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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
George Orwell once said that the British love a really good murder. He might have added that the only thing the British love more than a good murder is a really good scandal, and best of all are the sexual and political scandals that take place behind the gilded doors of Britain's royal palaces. From Edward II's intimate relationship with Piers Gaveston to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's dramatic exit from the royal family, the royal residences have seen it all. This glorious romp of a book contains new information on well-known and not-so-well-known scandals, including those that have only recently been revealed through the release of previously secret official papers. Exploring surviving palaces such as Kensington as well as long‑vanished residences including Whitehall, Scandals of the Royal Palaces is the first in-depth look at the bad behaviour of not just the royals themselves but also palace officials, courtiers, household servants and hangers‑on. Delving into the bitter hatreds that generations of King Georges nursed for their eldest sons, Queen Victoria's opium‑fuelled rages and Edward VII's near-miss perjury conviction, royal expert Tom Quinn reveals that scandal and the royal family have always been bedfellows. And if the behaviour of today's royals is anything to go by, the glittering palaces will continue to house intriguing, embarrassing and outrageous scandals for centuries to come.
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SCANDALS OFTHE ROYAL PALACES
AN INTIMATE MEMOIR OF ROYALS BEHAVING BADLY
TOM QUINN
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
‘Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.’
Henry Fielding
George Orwell once said that the British love a really good murder, whether in their novels or their Sunday papers. He might also have said that the only thing the British love more than a good murder is a really good scandal, and best of all are the political and sexual scandals that emanate from Britain’s royal palaces.
Of course, the kiss and tell story is now a commonplace, but scandal itself isn’t a recent phenomenon. It has a long history; one tied up with power and position, especially royal power and royal position; a history that includes scandals in such high places so damaging – Edward and Mrs Simpson’s relationship, for example – that when they do blow up, they become lodged in the collective consciousness never to be forgotten.
But dozens of other royal scandals have been covered up or viiisuppressed to some degree by an establishment that is famous for its determination to keep royal secrets, well, secret.
This book is the first in-depth look at the outrageous behaviour of not just the royals themselves but also palace officials, courtiers, household servants and hangers-on. Covering existing royal palaces in some depth as well as taking a briefer look at scandals linked to long-vanished royal residences such as Whitehall, Nonsuch and Kings Langley, Scandals of the Royal Palaces also includes new information on well-known and not-so-well-known scandals, including those that have only recently been revealed in detail through the release of previously secret official papers.
Political, social, financial and sexual scandals have been linked to Britain’s royal palaces for centuries – from Edward II potentially being killed because of his attraction to men to drug-fuelled and lesbian queens, perjurers, liars, thieves and even Nazi sympathisers, the royal residences have seen it all.
The behaviour of today’s royals seems perpetually to threaten scandal; three of HRH Queen Elizabeth’s children are divorced following adulterous affairs and one was the friend of a notorious paedophile. Meanwhile, the two sons of the Prince of Wales – himself no stranger to scandal – have publicly fallen out with the press and with each other.
As this book will show, scandal and the royal family have always been strange and not-so-strange bedfellows, and key to the sometimes extraordinary scandals the royals have become involved in are the palaces in which they live. Free to move between some of the most luxurious homes in England – Windsor ixCastle, Kensington Palace, Balmoral and Buckingham Palace, to name but four – and living in a world of excessive deference and financial security, members of the royal family find it impossible to resist the lure of flattery and personal power. Since they are often unhappy in their gilded cages it is perhaps no wonder that down the ages royal men and women have used their position and influence to get what they want – whether that be sex, drugs or money – while hoping to maintain their reputations as moral leaders.
Readers may ask, why a book about royal scandals, many of which are already well known? First, new information is always becoming available. Second, interpretations and our understanding of the past change as society changes. We are far more accepting of same-sex relationships today, for example, than we ever were in the past. We are also far less deferential to the royal family. Even fifty years ago biographers of members of the royal family tended to gloss over their subjects’ sexual peccadilloes.
Few today would think it a good thing always to suppress the misdeeds of royal individuals just because they happen to be royal. The sense that we are all equal is far stronger now than it was historically when the sole aim of the establishment was to protect the reputation of public figures by whatever means necessary. Where biographers and historians in the past felt their role was to uphold the dignity of members of the royal family by suppressing anything deemed to be damaging to their reputations, we now see that a warts-and-all picture is far more accurate and interesting.
