I think that this is one of three main reasons the young Edward III was compelled to stage his coup at Nottingham Castle. Mortimer was acting as king in all but name, and clearly Isabella would have preferred to be the only Queen residing in England. Actually the Annales Paulini say about a quarter of a century later that Valois and Evreux went back to France and complained to Philip IV that Edward frequented Piers' couch more than the queen's.
Minor details, and not undermining your main point at all, just amending a little since I've been poking at the manuscripts lately - and yes, manuscripts plural! There is another witness to this section of the ms, and I need to work out whom at the BL I ought to notify of the fact that those couple of folios of the Murimuth copy in Add.
Partly on the strength of that extra copy - which goes up to - and partly on the strength of the change of hands in the Westminster manuscript at the same point, and partly because of internal literary qualities, it's fairly certain that that first section of it was actually written well before the next continuation, and probably fairly soon after That said, part of the reason it's clearly a discrete section is because it IS such a clearly defined story with a strong internal narrative which is made to serve a very particular purpose - and while it's strong on the detail and local colour, and therefore probably reasonably accurate in that regard, that isn't the same as being trustworthy when it comes to bias, of which it is very very full.
And another minor detail, which is more of a question mark than anything - the word used for 'couch' 'triclinium' is one I've never heard in medieval Latin before, and I'm not actually quite sure how it ought to be translated in that cultural context. In classical Latin it would be 'dining couch', but of course you don't have a dining couch in a medieval banquet hall.
Does it mean couch as in bed? Or should the emphasis be on dining and, since this occurs in the description of the banquet, should we assume that he's sitting at Piers' bench at the table? In either case, in the context of the passage and the author's concerns elsewhere , I think the emphasis is probably on Piers' inappropriate proximity to the king's body - not necessarily in a sexual way, but in terms of controlling access to it yes, yes, minds in the gutter, I know.
