Chapter 1

THE REPUTATION OF A KING

The general opinion of Edward II from his own day to the present has been that he was a failure: as a king he was incompetent and neglectful of his duties, leaving the business of government to ill-chosen and self-serving councillors; and as a man he had a fatal ability to create enemies through his attachment to favourites, through his hostility to the English magnates, and finally through his alienation of Isabella, his wife and queen. Even the weather appeared to conspire against him. The combination of these failings was to prove disastrous to the peace and stability of his kingdom and ultimately fatal to Edward II himself. With the significant exception of Geoffrey le Baker's Chronicon, the contemporary and near-contemporary chronicles were usually critical of him, when they were not openly hostile.¹

COMPARISONS OF EDWARD I AND EDWARD II

Part of Edward II's problem both with his contemporaries and with posterity was the very fact that he succeeded a powerful and, by contemporary standards, highly successful king. The Commendatio Lamentabilis, a lengthy eulogy of Edward I composed by John of London at the time of Edward's funeral in 1307, claimed that ‘Once with Alexander, king of Macedon, we defeated the kings of the Medes and the Persians and subdued the provinces of the East. Now, at the end of time, with great King Edward, we have borne a ten-year war with Philip, famous king of France; we have won back Gascony, taken by guile, with force of arms; we have got Wales by slaughter; we have invaded Scotland and cut down her tyrants at the point of the sword.’² Edward I's powerful treasurer, WalterLangton, bishop of Coventry & Lichfield, with whom the future Edward II quarrelled bitterly in 1305 and who was to be dismissed and put on trial for peculation early in the new reign, had scenes from the life and campaigns of his royal patron painted on the walls of his magnificent new episcopal palace, which was itself designed as a smaller version of Caernarfon castle.³ Whoever followed Edward I on the English throne would be hard put to match the glowing opinions of his predecessor, all the more so since they conveniently glossed over the many problems Edward I had bequeathed to his son. To take but two: although a peace treaty was made with France in 1303 by which the duchy of Aquitaine was formally restored to English control, England and France had really fought one another to a standstill, while in 1307 Edward I was still far from achieving his ambition to conquer the Scots.⁴

Edward II also suffered because he was so different in character from both his more readily understood and infinitely more successful father and his own son and successor, Edward III. As the fourteenth-century chronicler, Jean le Bel of Liège, an admirer of the English crown who had first-hand knowledge of England and who wrote after the victories of Edward III, was to remark, ‘it was commonly believed in England, and had often happened since the time of King Arthur, that a less able king would often come between two valiant monarchs’.⁵ Thus Edward I, who was wise, a man of prowess, bold and enterprising and fortunate in war, who conquered the Scots three or four times, was succeeded by Edward II, who did not resemble him either in wisdom or in prowess, who governed savagely and with the advice of others, and who was defeated with all his barons by King Robert of Scotland at the battle of Bannockburn.⁶ Another factor was that, unlike France, where the Grandes Chroniques, for example, provided a carefully structured and lavishly illustrated account of French history which was intended to reflect and to embellish the glory of the monarchy,⁷ there was no tradition in early fourteenth-century England of official history writing. The nearest to such a work in Edward II's time was the continuation down to the year 1306 by a monk at Westminster of Matthew Paris's St Alban's chronicle, the Flores Historiarum. This praised Edward I and was possibly intended for presentation to Edward II at his coronation in 1308.⁸ In contrast, Edward II's father-in-law, Philip IV of France, went to great lengths during his reign to present himself to his subjects and the world at large through images of majesty and power.⁹ Edward II was certainly very conscious of his royal dignity, but there is nothing comparable to this systematic use of propaganda during his own reign.

