Authors: Thomas B. Costain
Perhaps he should have been a farmer instead of heir to a great throne. He was much more interested in horses and cattle and in a camel kept
in the royal stables (how it came to be there, or why, was a mystery) than he was in the not too persistent efforts of Master Walter Reynolds to teach him Latin. He was happier helping to plant turnips than in discussing the strategy of a campaign; a fact that caused people to recall that he had been born on St. Mark’s Day, when long processions were held with crosses swathed in black and prayers were said for good weather and fine harvests.
In one respect only did the young prince run true to form. Like most youths of royal blood, he was interested in his wardrobe. As it happened, the world was seeing a sudden revolution in men’s apparel. The ladies, perhaps because they were preached at from the pulpit and partly because husbands had not yet been educated to spending money to clothe their wives, continued wearing modest long robes which seldom allowed as much as the tip of a toe to show and fitted snugly up under the chin. But suddenly the young men of blue blood and wealth began to support an extravaganza of fashion. The first indications of it seem to have come from France, where even in those days the tailors were an enterprising and imaginative lot. The first step was the introduction of the
cote-hardie
, a close-fitting garment like a waistcoat which fell some distance below the waist but exposed to view the masculine leg in tight-fitting hose. With this foppish fashion, as it was called in conservative circles, went a positive frenzy for fantastic color schemes. The
cote-hardie
could be parti-colored, red on one side and perhaps tan on the other. The shades would be reversed for the hose. Sometimes greater extremes were reached with diagonal and vertical bars of contrasting colors. In these garments the young men of fashion strutted about like animated chessboards. Their shoes, moreover, had such long toes that they curled up in front. This queer fashion was carried to such extremes in later years that the tips had to be tied to the ankles with silken cords. Their hoods were supplied with long tassels which had to be tied around the neck and became known as
liri-pipes
.
Young Edward was tall and straight and his legs were well turned, so he became a leader in this rather silly revolution.
The king did everything possible to train the boy along the right lines. When the prince was thirteen years old, as we have already said, the father had to take an army to the continent to strike a blow for his Flemish allies, and before leaving he appointed his son regent. It happened to be a troubled time, one crisis following another. Warenne got himself thoroughly beaten by Wallace at Stirling Bridge; the barons became incensed with the king’s attitude in levying taxes without parliamentary sanction and insisted on a confirmation of the Great Charter and the Forest Charter. A
Confirmatio cartarum
was laid before the youthful regent, and on the advice of the chief officers of the crown he signed it in his father’s
name; an act which Edward confirmed later. The boy, in fact, seems to have behaved with proper decorum and even a trace of dignity.
The king began to devote a great deal of time to the education of the young Edward in all matters of statecraft and personal conduct. In one year he addressed no fewer than seven hundred letters to his heir, full of sage advice and often couched in terms of sharp reproof.
Almost from the time he was born there was much speculation as to his matrimonial future. First a marriage arrangement was made by which he would wed the Maid of Norway, but this eminently satisfactory plan became null when the little princess died before reaching Scotland. Then Edward conceived the idea that his son should marry the daughter of Guy de Dampierre, hereditary ruler of Flanders, whose name was Philippa, although she seems to have been called the little Philippine. The King of France put a stop to that by swooping down on the Flemish cities and taking Guy and his daughter prisoners. The father was imprisoned for most of his life and the little Philippine became a member of the French royal household. Finally it was settled that the heir to the English throne was to marry Isabella of France, Philip’s daughter, who was called Isabella the Fair.
King Edward had every reason to know that the Capetian family tree had sprouted something strange and fearsome in Philip the Fair. That the daughter of this cruel and capricious monarch might take after him in character as well as in looks should have given Edward reason to pause and wonder. Would the lovely and sophisticated Isabella be a suitable mate for his undeniably naïve son?
The king made two great mistakes in his efforts to map the future life of his long-legged heir. This was the first.
