The village of Deddington in Oxfordshire was arranged around a castle built shortly after the Norman Conquest by Odo, bishop of Bayeux, the brother of King William I. It was familiar territory to Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke, whose wife was staying just twenty-two miles away in the manor of Bampton when the earl arrived in the village on the evening of 9 June 1312.
The earl came to the village with a notorious prisoner in tow. Piers Gaveston was captured. The king’s favourite had been in custody since 19 May, when he had surrendered to Pembroke, the earl of Surrey and two other barons who were besieging him in Scarborough castle. Pembroke held Gaveston prisoner in the name of the political community of England. He affected to take his duties extremely properly: during negotiations with Edward II that had taken place at York, the earl had agreed that he would forfeit all of his property if any harm should come to Gaveston while he was in custody.
The manhunt for Gaveston had been planned and put into action with a remarkable degree of cooperation between the great magnates of England. Within weeks of Gaveston’s arrival back in England the earls had mustered men right across England and Wales during March, under the pretence of organizing tournaments, ‘lest the country be terrified by the sight of arms’, wrote the author of The Life of Edward II.
The real reason for raising men was of course to make war upon the king and his loathsome favourite. The prime movers in the plot were Archbishop Winchelsea, who had excommunicated Gaveston, along with the earls of Lancaster, Pembroke, Hereford, Arundel and Warwick and two lesser barons, Henry Percy and Roger de Clifford. Others, such as the earls of Surrey and Gloucester, were aware of the plot and involved to a lesser degree. Each magnate had been charged with keeping the peace in a different part of the kingdom, while Pembroke and Warwick had formal responsibility for capturing Gaveston himself.
It had eventually been Pembroke, Surrey, Percy and Clifford who plucked Gaveston from his bolt-hole at Scarborough castle on 19 May, after a short siege. Negotiations for Gaveston’s release had immediately begun with Edward, and were set to continue nearer to London during the summer. Pembroke journeyed south with the captured earl, and on a warm June night arrived in Deddington.
In spite of Pembroke’s solemn oath to ensure Gaveston’s safety, the earl made a curious decision that evening, announcing that he was leaving Deddington and going to visit his wife at Bampton. He would be leaving Gaveston to rest under a light guard.
Was this foolishness or treachery? Pembroke would for ever protest the former, but it was naïve to leave the most hated man in England alone overnight, when his enemies abounded. Within hours of Pembroke leaving Deddington, the earl of Warwick had swooped into the village with a large party of men-at-arms. The man that Gaveston had scorned as the Black Dog was here to bite his tormentor. The author of The Life of Edward II gave the story a vivid hue:
When the earl of Warwick had learned all that was happening about Piers, he took a strong force and secretly approached the place where he knew Piers to be. Coming to the village very early in the morning one Saturday he entered the gate of the courtyard and surrounded the chamber [where Gaveston was staying].
Then the earl called out in a loud voice: ‘Arise traitor, you are taken.’ And Piers, hearing the earl, also seeing the earl’s superior force and that the guard to which he had been allotted was not resisting, putting on his clothes came down from the chamber. In this fashion Piers is taken and is led forth not as an earl, but as a thief; and he who used to ride on palfreys is now forced to go on foot.
Warwick marched Gaveston from the village of Deddington in triumph, his retainers blowing trumpets to advertise the victory around the rolling fields of Oxfordshire. Crowds thronged around the parade, bellowing abuse at the fallen favourite. Gaveston was marched all the way to Warwick castle, where he was thrown in prison as a traitor to the realm.
This was no renegade action from a single earl. Within a week of Gaveston’s capture the town of Warwick filled with the earls of Lancaster, Hereford and Arundel and their retinues, along with lesser barons involved in the plot. Pembroke, now showing genuine horror at his contemporaries’ ruthlessness, approached and protested that his vow to protect Gaveston was being torn up in front of him. He was dismissed with the advice that he ought in future to make his promises with greater care.
Lancaster, a royal earl, a Plantagenet and the most senior man present, from this point took overall responsibility and risk for the fate of Gaveston. The prisoner was tried before a court assembled under Lancaster and Warwick’s authority, accused of breaching the terms of the Ordinances, which called for his exile. Clearly he was guilty: here was a man brought before a court assembled especially for his condemnation, operating under a law drafted specifically for his destruction.
Gaveston was sentenced to death. On 19 June he was taken from his cell and brought before Lancaster. Chroniclers described a pitiable scene in which the prisoner wailed for mercy. Instead of clemency, Gaveston was handed over to armed guards, who dragged him two miles north of Warwick to Blacklow Hill. At the top of the hill he was passed on to two Welshmen. Each dealt a deadly blow: one ran him through the body, and the other hacked off his head.
Lancaster was shown Gaveston’s severed head as proof that the ghastly deed was done. But the body lay on the ground where it fell, until some Dominican friars collected the remains, sewed the head back onto the body and took it to Oxford. For two and a half years the corpse lay embalmed and dressed in cloth of gold in the Dominican house. That was as much as charity would bear: Gaveston died excommunicate and could not be buried on holy land.
Even given Gaveston’s insolence and his irresponsible career, this was a shocking way for him to die. And it had profound implications for the future. Edward, when he discovered the fate of his adopted brother, was distraught. Rather than counting his errors, he became ever more determined to resist the Ordinances. He would never forgive his cousin Lancaster for his act of arrogant brutality, and a blood feud would boil between the two for the best part of the next decade.
And far from uniting England, Gaveston’s death had divided the political community. A permanent split was created among the barons: those responsible for Gaveston’s murder were now permanently isolated from royal favour, while Pembroke and Surrey, who felt that they had been at some level deceived by Lancaster and Warwick, became unwavering loyalists to Edward.
But far more deadly than all this was the line that had been crossed when Gaveston was tried under a court whose quasi-judicial authority stemmed from the earl of Lancaster and the Ordinances he championed. For all his transgressions, Gaveston’s death could not possibly be a just sentence under the laws of the realm. Rather, when he was run through and beheaded on Blacklow Hill, Piers Gaveston – an earl, whether his peers liked it or not – was murdered. And his murder was political.
For more than 150 years the Plantagenets had reigned in England by rule of law. Only in the most severe instances had great men died in the course of political and constitutional disputes: Thomas Becket by misadventure; Simon de Montfort on the battlefield; Arthur of Brittany in cold blood in his prison cell. Now a king’s closest companion had been killed in calculated fashion on the order of one of the most senior Plantagenets in the realm.
Kidnap, violence and murder were commonplace in medieval society, but they were not an acceptable part of the ordinary course of royal government except under the severest circumstances. Now, however, violence had become a political tool in England. Pandora’s box was open. As Edward and Lancaster moved towards implacable hatred, the Plantagenet family was in danger of tearing itself apart – and taking England with it.