EDWARD II AND WESTMINSTER ABBEY

Despite the fact that Westminster Abbey ‘in some respects stood in a relation to the English kings similar to that of St. Denis to the French ones’, since ‘its patron was the king, it was the scene of coronations, a royal mausoleum, and situated close to the scene of government’,¹⁰ it was not to be the source of historical writing favourable to the crown. This is all the more remarkable given the attention lavished on the abbey church and on the shrine of the royal saint, Edward the Confessor, by the crown from the reign of Henry III onwards.¹¹

Even before the accession of Edward II the monks of Westminster were already in bad odour with the crown because of their complicity in the theft in 1303 of the royal treasure stored in the abbey.¹² Edward II's own bad personal relations with them began in January 1308, a month before his coronation in the abbey, with his intervention in the bitterly contested election of a new abbot, and were to be reflected later in his retention of the manor of Eye, covering the area of the modern Pimlico and Mayfair, from 1316 until the end of his reign, and in his occupation and retention in 1320 of a cottage and large garden within the precincts known as ‘Burgoyne’.¹³ More seriously for his posthumous reputation, they were also reflected in the further continuation, from 1306 to 1327, of theFlores Historiarum by the Westminster monk, Robert of Reading, who probably wrote to justify the seizure of power by Isabella and Mortimer in 1326 and was unsparing in his vilification of Edward II, accusing him of being paralyzed by sloth, of cowardice in battle, of failing to keep his word, of rapacity and avarice, and of stupidity and tyranny.¹⁴ When describing Isabella's mission to France in 1325, for example, Robert denounced Edward's cruelty to his queen: ‘Oh! The insane stupidity of the king of the English, condemned by God and men, who should not love his own infamy and illicit bed, full of sin, and should never have removed from his side his noble consort and her gentle wifely embraces, in contempt of her noble birth.’¹⁵ On another occasion the author poured scorn on the fact that in early September 1315 Edward II was nearly drowned when a boat overturned while he was rowing in Cambridgeshire, to which he had gone with ‘a great company of simple people’.¹⁶ In describing the great wind, accompanied by sudden darkness and a water-spout, which struck the manor of Cowick in Yorkshire in May or June 1323 while Edward and the Younger Despenser, ‘his evil councillor and parasite’, were having breakfast¹⁷ the author treated the event as if it were a supernatural judgment on both men.¹⁸ This was part of a deliberate attempt to use religious imagery to blacken Edward's name, and it follows a passage in which Edward is described as being more evil than Pontius Pilate and as being a tyrant in his oppression of the people and the Church and in his shedding of the blood of the innocent at York. The passage is preceded and followed by accounts of miracles at Thomas of Lancaster's tomb and of an account of Roger Mortimer's escape which the author likens to St Peter's miraculous deliverance from prison.

Writing of Edward II's deposition, the author was at pains to make it appear, contrary to most other evidence, that the king resigned the throne of his own free will: ‘I greatly lament that I have so utterly failed my people, but I could not be other than I am; I am pleased that my son who has been thus accepted by all the people should succeed me on the throne’.¹⁹ It is also likely that the hostility that had grown up between Westminster Abbey and the crown during the reign of Edward II was one reason why Edward III refused the monks' request that he should be buried there, and instead chose St Peter's abbey, Gloucester, which he probably then endowed with a magnificent royal tomb and with other patronage.²⁰

EDWARD II AND ENGLISH CHRONICLERS

There was no shortage of comment and criticism among other contemporary or near-contemporary writers in England. In a memorable passage of his Polychronicon, probably begun in or soon after 1327, Ranulf Higden produced a description of the personality and character of Edward,²¹ which was to be quoted by several other fourteenth-century chroniclers,²² and which has strongly influenced much subsequent opinion:

King Edward was a man handsome in body and of outstanding strength, but, if common opinion is to be believed, most inconsistent in behaviour. For, shunning the company of the nobles, he sought the society of jesters, singers, actors, carriage drivers, diggers, oarsmen, sailors, and the practitioners of other kinds of mechanical arts. He indulged in drink, betrayed confidences lightly, struck out at those standing near him for little reason and followed the counsel of others rather than his own. He was extravagant in his gifts, splendid in entertainment, ready in speech, but inconsistent in action. He was unlucky against his enemies, violent with members of his household, and ardently attached to one of his familiars, whom he sustained above all, enriched, preferred, and honoured. From this obsession opprobrium came upon the lover and obloquy to the loved one; scandal was brought upon the people and the kingdom was damaged. He also promoted unworthy and incapable men to office in the church, a practice which was to be like a beam in his eyes and a lance in his side. In his days there was also a dearth of grain and a constant mortality among farm animals, such as had scarcely been seen before.²³