From the time Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine and so became ruler of all the western provinces of France, the princes of the Plantagenet line had spent most of their time abroad. Richard of the Lion-Heart was seldom in England, not even when he became king. Edward would have followed this example if the troubles in which his father had involved himself with the barons in England had not made it necessary for him to stay at home and fight the king’s battles. Both of these high-spirited and brave princes had preferred to live in the south, making the old Roman city of Bordeaux their headquarters but being much of the time in Gascony. Life was gracious and comfortable in that great city on the Garonne, with its soft airs and golden sunlight beating down so warmly on the leaves of the plane trees; with its wealth and culture. It was pleasant to sit on
the open terrace of a low, white stone palace and look out over the lands of the triangle where the grapes grew; much more desirable, in fact, than to be housed in a tall, frowning, mysterious hotel in malodorous Paris or in a grimly frowning Norman castle in foggy London. There was another reason: the companionship they found in the knights and cadets of Gascony who had the minstrel strain in them but were nonetheless long-headed, shrewd, and gallant.
One of these old retainers of Edward’s, a certain Arnold de Gaveston, put in an appearance in London in a destitute condition, having escaped from a French prison. He was accompanied by a son called Piers or Perrot. In striving to provide for this unfortunate old comrade-in-arms Edward took the boy into his household as a squire. The boy behaved himself so well that the king decided he would be a suitable companion for his own son. It seemed to the king that the handsome and accomplished Gascon youth would introduce a better note into the oafish household at King’s Langley, where they were still emptying five casks of wine weekly and keeping the dice rolling on the trestle table both above and below the salt. So Piers de Gaveston was sent to live there as a comrade for the prince; and this was the second of the two grave errors of which the king was guilty.
With the first glance that passed between them, Piers de Gaveston gained a complete ascendancy over the young prince. He was one of the figures who appear frequently in history and who can only be described perfectly by a modern word, incandescent. A prime example of this was a long-legged and decorative young man named George Villiers who would come along in the reign of James I and be given the title of Duke of Buckingham. A room seemed to light up when men of this caliber entered. They were always handsome and filled with amusing talk. The youthful Gascon had these qualities. He was, moreover, adept at games and the use of weapons.
There were two serious flaws in his character which began to show as soon as he was certain of his hold on the heir to the throne of England. He was greedy for wealth and honors, and his pride was like tinder. Nothing was too much for him to ask. At the least hint of opposition he would flare up into tempers, even at the expense of the most important men in the realm. There was one occasion when the boisterous train of the prince, headed by young Edward himself and Gaveston, invaded the preserves of Bishop Langton, the king’s treasurer. After pulling down the palings, they proceeded to wreak havoc among the deer and smaller game. Langton was not one to accept such treatment in silence, prince or no prince. He had been one of the king’s most respected councilors for many years and stood high in the royal regard. He went to the king and told
his story, with the result that the prince was sent to Windsor Castle with none of his personal household to wait upon him. Here he was kept in disgrace for six months. He was not allowed to see “Brother Perrot” or Gilbert de Clare, who had borne a part also in the household revels.
In 1306, when the heir to the throne had reached the age of twenty-two and had been given the title of Prince of Wales, he went with his father on a final campaign in Scotland, or at least what they hoped would be the last. He did not distinguish himself particularly, except in the ferocity with which his troops were urged on to ravage the countryside. At the close of the season’s fighting he sat in the Parliament at Carlisle, where arrangements were discussed for his marriage to Isabella of France. Edward had never expressed any interest before in matrimonial arrangements, but the reports of the beauty of the French princess had made him favorable to and even eager for the match.
It was during these discussions that the full extent of the favorite’s hold on his affections became evident for the first time. There had been a great deal of talk about them, and it was being said openly that there was an immoral side to the tie. The king must have heard something of this, for he was keeping too close a watch on his son to have missed it; but if so, he had kept the knowledge to himself.
