Two royal proclamations from the early months of 1312 provide a very clear idea of the nature of Edward II's kingship, as he saw it, and of his relations with his kingdom. The first was issued at York on 18 January and referred to the laws and usages of the kingdom which Edward had sworn to uphold at his coronation.1 Five weeks later, on 24 February, a second order was issued at York, containing a proclamation of the peace in the following words:
We desire, as befits our royal majesty, and are bound by our oath to maintain and preserve whole and unharmed the rights of our royal crown, our royal dignity, and the peace and tranquillity of the Holy Church and whole people committed to our rule, and to resist with God's help all things that might occur to weaken the aforesaid rights or our royal dignity, or in breach or disturbance of the peace, or terror of our people.2
These two proclamations suggest that Edward II had a very strong sense of his royal status and of his rights and duties as king. This was the case throughout his reign, from the time of his coronation in 1308, which was carefully prepared and clearly meant a great deal to him, until the very end. Even in his last independent action, at Neath abbey on 10 November 1326, he still saw himself as king.3 Others did too: the difficulty with which he was finally removed as king in January 1327 and the reluctance with which many of those present accepted his removal show the durability of kingship however unsatisfactory or unworthy its holder.
Edward II could never be represented as one of the greatest of medieval English kings. There are no enduring legal reforms; no successful wars of conquest. There is no court as a centre of culture:4 despite his interest in architecture there are no great building projects to match the castles of his father's reign. The administrative reforms which marked his own reign came either as the result of pressure from opponents or as part of a general exercise in administrative tidying up with which he had little to do.
Whether he performed his duties as king as seriously as he regarded his status as king is more difficult to determine. The first proclamation may throw some light on that: it was evidently an unusual document since the chancery clerk noted that ‘this form was made by the king himself, and that he took the writs as soon as they were sealed and put them on his bed’.5 The remark of the bishop of Worcester in October 1320 that the king was rising unusually early and was contributing to the discussions of parliamentary business6 also suggests that he did not do so as a matter of course. As this book has attempted to show, Edward resisted with remarkable stubbornness and tenacity any attempt to restrict the powers of the monarchy. Although his voice does not echo through the records of government in the imperious way that his father's had done, it is unwise to assume that Edward II was neither interested in nor involved in the day-to-day business of government.7 But his activity was inclined to be sporadic and unpredictable and gave ample scope both for favourites as well as for others with better intentions (such as the earl of Pembroke) to exert influence over him.
Edward was however fortunate in having a number of able administrators at his command, men such as William Melton who had been with him since his youth, John de Hothum and Walter Stapeldon; nor was Walter Reynolds, his chancellor and then archbishop of Canterbury, who had also served him in his early years, as lacking in ability as the chroniclers would have us believe. Such men remained loyal to him and it was only in the final crisis of 1326–7 that they finally accepted the inevitability that Edward would lose his throne. Edward also inspired a remarkable degree of loyalty among the military members of his household, many of whom had served him when he was Prince of Wales or had known him well before he became king.8 Despite recent work on the unreliability of royal knights, it was only after Edward's victory in the civil war of 1321–2, and the brutality with which that victory was maintained, that royal knights deserted Edward's cause in significant numbers. As the plots to release Edward from captivity and the later attempts to portray him as a saint show, loyalty to him persisted in certain quarters after his deposition and even after his death.
Edward had considerable skill when it came to dividing his enemies and wearing down opposition until he got his way, as he did in the protracted negotiations with Thomas of Lancaster and his allies after the execution of Gaveston in 1312, and again in the negotiations in 1317–18. He was certainly helped by the calibre of his leading opponent, his first cousin the earl of Lancaster, whose character won him enemies and whose capabilities meant that he was even less suited for the work of government than Edward. Some may have thought of Lancaster as worthy of canonization after his defeat and death in 1322: few if any would have thought him worthy of veneration while he lived.