The description of Edward II in Sir Thomas Gray of Heton's Scalacronica, begun in 1355, was one of those influenced by the Polychronicon, but was rather more sympathetic towards him, noting in the description of Edward at his accession that ‘he was not hard-working, and nor was he loved by the magnates of his realm; on the other hand, he was generous, and genial well beyond measure to those whom he loved, and very affable to his close companions. And physically he was one of the strongest men in the realm.’ In his account of Edward at the time of his deposition in 1327 Gray remarked that ‘he was wise, charming and affable in conversation, but malevolent in deed. He was clever at whatever he fancied to turn his hand to. He was overly friendly with his intimates, reserved with strangers, and he loved too much a certain person in particular.’ Gray also commented on Edward II's display of physical courage at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314 and his extreme reluctance to leave the battlefield.²⁴

Thomas of Otterbourne, the probable author of the chronicle of the Franciscan house at Lanercost in Cumberland, who had became lector of the Franciscans at Oxford some time before 1350, supplied a graphic account of Edward II's rustic activities: ‘From his youth he devoted himself in private to the art of rowing and driving carts, of digging ditches and thatching houses, as was commonly said, and also with his companions at night to various works of ingenuity and skill, and other pointless and trivial occupations unsuitable for the son of a king.’²⁵ The anonymous Brut chronicle quotes some verses allegedly sung by Scottish maidens after Edward II's defeat by the Scots in 1314. The occasion of the lines was the discomfiture of Sir Edmund Mauley, the steward of the royal household, who

for drede went and drenchede himself in a fresshe ryver that is callede Bannokesbourn; therefore the Scottes saide, in reprofe and in despite of Kyng Edward, foralsemiche as he lovede forto go by waters, and also for he was descomfitede at Bannokesbor(n)e, therfore maidenes made a songe therof, in that contre, of Kyng Edward of Engeland, and in this manner thai songe:

  Maidens of England, sore may you mourn,

 For you have lost your men at Bannockburn with ‘Heavalow’.

What, would the king of England have won Scotland with ‘Rumbalow’?…²⁶

This is, however, only a small part of the information and opinion contained in the Brut, which survives in many manuscripts; in a short version which ended in 1333 and in a long version ending in 1377; and in French, English and Latin.²⁷ Although the identity of the author or authors is unknown, the account of the reign of Edward II shows a definite bias towards the side of Edward's first cousin and inveterate opponent, Thomas earl of Lancaster;²⁸ the author also described the cult which sprang up after the execution of Lancaster in 1322;²⁹ and in his account of the deposition of Edward II he went to great lengths to demonstrate that the disasters of Edward II's reign were the fulfilment of the prophecies of Merlin.³⁰

At least three chroniclers wrote works devoted in whole or in part to Edward II's life.³¹ The well informed and extremely perceptive author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi, who appears to have written at intervals during the reign and to have finished his work shortly before the disasters of 1326–7,³² described Edward II at his accession as ‘a strong young man’ who ‘did not achieve the ambition that his father had set before himself, but directed his mind to other things’, most notably his favourite, Piers Gaveston, who lorded it over the English magnates ‘like a second king, to whom all were subject and none equal’.³³ ‘If he had practised the use of arms, he would have exceeded the prowess of King Richard. Physically this would have been inevitable, for he was tall and strong, a handsome man with a fine figure. But why linger over this description of him? If only he had given to arms the attention that he expended on rustic pursuits, he would have raised England on high; his name would have resounded through the land. Oh! What hopes he raised as prince of Wales! All hope vanished when he became king of England.’³⁴

