To all outward appearances Edward II was a founder member of that select band of rulers who seem to have been doomed to disaster and to ignominy almost from the moment of their birth; about whom little that was good was said in their lifetime, and little to their credit has been written since. Lacking even the aura of incarnate evil that has traditionally been attributed to John and to Richard III, Edward II is depicted as worthless, incapable of any sustained policy, and influencing events only by sporadic displays of ill-directed energy or by a stubborn adherence to greedy and ambitious favourites. He is seemingly the locus classicus of the rex inutilis discussed by such diverse authorities as canon lawyers and the writers of Arthurian romances, who was fit only to be deposed and replaced by someone more worthy of the throne.1
While kings can normally be expected to die and be buried in readily confirmed circumstances, even the fact of Edward's death in 1327 is open to challenge: rumours circulated that he had escaped from his prison cell and led a life as a wanderer and ultimately as a hermit in a remote Italian castle.2 Edward II thus had an ‘afterlife’ which makes an assessment of him even more complicated. These ambiguities are somehow typical of Edward and his reign. Edward II was a man who did not fit neatly into the traditional and acceptable categories of medieval monarch: the great warrior, the lawgiver, or the man of God. Some of his personal tastes and behaviour were not what was expected of a king. In consequence he was misunderstood in his own day and has been maligned ever since, his only real value being to demonstrate to his successors the awful consequences of relying on favourites and of falling out with their leading subjects.
Edward II was not however alone among medieval rulers in attracting abuse. In his Divine Comedy the poet Dante depicted Pope Nicholas III (1277–80) head down in a pit in the eighth circle of hell reserved for those guilty of simony, the buying and selling of ecclesiastical offices, and with flames playing on the soles of his feet. But Nicholas was, so to speak, keeping the spot warm only until the time when his place would be taken by Dante's contemporary and bête noire, Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303).3 Boniface was also to be accused in 1303 by King Philip IV of France of a multitude of offences, ranging from heresy to sodomy, idolatry, murder, and other crimes.4 In 1320 a French friar, Brother Pierre Girovart, prior of St Géréon in Nantes, said that the reigning pope John XXII (1316–34) was melancholic, frenetic and mad (melanconicus, freneticus seu furiosus), that he did not know what he was doing, and that he would no more obey this pope than he would an ass.5 Kings also came in for their share of attacks. In the late 1270s, for example, Philip III of France was charged with committing unnatural sexual acts by a canon of Laon and two holy women of Liège, while in a separate scandal his second wife Marie de Brabant was accused of killing her two stepsons by poison.6 In 1301 Philip IV, Philip III's son and successor and later to become the father-in-law of Edward II, was allegedly described by Bernard Saisset, the bishop of Pamiers in southern France, as ‘neither man nor beast, but only image’; and, he added ‘he did nothing but gaze at men’. The bishop then gave further offence ‘by comparing Philip to the large, handsome, and worthless owl, who does not respond but simply passes air’.7 By comparison the remarks of the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani, written after Philip's death in 1314, are no more than modest criticisms, for he said that, although Philip devoted himself to his pleasures – chiefly those of the hunt – neglected the work of government, leaving it to others, and was badly advised, he was ‘a wise and good man, for a layman’.8 Even Edward II's father, Edward I, who was eulogized after his death in 1307 and who is still generally regarded as one of the most successful of the medieval kings of England, was abused on occasion. In 1294 one Irish magnate Sir William de Vescy is said to have told another, Sir John Fitz Thomas, that ‘the people of Ireland were the most miserable he knew … If they knew as much about the King as he knew, they would value the King very little, for he is the most perverse and dastardly knight of his kingdom’;9 and in 1297 a London goldsmith, John Pater Noster, was drinking in a local tavern when a certain William of Gloucester ‘despised the king’ and said that he wished the king's head was on a nearby spike alongside that of the Welsh rebel, Llywelyn.10One of Edward I's chief ministers, his treasurer, Walter Langton bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, who fell from office spectacularly as soon as his master and protector was dead, was accused of murder, adultery, simony, pluralism, and intercourse with the devil.11
In most if not all of these statements, on the other hand, the loud grinding of axes can be heard in the background. The poet Dante, for example, was caught up in the politics of his native Florence and in the continuing battles between empire and papacy, and so was hardly an impartial observer;12 the French friar Pierre Girovart was probably a member of the spiritual wing of the Franciscan order which was then involved in a desperate battle of its own with the papacy;13 William de Vescy was engaged in a bitter dispute with John Fitz Thomas which almost ended in a trial by battle before the king;14 Walter Langton was certainly guilty of many things but devil worship was not one of them.15 To take one's sources at face value, especially when they are dramatic and lend themselves to easy quotation, can often therefore be highly misleading.
