Edward II: The Unconventional King (10 page)

On 30 July 1309, Edward summoned the earl of Gloucester and 174 others to muster at Newcastle ‘to proceed with the king’s army against the Scots’.
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The campaign was later cancelled, as in 1308.
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Edward still had no interest in fighting in Scotland, either because he had no stomach for war, or because he was distracted with Gaveston, or for some other reason – and this despite the fact that Clement V had absolved him from future ‘homicides committed in time of war’, thus giving Edward carte blanche to kill as many Scotsmen as he liked with the Church’s blessing.
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Philip IV sent envoys to attend Robert Bruce’s first parliament in 1309, and even acknowledged Bruce as king of Scotland. Edward only called him ‘earl of Carrick’, his title before his accession, or, considerably less courteously, ‘traitor and rebel’.
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On 3 August, Edward wrote to complain to Philip IV about letters shown to him, in which Philip called Bruce ‘king of Scotland’ in the letter addressed to Bruce himself, but only ‘earl of Carrick’ in the letter to Edward. Edward’s annoyance is very apparent, especially as Philip’s envoy Sir Mahen de Varennes had hidden the letter acknowledging Bruce as king in the breeches of the messenger he sent to Scotland. (One wonders how Edward’s men who found the letter happened to come across it.) Edward’s letters to Philip usually begin ‘To the very excellent and very noble prince, our very dear and beloved father, greetings and very dear affection’, whereas this one opens abruptly with ‘To the king of France, greetings’. Edward goes on to say brusquely, ‘Kindly have regard for your own honour and ours,’ and that he finds Philip’s motives and Varennes’ behaviour suspicious. The letter ends equally abruptly with no closing line at all.
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Addressing Philip in rather less than courteous terms was as far as Edward dared go against the powerful king of France, though he was less reluctant to take out his anger on others on occasion; the later chronicle
Polychronicon
says – although no other source confirms it – that he ‘smite men that were about him for little trespass’.
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Edward had a vile temper, which he had inherited from his father: not only did Edward I pull out handfuls of his son’s hair during their 1305 quarrel, he tore the coronet from his daughter Elizabeth’s head and threw it on the fire in 1297, and had to pay compensation to a servant whom he hit with a rod and injured at his daughter Margaret’s wedding in 1290.
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For all Edward II’s displeasure with his father-in-law, however, he himself was not averse to offering to recognise Bruce as rightful king when it served Piers Gaveston’s interests, as he would demonstrate some years later.

Edward spent much of August and September 1309 at Langley, the place where he always felt most comfortable, with Isabella, Gaveston and, perhaps, Margaret, Gaveston’s wife and Edward’s niece. In early August, Edward wrote to King Haakon V of Norway, to whose niece Margaret the ‘Maid of Norway’ he had been betrothed as a child, informing him that he would be happy to renew the ancient bonds of friendship between the two countries, again making an effort to reach out to fellow kings in a bid for allies.
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Edward summoned parliament at York, in October 1309 and again in February 1310, but most of his earls refused to attend, because ‘as long as their chief enemy [Gaveston], who had set the baronage and the realm in an uproar, was lurking in the king’s chamber, their approach would be unsafe’.
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Little had changed since Gaveston’s return from exile, and most of the magnates hated the favourite as much as ever. Edward continued to grant him lands and favours, although Queen Isabella and the loyal earl of Surrey were also the recipients of his generosity.
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Edward, though, remained wilfully blind to political realities. An example of his indulgence towards Gaveston occurs in February 1310, when he pardoned his friend for the ‘trespasses committed by him in hunting in the king’s forests and parks and fishing in his ponds’, then immediately granted him a ‘licence to hunt in the king’s forests and parks and to fish in his ponds’.
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The king spent a few days in November 1309 at Burstwick, a royal manor near Hull. Robert Bruce’s wife Elizabeth de Burgh had been taken there in September 1306, after she and other members of Bruce’s family were captured in Tain by the earl of Ross and sent to Edward I. Fortunately for Elizabeth, she was the daughter of Edward I’s ally the earl of Ulster, and was sentenced to a far less harsh fate than Bruce’s sister Mary and Isabel MacDuff, who crowned Bruce king and was claimed by some English chroniclers to be his mistress: they were incarcerated in cages at Berwick-on-Tweed and Roxburgh castles.
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At an unknown date, Queen Elizabeth sent Edward II a letter asking him to grant her more money, as she didn’t have sufficient clothes, headdresses or bed linen for herself or her attendants. She signed herself ‘Elizabeth Bruce’, not ‘Queen Elizabeth’, having told her husband at their crowning at Scone that he might be a summer king, but would never be a winter one – for which humiliation Bruce supposedly tried to kill her with his sword, but bystanders prevented him.
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Edward improved her living conditions, granting her a household of two damsels, two squires and two valets, and gave her two pounds a week for their expenses.
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Edward and Piers Gaveston spent Christmas 1309 at Langley, probably glad to escape from the seething cauldron of tension they themselves were mostly responsible for, and passed the time ‘making up for former absence by their long wished-for sessions of daily and intimate conversation’.
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It would have been more sensible for Edward and Gaveston to discuss how they could stop offending the great magnates, as the new year of 1310 saw no improvement in relations between Edward and his barons. On 19 January, the king banned a jousting tournament, as he frequently did when he felt threatened.
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The earls of Lancaster, Warwick, Pembroke, Hereford and Arundel came to parliament in February 1310 armed, and Edward was forced to send Gaveston away ‘to a very safe place’.
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Once again, relations between Edward and his earls see-sawed, and he now viewed his brother-in-law Hereford as a threat. Edward’s cousin Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke, was usually one of his most reliable and loyal allies, and why he came to parliament armed at this time is unclear.