Another apparent attempt at a biography is the Vita et Mors Edwardi Secundi, traditionally attributed to the Oxfordshire knight Sir Thomas (Laurence) de la More, a nephew of John Stratford, archbishop of Canterbury, who was a witness to many of the dramatic events attending the deposition of Edward II in 1327.³⁵ The Vita et Mors is actually an abbreviated version of the Chronicon written by Geoffrey le Baker of Swinbrook in Oxfordshire, who probably obtained much of his information from More but did not begin writing until after 1341.³⁶ Although unsparing in their criticism of the royal favourites, Piers Gaveston and the Despensers,³⁷ these two works are sympathetic to Edward II, especially in the predicament he faced after his deposition, and are the source of the tales of Edward's ill-treatment while a prisoner and of his brutal murder at Berkeley castle.³⁸ Le Baker's gruesome account of the death of Edward II, which has coloured all subsequent accounts of the reign, both literary and historical,³⁹ seems to have been designed to give the impression that Edward's sufferings were a sign of sanctity and probably played a part in the development of the cult of Edward II which culminated in the attempts by Richard II to have his predecessor canonized. The red-hot iron story and the use made of it by other authors could also, however, be taken as part of an attempt to blacken Edward's posthumous reputation by portraying him as a sodomite.⁴⁰

The remaining work, the Gesta Edwardi de Carnarvon,⁴¹ was ‘written in its present form towards the end of Edward III's reign’ by a canon of the Augustinian priory at Bridlington in Yorkshire. It was, however, derived from ‘a lost chronicle begun late in Edward II's reign’.⁴² Part of the chronicle's interest lies in the prophetic writings, drawn from the works of John of Bridlington, which are inserted at intervals in the text. The prophetic verses about Edward II, which were included at the end of the account of his reign, were intended (like the Brut author's use of the prophecies of Merlin) to show that the disasters he experienced had been foretold,⁴³ and are immediately preceded by a character sketch of Edward II derived from, but not identical to, the passage in thePolychronicon of Ranulf Higden which has already been cited.⁴⁴

OTHER CRITICS OF EDWARD II

The chronicles are not the only sources of comment on and criticism of Edward II. The Exchequer Memoranda Roll for 1315–16 records that in July 1314 Robert de Newington in Kent, a messenger in the royal household, remarked that Edward could not be expected to win battles (he had been defeated by the Scots at Bannockburn the month before) if he spent the time when he should have been hearing mass in ‘idling and applying himself to making ditches and digging and other improper occupations’.⁴⁵ These criticisms were echoed in the articles of his deposition in 1327 when Edward was accused, among other failings and inadequacies, of devoting himself to unsuitable work and occupations instead of to the affairs of his kingdom.⁴⁶ In January 1315 a London goldsmith, John Bonaventure, complained that he had been imprisoned by the marshals of the king's household on an accusation by John of Lincoln of having said ‘certain evil and shameful things about the king’.⁴⁷

On two or three occasions during the reign an impostor appeared. On 22 May 1313, when Edward II and Isabella were on the point of crossing to France for a state visit to Paris, a certain Richard de Neueby, described as a yeoman from Gascony, came to the royal court at Eltham, claiming that he was the king's brother. Rather than throwing him into prison or worse, Edward II gave him £13, after which nothing more is heard of him.⁴⁸ There is also the episode in 1316 when a clerk named Thomas de Tynwelle was accused of saying publicly in the park of north Oxford on 19 December 1315 that Edward II was not his father's son.⁴⁹

The best known and the most serious of these episodes also took place in Oxford. This was the humiliating occasion in late June 1318 when a certain John of Powderham, from Exeter, appeared, claiming that Edward II was an impostor and that he was the rightful king. John was taken to Northampton where he was brought before the king, who was at first inclined towards leniency. After Edward was advised very strongly that such a public challenge to his royal status could not go unpunished, John was summarily tried and executed on about 23 July. Ironically, although the incident took place at a very delicate stage in the negotiations between Edward II and Thomas of Lancaster, which resulted in the Treaty of Leake in early August 1318, it does not appear to have had any political context. John of Powderham was a deranged individual acting for reasons of his own.⁵⁰ In the 1330s this incident was referred to by the Dominican scholar Robert Holcot in his lectures on the Book of Wisdom⁵¹ and was to be quoted from that source by Walter Bower, the author of the Scotichronicon, in the 1440s when he was writing about James I of Scotland.⁵²

