Edward II: The Unconventional King (11 page)

Edward spent almost a year in the north and achieved nothing except infuriating his magnates still further, and failed even to engage Robert Bruce in battle, let alone defeat him. He finally bowed to the inevitable and summoned parliament, to begin in London on 8 August 1311, but didn’t arrive until 13 August. He stayed at the house of the Dominicans, and paid Janin the Bagpiper two pounds for performing for him there.
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The
Vita
says that Edward went on pilgrimage to Canterbury as a way of putting off the moment of reckoning at parliament, though looking at his itinerary it is hard to see when.
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Piers Gaveston remained in the north, at the stronghold of Bamburgh, but kept in close contact with Edward.
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Around this time Edward heard the sad news that his five-year-old half-sister Eleanor had died at Amesbury Priory, and he paid £113 for her funeral at Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire.
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To Edward’s horror, the forty-one Ordinances or reforms of his household presented to him at parliament limited his royal powers severely, and he protested that ‘some things were disadvantageous to him, some fabricated out of spite, and he argued and pleaded that he was not bound to give his consent to these’.
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But the Ordinance that caused him greatest consternation was the twentieth: ‘Piers Gaveston, as a public enemy of the king and of the kingdom, shall be utterly cast out and exiled … forever and without return.’ Edward was so desperate to save Gaveston that he finally agreed to accept all the Ordinances if the lords would only revoke the twentieth. He said, ‘Whatever has been ordained or decided upon, however much they may redound to my private disadvantage, shall be established at your request and remain in force for ever. But you shall stop persecuting my brother Piers, and allow him to have the earldom of Cornwall.’ This, however, the Ordainers refused to do. Edward refused to accept his friend’s banishment, and, anguished at the thought of his being forced into exile yet again, gave vent to his emotions. He alternated between shouting insults and threats at the Ordainers and trying to cajole them with flattery and promises of favours, but to no avail. They warned him that if he did not consent to Gaveston’s banishment, he ‘might through imprudence be deprived of his throne and his kingdom’.

Faced with the possibility of losing his throne – the second time this threat was used – Edward had little choice but to accept the Ordinances, and they were published on 27 September 1311.
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It had taken him six weeks to agree. This was a common feature of Edward’s reign; he stubbornly dug in his heels and refused to do what his magnates wanted, yet inevitably was forced to bow to pressure in the end. In the four years since his accession, Edward had brought his kingdom to the brink of civil war numerous times, and for the remaining years of his reign, this terrible cycle would continue. Edward would not, or could not, be the king his subjects needed him to be. He persisted in his unconventional ways, flaunted his affection for Piers Gaveston, and utterly refused to modify his behaviour and attitudes.

On 8 October, Edward granted Piers Gaveston a safe-conduct to come to London.
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The following day, he wrote to his kinsman Fernando IV of Castile, who had asked him to donate money for a crusade, informing him that ‘he has been so engaged with the war in Scotland and other matters that he is unable to accede to this request’.
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He also wrote to his sister and brother-in-law the duke and duchess of Brabant asking them to receive Piers Gaveston, and informed his father-in-law Philip IV that he was anxious to have a personal interview with him, presumably to ask him to help or protect Gaveston.
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Unsurprisingly, this letter opened with flowery declarations of Philip’s high and mightiness and Edward’s enormous affection for his beloved ‘father’. Queen Isabella also sent letters to Philip in November 1311, although the content of them is unfortunately unknown.
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Gaveston himself, meanwhile, sent an Italian merchant named Blasius of Siena to Brabant and elsewhere to make financial arrangements on his behalf in early October.
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Gaveston was now exiled from England for the third time, probably an all-time record, and was ordered to ‘leave and utterly depart from the realm of England and every lordship of the king’ by 1 November 1311, from Dover, and nowhere else. If he did not leave, he would ‘thereafter be treated as an enemy of the kingdom, the king, and the people’.
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The Ordinances also mandated the removal of other people from Edward’s court, most notably his French cousins Henry Beaumont and Beaumont’s sister Isabella, Lady Vescy. Beaumont and Lady Vescy, like Edward, were great-grandchildren of Queen Berenguela of Castile and King Alfonso IX of Leon. In 1304, Edward I had appointed Lady Vescy as lifetime custodian of Bamburgh Castle, a rare honour for a woman, and Edward II, very fond of his mother’s relatives, confirmed the appointment at the beginning of his reign.
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Gaveston departed into exile later than ordered, on 3 or 4 November, and not from Dover as instructed but from London or somewhere along the Thames.
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It is not clear whether Edward was there to see him off, though it seems not, as his court, household and privy seal were at Windsor, 30 miles away, where government business continued.
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If he did not go to say farewell to Gaveston, this is probably because he couldn’t bear yet another parting from his beloved friend. He must have been distraught, though whether he realised that he himself was mostly to blame is hard to say. Had he learned his lesson from Gaveston’s previous exile and behaved with circumspection, Gaveston might not have been banished yet again. Gaveston may have expected his exile to be permanent, or at least for some years, as on 22 October he was given letters of protection for five years, and appointed four attorneys for the same length of time.
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His wife Margaret did not accompany him abroad this time, for the simple reason that she was six or seven months pregnant. Gaveston’s earldom of Cornwall was revoked, but financial arrangements were made for Margaret, and she was allowed to keep Wallingford Castle.