At Carlisle, however, the prince made a demand which caused his father to fall into one of his blackest rages. He wanted the province of Ponthieu in France to be given to Brother Perrot. Ponthieu contained the busy city of Abbeville at the mouth of the Somme. It had belonged to the queen, Edward’s mother, and on her death it had remained among the royal possessions. The demand of the prince was a monstrously foolish one. The fief was strategically situated on the Channel and was of the first importance to the English king; it would have taken all the armed might of France to wrest it from him.
The curious part of the story is that his old enemy, Bishop Langton, was selected by the prince as mediator in the matter. The bishop, most unwillingly, conveyed the request to his sovereign and was the victim of the first stages of the royal indignation. When young Edward was summoned into the cabinet, he was seized by his father and dragged by the hair (so it is said) about the room.
“Thou wouldst give away lands!” cried the king. “Thou who hast never won a rod!”
It was on the young Gascon that the punishment fell. He was banished to his first home in Gascony.
It is not recorded whether Gaveston was compelled to obey the rules imposed on those sentenced to banishment. This was what they had to do: proceed at once to the nearest seaport and embark on the first ship leaving for the continent; and, in cases where a vessel was not immediately
available, to strip each day to shirt and drawers and wade out into the water until it reached the chin, as an earnest of their intention to obey the sentence.
The haughty Gascon would have found this daily ritual a humiliation hard to bear. However, as Dover was designated as his port of departure, he probably experienced no delay in getting off.
T
HE concluding years in the life of Edward were not happy ones. He had retained most of his teeth and his eyes were filled with the same fire while his hair which had once been the color of straw was now a snowy white; but the aches of old age and many campaigns were in his bones. His temper had become shorter. He was having trouble with Robert de Winchelsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his barons, with his son, and with Scotland.
Archbishop Winchelsey is less well known than he should be, considering the controversial part he played through the latter half of the reign. He had been a rather handsome man and a speaker of considerable power, but by the time he was chosen to succeed Peckham he had become corpulent and coarse of feature. His manner was open, friendly, and even jovial. He was a man of real piety and his personal life was above reproach. A spare trencherman, he refused to eat anything but the plainest food and had the best dishes given to the poor, much to the indignation of his servants, who thought they should be considered first. The archbishop never spoke to women.
This was an age when the Church struggled to maintain the supremacy of Rome over temporal power. The Pope, Boniface VIII, the most violent contender for that principle, had fallen foul of the taciturn but volcanic Philip the Fair and had issued a bull,
Clericis laicos
, in which the clergy were forbidden under pain of excommunication to give any part of their revenues to temporal rulers without papal consent. This was aimed at Edward as much as at France, for he had been exacting heavy subsidies from the churchmen of England.
What stand would Winchelsey take in this delicate position? He soon made it clear. At a convocation in St. Paul’s he delivered a sermon in
which he said, “We have two lords over us, the king and the Pope, and though we owe obedience to both we owe greater obedience to the spiritual than to the temporal lord.”
The other bishops, who knew the temper of their temporal lord and had made a point of meeting his demands, sat in silent dismay. Edward was enraged beyond measure when he heard what had happened, and from that time on there was continuous trouble between them. At first Winchelsey refused to allow any subsidies at all. When Edward demanded a fifth of all church revenue, the archbishop compromised with an offer of a tenth. Finally the latter agreed to allow each bishop to make his own decision but flatly refused to give as much as a shilling of the Canterbury revenues. This dispute went on for years. The other bishops resented the uncompromising attitude of the primate because of the difficulties in which it involved them, and Winchelsey found himself with few friends, except among the common people, who saw a successor to the martyred Thomas à Becket in the militant but tactless archbishop. There were minor troubles as well. Winchelsey took the part of the prince in some of his disputes with his father. He never missed a chance to trample on the toes of the Archbishop of York, denying him the right to carry his episcopal cross in front of him on his visits to Canterbury territory.