The truth is that we have come a long way – so far, indeed, xthat in 2018 the royal family happily announced the marriage between Ivar Mountbatten, a cousin of the Queen, and his partner James Coyle. Perhaps what makes this even more extraordinary – and further evidence of just how far we have come in our attitudes and values – is that Ivar’s former wife, Penny Mountbatten, gave her ex-husband away.
The world is a healthier place since the death of Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Ivar’s ancestor, who spent his life concealing from the public and his friends his promiscuous taste for young men; a taste he was happy to indulge to an extraordinary degree safe in the knowledge that no newspaper would ever print anything he did not like.
We live in an age of far greater freedom; freedom to discuss the lives, loves and indiscretions of the most famous family in the world, a family whose members – as we will see – have intrigued and embarrassed, outraged and entranced us for centuries.
CHAPTER ONE
THE KING AND HIS HUSBAND
‘Is it not strange that he is thus bewitched?’
Christopher Marlowe,Edward II
Visitors to London are sometimes confused by the fact that the British Parliament meets in the Palace of Westminster, a building that is obviously not a palace at all. In fact, the name has survived where the palace, in the sense of a royal residence, has not. We know that the late Saxon kings including Cnut and Edward the Confessor lived in a palace where the ‘palace’ of Westminster now stands. The area was once known as Thorney Island, a marshy area, criss-crossed by streams and surrounded by mudflats but which lay at an important and strategic crossing point on the River Thames. Edward the Confessor built the first palace there. He also built, probably simultaneously, the great minster or church – Westminster Abbey – which still stands, though much altered, today.
It is difficult today to visualise the very early palace because 2over succeeding centuries it gradually expanded until it sprawled from the river across almost to St James’s Park in one direction and from the Jewel Tower, which still exists, to Charing Cross in the other. The palace eventually surrounded the abbey itself and continued past the Jewel Tower to what is now Great College Street. Beyond the outer wall, which followed the route of modern Great College Street, was a narrow path and a water-filled ditch, the remains of which were discovered during work in the 1970s.
The fact that the minster and the palace were almost coterminous in this early period simply reflects the closeness between the king and the church, between temporal and spiritual power. And it was to the old palace at Westminster that the King’s Council (the Curia Regis), the forerunner of Parliament, was summoned whenever the king felt it was necessary. Nothing remains of the buildings from the time of Edward the Confessor or indeed from the time of William I, but William II’s magnificent Westminster Hall still exists and it was there that the king met his council. Of course, during the medieval period, the king tended to move almost continually around the country and ministers and advisers would follow him, but the Palace of Westminster along with the Tower of London were his London residences.
By modern standards, the old medieval palace would have seemed sparsely furnished with simple wooden furniture and chests but also rich fabric hangings dyed in surprisingly bright colours. Visitors to the meticulously restored rooms at the Tower of London can get a more accurate idea of what the 3king’s apartments at Westminster might have looked like. But we should remember that important items, such as the king’s bed, were deliberately made in such a way that they could easily be dismantled to be carried with the king on his never-ending journeys around the country.
By the time of Edward II (1284–1327), the earls who had formed the Curia Regis had been joined by representatives of the towns and boroughs across England. This Model Parliament, as it was known, had been introduced in 1295 under Edward I and arguably began a long process of democratisation which continues to this day with attempts to remove hereditary peers from the House of Lords.
These early Parliaments were not recognisably Parliaments in the modern sense. They met irregularly, usually when the king needed money. In return for Parliament agreeing to introduce taxes to pay for the king’s wars, the king agreed to listen to the grievances and petitions of his more important subjects.
But although the old Palace of Westminster looms large in the popular imagination as the setting for many of the most tumultuous scenes of Edward II’s extraordinary life, he actually spent a great deal more time at his palace at Kings Langley in Hertfordshire, of which not a trace survives today.
* * *
The modern village of Kings Langley is twenty-one miles from the Palace of Westminster. It gets its name from the palace built there, on lands formerly owned by the Abbey of St Albans but 4acquired by Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I, in 1276. Work on the palace, which was situated at the top of a hill to the west of the village, probably began shortly thereafter. By 1308, a year after Edward II’s coronation, a Dominican priory had been established next to the new palace – here as elsewhere it was important that king and church should seem almost coterminous.
Surviving records from 1291–92 reveal that the great hall at Kings Langley was decorated with ‘fifty-four shields and a picture of four knights seeking a tournament’. The palace included private apartments for the king and queen, which would have looked much like the recreated royal apartments we see at the Tower of London today.
