| Piers
Gaveston and
Edward II
- ad 1308 -
|
 |
‘Fair of body
and great of strength’, Edward of Caernarfon,
England’s first Prince of Wales, was widely
welcomed when he came into his inheritance as
King Edward II at the age of twenty-three. But
as he made his way down the aisle of Westminster
Abbey at the end of February 1308 with his young
queen Isabella, daughter of the French king
Philip IV, all eyes turned to the individual
behind him – Piers Gaveston, a young knight
from Gascony. The new king had awarded Gaveston
pride of place in his coronation procession,
bestowing on him the honour of carrying the
crown and sword of Edward the Confessor, and
Gaveston, in royal purple splashed with pearls,
was certainly dressed for the occasion. His
finery was such, wrote one chronicler, that
‘he more resembled the god Mars, than
an ordinary mortal’. According to the
gossips, King Edward was so fond of Gaveston
that he had given him the pick of the presents
that he had received at his recent wedding to
Isabella. The Queen’s relatives went back
to France complaining that Edward loved Gaveston
more than he loved his wife.
Edward’s father, Edward I, the pugnacious
‘Hammer of the Scots’, had been
infuriated by his son’s closeness to the
flamboyant young Gascon. The old king had made
Gaveston, the son of a trusted knight, a ward
in the prince’s household, but there were
complaints that the two men got up to mischief
together, frequenting taverns and running up
debts. On Edward I’s last unsuccessful
campaign against the Scots in Carlisle in the
winter of 1306–7, the prince had suggested
giving Gaveston some of the royal estates in
France. His father exploded, seizing Edward
by the hair and tearing it out in tufts. He
ordered Gaveston into exile.
On coming to the throne, Edward II’s first
concern had been to expedite the return of his
friend Piers. When he went off to France to
marry Isabella in January 1308, a few weeks
before the coronation, he placed Gaveston in
charge of England, and, to the fury of just
about every baron in the land, he also bestowed
on him the rich earldom of Cornwall.
The reckless passion of Edward II for Piers
Gaveston ranks as the first of the momentous
love affairs that have shaken England’s
monarchy over the centuries. Homosexuality was
deeply disapproved of in medieval England. It
was considered by many a form of heresy –
a ticket to hell – though there is enough
evidence to make it clear that many a monk and
priest might have been seen at the ticket barrier.
‘The sin against nature’ was usually
referred to indirectly, with comparisons to
the Old Testament love of King David for Jonathan
– ‘a love beyond the love of women’.
When writing specifically of Edward’s
love for Gaveston, the chroniclers of the time
would call it ‘excessive’, ‘immoderate’,
‘beyond measure and reason’. But
one source referred directly to a rumour going
around England that ‘the King loved an
evil male sorcerer more than he did his wife,
a most handsome lady and a very beautiful woman’.
It should be stressed that the details of Edward’s
physical relationship with Gaveston are as unknowable
as those of any other royal bedchamber, and
we should not forget that the King had four
children by Isabella. It has even been argued
that the two men were totally chaste, cultivating
their relationship as devoted ‘brothers’.
Certainly, none of this would have been an issue
if Edward had not allowed his private affections
to intrude so fiercely into his public role.
Other kings had no problems with same-sex relationships.
It is generally assumed that William Rufus (who
ruled from 1087 to 1100) was gay – he
produced no children and kept no mistresses
– and the same has been said of Richard
Coeur de Lion, though this is hotly denied by
recent biographers. Whatever their predilections,
these monarchs did not allow their private passions
to impinge on their royal style or, more important,
to influence their decisions when it came to
handing out land and other largesse.
Edward II, however, displayed an assortment
of characteristics that were viewed as unkingly.
For a start, he dressed like his friend Piers,
a little too extravagantly. He enjoyed the unusual
sport of swimming and also rowing, which was
considered demeaning – kings traditionally
showed their power by getting others to row
them. He kept a camel in his stables. He pursued
a whole range of ‘common’ pursuits
such as digging, thatching, building walls and
hedges, and he enjoyed hammering away at the
anvil like a blacksmith. Nowadays England might
welcome a DIY king, but in the fourteenth century
such activities, not to mention the pleasure
Edward took in hobnobbing with grooms and ploughmen,
were considered abnormal.
The major grievance, however, was the disproportionate
favour that Edward showed Piers Gaveston. When
the barons in Parliament called for the exile
of the favourite, Edward’s response was
to endow him with still more castles and manors.
He did agree, reluctantly, that Gaveston should
go over to Ireland for a while as his representative,
but he was clearly unhinged by his departure.
The King took his entire household to Bristol
to wave Gaveston off and pined for him in his
absence, getting personally involved in such
petty problems as the punishment of trespassers
on Gaveston’s property on the Isle of
Wight.
When, in an attempt to curb the King’s
aberrations, Parliament presented him with a
set of ‘Ordinances’ in 1311, along
the lines of Simon de Montfort’s Provisions
of Oxford, Edward took the extraordinary step
of offering to agree to any restriction on his
own powers provided that his favourite was in
no way affected.
The muscular Gaveston did not make things any
easier. He took delight in defeating the barons
in jousts and tournaments, and then rubbed salt
in their wounds by mimicking his critics and
giving them derisive nicknames. The Earl of
Gloucester was ‘whoreson’, Leicester
was ‘the fiddler’, and Warwick the
‘black hound of Arden’.
‘Let him call me“hound”,’
the earl exclaimed. ‘One day the hound
will bite him.’