The same is true of Edward II. Just as everybody ‘knows’, for example, that he was homosexual and that he was cruelly put to death in Berkeley castle in 1327 by a red-hot iron inserted into his bowels,16 in reality neither statement can be confirmed by clear and unambiguous evidence. Edward's reputation, especially at the time of his deposition and in the years after his death, was to some degree a manufactured one, influenced by the extremes of hostility on the one hand and of sympathy on the other. There were a few who stayed loyal to him after his fall and who tried repeatedly to free him from captivity, while there were others, including his great-grandson Richard II, who saw him as a figure worthy of veneration and even of canonization.
This book is not an attempt to present Edward II as a heroic or successful king: the mere fact of his deposition after a turbulent reign of nearly twenty years is proof enough that something went terribly wrong. But it is an attempt to rehabilitate him to some degree. The more one looks at the multitude of available sources for the reign the more apparent it becomes that the traditional view of Edward II needs to be qualified and a more complex picture presented, in line with the complexity of events and of the man himself. If Edward II was not a successful king, neither was he a nullity; in many respects he was not fundamentally different from most of his predecessors and successors on the English throne.17
Somewhere a balance has to be struck between the extremes of the calamitous and incompetent Edward II on the one hand and the holy man on the other. What follows is an attempt to achieve such a balance.
1 See E. Peters, The Shadow King (New Haven & London, 1970), esp. chs 3, 5; and idem, ‘Henry II of Cyprus, “Rex inutilis”’, Speculum, lxxii (1997), esp. 769–74.
Had Edward II ruled a generation earlier he might have joined his grandfather Henry III in Dante's gallery of negligent rulers: Dante, The Divine Comedy: Purgatory, canto VII, trans. D.L. Sayers (London, 1949), where, ironically, Henry III is described as having a better issue among his branches. See also E. Peters, ‘I Principi negligenti di Dante e le concezioni mediovali del Rex Inutilis’, Rivista Storica Italiana, lxxx (1968), 741–58.
2 I believe that Edward II did indeed die and was buried in 1327 but for an examination of the controversies surrounding his afterlife see ‘“Edward II” in Italy’, in Thirteenth Century England, x, ed. M. Prestwich, R. Britnall & R. Frame (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2005), 209–26; and see below, Chapter 12.
3 Dante, The Divine Comedy: Hell, canto XIX. An illustration of Nicholas III's predicament, taken from a fifteenth-century Sienese manuscript of the Divine Comedy, is reproduced in G. Barraclough, The Medieval Papacy (London, 1968), 137.
4 B. Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300 (New York, 1964; repr. Toronto, 1988), 190.
5 Additiones agli ‘Instrumenta Miscellanea’ dell'Archivio Segreto Vaticano (7945–8802), Collectanea AV, 57, ed. S. Pagano (Vatican City, 2005), 7–8 (no. 7952).
6 E.A.R. Brown, ‘The prince is father of the king’, Mediaeval Studies, xlix (Toronto, 1987), 325–6.
7 E.A.R. Brown, ‘The case of Philip the Fair’, in Persona et Gesta, Viator, xix (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1988), 228; A. Brachet, Pathologie mentale des Rois de France (Paris, 1903), 444.
8 Cited in J. Calmette, Textes et documents d'histoire, ii, Moyen Age, 2nd edn (Paris, 1953), 166.
9 CDI, iv, 1292–1301, 71.
10 CCW, 76. The Welshman in question was probably Madoc ap Llywelyn who had rebelled in 1294–5.
11 T.F. Tout, The Place of the Reign of Edward II in English History (Manchester, 1914; 2nd edn, revised by H. Johnstone, 1936), 13–14.
12 See P. Partner, ‘Florence and the papacy, 1300–1370’, in Europe in the Late Middle Ages, ed. J. Hale, R. Highfield & B. Smalley (London, 1965), 76–121.
13 See M.D. Lambert, Franciscan Poverty (2nd edn, Oxford, 1998).
14 De Vescy's remarks referred to Edward I's alleged cowardice shortly before the battle of Evesham in 1265, at the end of the civil war in the reign of Henry III: CDI, IV, nos 62–4; M. Prestwich, Edward I, 353–4.
15 On Langton and his career see A. Beardwood, ‘The trial of Walter Langton, bishop of Lichfield, 1307–1312’, Trans. American Philosophical Society, new ser., liv, part 3 (Philadelphia, 1964), 1–45.
16 The report of the excavation of the remains of the Rosary, a former royal house on the south bank of the River Thames in the News and Observer, Raleigh, North Carolina, on Sunday, 22 May 1988, which I read while a Fellow at the nearby National Humanities Center, says it all: ‘Archaeologists have unearthed the fourteenth-century remains of King Edward II's palace where he relaxed with his homosexual lover before being deposed by his wife and murdered, as tradition has it, with a red-hot poker.’ The Rosary was not however built until 1324–5, long after Gaveston's death: KW, i, 508, n. 10.
17 See J.R.S. Phillips, ‘The Place of the Reign of Edward II’, in The Reign of Edward II, ed. G. Dodd & A. Musson (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2006), 220–33; and the Conclusion to this book.