Though he was born hundreds of miles away at Caernarfon Castle, Edward II spent most of his early years at Kings Langley and it was always his favourite palace. It was also to be the final resting place of the man for whom he was forced to give up his throne.
According to the Kings Langley History Society, the palace included:
three courts. The great court contained the principal royal apartments which included the hall and chapel, prince’s chamber and queen’s chamber. The domestic buildings [included a] bakery, larder, roasting house and saucery in addition to the Great Kitchen. There were also stables, barns and mills, a hunting lodge and Great and Little Parks and gardens.
Through the reigns of Edward III and Richard II, the palace 5was repaired and expanded. But its associations with Edward II and with the ill-fated Richard II, murdered at Pontefract and initially buried at Kings Langley, may have made the place seemed cursed, for by the time of Henry VIII, the palace had fallen into near-ruin.
Today, though the site is officially listed as an ancient monument, nothing remains of the palace. But as the wind blows across the open hilltop, it is easy to imagine Edward arriving with his favourite, Piers Gaveston (c.1284–1312), through the thick woodland that once covered the area.
* * *
Despite their fame, or in some cases infamy, we know relatively little about the personal lives of English medieval kings. The Plantagenets ruled England from 1154 to 1485 and we know a great deal about their wars, their marriages and indeed about the great constitutional changes, such as Magna Carta, that occurred during their reigns, but the details of their private passions are more difficult to trace. There is, however, an exception – Edward II.
The story of Piers Gaveston and Edward II has been told so often but historians take different, sometimes vehemently opposing, views about what really went on between the two men. As recently as the 1960s, authors tended to skirt over the issue of whether or not Edward’s relationship with Gaveston was physical. This was a reflection not of the existence or otherwise of evidence about a physical relationship; it was evidence that, even 6in the 1960s, homosexuality was still a subject many people felt it was improper even to discuss.
Members of the royal family were known to have been gay or bisexual – Elizabeth II’s great-uncle Albert, for example – but it was not done to write about these things or to expose someone unless they were so indiscreet that exposure and condemnation became inevitable. Homosexuality was a fact of life, especially aristocratic life; everyone was aware of it, but the point was not to discuss it and not to get caught. Hypocrisy did not matter. The MPs Jeremy Thorpe and Tom Driberg, later Baron Bradwell, are good examples. Both were prominent public figures – Thorpe an Old Etonian and rising political star, Driberg a peer – yet both were able to continue their respectable lives despite their friends’ and colleagues’ full awareness that they were behaving in ways that, at the time, were criminal. Driberg got away with it. Thorpe was not so lucky; having become embroiled in numerous gay affairs, his life fell apart when he was accused of having conspired to murder a troublesome former lover. Thorpe and Driberg, though influential establishment figures, still had to seem to be obeying the rules or at least not get caught disobeying them. Not so for monarchs in late medieval England. Their lives were lived in the public arena, an arena in which keeping secrets was all but impossible.
* * *
Born on 25 April 1284, Edward II was just twenty-three when his father died and he became king. As the fourth son of Edward I, 7he was never destined for the throne; but for the deaths of his older brothers, he might have lived in relative obscurity.
From the start, his reign was characterised by personal, political and military difficulties that he seemed ill-equipped to deal with. Within months of becoming king, Edward had invested Gaveston, a Gascon nobleman, with the title Earl of Cornwall. Edward’s older advisers whose titles were far more ancient were incensed. The situation grew worse almost daily as a man seen as an upstart became the centre of Edward’s public and private life. Gaveston was given jewels, money, land and titles at such a pace and in such an extravagant fashion that rumours began to spread that the two men were lovers.
It is easy to dismiss this as an accusation invented long after Edward’s death simply to further blacken the name of a man who was seen for many reasons as a failed king. Over time, the stories of successful monarchs tend to be embellished so that it can seem as if they could do no wrong; over time, failed kings become ever more useless, ever more monstrous. This was true, for example, of Richard II, deposed for sheer incompetence, and Richard III, defeated at Bosworth by Henry Tudor but not before he had apparently murdered the princes in the Tower of London.
The truth about Edward II is that he failed to understand that although he was a monarch with the right to rule as he chose, he could not survive without the support of the group of aristocrats just below him in the ranks of the powerful. These aristocrats – the so-called barons – didn’t mind what Edward did to those below them, but they saw their own privileges as 8sacrosanct regardless of the power of the king. Which is why, in 1311, some twenty-one of the great landowning noblemen drew up a document known as the Ordinances.