Edward also showed great determination at some moments of crisis, most especially in the civil war of 1321–2, but then threw away the fruits of victory by his vindictive treatment of his opponents. On other occasions, such as the Scottish campaigns of 1314, 1319 and 1322, his eagerness to go to war led to disaster and humiliation. His one major military success, against the Scots in Ireland in 1318, should not however be under-rated since it removed the very real possibility of a profound reshaping of political structures and relationships within and between the islands of Britain and Ireland. The victory owed something to the skill and application of his advisers in England but more to his supporters in Ireland.
Just as he enjoyed a surprising degree of loyalty until the closing years of the reign, so he was loyal to those he considered to be his friends. Unfortunately these friends sometimes became favourites, a danger which any medieval king was wise to avoid, and they diverted patronage and royal attention from others whose support Edward should also have cultivated. While Edward I had been if anything too niggardly in his distribution of patronage, his son was often too generous and succeeded only in creating resentment in those who went unrewarded and in making his court ‘a hotbed of political intrigue’.9 Edward's loyalty to Piers Gaveston may well have been based on a relationship of brotherhood, as Pierre Chaplais has argued, but whatever its basis it greatly embittered the politics of the early years of the reign and, after Gaveston's death in 1312, poisoned the politics of the next ten years as well. The two proclamations with which this conclusion began were not just resounding statements of Edward II's status and duties as king: they were also issued in the context of Edward's declaration that the sentence of exile upon Gaveston in 1311 had been contrary to law and that Edward was exercising his authority as king in recalling him to England.
Edward's loyalty and attachment to Gaveston were unwise and were pursued to an extreme which alienated many potential allies. Their relationship obscured the fact that Edward II had inherited many serious problems from the reign of his father, especially a heavy burden of debt and administrative confusion, both largely caused by the war with Scotland; and he inherited the war itself which was already going badly, which it was politically unthinkable to abandon, and which was to dominate much of his own reign. Edward II also inherited a deep-seated distrust among his leading subjects of the monarchy's good faith in accepting and implementing demands for reform, and a growing degree of popular disorder and resistance to taxation. Even though Edward was probably more ready to accept reform in 1308 than he has usually been credited with being, his willingness was soon overtaken by events. It has been well said that ‘Edward II sat down to the game of kingship with a remarkably poor hand, and he played it very badly’.10In fairness to him, however, even a more able king would have found the task a formidable and perhaps impossible one. It is also arguable that the political and administrative problems involved in governing the kingdom were starting to exceed the capacity of any king, other than the most able, especially if warfare added to their complexity, and that Edward II was unfortunate to be the first ruler fully to experience this.
His loyalty and attachment to Hugh Despenser the Younger had far more serious consequences. Edward's desire to destroy Lancaster blinded him to the dangerous ambitions of Despenser. Edward became ensnared by those ambitions and after 1322 had no choice but to follow the course set out for him by Despenser. Both men destroyed their enemies in 1322; both prospered and became immensely wealthy with the spoils of victory or royal patronage. What followed was not so much tyranny (of which Edward was never directly accused, even at the end of his reign) as a rapacious and harsh regime, which exploited the legal and administrative systems to its own advantage but also operated in a climate of conspiracy, intrigue and incipient revolt. The fates of both men became inextricably linked and they fell together in 1326–7. Much ink has been spilled on whether or not a sexual relationship existed first between Edward and Gaveston and secondly between him and Despenser.11 It seems to this writer unlikely that there was such a relationship with either favourite. While sodomy was used as a charge to blacken Despenser's name in 1326 and indirectly to blacken that of the king, there is no recorded gossip about such practices at Edward II's court. All the complaints about Edward's engagement in ‘improper pastimes’ relate to quite different activities, which today would be regarded as hobbies or mild eccentricities rather than matters for opprobrium.12
