Cornwall in August. The grant was witnessed by many of the most powerful men in England: the bishops of Durham, Chichester, Worcester and London and the earls of Gloucester, Lincoln, Surrey, Pembroke, Hereford and Warwick. However, the king’s cousin, Thomas earl of Lancaster, the earl of Arundel and Archbishop Winchelsea were absent.
Almost as soon as Gaveston was back, his intemperate behaviour resumed. According to several chroniclers, he came up with offensive nicknames for a number of the other English earls. He called the earl of Warwick ‘the black dog of Arden’, Gloucester was known as ‘whoreson’, Lincoln as ‘burst belly’, Lancaster as ‘churl’ and Pembroke as ‘Joseph the Jew’. Gaveston also upset the earl of Lancaster by having a Lancastrian retainer replaced in a royal office by one of his own men. His influence over the king remained powerful and extremely disturbing, not least as the country was supposed to be readying itself for a return to war with the Scots.
As 1309 unfolded, tensions grew. An army ordered to muster for Scotland in September did not materialize. Yet Edward’s officials continued to exercise the rights to prises and purveyance, using the food and supplies they seized from the country to supply royal garrisons in the north. A tax of a twenty-fifth was also taken. The burdens on the country were considered so severe that rumours of an impending peasants’ revolt began to circulate.
Popular anger was focused through the magnates at a parliament in early 1310. There was a general refusal to attend Westminster unless Gaveston was dismissed from the king’s presence. When Edward acceded to this request, The Life of Edward IIrecords that parliament made urgent complaints that ‘the state of the king and the kingdom had much deteriorated since the death of the elder King Edward … and the whole kingdom had been not a little injured …’
Their complaints were summed up in a petition. Its authors pointed out that since 1307 Edward had been guided by evil counsellors, and that he had impoverished the Crown to such a degree that his ministers were forced to break Magna Carta by extorting goods and money from the people and the Church. Edward was accused of losing Scotland by his negligence and diminishing the royal possessions in England and Ireland.
This was a damning indictment, and in the main a fair one. To blame the dire Scottish situation on Edward II overlooked the fact that the overstretched military position derived in large part from his father. But otherwise, the complaints were justified.
To remedy the broken state, the petitioners in parliament demanded that ‘twelve discreet and powerful men of good reputation should be elected, by whose judgement and decree the situation should be reformed and settled; and if anything should be found a burden on the kingdom, their ordinance should destroy it …’ This was a bold and urgent step to take when a reign was still only in its third year. And it shows the concern with which the whole political community viewed Edward’s leadership. The barons were not unreasonable men, driven by ambition and a desire to encroach upon royal power. In the main they simply wanted a strong, fair king. In that sense, their hatred of Gaveston and the misrule for which they blamed him was constitutional as well as political.
If Edward was unconvinced at the beginning of the parliament, he was soon shown how seriously his magnates took the situation. The Life of Edward II records that they accused the king of breaking his coronation oath and threatened him with deposition if he failed to heed their demands: ‘The united barons … [said] that unless the king granted their requests they would not have him for king, nor keep the fealty that they had sworn to him, especially since he himself was not keeping the oath he had taken at his coronation.’
This was a deadly situation, and Edward realized that he had no choice but to bow to the popular demands. On 20 March 1310, a group of twenty-one Ordainers – as the lords who were responsible for carrying out the Ordinances became known – was elected and sworn in. It was a balanced panel of loyalists and reformers, which included the archbishop of Canterbury and many of the English bishops, along with every English earl except for Oxford, Surrey and – unsurprisingly – Piers Gaveston, earl of Cornwall. They agreed to publish their Ordinances for the reform of the realm in September 1311.