by Lisa Hilton
The question of the supposed homosexuality of Edward II is far more vexing than that of Richard I. That he ‘loved’ Piers Gaveston is beyond doubt, but the nature of that love has exercised generations of scholars. Such efforts have been deemed ‘both anachronistic and futile: anachronistic because medieval attitudes to sexuality were so different from our own and futile because the nature of the evidence makes it impossible to tell what Edward actually did’1. What Edward got up to with Gaveston is actually less important than what his contemporaries thought he did, and the implications this held for their understanding of his failed kingship.
That the Prince was passionately involved with Gaveston was apparent from their first meeting in 1300, when Gaveston was appointed a member of his household, one often young men selected by the King to provide his heir with knightly companionship. Gaveston was clearly capable of making an impression, as this son of minor Gascon gentry was chosen despite having no claim to nobility. It was generally agreed that he was good-looking, intelligent and proficient on the battlefield — indeed, he distinguished himself on one of the Scottish campaigns in 1303 — but he was also arrogant, conceited and made spiteful use of his wit. His lack of respect for the King’s values was demonstrated in 1305 when he casually left the Scottish battlelines for a tournament in France, and his contempt for authority when he, Edward and a gang of friends ravaged the estates of the bishop of Chester, driving off his game. The King was so disgusted by Edward’s impertinent response to his remonstrances that he disbanded his household, forbade him to see Gaveston and sent him to Windsor Castle with a single manservant. It was at this point that Edward sought the Queen’s intercession, and in August he wrote to thank her for the restoration of the majority of his household: ‘We know well that this was done at your request, for which we are dearly grateful to you, as you know’. He continued to plead for her good offices, asking her to petition for the return of his cousin Gilbert de Clare and the disgraced Gaveston himself. ‘But truly, my lady, if we should add those two to the others, we would feel much comfort and alleviation of the anguish we have endured and continue to suffer, by the ordinance of our aforementioned lord and father. My lady, will you please take this business to heart, and pursue it in the most gracious manner you may, so dearly as you love us.’2
The Prince of Wales clearly felt he could trust his stepmother with this intimate declaration, and his trust in her power to sway his father was well-judged, for by Whitsun 1306 Gaveston was back in favour and being knighted at Westminster alongside his dear friend. By February 1307, however, the King was so anxious about the ‘inordinate affection’3 between Gaveston and his son that he banished the knight to Gascony. In fact, he went only as far as Eleanor of Castile’s county of Ponthieu where, in the summer, he received the news that the man who called him ‘brother’4 was now King of England.
Marguerite had accompanied King Edward north once more for the now-customary summer campaign. Usually, she would remain at Tynemouth, on English soil, for her own protection, but this time she was with her husband at Burgh-on-Sands, because the King had become so ill he could not rise from his bed. On 7 July, he died.
The very first act of the new King was to summon Gaveston. At this point, the grieving Marguerite could not have imagined she had anything to fear from the favourite’s return. She and Edward had a strong relationship and he was in her debt for her positive efforts on Gaveston’s behalf. But suddenly her own interests appeared to be threatened. In early August, before Gaveston had even set foot in the kingdom, Edward made him Earl of Cornwall. This was both undutiful and, frankly, stupid, and it immediately provoked the anger of the magnates and the enmity of the Dowager Queen. Cornwall was a royal earldom, and Edward’s right to bestow it was dubious; moreover, Marguerite had understood it to be intended for one of her own sons. Edward was also foolish and insensitive in the semi-royal marriage he arranged for Gaveston a few months after his return to England. Gaveston’s bride was Margaret de Clare, the daughter of the King’s sister Joan of Acre and her husband Gilbert de Clare, the Earl of Gloucester. Joan had been mocked for marrying beneath her station for love, but she was still a royal lady and Margaret was the King’s own niece. Despite Gaveston’s new title, this marriage, too, was ‘disparaging’, one of the offences to the social order the medieval nobility found so threatening. Gaveston made matters worse by insulting his brother-in-law, calling him ‘whoreson’ in reference to Joan’s disparaging match. As a French princess and Margaret’s relative, Marguerite would have been highly sensitive to the insult to the royal family, and King Edward compounded it by insisting that the marriage was held at Berkhamsted Castle, one of Marguerite’s properties.
