by Ed West
The Scots responded with what is now called a scorched earth policy, denying the enemy supplies by destroying everything in their wake. This form of warfare, brutal but effective, went back to the ancient Greeks and was used by the Celts against the Romans. Byzantine Emperor Maurice’s Strategikon recommended a policy of destroying crops, fields and trees, and poisoning wells, and similar tactics, while in the twelfth century, Count Philip of Flanders advised laying waste the land: “by fire and burning let all be set alight, that nothing be left for them, either in wood or meadow, of which in the morning they could have a meal.”4
It was the peasantry who suffered most, both in Scotland and the north of England. Taxable revenue in the border areas fell by more than 90 percent,5 and it was said in 1317 that “no man nor beast was left between Lock Maben and Carlisle,” a distance of twenty-five miles.6 As Varys put it: “Why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones?”7
After April 1306, Edward’s army headed north again toward Galloway where he directed his men “to burn and slay and raise the dragon banner”—that is, to take no prisoners.8 His son Edward was even worse, and “would spare neither sex nor age. Wherever he went, he set fire to villages and hamlets and laid them waste without mercy.”9 The father chastised his son, not on humanitarian grounds, but because he should spare “the penalty for their betters, as the rich had taken to flight.”10 It was bad strategy to attack the poor but not the rich, and however brutal King Edward was, he was never brutal just for the fun of it.
Before leaving for Scotland, the king held a grand ceremony in Westminster where his son and 260 other young men pledged to follow him into Scotland and on crusade, after which they were knighted—alongside the young prince were Piers Gaveston, Hugh le Despenser, and Roger Mortimer, three men whose fate would be tied up to the young heir and his disastrous reign to come.
There was a fresh Scots revolt in 1307, and Edward, now sixty-eight, marched north once again. He never made it, and near the border he came down with dysentery and expired. Even with his dying breath, the king demanded that servants carry his bones around Scotland until the rebels were crushed.
“We will never see his like again,” said Ser Loras Tyrell to Cersei at Tywin’s wake, and many people were similarly devastated by the English king’s death, poems lamenting that the Lion had gone. He had surpassed “not only Arthur and Alexander but also Brutus, Solomon and Richard the Lionheart,” one writer said with great sadness: “We should perceive him to surpass all the kings of the earth who came before him.”11
And yet there was one man who did not regret the lion’s passing, the outcast who had brought shame on him—his own son.
THE KING’S ARRIVAL
In 1284 while on campaign in Caernarvon, north Wales, Queen Eleanor gave birth to her sixteenth and last child, christened Edward. He was their fifth son, but none of his brothers would survive childhood and he grew up an isolated, lonely figure, his parents having left him in England when he was very young, moving to Gascony where they spent three years without their boy. His mother died when he was seven and his father was already an old man, and often away on campaign.
Longshanks was a brutal and unsympathetic father, and once threw his daughter’s crown in a fire in a rage, while on another occasion he ripped out his son’s hair. And so, when, just before the old king’s death, his son Edward told him of his plans to award land to his close friend Piers Gaveston, the father exploded in anger: “You baseborn whoreson! Would you give away lands, you, who never gained any?”12
Like the Lannisters, Plantagenet father and son hated each other. Edward was not a dwarf, but another type of medieval outcast, a homosexual, and his attachment to Gaveston provoked fury in his father. Gaveston’s influence would prove disastrous to his reign, as would that of a later lover; more important than his sexual preferences, which most regarded with disdain but considered a private matter, it was the largess he dispensed toward favorites that alienated the aristocracy, and eventually his own wife.
To broker peace, Philippe IV and Edward I had arranged a marriage between the heir to England and Philippe’s daughter Isabella, while at the same time the widowed Longshanks was to be married to Philippe’s young sister Margaret. She was eighteen and he sixty, but such age gaps were not unknown, nor such double marriage-alliances that led to complex familial relationships, especially if they brought peace between hostile neighbors. Isabella, the Iron king’s sixth child but only surviving daughter, was promised to Edward when she was four and so all her childhood was spent knowing she would one day become queen of England; however, such were the political complications that Longshanks only finally agreed on the match soon before he died, the bride bringing an enormous dowry of land, gold, jewels, and silver.