Sermons were another device for expressing criticism or comment on Edward II and his regime. Those preached by three of the leading clergy before the session of parliament assembled at Westminster in January 1327 apparently formed a carefully graduated progression, preparing the way for the actual deposition of the king imprisoned at Kenilworth. According to the Lanercost chronicler, on 13 January Adam Orleton, the bishop of Hereford, preached on the theme ‘A foolish king destroys his people’; on 14 January John Stratford, bishop of Winchester, used the text ‘my head is sick’; and finally on 15 January Walter Reynolds, the archbishop of Canterbury and a former close ally of the king, began by stating that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’.⁵³ Less well known are the sermons in which itinerant preachers in Scotland in 1307 foretold that after the coming death of Edward I, le Roy Coveytous, the Scots and the Welsh would join together in an alliance against the English;⁵⁴ a similar pattern of events occurred around 1315 at the time of the Scottish invasion of Ireland, when Irish Franciscans preached against English rule.⁵⁵ In or about 1310 an Irish Franciscan named Malachy had apparently even preached before Edward II, his court, and the bishops, and had strongly condemned the vices of the age.⁵⁶

In late December 1314, the chancellor of Oxford University, Mr Henry Harclay, apparently referred to Edward II when he preached a sermon to commemorate the murder in December 1170 of Archbishop Thomas Becket at the hands of Henry II's knights and implied that final punishment for Becket's death might be visited upon the fourth generation.⁵⁷ Another ecclesiastical protest, in the form of a letter addressed by ‘a certain regular of admitted authority’ to the king's confessor, is recorded by the author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi under the year 1316; the letter complained about such matters as the abuse of purveyance by the king for the use of his household, failure to pay his debts, and his habit of staying too long in religious houses.⁵⁸

A more public form of protest took place at Pentecost, 22 May 1317, when a woman dressed as a theatrical player rode into Westminster Hall while Edward II was feasting with his magnates and presented a letter to the king. Under questioning she revealed that she had been induced to do this by one of Edward II's own household knights: they were annoyed that the king was neglecting knights who had served his father and himself in battle and was promoting others ‘who had not borne the heat of the day’.⁵⁹ This episode certainly relates to the marriages in late April of Roger Damory and Hugh Audley the Younger to Elizabeth and Margaret de Clare, two of the three heiresses to the lands of the earldom of Gloucester, and to the partition of their inheritance which had been ordered on 17 April.⁶⁰

A further category of comment is the literary genre often referred to as ‘political songs’, many of which survive in English, French or Latin from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and relate to various reigns and political situations. One of them, the Poem on the Evil Times of Edward II, was written in the 1320s. While the author is critical of what he sees as the oppressive government of Edward II, he also bemoans the state of society in general: ‘The Church, from pope and cardinals to parish priest, is corrupt. Money rules in the ecclesiastical courts, the parson has a mistress, abbots and priors ride to hounds, friars fight for the corpses of the rich and leave the poor unburied. Chivalry is in decay; instead of going on crusade, earls, barons and knights war among themselves. Justices, sheriffs, and those who raise taxes for the king are all bribable, so that the poor are taxed while the rich escape. Physicians charge too much, lawyers and traders cheat their clients. The poor are perennial victims.’⁶¹ Shortly before the end of the reign of Edward II, one of his Gascon subjects, the troubadour poet Pey de Ladils, composed the sirventés, El dugat (The Duchy), in which he criticized the king-duke for his failure to defend Gascony against French encroachments and declared that the only answer was for the king to come in person. This was written in the context of the Anglo-French war of St Sardos in 1324–5 in which the French had gained the upper hand and had forced Edward's half-brother, Edmund earl of Kent, into a humiliating surrender at La Réole.⁶² Other poems from the reign of Edward II include two celebrating the death of Gaveston in 1312, which are composed as parodies of familiar church hymns; and another marking the death of the courageous young earl of Gloucester, allegedly betrayed by one of his knights, named Bartholomew, at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314.⁶³ Another poem on the battle was allegedly composed by the English Carmelite friar Robert Baston, who had been taken along by Edward II to mark the expected English triumph over the Scots and was instead taken prisoner and required to write verses in praise of the Scottish victory. The fifteenth-century Scottish chronicler Walter Bower gave them an honoured place in his Scotichronicon, since ‘in view of their excellence these verses are certainly not to be hidden under a bushel, but should be set forth on a candlestick’.⁶⁴ The execution of the earl of Lancaster in 1322 was followed by the composition of an office of ‘St’ Thomas of Lancaster which was intended to demean the authority of the king who had executed him as much as to extol the merits of the martyred earl.⁶⁵ Such poems were probably far more influential than the attempt possibly made by the royal administration at the time of the great famine of 1316–17 to present Edward II ‘as the wise king, dealing with the famine with aplomb and rectitude, like the pharaoh who had put Joseph in charge of the granaries of Egypt in the time of the patriarchs’.⁶⁶