One of the first written attempts to restrict the powers of the monarch, the Ordinances focused mainly on financial matters and aimed to remove the right of the king to appoint whomever he liked without consultation. Clearly, both these areas of the king’s power related directly to the manner in which Edward had appointed and promoted Piers Gaveston. Having agreed to the terms of the Ordinances, Edward seems to have realised that the forces ranged against him were too formidable to resist and he also agreed to Gaveston’s banishment. This was, as it were, merely a tactical retreat and by 1313, Gaveston was back in England. The great landowning earls had had enough. Gaveston was kidnapped and quickly executed by the second most powerful man in the land, Edward’s cousin Thomas, Earl of Lancaster.
Around this time Edward’s personal difficulties were made worse by the rebellion of Robert the Bruce in Scotland. Edward’s army met the Bruce army at Bannockburn in 1314 and Edward was defeated. Had he won this decisive battle, his personal history might have been very different – a great military leader could arguably do as he pleased; a military failure could not. Certainly, Edward’s reputation would have been enhanced rather than fatally damaged. With Edward’s loss of Scotland – a loss blamed personally on him – the Earl of Lancaster began to behave as if he were the king or at least the king of northern England.
So, on the one side we have Edward, still raging over the death 9of his favourite, and on the other is the Earl of Lancaster, who is now Edward’s bitter enemy. A third group of earls led by Aymer De Valence tried to make peace between the two factions.
* * *
Edward’s need for male favourites seems at this time almost pathological. With Gaveston out of the way, Edward might have focused his attention on his political difficulties, especially with regard to Scotland. Instead, he was soon obsessing about a new male favourite, or rather two male favourites: Hugh le Despenser (1261–1326) and his son, also Hugh (c.1287–1326). They became replacements for the lost Gaveston.
Despenser the Elder, later the Earl of Winchester, had been a friend and adviser to Edward’s father and was one of a small number of barons who had supported Edward II in the row over Gaveston. Despenser the Younger had actually supported the barons in their claims against Gaveston and their insistence that he be exiled. But the shifting sands of politics and personal favouritism soon brought him close to Edward and in a pattern that parallels remarkably closely the king’s behaviour towards Gaveston, the Despensers began to receive numerous gifts and honours. Though the younger Despenser was seen as the more corrupt, his father also became the focus of huge resentment.
At this distance in time, it seems extraordinary that the Despensers, both father and son, could not see the dangers of becoming Edward’s favourites. By accepting the king’s extravagant gifts – including castles, titles and vast estates in Wales 10and elsewhere – father and son were always going to be accused of corruption, while the king would be accused of lack of judgement.
Inevitably, Edward’s obsession with his new favourites led to rebellion. The barons insisted the Despensers be exiled and they left England in 1321, less than a decade after Gaveston’s execution. But in an act of almost suicidal stupidity and to the fury of Edward’s wife Isabella (c.1295 –1358), Thomas of Lancaster and other barons, the king allowed the Despensers to return to England barely a year later.
Rebellion led to war and Edward’s army met the defiant Thomas of Lancaster at Boroughbridge in Yorkshire in 1322. Lancaster was defeated and executed by Edward – an act widely seen as revenge for Gaveston’s death.
Unable to learn from his own past mistakes, Edward continued to reward the Despensers with gifts and titles. He formally revoked the Ordinances and seemed to lose any sense that he might be making enemies. His own queen eventually lost patience and while on a diplomatic mission to Paris in 1325, Isabella switched sides and became the mistress of one of Edward’s greatest enemies, Roger Mortimer, a man who had gone into exile to avoid the same fate as Thomas of Lancaster.
A year later Mortimer invaded England with the full support of Isabella, defeated Edward and executed the Despensers. Edward was forced to abdicate and his son became Edward III. For centuries it was believed that Edward II was murdered in Berkeley Castle in 1327, but there is some evidence to suggest he 11survived until 1330 after secretly leaving England. This theory is based on a letter written by Italian bishop Manuele Fieschi to Edward III and discovered in an old archive in the 1880s. Fieschi claims Edward escaped abroad after 1327 and, although there is little additional evidence to support the claim, it has the support of a number of historians.
Curiously given her role in deposing her own husband, Isabella insisted on being buried with Edward II’s heart and wearing the mantle she had worn when she married him – acts hardly suggestive of a hatred for her husband.