The marriage took place in January 1308. When Edward arrived for the wedding in Boulogne-sur-Mer, in the very north of France, the Channel crossing took three days, due to the unusually cold weather, and during the ceremony it fell well below freezing, 30–40°F colder than what was normal for that time of year.13 It was an ominous sign.
After a wedding, traditional medieval custom dictated that the bride and groom were ceremonially put to bed, but on this occasion, on account of her young age, that didn’t happen. At the time Isabella was just twelve, but as she grew into a woman, the queen became noted for her fierce intelligence and cunning. Her father King Philippe was a strangely unemotional man and her mother also died young, and she grew up to be hard, and feared and disliked among many in France. She was more popular in England, at least until she took a lover, although there were plenty of contemporaries willing to hurl insults at her: Geoffrey le Baker calling her “that harridan”, “that Virago” and “Jezebel.”
In later chronicles her name was blackened, and in the most famous phrase the poet Thomas Gray wrote of her: “She-Wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs, that tear’st at the bowels of thy mangled mate.”14 Indeed, Maurice Druon describes her in his series as “having small, sharp, pointed carnivore’s teeth, like those of a she-wolf.”
In reality, Isabella was by all accounts exceptionally attractive, even at a time when men were prone to exaggerate the beauty of powerful women. Godefroy de Paris called her “the most beautiful woman in the kingdom and the Empire,” and Walter of Guisborough said she was “one of the fairest ladies in the world.” She had thick blonde hair and large blue eyes, one portrait of her showing curls escaping from under her wimple. (Art was tantalizingly close to giving us an image of Isabella—her successor and daughter-in-law Philippa of Hainault was the first queen of England of whom a realistic likeness was drawn.)
She was also lavishly attired, so that at her wedding her wardrobe contained “dozens of dresses” just for her own personal use and seventy-two headdresses; indeed Isabella had inherited her father’s rapaciousness and her spending was phenomenal. As queen she enjoyed many conventional pursuits that fitted her role as an aristocratic lady, such as hunting, hawking, and romances, and could be charitable, once arranging for a boy orphaned in the Scottish war to be adopted. She could also be cruel and vindictive, and became a master at dissembling, hiding true feelings that could prove dangerous. She was much more intelligent than her husband, and when their fairy-tale marriage proved bitterly empty he was no match for her, politically.
When Edward and Isabella first met, at their wedding, her husband must have appeared a prince straight from a chanson de geste, the romantic poems told by the trouvères of her native France.* King Edward II was tall at six feet and “a fine figure of a handsome man’ and “one of the strongest men in his realm.”15 He was well spoken in his native Norman French and dressed well, and yet knowing how to dress and how to smile did not make him fit to be king.
People often complained that the new king’s countenance was unregal, that he preferred gardening to soldiering and liked to mingle with “harlots, singers and jesters.” Worst of all was his poor judgement in people, and that he was
weak and easily influenced. Before his father’s death, Edward had developed a close friendship with Gaveston, who was a Gascon from the minor aristocracy. His father had banished Gaveston, but after the old king died, and even before he was buried, Edward had reinstated his friend and elevated him to Earl of Cornwall. And yet there was something more to their friendship.
A chronicler of the period wrote that when Edward Longshank’s son saw Piers Gaveston, “he fell so much in love that he entered upon an enduring compact with him and chose and determined to knit an indissoluble bond of affection with him, before all other mortals.”16 Thomas Burton, a Cistercian monk at the Abbey of Meaux, put it more crudely when he said that Edward was “too much given to sodomy.”
