CAERNARVON CASTLE.
Piers Gaveston.
This first English Prince of Wales led a most unhappy life, and his history illustrates in a most striking manner one of the classes of quarrels enumerated at the head of this chapter, namely, the disputes and contentions that often prevailed between the sovereign of the country and his principal nobles. While he was a young man he formed a very intimate friendship with another young man named Piers Gaveston. This Gaveston was a remarkably handsome youth, and very prepossessing and agreeable in his manners, and he soon gained a complete ascendency over the mind of young Edward. He was, however, very wild and dissolute in his habits, and the influence which he exerted upon Edward was extremely bad. As long as the common people only were injured by the lawless behavior of these young men, the king seems to have borne with them; but at last, in a riot in which they were concerned, they broke into the park of a bishop, and committed damage there which the king could not overlook. He caused his son, the young prince, to be seized and put into prison, and he banished Gaveston from the country, and forbade his son to have any thing more to do with him. This was in 1305, when the prince was twenty-one years of age.
Edward II. and his favorite.
Their wild and reckless behavior.
In 1307, two years later, the king died, and the prince succeeded him, under the title of King Edward the Second. He immediately sent for Gaveston to return to England, where he received him with the greatest joy. He made him a duke, under the title of Duke of Cornwall; and as for the bishop whose park he and Gaveston had broken into, and on whose complaint Gaveston had been banished, in order to punish him for these offenses, the young king seized him and delivered him into Gaveston's hands as a prisoner, and at the same time confiscated his estates and gave them to Gaveston. Gaveston sent the bishop about from castle to castle as a prisoner, according as his caprice or fancy dictated.
These things made the barons and nobles of England extremely indignant, for Gaveston, besides being a corrupt and dissipated character, was, in fact, a foreigner by birth, being a native of Gascony, in France. His character seemed to grow worse with his exaltation, and he and Edward spent all their time in rioting and excess, and in perpetrating every species of iniquity.
The king goes away to be married.
Edward had been for some time engaged to be married to the Princess Isabel, the daughter of the King of France. About six months after his accession to the throne he set off for France to be married. It was his duty, according to the ancient usages of the realm, to appoint some member of the royal family, or some prominent person from the ancient nobility of the country, to govern the kingdom as regent during his absence; but instead of this he put Gaveston in this place, and clothed him with all the powers of a viceroy.