Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/353

A.D. 1308.] to the Earl of Gloucestor, and appointed him lord chamberlain. All this did not seem to satisfy the king's desire of heaping honours and wealth upon him; and he is reported to have said that, if it wore possible, he would give him the kingdom itself.

It would have been strange if the favourite, under such a rain of favour and fortune, had displayed more wisdom than his royal friend. It would have required a mind of peculiar fortitude and moderation not to have been thrown off the balance by such a rush of greatness, and Gaveston was not of that character. He was gay, vain, and volatile, and rejoiced in the opportunity of humbling and insulting all who had real claims to superiority over himself. The great and proud nobles who had surrounded the throne of Edward I. in the midst of its victorious splendour, and who had contributed by their counsels and their swords to place it above all others in Europe, naturally beheld with ill-concealed resentment this unworthy concentration of the royal grace and munificence in one so far inferior to them in birth and merit; and Gaveston, instead of endeavouring to appease that resentment, did all in his power to exasperate it by every species of ostentation and parade of his advantages. Vanity, profusion, and rapacity of fresh acquisition all united in him. He kept up the style and establishment of a prince; he treated the gravest officers of state and the possessors of the noblest names with studied insolence. He imagined that in possessing the favour of the king nothing could again shake him, and therefore he was as little solicitous to conciliate friends as he was careless to make enemies. At every joust and tournament ho gloried in foiling the greatest of the English nobility and princes, and did not spare them in their defeat, but ridiculed them to his companions with jest and sarcasm. This could not last long without combining the whole court and kingdom for his destruction, and perhaps for his master's.

The young king was bound, by the laws of feudalism, to pass over to France, and do homage to Philip for his province of Guienne, and, by those of chivalry, to fulfil, as early as possible, the contract of marriage with the Princess Isabella, to whom he had been long affianced. This was a contract into which his father had been led in the course of his ambitious projects, and for which he had broken off the previous contract with Guy, Count of Flanders, for his daughter Philippa. It was a marriage projected in cruel perfidy, the old count being left to the malice of his enemies, and to perish in prison in his eighty-first year, and the fair, forsaken Philippa, who was really attached to Edward, dying of a broken heart about two years before this ill-fated espousal. The results of this marriage wore as disastrous as its arrangement was unprincipled. Isabella soon came to entertain a deep contempt for and deeper hatred of her husband, and remains branded to all time as the accomplice in, if not the instigator of, his murder; and from this alliance sprung those claims on the crown of France, which steeped the soil of that country with blood, and raised an enmity between the two nations prolific of ages of carnage, bitterness, and misery.

Great Seal of Edward II.

Isabella of France was reputed to be the most beautiful woman of her time, and she was as high-spirited and intriguing as she was handsome. The royal couple were married on the 28th of January, 1308, with great pomp and ceremony, in the church of Our Lady of Boulogne, five kings and three queens being present on the occasion. No great affection appears to have existed on either side. Isabella could not fail to be already well aware of her husband's character, and she is said to have trusted to her influence to overturn the king's favour for Gaveston, and to be able to rule him and the kingdom herself. Edward, though wedded to the loveliest woman of the age, and surrounded by every species of festivity and rejoicing, evinced, on his part, no other desire than to get back as speedily as possible to his beloved Gaveston, to whom, in his absence, he had loft the management of the kingdom—a fresh indignity to his own royal kinsmen. The festal gaieties of the French court were suddenly broken off to gratify this impatient anxiety of the king to return, and the royal couple embarked for England, accompanied by a numerous routine of French noblesse, who came to attend the coronation.

Gaveston, accompanied by a great array of the English