Openly gay rulers were unusual in the medieval period, and for obvious reasons; homosexual acts were considered a serious sin, and so the allegation was only made against unpopular rulers. William II (1087-1100) was accused of indulging in various vices, one chronicler complaining that the court was full of “prostitutes and parasites” of both sexes. Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote of William’s followers that many had abandoned themselves to homosexuality, their long hair and effeminate clothes having encouraged this abomination. And yet Anselm and King William had violently fallen out by this stage, so he was not an impartial source; the only circumstantial evidence is that William did not marry, nor father any bastards.
After their marriage, Edward had put Gaveston in charge of his coronation that same year, a heavily symbolic event with ancient origins in which all the leading magnates of the realm had a role. The ceremony represented the mystical bond between God, the king, and his people, an inviolable pact that blessed the ruler with divine approval; it was this relationship that made the slaying of kings the most heinous of crimes.
The king and queen stayed at the Tower until the day before the ceremony, when they rode across London; in the morning they walked from Westminster Hall to the Abbey, with the king’s cousin Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, carrying Curtana, the sword of peace that symbolized royal authority. His brother Henry carried the rod, while the Earl of Hereford held the sceptre with the cross, the Earl of Lincoln the royal staff, and the Earl of Warwick the three swords of state. All of these treasures meant something, as did the act of Earl of Arundel, Thomas de Vere, Hugh le Despenser, and Roger Mortimer carrying the royal robes on a board covered with a checkered cloth.
And yet, during the ceremony King Edward and Gaveston stunned Isabella’s two uncles by outward signs of physical affection, touching and caressing. The upstart Earl of Cornwall was dressed in purple sewn with pearl, a regal outfit unsuitable for a courtier and which could only be interpreted as an insult. A London chronicler said that “rumors circulated that the king was more in love with this artful and malevolent man than his bride, that truly elegant lady, who is a most beautiful woman.”17 After the ceremony, Gaveston angered many noblemen by carrying Curtana, and the banquet following the coronation almost ended in murder. When Piers, in his imperial purple, beckoned the king to join him at his seat, one earl drew his sword and had to be restrained. The queen’s uncles stormed off, furious at the humiliation of their kin.
Isabella grew to hate her husband’s favorite, but still a child, endured this insult without complaint; yet, the leading barons would not take such an upstart usurping their power. Edward and Gaveston even wore the same clothes when they were holding court, and the king’s favorite made enemies by giving powerful barons acidic nicknames, “whoreson” for the Earl of Gloucester, “the fiddler” for Leicester, and “the black hound” for Warwick. To further anger them, Gaveston, like the Knight of the Flowers, was also an accomplished and skilled tournament fighter, and defeated a number of leading magnates with whom he had already made enemies.
Soon an opposition formed, a group of barons solely committed to removing Gaveston. They were led by the king’s cousin Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, who set up a committee of twenty-eight men, called the Lords Ordainers; Lancaster was the son of Edward I’s brother Edmund and was the wealthiest magnate in the realm, the House of Lancaster being tremendously rich on account of owning large amounts of land in the northwest. In fact, Lancaster was far wealthier than any of the other twelve earls in England, with an annual income of more than eleven thousand pounds, as well as a large private army and a fiery temper.
Tall and imposing like his uncle Edward, he was also deeply unpleasant, “haughty, selfish, treacherous and vicious” and “a sulky, quarrelsome and vindictive man . . . quick to resort to violence.”18 Dressed flamboyantly, “his speech was coarse, and he was promiscuous to excess.”19 A chronicler at the time said that Lancaster had “defouled a great multitude of women and gentle wenches,” and rather unsurprisingly he had a deeply unhappy marriage. Among Edward’s other enemies, the Earl of Hereford was “prickly and quick-tempered, but also intelligent with a sense of humor,” while Warwick was very cultured and owned numerous books, but he was also a “thug.” Another, Surrey, was “a nasty, brutal man with scarcely one redeemable quality”;20 both Lancaster and his father-in-law, the more moderate Earl of Lincoln, especially detested him.
