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  The boys immediately became inseparable companions, their time divided between London, Windsor and Langley Manor in Hertfordshire. The latter was Edward’s favourite residence, which accounts for it being called King’s Langley today. Here, away from disapproving courtiers and frosty barons, the prince and his “Perrot” were free to indulge in their unusual enthusiasms - training dogs, thatching cottages, digging ditches, working in the local smithy and rowing on the River Gade. When the weather confined them indoors they passed the time with minstrels and buffoons, and in drinking with the “vylans and vyle persones” which aroused the censure of the chroniclers. What escaped the pious men of letters was that briefly at Langley there was something rare for medieval times - a sense of fun. And the prince, who kept his camel in the manor stables, had a streak of humour not so far removed from today’s brand of royal jocularity, as is shown in a letter he wrote at the age of twenty-one to the Count Evreaux: “We send you a big trotting palfrey which can hardly carry its own weight, and some of our bandy-legged harriers from Wales who can well catch a hare, if they find it wise enough to allow Wallace to fade into oblivion in some remote prison it might have been so; instead Edward made the mistake of giving the Scots a martyr. On August 28, during Prince Edward’s banishment, Wallace was found guilty of treason to his lord the King of England. From Westminster he was pulled on a hurdle via the Tower to Smithfield Elms where he was hanged from a gibbet but cut down while still alive, his belly was opened and he was viscerated, after which his head was cut off to become a trophy on London Bridge, The Smithfield executioners burned his heart and entrails, and divided his body into four so that a quarter could be publicly displayed at Berwick, Newcastle, Stirling and Perth. This form of execution, which was to become traditional in England, had the opposite of the desired effect, instead of cowing the Scots it revived their nationalism and the next year Robert the Bruce — having murdered his rival John Comyn before the altar in the church of the Minorite Friars at Dumfries — declared himself King of Scotland.

  The ageing Edward braced himself for yet another Scottish campaign. On May 23, he knighted the prince and 297 young nobles at Westminster in what was described as the “largest mass knighting in medieval England”. At the banquet which followed the music of the eighty minstrels was halted when two royal swans in a golden net were placed before the king who vowed “by the God of Heaven and the two swans that he would go to Scotland and living or dead would avenge Comyn.” The terrifying old warrior adjured his son to carry his bones into Scotland with the army should he die on the journey, but added if he was spared he would once again take the Cross when Bruce was defeated. No doubt he thought that his promise of infidel blood flowing in the Holy Land would solicit divine aid for the forthcoming campaign. Prince Edward also took the “oath of the swans”, declaring that he would not sleep two nights in the same place until he had crossed into Scotland.

  In the following campaign the prince played a larger part than his father who, weakened by dysentery, had to travel by litter until he was forced to remain at Lanercost Priory. Bruce, defeated by English forces at Methven, became a fugitive while the Earl of Pembroke and Prince Edward beseiged Kildrummy Castle in which Bruce’s women had taken refuge; they were his sister Mary, his wife and daughter and Isabel, Countess of Buchan, who had followed the tradition of her family by placing the crown on his head.

  Kildrummy’s garrison soon surrendered and by order of Edward I, Mary and Isabel were each imprisoned in cages one of which was set high on the wall of Roxburgh Castle, the other at Berwick Castle, where they were exposed for three years. Although Prince Edward had not inherited such a savage streak from his father, he proved himself to be a formidable foe during the fighting and from a Scottish writer earned the description of “the starkest man of ane.”

  During “the winter the two Edwards stayed at Lanercost Priory, and this was when the ailing king ordered Piers Gaveston to be exiled to his home country of Gascony. Yet this was in no way intended as any punishment for Gaveston who never seemed to have lost the king’s approval, rather it was an attempt to break what the king rightly saw as a dangerous liaison.

  The grieving prince escorted his companion to Dover, loaded him with presents and, as a gesture against his failing father, commanded his Perrot to go to Ponthieu and not Gascony.

