History of England 1-6

The coronation of 1307 did not go quite according to plan. The crown was carried, much to the scandal of the great lords, by a close companion of the king with the name of Piers or Peter Gaveston. The number of people at the ceremony was so large that a plaster wall collapsed, bringing down the high altar and the royal scaffolding for the service. One knight was killed. The service was then quickly and even summarily completed. There was an indication that the new king was not altogether trusted. A new provision had been added to the coronation oath. The king now declared that he would ‘uphold and defend the laws and righteous customs that the community of the realm shall choose’. The ‘community of the realm’, in this instance, meant the magnates and prelates. It was an ominous beginning.

The royal banquet, after the ceremony, was also badly managed. Piers Gaveston seemed inclined to outshine even the king with a costume of imperial purple and pearls. When Edward preferred the couch of Gaveston to that of his queen, Isabella of France, his wife’s relatives returned indignant to their homeland. We have here the makings of a royal disaster.

Gaveston was the same age as Edward. The old king had placed him in the prince’s household to provide a fitting military example to his heir, but they may have had other interests in common. There quickly grew up an attachment between the two young men that some have considered to be sexual, but which others have believed to be simply fraternal. He has been described as Edward II’s ‘minion’ but that is a courtly and chivalric term which does not imply homosexuality; Henry VIII had his minions. It was considered proper that the king, at court, should lean upon the shoulder of his minion. It was an accepted posture. Modern sexual terms have no meaning in fourteenth-century England, where in any case they would not have been understood. Edward did have a bastard son, Adam, even before he became king. Isabella herself would subsequently give birth to two sons and two daughters.

It is certain only that the young king preferred the company of Gaveston to that of his new bride. He had married the twelve-year-old Isabella, daughter of the king of France, on the orders of his father intent upon creating yet another grand and prosperous territorial alliance. The wedding had taken place in France a month before the coronation and, in his absence, Edward had appointed Gaveston as the keeper of the realm. This in itself was enough to arouse the envy and wrath of the English magnates. One of Edward’s first acts as king was then to honour Gaveston with the earldom of Cornwall, a title generally kept within the royal family. This was a serious blow to courtly protocol, and was more than a problem of etiquette. It was a question of land and money as well as title; if they were not properly distributed by the king, was then anyone safe? It was even believed that Gaveston himself had been given charge of patronage at court, granting goods and benefits without consultation with the barons. There could be no more important office in the fourteenth-century royal court, and it raised immediate problems about the king’s judgment.

Gaveston did not help matters with a waspish wit and a strong sense of his own importance. He was reported to be ‘haughty and arrogant’ with a pride ‘intolerable to the barons’. He invented nicknames for the leading magnates, such as ‘black dog’ for the earl of Warwick and ‘burst belly’ for the earl of Lincoln. He revelled in the king’s grace.

A parliament was held in the spring of 1308, at which the earl of Lincoln invoked the new provision of the coronation oath and demanded that Gaveston be dismissed from court. Edward refused but two months later, cowed by the presence of the magnates with their armed knights, he agreed to exile his favourite to Ireland. He wrote to the pope admitting that there had been ‘disturbance and dissension’ and that he had not yet ‘fully enforced unity’. This was the period, too, when his cousin abruptly left the court. Thomas of Lancaster was another grandson of Henry III, and was perhaps the richest as well as the best-connected noble in the land. He had also become disaffected, with fatal consequences for Piers Gaveston.

A year after his exile in Ireland, the favourite was back. The king had recalled him for assistance in his campaign against Robert Bruce. The Scots refused a set battle, however, and so the king was reduced to a number of sorties and skirmishes that still left the northern part of his kingdom unprotected against attack. Unlike his father, he had not kept the peace.