Edward found time on 24 October 1311 to remember the Dominican priory at Langley he had founded three years earlier, and granted the house fifty pounds a year on top of the hundred pounds annually he had already given them.
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In late October and early November, he gave Queen Isabella the palace of Eltham and lands in Kent and Lincolnshire; Isabella set off for Eltham immediately, accompanied by her husband’s niece Eleanor Despenser (née de Clare), and wrote to Edward on 28 and 29 October.
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Perhaps Edward was expressing his gratitude for her support of Gaveston: on 29 October, Isabella sent a letter to the receiver of Ponthieu ‘concerning the affairs of the earl of Cornwall’.
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Apparently she had agreed to help Gaveston in his exile, at least financially; perhaps in the naming of him as ‘earl of Cornwall’, which title had been stripped from him, we may see some sympathy on Isabella’s part to her husband’s favourite. Other than the period soon after her wedding, when the queen may have complained to her father about Gaveston and his relationship with her husband, there is little indication that she hated him, or resented his presence.

Piers Gaveston seems to have gone to Flanders.
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There were rumours by late November 1311, however, that he had already returned to England, or perhaps had never left, and on 30 November two Ordainers were despatched to search for him in the West Country, where he was thought to be ‘wandering from place to place’.
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There were also rumours that Gaveston had returned to his castle at Wallingford, or to Tintagel in Cornwall, or was ‘lurking now in the king’s apartments’.
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Edward fumed. And grieved. And, almost certainly, plotted to bring Gaveston back. It is likely that around this time, he wrote to the abbot of Glastonbury – and probably other churchmen, though the letters have not survived – asking him to search through his chronicles for information about people exiled from England during the reigns of his ancestors ‘and for what reasons and at what time, and by whom, and how, they had been recalled’. Evidently, he was searching for a precedent by which he could bring Gaveston back from his banishment. The abbot of Glastonbury received Edward’s letter on 2 January and replied two days later, enclosing a few extracts from his chronicles, which dated from 1210 to 1289. One of the precedents he found concerned William de Valence, half-brother of Henry III and father of the earl of Pembroke of Edward’s reign, exiled from England in 1258 and allowed to return in 1261.
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Although Gaveston was gone from England, the tension had not: on 11 and 16 November, the king banned a jousting tournament at Northampton, and on the 28th he forbade the earls of Gloucester, Lancaster, Hereford, Pembroke, Warwick and Arundel from coming to parliament armed.
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The earl of Surrey is the only notable absentee from the list, and remained very loyal to Edward at this time. Edward was, however, attempting to maintain amicable relations with his powerful kinsman Lancaster, who was seriously ill or had injured himself. The king wrote to Lancaster’s adherent Sir Robert Holland on 20 November that ‘we are very joyous and pleased about the good news we have heard concerning the improvement in our dear cousin and faithful subject Thomas, earl of Lancaster, and that he will soon be able to ride in comfort’.
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Further Ordinances were issued in late November, removing many of Gaveston’s adherents from Edward’s household, ‘lest they should stir up the king to recall Piers once more’. Edward fumed again, declaring that the Ordainers were treating him like an idiot, and that he could not believe that ‘the ordering of his whole house should depend upon the will of another’.
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The king spent the festive season of 1311 at Westminster, probably playing dice on Christmas night, a tradition of his, when he spent up to five pounds.
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Queen Isabella accompanied him.