Poems of social protest are usually anonymous but it has been suggested that, although they often purport to represent the voice of the ‘common people’, they were probably the work of educated writers, possibly including such clerics as the distinguished Oxford scholars Mr Ralph Acton and the Dominican friar William of Pagula.⁶⁷ The author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi also falls to some extent into the same category. While unsparing in his criticism of the personal failings of Edward II and the inadequacies of his government, he is also at pains to describe the failings of others, such as Edward's cousin and long-time opponent, Thomas of Lancaster, as well as the papal curia.⁶⁸

The charges that were laid against Edward II at the time of his deposition in January 1327 were broadly in line with the comments of chroniclers and other critics. He was accused, among other things, of being personally incapable of governing, of allowing himself to be led and governed by others, who advised him badly; of devoting himself to unsuitable work and occupations, while neglecting the government of his kingdom; of exhibiting pride, covetousness and cruelty; and of putting to death, imprisoning, exiling and disinheriting the great men of his kingdom; of failing to observe his coronation oath through the influence of his evil councillors; of abandoning his kingdom and doing all in his power to cause the loss both of it and of his people; and of being incorrigible and without hope of improvement.⁶⁹

‘ST’ EDWARD II

Virtually all the evidence cited so far is critical, sometimes venomously so, of Edward II both as a person and as a king. This was not however the whole story, since there were also counter-opinions. One of the elements was the cult of the royal saint, Edward the Confessor (canonized in 1162 during the reign of Henry II), which had been consciously developed by the English monarchy in the years before 1307, and which was given significant emphasis in Edward II's coronation in 1308.⁷⁰ Another possible source of inspiration, although there is no specific evidence to support this suggestion, is the life and death of an earlier king and saint, Edward the Martyr, who was foully murdered at Corfe in Dorset in the year 978.⁷¹ Just as Edward II himself was very conscious that his name bore the connotations of sanctity, so too were those who tried to promote Edward II's own claims to sanctity and even to canonization after 1327. The cult of Edward the Confessor also helped to inspire the otherwise unknown Adam Davy to write his English poem, Five Dreams of Edward II, at about the time of Edward II's coronation in March 1308, and with the apparent intention of presenting the poem to the new king. In the poem Edward II is depicted variously as a knight standing before the shrine of St Edward in Westminster Abbey (a conscious echo of the ceremony of Edward's knighting in 1306); as a pilgrim entering Rome upon an ass (as Christ had entered Jerusalem before the Crucifixion); as a crusader accompanied on crusade by Christ himself; and, finally, standing before the high altar at Canterbury, clad all in red, a colour suggestive of martyrdom.⁷²