* * *
When Edward was born, no one imagined that later in life he would be engulfed in scandal, but from the perspective of the twenty-first century it becomes clearer that the warning signs were there from very early on. From his teenage years and long before Gaveston became an issue, Edward broke the rules. It was almost as if he needed to live dangerously or needed constantly to provoke those around him unless he favoured them personally. He was a creature of extremes: if he hated a man, he was known to be vengeful; if he favoured someone, he would hear nothing against them.
Contemporaneous chronicles describe the young Edward as tall, good looking and immensely strong. He might, on the face of it, have been just the sort of king his contemporaries would have most admired – after all, this was an age in which kings 12were still expected to show personal strength and bravery. It was unthinkable that a king should choose not to personally lead his troops in battle.
Although he was routed by Robert the Bruce – a serious black mark against him – Edward did defeat his cousin Thomas of Lancaster at Boroughbridge and there is no contemporaneous suggestion that he was anything other than physically brave.
The great scandal of Edward’s youth was that his strength and physical prowess were directed in ways seen as disgraceful and demeaning: he loved music and dancing, which was just about acceptable, but he also developed a taste for physical activities that astonished those around him.
According to The Chronicle of Lanercost, an anonymous Latin history of England and Scotland covering the years 1201–1346 and probably written or compiled at Lanercost Priory in Cumbia, Edward’s private enthusiasms included hedging and ditching, rowing, bricklaying, cart driving, thatching and shoeing horses. These were the occupations of peasants and it was unseemly and undignified for a king even to notice such occupations let alone take part in them. Edward’s contemporaries would undoubtedly have agreed with Sir Walter Raleigh who singled out only one activity at which a king needed to excel: ‘There is no art or other knowledge so seemly or necessary for a prince, as the art military.’
Even today there is an echo of this tradition in the royal family. Elizabeth II’s three sons all spent some time doing military service, as did her grandsons William and Harry, and if one looks at certain regiments (the Brigade of Guards and the Royal 13Green Jackets, for example), it is easy to find officers from very grand landed families who speak of ‘the profession of arms’ in a way that Sir Walter Raleigh and monarchs of earlier ages would have understood.
Just as there were punishments for peasants who behaved in ways that were inappropriate to their station in life, so there were punishments for members of the nobility who behaved in ways that were seen as demeaning to their status. Edward’s demeaning behaviour was a problem not just because it reflected badly on him as an individual king but because it reflected badly on the institution of the monarchy.
It is difficult to appreciate today the extent to which the medieval court was a public arena. Indeed, the idea of privacy in the modern sense did not exist at this time – the Latin root of the word ‘privacy’ suggests not a comfortable quiet time with friends and family but instead isolation and the absence of others, a meaning that survives in the word ‘privation’.
There is also the importance of form; noblemen stood intensely on their dignity. Servants who showed disrespect to their lord could and probably would be killed. Any perceived slight might bring a violent physical response – knights might go to war with each other over such things. In 1609, for example, Sir George Wharton and Sir James Stewart, who had been great friends up to this point, fell out over a game of cards. They fought a duel the next day in Islington fields and both were killed. The question of honour (which still plagues many parts of the world today) survived into the nineteenth century when two gentlemen would fire pistols at each other from point-blank range if 14they felt their honour had been impugned. Medieval noblemen were far more sensitive to these things, even if the perceived lack of respect emanated from a king.
Edward had been made Prince of Wales in 1301 – indeed, he was the first of that title – and presumably at this stage, since he was not yet king, the nobles would have felt able to tolerate his eccentricities. They probably assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that he would grow out of these absurd lowly interests and adopt the proper pursuits of the nobility: hunting, jousting and war. But this was not to be.
Our source for much of Edward’s life is The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough, first published in 1687. We know very little about Guisborough, but he was almost certainly a canon at Guisborough Priory in Yorkshire and though his account of Edward’s reign may be based on earlier, now lost, accounts by others, it fits a general picture of a man at loggerheads with his family and his duty and with what was expected of him. Indeed, if the Guisborough chronicle is to be believed, Edward seems to have been an early example of what looks very much like teenage rebellion. He was certainly what biographer Kathryn Warner calls ‘the unconventional king’ and this unconventionality was perceived both then and in the centuries that followed his death as scandalous.
* * *
The great question about Edward is simply this: was his relationship with Piers Gaveston, and later on with the younger 15Despenser, simply a question of friendship, the bond of brothers who just happened to get along wonderfully well, or were these relationships a combination of intense affection combined with physical love? In other words, did this deeply unconventional king have a same-sex relationship with Gaveston at least if not Despenser?