The author of the
Vita
makes one of his rare mistakes when he says that Gaveston spent Christmas with Edward, but wherever Gaveston was, he was not with the king, as on 23 December, Edward gave Gaveston’s messenger a pound for carrying letters between them.
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What happened next is rather murky and confused, and the only certain thing is that Piers Gaveston returned to England in early 1312. Why he returned, when he had previously made arrangements for a long exile, is not known. Perhaps he only intended to slip into England for a little while and see his wife and the birth of his child, or perhaps Edward, in a fit of pique and hatred of the Ordainers, had ordered him back. According to the
Vita
, Edward, swore on God’s soul – his favourite oath – that ‘he would freely use his own judgement’, and recalled Gaveston.
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Unfortunately, Edward II had no judgement whatsoever, and his recall of Gaveston led to inevitable tragedy.

Edward left Westminster for Windsor on 27 December 1311, leaving Queen Isabella behind, although she sent him unspecified ‘precious objects’ for his New Year gift.
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Sometime in early January, Edward collected his niece Margaret Gaveston from her castle of Wallingford, and headed to Yorkshire with her.
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The 200-mile journey must have been dreadfully uncomfortable for Margaret, whose pregnancy was nearing full term, but she arrived safely in York and gave birth there to Gaveston’s daughter Joan, named after her mother and Edward’s sister Joan of Acre, on or around 12 January.
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The king seems to have met Gaveston at Knaresborough on 13 January, and the two men rushed the 17 miles to York that same day, probably so that Gaveston could see his wife and newborn child.
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It is possible that Gaveston intended to leave England once he had seen his family and knew they were well, but Edward took the decision out of his hands: on 18 January 1312, the king revoked his friend’s exile and declared him ‘good and loyal’.
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Edward had his sheriffs proclaim the news, and two days later, ordered the restoration of the lands of Gaveston’s earldom to him. A memorandum was added: ‘These writs were made in the king’s presence by his order under threat of grievous forfeiture.’ By restoring Gaveston, Edward proved that he adored his friend beyond reason, and could not bear to be without him, and that he was prepared to face civil war for him. The writ revoking Gaveston’s exile was written in French, not the usual Latin, which probably means that Edward himself drafted it; he could not have managed it in Latin. In 1317, he asked the archbishop of Canterbury to translate a papal letter from Latin into French for him, a fact which, with his taking his coronation oath in French, caused historians of the early twentieth century to condemn him unfairly as uneducated and illiterate.
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Papal texts were, however, written in a Latin difficult and convoluted even for scholars to follow, and rather than criticise Edward for his lack of education or intelligence, we should perhaps acknowledge the common sense that drove him to ensure that he understood the letter by reading it in his mother tongue, rather than in a language he had learned in childhood but had had little occasion to use since.

The Ordainers, furious, ordered that Edward ‘should not receive from his exchequer so much as a half-penny or farthing’, with the result that he and Gaveston ‘plundered the town and country, because they had not the wherewithal to pay their expenses’.
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Desperate to protect Piers Gaveston, at any cost, Edward even tried to negotiate with Robert Bruce to take care of his friend, and, amazingly, offered to recognise Bruce as king of Scots if he took Gaveston under his protection. Robert Bruce refused, exclaiming, ‘How shall the king of England keep faith with me, since he does not observe the sworn promises made to his liege men? … No trust can be put in such a fickle man; his promises will not deceive me.’
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This offer was simply incredible – Edward was prepared to throw away his claim to overlordship to Scotland, for the sake of Piers Gaveston.