  For a short while he moped at Langley where one can imagine him looking at the thatches and ditches which he and his absent companion had worked on together in happier days, then he rode north to join his father’s last campaign.

  Robert the Bruce had reappeared with an army at his back and defeated the Earl of Pembroke at the Battle of Loudoun Hill. The prince had not reached his father when the sixty-eight-year-old warrior set out on July 3, 1307, from Lanercost to lead his army in person. He was so ill he had to be carried to Carlisle in a litter but here he offered it up in Carlisle cathedral and was lifted on to his destrier. He only managed to ride two miles in two days. On July 6 he reached Burgh-by-Sands, close to the ford over the Solway Firth, but now even his extraordinary will could no longer activate his worn out body for when his servants tried to lift him out of bed the next morning he fell back dead.

  * * *

  With the crown Edward II inherited daunting problems, not the least being the cost of his father’s glory. The late king’s campaigns in Scotland, Wales, Flanders and Gascony had placed a tremendous financial strain on the kingdom. There were debts over £60,000 and huge arrears of pay for soldiers and officials, and much of the future revenue was earmarked for the Florentine bankers Frescobaldi and Bardi. On top of this there was the question of the Scottish war, with an army prepared to cross the Solway the new king must have wondered how it was to be paid — and yet his father had commanded him to carry his remains to victory against his old foes!

  Edward I might have experienced antagonism from his nobles over some of his policies but as a warrior king he was revered, and he had never offended the conventions of his day. What chance did his frivolous and unconventional son have of filling his formidable shoes? But all these problems Prince Edward managed to push to the back of his mind when he was informed he was the new king — to him the first and most important act of his reign was the recall of Gaveston, and this was done without the consent of Parliament. A chronicler wrote: “Anon he had home his love Piers of Gaveston, and did him great reverence, and worshipped him and made him great and rich. Of this doing fell villainy to the lover, evil speech and backbiting to the love, slander to the people, harm and damage to the realm.”

  At first many magnates must have welcomed the thought of a new young monarch, believing he would be more tractable than his father, but such hopes were to be dashed even before the body of Edward I was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. On August 6, a royal charter made Piers Gaveston Earl of Cornwall, a tremendously rich apanage which was traditionally reserved for members of the blood royal. That an obscure Gascon should be given such an endowment rather than either of Edward’s young half brothers sent a Shockwave through the kingdom. Worse was to come.

  On October 27 the remains of Edward I were interred in a simple tomb of Purbeck marble which today carries the famous inscription, with an incorrect date, which was cut in the Sixteenth Century: “Edvardus Primus Scotorum malleus hie est, 1308. Pactum Serva.” Because of the present lack of decoration on the tomb Edward II has been criticised wrongly for not honouring his father correctly; it did in fact have an ornate wooden canopy which was destroyed as a result of a riot in the abbey in 1764. Certainly Edward failed to honour his vow to have his father’s bones carried at the head of the army, for Edward I’s last campaign was abandoned by the autumn, yet he did not forget the pact completely. The old king had also wanted his heart taken on a crusade after Scotland was humbled and in this regard his son issued a macabre decree that every two years the royal tomb should be unsealed and his father’s shroud re-waxed to keep him in readiness for posthumous victory. This practice continued until the Plantage
net line was cut off by the usurper Henry VII in 1485.

  Following the funeral Piers Gaveston was married to Margaret de Clare, niece of the king who had engineered the union. The ceremony was performed in splendour and for Edward’s Perrot it was a brilliant match; for the nobles it was a cause for outrage almost as much as his elevation to the peerage. Gaveston added salt to their wounds soon afterwards at a tournament he arranged at Wallingford which he now owned as Earl of Cornwall. The young man was brilliant in the lists and revelled in unhorsing the barons whom he knew detested him. It was said that “he exulted so much that his pride damaged him more than his prowess.”