An even more extraordinary prophecy is contained in a work known as the Verses of Gildas,⁷³ which was composed by an unknown author apparently writing around the middle of the reign of Edward II. Although the subject of the prophecy is described only asRex noster nunc regnans, it is clearly intended to refer to Edward II. The prophecy begins, not with a great achievement in the Holy Land, but with Ireland, to which the king will go in 1320 after a certain grave crisis.⁷⁴ Once in Ireland, Edward will bring about peace between the English and the Irish, who will then all live together under one English law. From Ireland, Edward will travel to Scotland, in company with the English, Irish and Welsh, and there defeat the Scottish rebels and put Robert Bruce to flight. Rex nosterwill then go to Gascony and kill all the French found there, after which the son and heir of the king of England by his French queen, quae nunc est,⁷⁵ will become king of Scotland and reign there for the lifetime of his father. On his return from Scotland, the king will honour the magnates of England who come to seek his grace, and will exile all the greatest rebels. As if these prophecies were not fantastic enough, Edward II will then conquer France, pass through Spain, defeat the rulers of Africa, receive the submission of Egypt, and advance to Babylon in Persia. After Edward has reconquered the Holy Land, the pope will three times offer him the crown of the world, which he will finally graciously accept. Edward's career will culminate in the defeat of the emperor of Constantinople, the conquest of the world, the subjection of the pope and cardinals, who will be forced to live by the apostolic rule, and the abolition of the very name of pope.⁷⁶

Neither Adam Davy nor the author of the Verses of Gildas is known to have had any direct contact with Edward II, and the prophecies embodied in their writings may be regarded as the triumph of hope over experience. However, between 1317 and 1319 there was the strange episode of the Holy Oil of St Thomas of Canterbury, allegedly given to Thomas Becket by the Virgin Mary while Becket was in exile in France after 1164. According to an accompanying legend, the fifth king of England after the reigning king (i.e. Henry II) would be a good man and a champion of the Church, and by virtue of the Holy Oil he would succeed in recovering the Holy Land from the infidel. Edward II became personally involved in this after he was persuaded that he was the prophesied king and that the oil would be the answer to his political troubles, if he were to be anointed with it. Edward's efforts to persuade the pope to allow this were firmly rejected by John XXII, and the incident resulted only in Edward II's embarrassment, and in the arrest and subsequent flight from captivity of the apparent instigator of the whole idea, an English Dominican, Nicholas of Wisbech, who had earlier been the confessor of Edward II's sister, Margaret, the duchess of Brabant.⁷⁷ As Edward himself remarked in 1319, in a very frank letter to the pope, which is revealing both of the king's piety and of his gullibility in religious matters, he had through his own ‘imbecility’ allowed the unscrupulous friar to take advantage of his ‘dovelike simplicity’.⁷⁸

After his death Edward II became the subject of contrasting interpretations among the chroniclers. After telling the red-hot iron story, Ranulf Higden, the author of the Polychronicon, remarked that some people thought that Edward II should be placed among the saints, but countered this view with an account of Edward's vices and the failure of his government. However, he also made a very interesting choice of religious imagery in referring to Edward's promotion of unworthy churchmen, whom he described as ‘a beam in his eyes and a lance in his side’.⁷⁹ In contrast, Geoffrey le Baker's account of Edward II's death, in which he is presented as a martyr, seems positively designed to prepare the way for a cult of royal sanctity.⁸⁰

Geoffrey le Baker was writing in the 1340s, by which time a movement to present Edward II as a holy figure and even to have him canonized may have been gathering strength. The now famous letter written to Edward III by the Genoese cleric, Manuel Fieschi, in which Edward II appears as a hermit offering prayers for his own redemption and that of others, might have had the same effect if it had circulated more widely. An exceptionally interesting example of writing which was certainly designed to enhance Edward's reputation, if only among the academic community, can be found in the work of the Dominican scholar Thomas Ringstead, who was bishop of Bangor between 1357 and 1366, but who was teaching in Cambridge in the 1340s. In one of his lectures on the Book of Proverbs Ringstead told of how Edward I had cast Prince Edward off under the influence of evil counsellors. ‘He bore the injury patiently and came to his father's help on a winter's night, when the king was riding along a muddy, dangerous road. Fearing for his safety, Prince Edward took the horse's bridle and walked beside him until the danger was over. The king did not know who had come to his rescue.’ And so, according to Ringstead, Talis filius fuit Christus.⁸¹