Recent biographers have taken opposing views. In his Edward II the Man: A Doomed Inheritance, Stephen Spinks argues that Edward did indeed have a physical relationship with Gaveston. By contrast, California State University academic Jochen Burgtorf believes the two men were simply platonic friends. Kathryn Warner, in her book Edward II: The Unconventional King, takes a middle view and thinks we will simply never know for sure. The only direct, unequivocal evidence that Gaveston and Edward were lovers comes from Jean Froissart’s Chronicles, which were written long after Edward’s death, probably in the last quarter of the fourteenth century. Froissart himself was not born until 1337 and we know that much of his material, like that of Walter of Guisborough, was copied from earlier sources. With these caveats in mind, we must approach Froissart with caution, but he is unequivocal in his description of the relationship between Gaveston and Edward as ‘sodomitic’. Against this we must weigh the fact that by the time Froissart was writing his chronicles, the conventional judgement of Edward had become fixed: he had failed as a king and must therefore be guilty of every possible sin.
Even allowing for differences of opinion among professional scholars and uncertain historical evidence, one thing remains 16both true and remarkable: Edward’s friendship with his male favourite was intense and passionate. Stephen Spinks sums the situation up neatly: ‘While no evidence explicitly states that they were lovers, the action and policies of the king … give a clear indication as to motivation.’ Spinks continues: ‘The act of same-sex intimacy was not tolerated. However, Edward was a king and his position allowed him the freedom to express his intimate attachment to Gaveston in ways that many at the time were not able to do.’
Edward’s rational side – the side that told him his very position as king might be threatened if he pursued his passion for Gaveston – was overthrown by what can be described only as a passion that must have included a physical element. It is a situation that has many parallels in recent times – the brilliant parliamentarian Jeremy Thorpe, for example, threw all rational considerations aside in his passion for Norman Scott. Thorpe took terrible risks with his career and his public standing by sending passionate letters on House of Commons notepaper to both Scott and dozens of other male lovers at a time when homosexual acts represented a serious criminal offence. Despite the enormous value he put on his career, Thorpe, like Edward II, could do no other than respond to a passion that almost always overrode sense and reason – and it was the physical element of this passion that was key to its excessive nature. Likewise, Edward simply could not stop himself loading Gaveston down with land, titles, jewels and money – objective manifestations of the extent of his passion. Had he and Gaveston simply been friends, the advice and warnings of powerful men across England 17would surely not have been ignored and though Edward might still have ennobled his friend and even made him rich, he would not, perhaps, have ignored at his peril the code that governed the behaviour of kings and noblemen.
Edward’s greatest act of folly given the standards of the time was to leave Gaveston as Regent of England during the king’s absence in France in 1308. It is difficult to believe that Edward had no idea that he would enrage his advisers by this act. Most of the powerful men who surrounded Edward had every reason to resent taking orders, however temporarily, from a young Frenchman from an obscure family. They knew that according to the rules, one of them should have been made Regent in Edward’s absence. Breaking this rule simply told the barons that Edward was either mad or bad or both: in short, he was not fit to be king.
* * *
Although Froissart’s reference to a ‘sodomitic’ relationship dates from long after Edward and Gaveston had died, there were contemporaneous references that went almost as far. The anonymous author of the Annales Paulini 1307–1340, for example, writes under the entry for 1308 that Edward’s love for Gaveston was ‘beyond measure’.
Power and sexual desire combined are especially corrupting on a personal as well as a political level, which explains why the powerful have always used their position to extract favours, especially sexual favours, from lesser mortals.
18By 1577, the year Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland were published, historians were simply repeating and embellishing tales about Edward that had been handed down for centuries and in an age when something written down in a previous century had the authority bestowed by long use, Edward’s name was increasingly blackened. Soon nothing good could be said about him as either a king or a man.