  Edward delivered his nobility a third slap in the face in January, 1308, when he crossed the Channel to attend to his own nuptuals and left Piers as Regent of England. “It was thought remarkable that one who had recently been in exile from the land should now be its keeper,” wrote a narrator of the time.

  On January 25, in the Church of Notre Dame in Boulogne, Edward II married Isabella the Fair, daughter of Philip IV of France. It was a good political match, the youthful bride was beautiful and the ceremony was attended by an extraordinary assembly of European royalty — five kings, three queens and an archduke and various princes and dukes.

  Isabella must have heard rumours of her bridegroom’s infatuation with his boyhood companion, but doubtless she thought that her own charms, which were famous throughout the Continent, would soon lead him on to the heterosexual path. But a shock was waiting for her when the king’s ship berthed at Dover. Edward leapt ashore before the mooring ropes were tied and embraced the waiting Piers Gaveston, almost overwhelming him with caresses and endearments. And if Isabella’s French courtiers looked aghast at the scene it was merely a prelude to a greater outrage. After Edward’s belated coronation on February 25 it became known that the king had bestowed upon his favourite gifts which his father-in-law had given him together with the best pieces of Isabella’s jewellery.

  The coronation itself was a debacle with the barons enraged that the hated Gaveston — “so decked out that he more resembled the god Mars than an ordinary mortal” — was given the high honour of carrying the crown, while the queen’s uncles, who had accompanied her from France, returned in furious indignation to report to her father that at the wedding feast Edward preferred to share a couch with Gaveston rather than his bride.

  Thus the scene is set for the inevitable tragedy. On the darkening stage stands the king, ignoring the portents provided he has the company of his boyhood companion; there is the haughty favourite content to bask in the glory the king has bestowed upon him; there are the barons, grizzled warlords who rode stirrup-to-stirrup with the old king and who wonder as they plot how such a son could have sprung from his loins; and finally there is the queen with disgust and resentment smouldering in her heart.

  It was not long before the drama began. In the coronation ceremony the king had sworn a new form of oath which contained an extra clause whereby he was asked to “uphold and defend the laws and the righteous customs which the community of your realm shall determine.” In April the barons, who arrived at the Parliament in armour under the leadership of Thomas of Lancaster, quoted this clause to emphasise their demands for the banishment of Piers Gaveston, arguing that as they were the “community” the king was bound to his vow to “protect” them. Edward, supported only by Sir Hugh Despenser in the confrontation, was wise enough to give way and avert civil war between the baronage and the crown. He signed letters which deprived Gaveston of his titles and ordered that he should be out of England by June 25.

  Edward rode with his Perrot to Bristol where he was to quit the kingdom, but here the king turned the tables on his troublesome nobility. How he and Gaveston must have laughed at the quayside for, instead of allowing his friend to leave as a humiliated exile, Edward suddenly bestowed upon him the highly desirable post of King’s Lieutenant in Ireland. According to the Lanercost Chronicle Gaveston left with blank royal charters to use as he wished, which, if true, shows the extent of Edward’s devotion to him. Then with the same determination as his father had shown in hammering the Scots, he set to work to get his favourite re-installed in England, bending his opponents “one after another to his will with gifts, promises and blandishments” so that within twelve months Piers Gaveston was back.

  Edward welcomed him at Chester on his return from Ireland where he had proved himself to be a very able governor. His easy manners had won him the friendship of the Irish nobility and he had successfully quelled revolts in Munster and Thomond, so it was with the air of a hero that he greeted his king at whose side he now remained. But the delight which the pair felt at being reunited must have blinded them to the dangers which still lay ahead. Perhaps Gaveston believed that with his recall the king had proved his invincibility, certainly he did not feel constrained to be tactful to the barons who had opposed him. And having proved the effectiveness of his jousting lance against them, he now subjected them to thrusts of his wit, inventing nicknames for them. One can picture Edward and Piers laughing together as the latter referred to the Earl of Lancaster as “the Old Hog”, the stout Earl of Lincoln as “Burst Belly”, the Earl of Pembroke as “Joseph the Jew”, and the Earl of Gloucester as “the Cuckold s Bird”, an unfortunate reference to his mother’s morality. The appellation Gaveston was most to regret was that of “the Black Dog of Arden” which he bestowed on the dread Earl of Warwick; strangely enough these nicknames did as much to seal his fate as his hold on the king.