Edward's loyalty to and dependence on Despenser ultimately alienated his wife, Isabella, with whom he appears to have enjoyed a happy and fruitful marriage up to about 1322. Her liaison with Roger Mortimer of Wigmore in France and later in England may or may not have been sexual, but it is significant that Isabella appears to have retained affection for her husband, even after his deposition. It is certainly significant that many years later when her own turn came to die she chose to be buried in her wedding clothes13and that Edward's embalmed heart was placed within her funeral effigy.14
The fall of Edward II was also a consequence of his alienation after 1322 of an important section of the English nobility, including his own half-brothers, and of several of the leading clergy whose role earlier in the reign had generally been one of mediation. But it was brought about by foreign war too: not with Scotland, since that conflict had been contained since the truce agreed in 1323, but with France. Hitherto Edward had worked with considerable success to maintain good relations with France, whose kings were his queen's father or brothers, to enable him to use French mediation against his opponents at home and to ensure that French interference in the lands of the English crown in Gascony was kept in check. The accession to the French throne in 1322 of a new king who was determined to exercise his own rights in Gascony ended that policy and led to a war in which France had the strategic advantage. Although the English administration did quite well in organizing the defence of Gascony, Edward could not prosecute the war by leading an army to France as he intended, since he could not afford the risk of revolt in England against himself and Despenser during his absence. He could not even afford to cross to France for long enough to perform homage, and so was forced to allow his wife Isabella and his elder son and heir Edward to go to France in an attempt to make peace. The outcome was the invasion of England, followed by Edward II's imprisonment, deposition and death. Without the war with France, Edward II's rule might have lasted considerably longer than it did. The war however had one other consequence. Although France ‘won’ in the 1320s, the intense legal and military pressure it exerted on the English monarchy and in particular on the young Edward III, who spent a very formative period in France in 1325–6, probably contributed to the outbreak of the greater conflict between the two kingdoms ten years later and to the devastation of France which followed.15
Within England itself the politically inspired violence which led to the destruction of Gaveston, and to the executions, confiscations and violent deaths that marked the closing years of Edward II's reign, continued into the new reign: the St Paul's chronicler Adam Murimuth noted with bitterness that from the execution of Lancaster in 1322 to that of Roger Mortimer in 1330 no noble condemned to death had been allowed to speak in his own defence.16 The political fabric of England broke down in the 1320s so far that no magnate, and in the last resort not even the king himself, was safe. In 1330 the nobles who passed judgment on Roger Mortimer were clearly uneasy, and they were even more uneasy at judging men who were not their peers, asking that this should not be made a precedent.17 Edward III's revision of the law of treason in 1352 was undertaken to avoid similar situations arising in the future.18
So what in the end can we make of Edward II?19 It is fair to say that he was probably under-rated in his own time and has certainly been underrated since. His personality was complicated, which made (and makes) it all the more difficult to assess him fairly. He was not lacking in physical or moral courage. He was not stupid; he was probably at least as well educated as his father Edward I and his son Edward III; on occasions he spoke in public with eloquence and firmness, most notably perhaps at Amiens in July 1320 when his refusal to perform fealty in addition to homage for Aquitaine apparently reduced Philip V of France and his council to stunned silence. He was religious in a conventional way in much of his life, but there was also something of the holy man about him, which made the later story of his wanderings around Europe in the guise of a hermit and the attempt by Richard II to have him canonized at least seem plausible.20
As a king he was too able to be ignored but had too many weaknesses of character and behaviour to be a success. His ultimate legacy lay not in any constitutional formulas21 or in any growth in the importance of parliamentary institutions,22 but rather in the precedent set by his deposition, which poisoned English politics for generations to come.23 Edward II was an enigma in his time and in some respects he remains an enigma now,24 despite the vast quantity of available record and chronicle sources and the efforts of historians over the past century and more. Instead of Cuttino and Lyman's question ‘Where is Edward II?’,25 perhaps we should echo Jacques Le Goff's magisterial study of another complex and enigmatic monarch, St Louis, and ask in its place ‘Who was Edward II?’26
1 CCR, 1307–13, 448–9. The original French text is printed in Foedera, II, i, 153.
2 Foedera, II, i, 158, has the full original Latin text, as does PW, II, ii, App. 46–7. The calendared version in CCR, 1307–13, 450, has none of the significant detail.