Edward had also failed to respect his father’s wishes for his funeral. The story was put about that the late King had left instructions for the flesh to be boiled from his body so that his bones, at least, could head a victorious army into Scotland. This tale is most likely a product of the ever-fertile imagination of the chronicler Froissart, but it supposedly caused Robert the Bruce to remark with some accuracy that there was more to fear from the dead Edward’s bones than the living Edward’s sword. In any event, Edward I was buried, intact, at Westminster on 27 October, and the Scottish campaign was apparently forgotten. A month later, Edward, who took no more than a token interest in tournaments, organised a great joust at Wallingford as an opportunity for his favourite to display his skills. Gaveston’s party carried the day, to the great resentment of the older magnates, and
from these and other incidents, hatred mounted day by day, for Piers was very proud and haughty in bearing. All those whom the custom of the realm made equal to him he regarded as lowly and abject, nor could anyone, he thought, equal him in valour. On the other hand, the earls and barons of England looked down on Piers, because, as a foreigner and formerly a mere man at arms raised to such distinction and eminence, he was unmindful of his former rank. Thus he was an object of mockery to almost everyone in the kingdom.5
It may have given Marguerite some satisfaction that Edward was obliged to issue orders reminding the court to style Gaveston with his proper title of Earl of Cornwall, but she had to contend with the fact that the favourite she had herself protected was now dangerously powerful. The award of the earldom, the Clare marriage and the funeral showed that Edward had no respect for his father’s memory. Would this neglect extend to Marguerite? Such fears were confirmed when Edward gave Berkhamsted to Gaveston. Marguerite was till only twenty-five, and at this point she might have made a second marriage, or even have returned to France. That she did not do so suggests both a genuine love for her husband and a need to protect her interests under the new regime, interests which were now allied to those of her niece, Isabella, the twelve-year-old girl who was about to become the next queen of England.
The terms of the treaty of Montreuil were fulfilled on 25 January 1308, when Isabella and Edward were married at Our Lady of Boulogne. For Queen Marguerite, the ceremonies, which lasted nine days, were a chance to see her brother and her mother, Marie, once more. She may have been hopeful that, as well as affording her the pleasure of a family reunion, the wedding would encourage her stepson to assume his proper role and diminish Gaveston’s influence. A silver casket engraved with Marguerite and Isabella’s arms, now in the British Museum, may have been a gift for the bride from Marguerite, intended to emphasise their potential alliance. When the English party returned to Dover on 3 February, however, it was soon clear that Edward still had eyes only for Gaveston.
For twelve-year-old Isabella, the first weeks m England were confusing. All her life she had expected to become queen of England, and her impeccable lineage (she was royal on both sides, her mother Jeanne having been Queen of Navarre in her own right), her magnificent 18,000-pound dowry and the splendour of her wedding, which was attended by five kings and three queens, led her to assume she would be treated with every honour. Yet supervising the ladies who would form her retinue, she found this Gaveston, a nobody,
who very shortly was seen peacocking about in Isabella’s own jewellery. As Marguerite was still in possession of the Queen’s dower lands, Edward was supposed to make separate provision for his wife, but despite pressure from King Philip, he refused to declare his terms, and Isabella discovered that she had nothing with which to maintain herself. Even before she was crowned, his furious bride was writing to her father to complain of her impoverished and ‘wretched’ position.
Thanks to Gaveston, even the coronation was in danger of collapsing into farce. According to the Annales Paulini, one magnate was so enraged by the indignity of the proceedings that he had to restrain himself from challenging Gaveston in Westminster Abbey itself. With the blindness characteristic of his favourite, Edward had put him in charge of the coronation ceremonies. From the start, the assembled nobility were incandescent when Gaveston appeared in purple robes, a colour only the King had the right to wear, and a deliberate insult to the earls in their own carefully ranked cloth-of-gold. Worse still, he carried the sacred crown of Edward the Confessor, an honour to which he had so little right it was almost sacrilegious. Perhaps, in fairness to Gaveston, it should be recalled that coronation disasters were practically an English tradition, hard to avoid when huge numbers of people were crammed into limited space, on this occasion the joint coronation was marred by the death of a knight under a tumbling wall. Nevertheless, it was Gaveston’s fault that the banquet at Westminster Hall was served so late and was so poorly prepared that the guests could hardly eat it. The representatives of the French royal family were disgusted not only by the food, but by the fact that Edward sat next to Gaveston, not Isabella, and that it was Gaveston’s arms that were displayed next to the King’s on the tapestries decorating the chamber.