  It is hard for us to understand why these taunts, which seem like typical pinpricks from the gay young Gaveston, should have so deeply wounded the earls, a fact confirmed by the prominence given to them in the chronicles. One can only assume that medieval aristocratic pride had a samurai-like quality which could face changing fortune and death with equanimity, but not a joke no matter how childish.

  A contemporary biographer of Edward II summed up the situation in a couple of lines which translated from the Latin read:-

  Though handsome, rich and clever you may be

  Through insolence we may your ruin see

  In October, 1309, Edward and Piers travelled to York where a council of magnates had been summoned. This proved to be a failure when five of the most powerful earls, significantly including Lancaster, refused to attend because of the presence there of the favourite. The king lost Lancaster’s vital support because of the overbearing treatment of one of the earl’s household followers by Gaveston. Despite this setback the friends spent a happy Christmas at their favourite residence of Langley “in long wished for sessions of daily and intimate conversation.” But another parliament was looming over them which was held at Westminster in February, 1310, and again the recalcitrant earls — Arundel, Hereford, Lancaster, Oxford and Warwick — refused to attend.

  Again beset by the problem which had vexed him since his father had tugged out handfulls of his hair at Lanercost, Edward sent Gaveston to the north for safety, and prepared for the worst. It came in the form of a committee called the Lords Ordainers. Its twenty-one members were made up of bishops, earls and barons, and while not all were opposed to the king, its purpose was to reform the governing of the kingdom — at least from the Ordainers’ point of view — and the running of the royal household which was deeply in debt largely due to the king’s generosity to Gaveston and enthusiastic complicity in his extravagance.

  Edward had little choice but to sign the letters patent for the transfer of power on March 16, 1310. Like his predecessor Ethelred the Redeless, who had bought off the Vikings with annual tribute of silver, he hoped to gain time, time to plan a political campaign against the Lords Ordainers and time to enjoy the society of his friend. With so much hostility from the baronage, it is easy to understand how Edward could only find relaxation with someone sympathetic to him. But even this was to be denied to him before long. The nobility may have grasped the sceptre, but their hatred for Gaveston remained as strong as ever and the next year, among the 41 Article
s of the Ordainers presented to the king was one which stated that Piers Gaveston had “misled and ill-advised our lord the King, and enticed him to do evil in various deceitful ways”, and continued that “as an open enemy of the King and his people, shall be altogether exiled from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and from all the dominions of our lord the King. . .”

  The other conditions so restrained royal freedom that the king exploded that they governed his life “as one would provide for an idiot”, but as before the king’s refusal would have meant civil war and for the third time Gaveston went into exile, sailing down the Thames on November 3. Although the banishment was decreed to be perpetual, Edward brought him back before the end of the year and they resided “now in the King’s apartments, now at Wallingford and now at Tintagel Castle”, and on January 20 all Gaveston’s property and titles were restored to him.

  The immediate effect of the king’s defiance of the Lords Ordainers was that Piers Gaveston was excommunicated by Archbishop Winchelsey in accordance with the twentieth Ordinance, and the five leading earls took vows to protect the Ordinances. Under the pretext of holding tournaments they began to organise their private armies.

  Edward, fearful for his favourite’s safety, took him north with the intention of finding him refuge with his old enemy Robert the Bruce of Scotland, and like a shadow stalking the royal party, went Thomas of Lancaster with his armed retainers. Rumour sped through the country that King Robert had refused to give sanctuary to England’s most hated earl, with the result that the king was stranded in Newcastle where the citizens had no heart to defend him against Lancaster’s troops.