At parliament, the barons presented to Edward a petition that was a harsh indictment of his rule, and expanded on the grievances presented to him the previous year.
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They claimed that Edward was misled by evil counsel and had wasted the treasury. He could not maintain his own household, and his officials extorted goods from poor people. He had lost Scotland, which they claimed had been left to him ‘in good peace’ by his father. His lands in England and Ireland were seriously dismembered, the people sorely grieved, and Edward had brought great shame on his country. The petition ended with a plea that Edward might redress these grievances.
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Therefore, in March 1310, Edward was forced to consent to the formation of a group who came to be known as the Lords Ordainer, to reform his household. Edward claimed that he consented to the reforms of his own free will, a face-saving measure, when in fact he was deeply humiliated and furious, and the magnates told him that if he refused, ‘they would not have him for king, nor keep the fealty that they had sworn to him’.
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This was the first time, though certainly not the last, that the barons held the possibility of deposition over Edward. At this time, however, the threat was almost certainly an empty one. Edward’s heir was Thomas of Brotherton, the elder of his half-brothers, a child of only nine. Edward’s disastrous reign had not yet reached the point where the Ordainers were willing to replace the king with a young boy. Still, Edward could not ignore the potent threat.

Of the eleven earls, eight – Pembroke, Lincoln, Lancaster, Hereford, Warwick, Arundel, Richmond, and Gloucester – were elected as Ordainers in the Painted Chamber at Westminster. The three absentees were Cornwall (Gaveston), Oxford, a political nonentity, and Surrey. The archbishop of Canterbury, six bishops and six barons completed the group.
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Edward did everything he could to obstruct the Ordainers, and his behaviour at this time shows how exasperating he could be. Robert Winchelsey, archbishop of Canterbury, arranged a meeting with Edward, to discuss a letter the pope had sent, at Westminster at the end of February 1310. Edward announced that he needed more time to think about it, and postponed the meeting until 15 March. Although he was also at Westminster, he failed to summon Winchelsey to him for the meeting, and the archbishop, forced to wait on the king’s pleasure, pressed him for an answer. The king sent his confessor to say that he was still unable to give one. Finally, at the end of March, he told Winchelsey that he would write to the pope directly and had no need to meet him after all. He had kept the archbishop waiting around fruitlessly for an entire month.
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In the summer of 1310, Edward finally decided to campaign in Scotland, after an absence of three years. His main aim was to avoid the Ordainers, who would remain in the south, working on their reforms of his government and household. Another important reason was that defeating Robert Bruce would strengthen his position enormously, and put an end to the claims that he had lost Scotland. Of the English earls, only three accompanied the king: Gaveston, Edward’s nephew Gloucester, and his nephew-in-law Surrey. Edward pardoned Gaveston and six of his retainers for the death of one Thomas de Walkyngham of Yorkshire in early September 1310, though for what reason Gaveston had killed him – an accident, an unprovoked attack, self-defence – is obscure. Gaveston was also pardoned for ‘all other felonies and trespasses with which he has been charged’.
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Edward travelled north throughout August 1310, accompanied by Queen Isabella. His wardrobe account records a payment of a pound to a woman he drank with on the way – a large sum, at least a few months’ wages for her.
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It is interesting to speculate on what they talked about as they drank together, and on where they drank, and why. Edward, described by fourteenth-century chroniclers as ‘prodigal in giving’ and ‘liberal in giving’, enjoyed being generous, and frequently handed out large sums of money to people who pleased him.
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He once paid his painter Jack of St Albans, who ‘made him laugh very greatly’ by dancing on a table, two and a half pounds or about a year’s wages by his own hands ‘in aid of Jack, his wife and his children’. On one occasion when Edward was stag-hunting in Walmer, he gave a pound to his cook Morys, who ‘rode before the king and fell often from his horse, at which the king laughed greatly’, and the same year gave another pound to a servant named Will Muleward, who spent time with him at a wedding and also made him laugh hard.
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Whatever Edward’s faults, he didn’t lack a sense of humour or the ability to laugh.

