To be in Paris during the summer of 1313 was to know the high delights of medieval France. At the beginning of June the whole population flocked in the city streets, and lodgings were crammed with countless noblemen, young knights, the aristocratic young ladies of Europe and dignified visitors from foreign lands. Great crowds watched public performances, ceremonies and processions. Colourful fabrics decked the streets, while the city bourgeois provided a fountain that sprayed wine into the air, decorated with fabulous creatures: mermaids, lions, leopards and mythical beasts. In a covered market in one part of the city an enclosed wood was built and filled with rabbits, so that revellers could amuse themselves by chasing tame animals. Open-air theatrical performances and musical recitals delighted the population. The French chroniclers averred that this was the most spectacular festival ever seen in France. It was a summer of great pageantry and celebration. King Edward II of England and Queen Isabella were at the heart of it all.
The king and queen of England had arrived in France on a state visit at the end of May, travelling with the earls of Pembroke and Richmond and other loyalists including Hugh Despenser the elder and Henry Beaumont. They had been invited to France to enjoy the honour of witnessing Edward’s father-in-law, King Philip IV, knight nearly 200 young men, including his sons Louis, king of Navarre, Philip and Charles. The ceremony had echoes of the great Feast of the Swans held by Edward I on the eve of his final Scottish invasion in 1306, at which Edward and all his new knights swore first to conquer Scotland, and then to win back the Holy Land. But as in all matters, the French Crown determined to make the ceremony greater than anything before it: an occasion of unsurpassed glory and magnificence.
As the English party rode into Paris on 1 June, they were greeted with huge acclaim and celebration. A series of six celebratory banquets was planned to mark their arrival, and the occasion was costing Edward handsomely: he had given his father-in-law nearly 100 oxen and 200 pigs, 380 rams, 200 pike, 200 carp and 80 barrels of wine towards the feasting. At the banquet that the English were to host, Edward planned service on horseback inside tents thrown open for the public to gawp into. The banquet was to be lit even in daylight by hundreds of torches. He had hired famous minstrels and musicians to entertain the guests, and the king of Navarre’s armourer had built a ‘castle of love’ to provide amusement between courses.
Here were the king and queen of England taking their place in a Capetian family snapshot. Edward was weak and unpopular at home, but in France he was welcomed with reverence into the royal carnival. At home the writer of The Life of Edward IIdismissed the first six years of Edward’s reign as a betrayal of Plantagenet values, writing that the king had ‘achieved nothing praiseworthy or memorable, except that he has made a splendid marriage and has produced a handsome son … How different were the beginnings of King Richard, who, before the end of the third year of his reign, scattered far and wide the rays of his valour.’ But in France, Edward was welcomed with dignity as a result of his connection to the Capetian bloodline.
There were many causes for the English and French royal parties to celebrate together. Philip wished to mark a victory in a long dispute with the papacy, as well as the destruction of the Templars in France, by putting together a great family pageant in Paris, showcasing the far-flung bloodstock and general worshipfulness of the French Crown. Peace between England and France over the state of Gascony was possible and indeed open to arrangement. And the two kings had also made that most Christian of Plantagenet–Capetian accords: an agreement to launch a new crusade against the Muslims of Egypt. On 6 June Philip and Edward took their crusading vows at Notre-Dame, where Edward became the sixth successive Plantagenet king to make the sacred promise.
How much life had improved since the previous June. Then, the murder of Gaveston had pushed the country to the brink of civil war. Edward had been among the hardest-headed belligerents. Although in public he lamented Gaveston’s idiocy in falling into Warwick’s hands, in private he had considered punishing Lancaster and his allies with a military campaign against them. Only counsel from those around him that civil war would allow Robert Bruce to invade from Scotland prevented Edward from raising an army against his enemies.
It had taken six months to coax England away from the brink of insurrection and anarchy. But as Edward and Isabella joined the revelries of the Capetian family, they could both reflect that things were on the mend. For a start, they were now parents. Queen Isabella had grown into her role as queen after Gaveston’s death, aided by the presence of her aunt, Margaret of France, who was the king’s stepmother. She had been loyal to her husband through his troubles and finally, on 13 November 1312, she had given birth to a son at Windsor. Resisting pressure from the French to name him Louis or Philip, the boy had been named Edward. According to a monk of St Albans, the boy’s birth had distracted the king from grieving for Gaveston. The queen had written to the citizens of London to announce the birth, and the news was greeted with great rejoicing in the streets of the capital. Edward of Windsor’s birth had been a relief to all – although the child had the dangers of childhood to negotiate, his existence gave a small measure of stability to the weak regime. The boy was made earl of Chester at the age of twelve days. To bolster the status of the royal – or rather, the loyal – Plantagenets, Edward II had followed the birth of his son by raising his twelve-year-old half-brother Thomas of Brotherton to the rank of earl of Norfolk.
When Edward and Isabella returned from their lavish tour of France in mid-July 1313, it seemed as though their greatest moment of crisis had passed. There was by no means an easy relationship between the king and his baronial enemies, who continued to despise royal companions who remained in the king’s circle, such as Hugh Despenser, who had been virtually the only baron to have stood by the king and defended Gaveston until his death. But at a Westminster parliament in October peace between the two parties was formalized.
Months of mediation by envoys from France and the papacy had been required to broker peace. But finally Edward agreed to pardon Lancaster, Hereford, Arundel, Henry Percy, Roger de Clifford and their allies for Gaveston’s death. In return, the barons agreed to pardon former allies of Gaveston like Despenser, whom the king kept in place around him. The Ordinances were not mentioned, and nor did the barons demand that any ministers were removed. Gaveston and his supporters were no longer described as enemies of the king and kingdom. It was a step towards peace, if not quite full reconciliation.
And more good news followed. At the end of November Edward obtained parliament’s consent to wage war against the Scots. In December he went to France to seek his father-in-law’s permission to secure a papal loan against the duchy of Gascony. He was successful, and in the spring of 1314 £25,000 was received from Rome, allowing Edward to fund a large campaign in the north. Finally, it seemed, he was about to take up where his father had left off.
The brief promise, alas, was nothing but an illusion. In a matter of months the joy of the French visit, Prince Edward’s birth and the reconciliation with the magnates had vanished, collapsing back into the grimness of reality, as surely as one of the carnival tableaux that had brightened the streets of Paris in that last, wonderful summer.