The Ordinances and Piers Gaveston

The first major crisis over these issues came in 1310, when Edward II, less than three years into his reign, was forced to agree to the appointment of a committee of twenty-one ‘ordainers’ to draw up detailed proposals for reform, the so-called ‘Ordinances’, eventually issued in 1311. Behind these disputes lay one fundamental issue: the King’s powers of patronage. Edward II had developed a passionate and, so far as his critics were concerned, unhealthy affection for a Gascon courtier named Piers Gaveston, son of a minor captain in the royal armies. Introduced to Edward’s household as early as 1300, Gaveston was already the subject of controversy before the death of the old King. After his coronation, Edward II’s very first act had been to create Gaveston Earl of Cornwall, previously a royal dignity held by successive members of the ruling royal family. Shortly thereafter, Gaveston was married to Edward’s niece, herself a very considerable heiress. When Edward himself was married, in January 1308, to Isabella, daughter of the King of France, his betrothed bride for the past ten years as part of the guarantees of Anglo-French peace, he is said to have sent his marriage bed to Piers as a love token.

Twentieth-century writers had little doubt what was at stake here, and even in less sexually liberated times, the Victorians were happy to portray Edward and Piers mincing and simpering at one another in a fully Oscar Wildean way. Yet both Edward and Piers fathered children, both in and outside wedlock. Edward, on those occasions when he could be persuaded to rise early enough in the morning, was a not inconsiderable commander of men. Piers met his end with grim stoicism bordering on bravery. If their love was illicit (and there is no doubt that by this date, whatever might have been the case a few centuries earlier, sodomy was considered one of the very worst of sins, close cousin to heresy and the denial of God), then it was probably a very long way from the sort of effeminacy against which the bearded Victorians were inclined to pronounce anathema. It may even have been not sexual love but a sworn blood brotherhood.

The problem here was that it was a pact between two very unequal partners. Only in romantic fiction could princes and paupers be friends. Moreover, like a lot of upstarts, Piers was possessed of a particularly wicked tongue. He had nicknames for all of his rivals at court, none of them polite, including ‘Bust-Belly’ for the Earl of Lincoln and ‘The Black Dog of Arden’ for the Earl of Warwick. The King’s cousin, Thomas of Lancaster, himself a grandson of King Henry III, would not have relished being described as ‘Ham actor’ by a man half his age and without a tenth of his noble ancestry. As early as April 1308, there were demands that Piers be exiled and his earldom confiscated. But, although Piers was sent to Ireland as the King’s lieutenant, and although the Ordinances of 1311 included specific clauses against ‘evil’ or ‘deceptive’ counsellors, Edward was not prepared to dispense with his favourite.

Patronage, the choice of who to promote and who to keep out, has always been one of the most jealously guarded of royal powers, least susceptible to limitation. It had been the attempts by the rebels of 1215 to force King John into recognizing the authority of a committee of twenty-five barons in the final clauses of Magna Carta, and by the barons of the 1260s to control appointments to household offices at court, that had proved, from the King’s perspective, amongst the most objectionable clauses in earlier ‘reforming’ legislation. As late as the 1840s, one of the very last constitutional crises for the English monarchy turned on just this issue of appointment to household offices at the court of the young Queen Victoria, and it could be argued that the most recent such crisis, came in the Abdication of 1936, itself provoked by outcry against a particularly feckless King and his choice of royal favourite. A direct line can be traced between the sharp-tongued and all-too heterosexual Wallace Simpson and the sexually ambiguous though no less sharp-tongued Piers Gaveston.