As approved by Parliament and reluctantly agreed
by the King, the Ordinances of 1311 imposed
stringent controls on royal power. Building
on Magna Carta and the Provisions of Oxford,
championed by Simon de Montfort, it was now
laid down that the King could not leave the
kingdom without the consent of the barons, and
that parliaments must be held at least once
or twice a year and in a convenient place. Clearly,
the immediate purpose of the Ordinances was
to deal with Gaveston, who was promptly sent
out of the country for a second time. But he
sneaked quietly back, and by the end of November
there were reports of the favourite ‘hiding
and wandering from place to place in the counties
of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset’.
That Christmas he appeared openly at Edward’s
side at Windsor.
For the indignant barons, this act of defiance
was the last straw. Using the authority of the
Ordinances, they summoned troops, while Edward
and Gaveston headed north to rally forces of
their own. Cornered at Newcastle, they managed
to escape, Edward to York and Gaveston to Scarborough,
where the barons besieged him. Lacking supplies,
Gaveston surrendered, and under promise of safe
conduct he was escorted south. But just beyond
Banbury the party was ambushed by the Earl of
Warwick, who whisked the favourite back to his
castle and delivered the promised ‘bite’.
On 19 June 1312, Piers Gaveston was beheaded
at Blacklow Hill on the road between Warwick
and Kenilworth.
The killing of Edward II’s beloved ‘brother’
devastated the King and prompted a backlash
of sympathy in his favour. But two years later,
finally doing what a king was supposed to do
and leading his army north against Scotland,
Edward was heavily defeated between Edinburgh
and Sterling in June 1314. Robert the Bruce’s
brave and cunning victory at Bannockburn is
one of the great tales of Scottish history,
but in England its consequence was a massive
further blow to Edward’s authority. Early
in 1316 at the Parliament of Lincoln, the King
humbly agreed to hand over the running of the
country to the barons.
The trouble was that Edward had found himself
another Gaveston. Hugh Despenser was an ambitious
young courtier whose father, also named Hugh,
had been an adviser and official to Edward I
and still wielded considerable power. The Despensers
came from the Welsh borders or Marches, and
they used their influence shamelessly to extend
their lands. Once again the barons found themselves
rallying together to restrict the power of a
royal familiaris – a favourite –
and this time a new element came into play.
In 1325 Edward’s long-suffering wife Isabella
seized the chance of a journey to France to
take a stand against the husband who had humiliated
her, first with Gaveston and now with the younger
Despenser. She took a lover, Roger Mortimer,
another powerful Welsh Marcher lord, who had
taken up arms against the King and the Despensers
in 1322, and who, after being imprisoned in
the Tower of London, had been lucky to escape
to France with his life.
When Mortimer and Isabella landed in England
in 1326, they had only a few hundred men, but
they held a trump card – Isabella’s
elder son by Edward, the thirteen-year-old Prince
Edward. As heir to the throne, the boy represented
some sort of hope for the future, and London
welcomed the Queen, whose cause, according to
one chronicler, was supported by ‘the
whole community of the realm’. In a widespread
uprising, the hated Despensers were tracked
down and executed – in the case of Edward’s
favourite, at the top of a ladder in Hereford,
where his genitals were hacked off and burned
in front of his eyes.
England now set about doing something it had
never attempted before – the deposition
of a king by legal process. Prelates prepared
the way. Early in January, the Bishop of Hereford
preached to a clamorous London congregation
on the text ‘a foolish king shall ruin
his people’, and a parliament of bishops,
barons, judges, knights and burgesses was convened
in Westminster. Preaching to them on 15 January
1327, the Archbishop of Canterbury took as his
text ‘Vox populi, Vox dei’ –
‘The voice of the people is the voice
of God.’ By the unanimous consent of all
the lords, clergy and people, h e announced,
King Edward II was deposed from his royal dignity,
‘never more to govern the people of England’,
and he would be succeeded by his first-born
son, the Lord Edward. So Edward III would be
the first English monarch appointed by a popular
decision in Parliament.
It remained to break the news to the King himself,
then imprisoned at Kenilworth Castle, and a
deputation of lords, churchmen, knights and
townsfolk set off forthwith for the Midlands.
Dramatically clad in black, Edward half fainted
as he heard William Trussell, a Lancastrian
knight, read out the verdict of the whole Parliament.
It grieved him, he said in response, that his
people should be so exasperated with him as
to wish to reject his rule, but he would bow
to their will, since his son was being accepted
in his place. Next day Trussell, on behalf of
the whole kingdom, renounced all homage and
allegiance to Edward of Caernarfon, and the
steward of the royal household broke his staff
of office, as if the King had died. The deputation
returned to Parliament and the new reign was
declared on 25 January 1327.
Now formally a non-king, Edward was imprisoned
in the forlorn and ponderous Berkeley Castle
overlooking the River Severn just north of Bristol.
It is possible that, with time, his imprisonment
might have been eased so as to allow him to
potter around the grounds, digging his beloved
ditches and hammering out a horseshoe or two.
But in the space of just a few months there
were two attempts to rescue him, and the Queen’s
lover, Mortimer, decided that he was too dangerous
to be left alive. In September 1327 a messenger
took instructions down to Berkeley, and two
weeks later it was announced that Edward of
Caernarfon, only forty-three and of previously
robust health, was dead. Abbots, knights and
burgesses were brought from Bristol and Gloucester
to view the body, and they reported seeing no
visible marks of violence. Edward had had ‘internal
trouble’ during the night, they were informed.
But in the village of Berkeley, tales were told
of hideous screams ringing out from the castle
on the night of 21 September, and some years
later one John Trevisa, who had been a boy at
the time, revealed what had actually happened.
Trevisa had grown up to take holy orders and
become chaplain and confessor to the King’s
jailer, Thomas, Lord Berkeley, so he was well
placed to solve the mystery. There were no marks
of illness or violence to the King’s body,
he wrote, because Edward was killed ‘with
a hoote brooche [meat-roasting spit] putte thro
the secret place posterialle’.
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