3 Foedera, II, i, 647.
4 See Prestwich, ‘The court of Edward II’.
5 CCR, 1307–13, 448–9.
6 Register of Thomas de Cobham, ed. Pearce, 97–8.
7 One of Edward's practices was to issue orders orally. This could cause problems if the person concerned had to seek payment of a debt owed by the king and was unable to provide a written warrant: this was the case in 1330 when Edward's former butler Benedict of Fulsham sought payment for supplying wine; the same thing had happened to Stephen of Abingdon an earlier butler of Edward II: PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, E 175/2/216, items 19, 20. Edward's son and successor apparently followed a similar practice: Ormrod, ‘Richard de Bury’, 168–9.
8 See Tebbit, ‘Household knights’ (Ph.D.), ch. 1, ‘Recruitment and function’.
9 Prestwich, ‘The court of Edward II’, 73. Tensions were created, e.g., by Hugh Audley the Younger's failure to obtain the earldom of Cornwall in 1318–19 and Bartholomew de Badlesmere's ambition to become earl of Kent in 1320–1, while the ambitions of their rival Hugh Despenser the Younger were promoted.
10 Vita Edwardi Secundi, ed. Denholm-Young, Introduction, ix.
11 See the discussion in ch. 3 of this book and J. Burgtorf, ‘“With my life, his joyes began and ended”’, in Fourteenth Century England, v, ed. N. Saul (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2008), 31–51.
12 See ch. 2 of this book and Prestwich, ‘The court of Edward II’, 70–1.
13 Fryde, 269, n. 28; Tout, Chapters, v, 249; E 101/393/4.
14 The Grey Friars of London, ed. Kingsford, 7, 74–5.
15 Phillips, ‘Simon de Montfort’, 89.
16 Murimuth, 56; McKisack, The Fourteenth Century, 103.
17 PROME, Parliament of Nov. 1330, C 65/2, item 4; Phillips, ‘Simon de Montfort’, 79–89.
18 Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III, 48–9; PROME, Parliament of Jan. 1352, Introduction.
19 For a more detailed assessment see Phillips, ‘The place of the reign of Edward II’.
20 Phillips, ‘“Edward II” in Italy’.
21 The events of the reign had finally shown that the finely wrought programmes of reform and high-sounding declarations of principle, which had punctuated the political history of England since 1307 and which have so fascinated historians down to the present, counted for nothing when there was deep distrust and even loathing between the opposing sides.
22 For an assessment of the role of parliament during the reign of Edward II see, e.g., the General Introduction to PROME and passim. As argued in ch. 11 of this book, the deposition of Edward II in 1327 was essentially the work of a powerful section of the magnates, whatever attempt there may have been to obtain as broad a range of consent (and complicity) as possible.
23 See Phillips, ‘Simon de Montfort (1265)’, 79–89.
24 There is no indication that he suffered from any mental illness, other than understandable depression after his deposition, but it is worth considering whether Edward II might, for instance, have been manic-depressive. This could account for his sudden fits of application to work, as noticed in 1320. It is however very dangerous to speculate on the mental state of any medieval monarch without clear and convincing evidence, as Nigel Saul has pointed out in his discussion of the problem of Richard II's mental condition in another Yale English Monarchs volume, Richard II, 462–4.
As I have indicated in ch. 1 there has been some speculation as to Edward II's sanity: Robinson, ‘Was Edward the Second a degenerate?’ This was answered very effectively by Dr Vivian Green in The Madness of Kings, 47–53, where he comments that ‘While his personality had abnormal traits and to many of his contemporaries seemed unfitting for a king, Edward II was not a madman’, and that ‘Edward II was surely neither mad nor degenerate but the complexities of his private life found a public expression’. No one is likely to go as far as the French scholar Brachet in his study of the kings of France, Pathologie mentale des rois de France, including an examination of the mental state of Edward II's father-in-law, Philip IV: Brachet, 443–54.
25 Cuttino & Lyman, ‘Where is Edward II?’, 522–43. As I argued in ch. 11, Edward II is in the tomb in Gloucester Cathedral and has been since 1327.
26 Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris, 1996), part 2, ‘La production de la mémoire royale: Saint Louis a-t-il existé?’