In 1309, his opposition to the crown intensified after one of Lancaster’s dependents was humiliated by Gaveston. By February the following year, many earls refused to attend court while the Gascon upstart was there, but the next month Edward agreed to allow twenty-one Lord Ordainers to help rule the country, among them eight enemies of Gaveston. For a second time, in 1310, the opposition told the king to exile Gaveston, and this time Edward made him Lord of the far-away Isle of Man, but he soon turned up again. By now Lancaster had become quite open in his contempt for the king and when the two men met, across the River Tweed in 1311, Lancaster made the monarch come to him, a hugely disrespectful act. Yet Guy de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, hated Gaveston with an unmatched intensity and after the king’s lover surrendered to the moderate Earl of Pembroke, Warwick waited for the magnate to leave for London and, in June 1312, dragged his prisoner out of Pembroke’s home. Gaveston was brought to Warwick castle, first on foot at the end of a rope and then on an old horse; he was then taken to a nearby hill where one Welshman ran him through with a sword and another hacked his head off. The king was devastated.
Yet in November Isabella gave birth to a son, christened Edward, following a difficult labor, and after the birth and the celebrations across the kingdom Edward declared peace with Gaveston’s killers and publicly dined with Lancaster. Isabella returned to France the following year, and again the year after, with an entourage of twenty-seven ships and thirteen barges. Back home she spent time with her father, her three brothers Louis, Philippe, and Charles, and their wives; the two younger boys had married two sisters, Blanche and Joan of Burgundy, and the eldest, Louis, was wed to their cousin Margaret of Burgundy. As a token of friendship, Isabella had given three distinctive purses to her three sisters-in-law. Her father would have been presented with his grandson, the future Edward III, and in Druon’s series the old king ponders what might happen if the baby inherits his force of will, and whether this could be disastrous. We can never know the Iron King’s thoughts, but Edward would indeed grow up to become the greatest king of the period, and bring horror to France.
The Queen spent eight weeks in her homeland, hunting with her greyhounds—of whom she had fifteen—and giving hugely generous gifts at various holy shrines. Even for the standards of the higher aristocracy Isabella was lavish, overspending by as much as ten thousand pounds a year and maintaining a household of two hundred servants.
Isabella had arrived the day after the Templar Jacques de Molay was burned, and the chain of events leading to France’s tragedy now unfolded. The Queen of England, a naturally suspicious individual, soon learned that not all was well with her three brothers and their brides; there must have been troubling rumors, or perhaps she had a sixth sense, and the presents she so generously gave to her sisters-in-law had been designed to find the truth.
So when the gift
s were found in the possession of two young brothers, Gautier and Philippe d’Aulnay, the consequences were horrific. Soon Margaret and Blanche confessed to their adulterous relationships with the young Norman knights, and the third bride, Jeanne, admitted to having concealed the liaison. Isabella’s three sisters-in-law were thrown in a dungeon, and Marguerite and Blanche made to wear “the cowled garb of a penitent” and their hair shaved as an act of public shaming. For their lovers, who had confessed after torture, a far, far worse fate awaited them.
In front of a baying mob both d’Aulnay brothers were castrated, and as the executioner raised in his hands the severed genitals of the two men the crowd cheered, before the penises and testicles were fed to dogs. Worse was to follow, as the two men were then flayed alive in front of the screaming small folk of Paris, spread-eagled on a wooden cartwheel, where their arms and legs were broken with iron cudgels as the wheels turned. After they were decapitated, their torsos were hung by their armpits in a gibbet where birds would eat them.
Flaying was a particularly gruesome form of execution that involved cutting off the skin, which a skilled torturer could keep intact; it was spectacularly painful, and it could take the victim days to die, either from blood loss, infection, or even hypothermia, the skin being vital for heat regulation. The practice dates back to the ancient Assyrians of what is now Iraq, who boasted about this punishment in their monuments, some of which can still be found in the British Museum in London. Even in the harsh Middle Ages, this was a rare punishment reserved for the most abominable of offences, and the cruellest of rulers; and so naturally Edward I also did it, back in 1303 when three monks were convicted of stealing from the treasury of Westminster Abbey. Their skin was left hanging on its door as a warning to others. (Unsurprisingly, no one attempted to rob it again.)