The modern idea of looking for historical evidence to back up statements of fact was still a long way off and chroniclers simply repeated what had always been said. Holinshed writes:
But now concerning the demeanour of this new king, whose disordered manners brought himself and many others unto destruction; we find that in the beginning of his government, though he was of nature given to lightness, yet being restrained with the prudent advertisements of certain of his councillors, to the end that he might shew some likelihood of good proof, he counterfeited a kind of gravity, vertue and modesty; but yet he could not thoroughly be so bridled, but that forthwith he began to play divers wanton and light parts, at the first indeed not outrageously, but by little and little, and that covertly. For having revoked again into England his old mate the said Piers de Gaveston, he received him into most high favour, creating him Earl of Cornwall, and Lord of Man, his principal secretary, and Lord Chamberlain of the realm, through whose company and society he was suddenly so corrupted, that he burst out into most heinous vices; for then using the said Piers as a procurer of his disordered doings, he began to have his nobles in no regard, to 19set nothing by their instructions, and to take small heed unto the good government of the commonwealth, so that within a while, he gave himself to wantonness, passing his time in voluptuous pleasure, and riotous excess: and to help them forward in that kind of life, the foresaid Piers, who (as it may be thought, he had sworn to make the king to forget himself, and the state, to the which he was called) furnished his court with companies of jesters, ruffians, flattering parasites, musicians, and other vile and naughty ribalds, that the king might spend both days and nights in jesting, playing, blanketing, and in such other filthy and dishonourable exercises: and moreover, desirous to advance those that were like to him self, he procured for them honourable offices, all which notable preferments and dignities, since they were ill bestowed, were rather to be accounted dishonourable than otherwise.
The references to ‘most heinous vices’ and ‘filthy and dishonourable exercises’ are as close as Holinshed gets to specifying the accusation of sodomy levelled at Edward. Froissart as we have seen was far more direct in his accusation of sexual impropriety. Christopher Marlowe’s famous play Edward II was published in 1594 and is damning, but playwrights are notorious for embellishing for dramatic purposes. That Edward’s flaws were fixed for ever in the public mind can also be seen in succeeding generations. In A Chronicle of the Kings of England, published in 1643, Richard Baker writes: ‘Never did a prince come to a crown with more applause of nobility and people … yet seldom doth advancement in honour alter men to the better; to the worse 20often and commonly then when it is joined with an authority that sets them above controlment.’
That is the key to Edward’s problem: he was, or felt he was, above ‘controlment’.
For Baker, the barons had no choice but to take matters into their own hands:
[Gaveston] now made the king not only more vicious than he would otherwise have been, but vicious where otherwise he would not have been; and therefore great cause in regard of the king, to remove Gaveston from his company; and no less in regard to the lords themselves; for Gaveston advancing was their debasing; his greatness with the king made them but ciphers; but in regard to the common-wealth most cause of all; for while the king was altogether ruled by Gaveston and Gaveston himself was altogether irregular, the common-wealth could have but little hope of justice; but was sure to suffer as long as Gaveston was suffered.
But Baker does at least acknowledge Edward’s good points: ‘He was fair of body and of great strength … he was extreme in nothing but loving … he was rather unfortunate than unhappy … two vertues were eminent in him above all his predecessors, continence and abstinence: so continent that he left no base issue behind him.’
Not leaving any illegitimate children might seem a virtue but this was unusual and it may well be a back-handed compliment as kings were almost expected to show their virility by having 21mistresses and making them pregnant. Could it be that having fulfilled his dynastic duty by having heirs with his wife he did not need to have a mistress since mistresses were about pleasure and Edward sought his pleasure with Gaveston?
* * *
By the nineteenth century, historians tended to be more euphemistic about exactly what Edward was accused of – British Victorian writers could not bring themselves to write unambiguously about a subject so far beyond the pale as homosexuality. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that writers felt able to discuss in an open and honest manner whether or not Edward II was gay or at least bisexual. The latter seems to be the current view. Certainly, like all medieval kings, Edward saw marriage as a purely political and dynastic necessity. In modern times such ‘lavender’ marriages – between a man and a woman whereby one or both of them are predominantly or exclusively gay – were and no doubt still are commonplace. The past century is littered with examples of politicians and members of the royal family who knew that in order to conform and be successful, they needed to be married and preferably have children. Becoming Prime Minister was for a long time seen as virtually impossible if you happened to be a single man – Edward Heath is a rare exception but he was plagued by rumours about his sexuality, rumours that damaged his effectiveness as Prime Minister.
Rumours during his lifetime also plagued Edward II’s reign and those rumours continued and were made more lurid in the 22centuries after his death, blinding historians – until recently – to the real merits and demerits of his rule.
The truth is that the loss of Scotland to Robert the Bruce probably did more to blacken Edward’s historical reputation as an effective king than his hedging and ditching and even his relationship with Gaveston.