The campaign in Scotland, unsurprisingly, proved futile.
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In late November 1310, Edward decided to spend the winter in Scotland, still trying to avoid the Ordainers, and he and Isabella spent the next few months at Berwick-on-Tweed, then on the Scottish side of the border. Isabella, clearly a fan of healthy eating, paid a total of fourteen pounds and seven shillings for 5,000 pieces of fruit on 16 November, 1,000 pears and 300 apples in early December, and 7,500 apples and 2,300 pears in the early months of 1311, while Edward spent over forty-six pounds on fish and ‘lard and grease’ during Lent.
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The king’s removal of the Exchequer and King’s Bench from London to York ‘much disturbed and outraged’ the Ordainers, and ‘many fear evil’, according to an anonymous letter-writer.
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The Ordainers realised the difficulty of curbing a king, especially one like Edward, who did exactly what he wanted, promised much and delivered little, and stood on his regal rights while elevating another man almost to the status of his co-ruler.

Edward sent Gaveston and the earl of Gloucester to parley with Bruce just before Christmas 1310.
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Of Edward’s personal courage in battle there is no doubt, but he was no general, and preferred negotiation to combat wherever possible. Contemporaries must have expected Edward, son of the man who conquered North Wales and grandson of the remarkable Castilian king who played an enormous and vital role in the Spanish Reconquista, to be a great warrior. Fernando III’s most notable achievement was the conquest of Seville in 1248 after almost five and a half centuries of Muslim rule, and he made a triumphal procession into the city on 22 December that year; it is likely that Edward’s mother Eleanor, then aged seven, was present, and possible that Edward heard about his grandfather’s achievements from her or his older sisters. (Fernando is now the patron saint of Seville.) Unfortunately, what Edward’s subjects got what was a man who closely resembled his other grandfather, Henry III, whose fifty-six-year-reign was a long history of baronial insurrections, failed military expeditions and lavish expenditure on foreign relatives and favourites. That Edward preferred hedging, ditching and digging to jousting and fighting did not endear him to his contemporaries, either: ‘If only he had given to arms the labour that he expended on rustic pursuits, he would have raised England aloft; his name would have resounded through the land’, laments the
Vita
.
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Meanwhile, in the south, the Ordainers prepared their reforms of government and Edward’s household. One of the Ordainers, the earl of Lincoln, died at the age of sixty in early February 1311. Lincoln had been regent of England in Edward’s absence, and the king sent his nephew Gloucester south to replace him, a great responsibility for the young man, not yet twenty.
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The earl’s death was a blow for Edward on two counts: firstly, Lincoln was a moderate and a royalist, despite his actions against Gaveston in 1308 and his role as an Ordainer, and secondly, Earl Thomas of Lancaster inherited his lands by right of his wife, Lincoln’s daughter and heir Alice. Thomas of Lancaster now held five earldoms, Lancaster, Leicester, Derby, Lincoln and Salisbury, and had a gross annual income of £11,000, which made him by far the richest and most influential man in the country. Edward had even greater cause to rue the loss of his former ally. Lancaster had to pay homage to Edward for his new lands, but refused to cross the Tweed into Scotland to do so. Edward refused to return to England to accept the homage. Lancaster threatened to take a hundred knights to forcibly enter his lands, and once again, civil war loomed.
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Eventually Edward caved in and agreed to meet his turbulent cousin at Haggerston, on the English side of the river, perhaps to save any future legal difficulties because Lancaster hadn’t paid homage to him in England. The two men ‘saluted each other amicably and exchanged frequent kisses’, each concealing his antipathy for the other, and Edward hiding his annoyance that he had been forced to travel to meet Lancaster when etiquette demanded that his subjects should come to him. Supposedly Piers Gaveston accompanied Edward, but Lancaster ‘would neither kiss him, nor even salute him, whereat Piers was offended beyond measure’.
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Gaveston was not well at this time: an anonymous letter written at Berwick on 4 April announced that ‘a secret illness troubles him much, compelling him to take short journeys’, but that when he visited Edward and Isabella at Berwick, he found them both well.
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Edward may have attended the funeral of his friend Bishop Anthony Bek at Durham Cathedral on 3 May 1311. He took over Bek’s stud of 240 horses and bought his gold plate from his executors at a cost of £1,383.
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The king was probably encouraged by the disunity among the Ordainers; relations between the earls of Lancaster and Gloucester were so bad that an anonymous letter-writer said that he feared a riot when the two men arrived in London.
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On the other hand, a feud between the richest men of the kingdom increased the already sky-high tension in England, and London was already suffering unrest. Despite the efforts of the mayor, Richer de Refham, the city annalist writes of the ‘rifflers and ruffians’ terrorising the streets.
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