Marguerite decided to retire to her castle at Marlborough after the coronation. If, in effect, she abandoned her lonely and bewildered niece, she may well have done so for political reasons. Resentment of Gaveston had risen to such a degree that ‘it was held for certain that the quarrel once begun could not be settled without great destruction’.6 Many magnates had united in a vow to depose the favourite, and when Parliament met on 28 April, having been postponed from 3 March, the assembled lords arrived in arms. They accused Gaveston of embezzling crown revenues and alienating the King from those who ought to have been his closest counsellors, and demanded that he be exiled. Three chronicles suggest that Isabella’s father, King Philip, angered not only by the reports of Gaveston’s ascendancy but by the continuing uncertainty over his daughter’s income, was conspiring with the English lords to bring him down, and Marguerite was also named in connection with the plan. According to Robert of Reading, Edward, desperately playing for time, was informed in mid-May that Philip and Marguerite had sent 40,000 pounds to the earls of Lincoln and Pembroke, who were among Gaveston’s most vocal opponents, to fund his deposition.
Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, was a grandson of John’s queen, Isabelle of Angoulême, the son of Henry III’s Lusignan half-brother William. He had been a close friend of Edward I and also enjoyed a warm relationship with Marguerite. In 1303, Pembroke had asked Marguerite to write to the then chancellor, William Greenfield, to petition for a postponement of the trial of two men accused of trespass in her parks, as at the time they had both been absent on campaign in Scotland. In her letter, Marguerite refers to Pembroke as her ‘dear cousin’, and wrote again to Greenfield a month later, mercifully requesting that since one of the men, Robert Parker, had paid his fine, he should be ‘quit of all manner of exigencies and other demands’. Marguerite’s closeness to Pembroke is demonstrated by her bequest of Hertford Castle, a significant enough portion of the Queen’s dower lands for Isabella of France to repossess it from Pembroke’s widow in 1327.
That Marguerite should have been able personally to raise even half the huge sum quoted by Robert of Reading seems implausible, but if she was in correspondence with Philip about the treatment of her niece and the vicious influence of Gaveston, she may well have been a conduit from the French King to Pembroke for his support of the anti-Gaveston party. Rumours abounded that Philip had sent envoys to declare his commitment to Gaveston’s banishment. It has been suggested that Isabella was conspiring against Gaveston, and certainly the magnates used her as a sort of figurehead, but given her immaturity and impecuniousness, if the earls did have a female ally in one of the French queens of England, it is far more likely to have been Marguerite. In response to the report of his stepmother’s involvement, Edward declared the same day that Isabella should be dowered with the counties of Ponthieu and Montreuil and be honourably and decently’7 Provided with the necessities to set up her household. If Philip was mollified by this, the English earls remained adamant, and on 18 May, Edward was forced to order that on pain of excommunication, Gaveston would leave England on 24 June.
Gaveston’s exile was however, short-lived. Edward made him Lieutenant of Ireland, where he stayed for just a year, appropriating the Crown revenues for his own enrichment, until the King’s wheedling lobbying of the Pope, the barons and even his father-in-law produced a bull quashing the sentence of excommunication. Gaveston returned triumphantly in June 1309, and Edward received him joyfully at Chester. They kept Christmas together that year at Edward’s favourite manor of Langley in Hertfordshire, with Queen Isabella an awkward third. For his own protection, Gaveston went north when Parliament met in February 1310, while Isabella accompanied Edward to Westminster. By the end of March, Edward had been forced to accept the election of twenty-one ‘Lords Ordainers’, Pembroke among them, whose job would be to reform the government. It was particularly galling for Edward that a prominent member of this group was his cousin Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, the most powerful magnate in the country and, until the Gaveston debacle, a firm supporter. The barons declared that if the King refused to accept their new rules, they would consider themselves free of the oath of loyalty they had sworn at his coronation. Edward announced his intention of resuming the Scottish campaign, in order to both reunite the barons and give him an opportunity to create a base of support in the north, but soon after he and Isabella arrived to join Gaveston at Berwick on 18 September, it became clear that hatred of Gaveston had superseded even the magnates’ pleasure in Scot-hunting and, humiliatingly, only three earls turned out to fight for Edward. Bruce commanded far more impressively than the English King, and his guerrilla tactics left the Scottish lowlands stripped of resources, forcing the invaders back over the border.