Scandal is rather like a snowball – once in motion, it picks up mass and momentum until it becomes unstoppable and, whatever the objective truth, even assuming such truth could be unearthed, members of the royal family whose reputations are badly damaged can be sure of one thing: they are very rarely rehabilitated.
CHAPTER TWO
TRACES REMAIN: PALACES RISE AND FALL
‘Nothing but a heap of Houses, erected at divers times, and of different Models, which they made Contiguous in the best Manner they could for the Residence of the Court…’
Samuel de Sorbière (1615–70) on Whitehall
It is perhaps worth taking a brief pause at this point to look at the monarch’s two most important London residences in this early period; key locations where Edward II and later kings and queens spent their days discussing affairs of state, meeting their ministers and friends and gossiping and intriguing.
During the tumultuous years of Edward’s love-tortured reign, he spent much of his time as we have seen at Kings Langley, the palace where as the Prince of Wales he had been allowed to indulge his love of manual labour. While in London, Edward lived at the old Palace of Westminster, completed in 1099, or the Tower of London. Of the old Palace of Westminster, only Westminster Hall and the Jewel Tower still survive, and it was at 24Westminster Hall, its interior then brightly painted, that much of the business of government – including angry scenes between the barons and Edward and Gaveston – would have played out.
Much of the old Palace of Westminster burned down in 1512. Henry VIII (1491–1547), needing another palace nearby, looked jealously to the west of his fire-ravaged residence. And when he looked west, Henry saw where Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, referred to at the time as second in wealth and power only to the king, lived at York Place, the London residence of the archbishops of York. York Place was situated towards the Trafalgar Square end of modern Whitehall. Wolsey, who among his numerous titles was also the Archbishop of York, had expanded and enriched York Place to reflect his own importance, but this was a dangerous game to play and when Wolsey failed to persuade the Pope to annul the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry accused him of treachery. This was a standard ploy for Henry when someone had displeased him and everyone knew it was politically motivated, but that did not lessen the effect of the accusation. By 1530 Wolsey had been removed from all his offices and Henry conveniently helped himself to York Place.
Many of the structures that made up York Place were built from white stone and as a result, by the early 1530s, the king’s new residence had earned itself a nickname: Whitehall. In succeeding centuries, it was to expand piecemeal until the Palace of Whitehall covered an astonishing seventy-three acres and boasted more than 1,500 rooms, but it was a mishmash of styles 25with no coherent overall architectural principle. Its labyrinthine layout – it took months, apparently, for new residents to find their way around – meant that for James I and Charles II it provided a perfect setting for their scandalous private lives.
At the end of the seventeenth century Edward Hatton (c.1664–1733) describes the importance of Whitehall compared with other royal residences:
Heretofore there have been many courts of our kings and queens in London and Westminster, as the Tower of London, where some believe Julius Cæsar lodged, and William the Conqueror; in the Old Jewry, where Henry VI.; Baynard’s Castle, where Henry VII.; Bridewell, where John and Henry VIII.; Tower Royal, where Richard II. and Stephen; the Wardrobe, in Great Carter Lane, where Richard III. [resided]; also at Somerset House, kept by Queen Elizabeth, and at Westminster, near the Hall, where Edward the Confessor, and several other kings, kept their courts. But of later times the place for the Court, when in town, was mostly Whitehall, a very pleasant and commodious situation, looking into St James’s Park, the canal, &c., on the west, and the noble river of Thames on the east; Privy Garden, with fountain, statues, &c., and an open prospect to the statue at Charing Cross on the north.
It is difficult now to appreciate the extent and variety of the Palace of Whitehall – it was almost completely destroyed by another fire in 1698 – but if one imagines a mix of St James’s Palace 26and Hampton Court Palace, combined perhaps with Knole House in Kent, one would have a fair idea of that long-vanished architectural oddity.
Added to the mix of courtyards, alleys and jumbled houses that made up the old palace, there was a jousting area, a cock pit, a bowling green, tennis courts, riverside walks and formal gardens. All that survives today of the later palace (other than Westminster Hall and the Jewel Tower) is the Banqueting Hall of 1622, so a late addition, but cleaned and seen in the sparkling light of a mid-summer’s day, its pale stone still gives us a glimpse of what the old Palace of Whitehall must have been like.
Edward II and other medieval monarchs spent far less time at the Tower of London, largely because it had developed into more of a fortress than a sumptuous home even at this early period. But the Tower still held enormous symbolic power, which is why, for example, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I spent a night or two there before their coronations.
In