Edward and Isabella remained in the north until the following July, but all the Scottish campaign yielded was an opportunity for the Ordainers to consolidate their position. When Edward eventually appeared at Westminster on 13 August 1311, he was presented with a list of forty-one injunctions. As with the Provisions of Oxford in Henry III’s reign, it was announced at the public proclamation of the injunctions on 27 September that disloyalty would be punished with excommunication. Isabella, unlike Eleanor of Provence, was not obliged to swear to the ordinances, confirming that her contemporaries at this juncture saw her political influence as minimal. The Queen was in communication with Marguerite, who was on a tour of her properties in Devizes, and a letter of 4 September suggests that she was keeping her aunt informed of events in London. Not surprisingly, one of the principal demands of the Ordainers was the removal, again, of Gaveston, whom they declared ‘a public enemy of the king and the kingdom’.8 Gaveston duly left the country in early November, but Edward clearly had no intention of keeping his promise. It is notable that at this point Edward restored Berkhamsted Castle to Marguerite, who kept Christmas there that year. Perhaps he hoped to enlist her support for Gaveston’s return, as he had done in the past.
By Christmas, Gaveston was back at Westminster. Interestingly, Queen Isabella now took a conciliatory attitude to him. Her New Year gifts diplomatically included presents of game to leading Ordainers, but she also sent a Brie cheese to Isabella de Vescy, whose husband Henry de Beaumont had been dismissed from court as a Gaveston
supporter, and other delicacies to Margaret de Clare, Gaveston’s wife, who was expecting a child. If Isabella was naively hoping for some sort of reconciliation, even Edward appreciated that Gaveston’s presence in the capital was impolitic, and in January, followed by Isabella, he removed himself, with Gaveston in tow, to York. It was here that Margaret de Clare gave birth to her child — her churching was celebrated by ‘King Robert’s’ minstrels, who received forty marks — and despite the fact that Isabella’s husband was behaving with insane carelessness, this York court was a happy time for the Queen, too. She was able to write to Marguerite with the news that after four years she had become pregnant.
But the Ordainers were arming themselves in the south. Edward’s blatant defiance in recalling Gaveston was essentially a declaration of war, and by April the King was forced to move on to Newcastle, with an army commanded by the Earl of Lancaster in pursuit, so hurriedly that many of Isabella’s possessions were left behind. Edward’s lack of consideration for his wife’s condition was shown when, just two days after her arrival in Newcastle, she was obliged to move again, to Tynemouth Priory on the coast, ostensibly for her own safety. Lancaster’s men were in Newcastle on 4 May, and the King and the favourite made a scrabbling, undignified retreat to Tynemouth, but a few days later, despite Isabella’s tearful pleas, they departed for Scarborough, leaving the Queen alone again (poor Margaret de Clare and her new baby having been left to fend for themselves in Newcastle). Entrusting the castle at Scarborough to Gaveston, Edward returned to York, where he summoned Isabella. But the favourite who had incurred such loathing with his boasts of military prowess surrendered to Pembroke on 19 May.
Gaveston’s good time was over. Pembroke accompanied him to Deddington in Oxfordshire. He swore that Gaveston would be treated honourably, on the pain of forfeiting his own estates, but the Earl of Warwick was less moderate. While Pembroke was absent on a visit to his wife, he abducted Gaveston and took him to Warwick, where the prisoner was forced to walk barefoot to the castle. ‘Blaring trumpets followed Piers, and the horrid cry of the populace. They had taken off his belt of knighthood, and as a thief and a traitor he was taken to Warwick.’9 On 19 June, Gaveston was beheaded on Blacklow Hill, saved from the full horror of a traitor’s death by his family connection to the Earl of Gloucester. The body was left in the dirt until a group of Dominican friars found it, sewed the head back and embalmed it. They carried the corpse to Oxford, but were chary of giving it burial because Gaveston was excommunicated as a consequence of defying the ordinances. The writer of the Vita Edwardi Secundi declared: ‘I may assert with confidence that the death of one man … had never before been so acceptable to so many’