The magnificent tomb erected in memory of Edward II in his burial place in Gloucester abbey showed Edward as a figure of great nobility, in contrast to the tragedy and humiliation with which he met his end.⁸² The tomb attracted a steady flow of pilgrims whose offerings contributed to the remodelling of the abbey. Royal patronage, by Edward III, Queen Philippa and the Black Prince encouraged the growth of Gloucester abbey as a pilgrimage centre with a special royal connection.⁸³ There is, however, no clear evidence of a systematic attempt, whether by Dominican enthusiasts or by royal authority, to start a formal process for the canonization of Edward II until the reign of Richard II.⁸⁴ But despite intense efforts by Richard himself and others acting on his behalf nothing had been achieved by the time of his deposition in 1399, after which no further action is known.⁸⁵

However much Richard II and others may have tried to enhance the memory and reputation of Edward II, others were working against them. Several of the chroniclers writing shortly before or during the reign of Richard II, such as the Bridlington author of theGesta Edwardi de Carnarvon, Henry Knighton in Leicester, and Thomas Burton at Meaux in Yorkshire, quoted Ranulf Higden's unflattering portrait of Edward II,⁸⁶ while Burton also expressed a sharply critical opinion of Edward II's morals in his remark that Edward delighted greatly in the vice of sodomy.⁸⁷ Indeed, it has been argued plausibly that Edward II's reputation for sodomy and specifically the story of his murder by red-hot iron, a form of anal rape, was developed after his death as a way of discrediting him.⁸⁸

Those involved in politics at the highest level were also conscious that Edward II's deposition had created a precedent for future action. In 1387, during the ‘Wonderful Parliament’, Richard II's opponents pointedly reminded him of his great-grandfather's fate. When Richard II was eventually deprived of his throne in 1399 the dramatic events of 1327, and probably also the likely fate of a deposed king, were very much in the mind of everyone involved.⁸⁹

EDWARD II IN LITERATURE: SIXTEENTH TO EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Although the cult of Edward II as a prospective saint does not appear to have survived the fourteenth century,⁹⁰ in later centuries an extensive literary tradition developed around him, variously expressed by historians, playwrights, poets and political commentators, and deriving its energy from the adverse opinions of the chroniclers as well as from the political precedents set by Edward II's deposition and death. Most concentrated on the relations between Edward and his favourites, especially Gaveston. Gaveston even played a role in French political controversy when in 1588 Jean Boucher drew a parallel between Gaveston and another Gascon gentleman, the duc d'Epernon, the favourite of the French king Henry III.⁹¹

In sixteenth-century England Holinshed's Chronicles, for example, were distinguished by their author's critical but also sympathetic and balanced judgement of Edward, and by his understanding of the implications of Edward's overthrow for the future of English politics.⁹² Holinshed also thought that there had been a sexual relationship between Edward II and Gaveston,⁹³ but it was only in Christopher Marlowe's famous play, Edward II, written in about 1592, that such a relationship was made explicit.⁹⁴ More frequently, its nature was hinted at cautiously or cited as a dreadful example and warning of the fate that had befallen kings who allowed themselves to be influenced by favourites and so estranged themselves from their subjects.

In 1596 the poet Michael Drayton published his Mortimeriados; the Lamentable Civil Wars of Edward the Second and the Barons, which he revised and republished in 1603 under its more familiar title, The Barons' Wars.⁹⁵ In the seventeenth century several works on Edward II (whose career was often treated in parallel with that of Richard II) were published at times of political excitement. A tortuous poem of 4,060 lines by Sir Francis Hubert, The Deplorable Life and Death of Edward II, was published in 1628, at about the time of the murder of Charles I's favourite, the duke of Buckingham.⁹⁶ An anonymous pamphlet of 1648, The People Informed of their Oppressors and Oppressions, compared the power of Gaveston under Edward II with that of Buckingham, and justified the deposition of Edward II and by implication that of Charles I as well.⁹⁷

The History of the Most unfortunate Prince King Edward II, attributed to Henry Cary, Viscount Falkland, Lord Deputy of Ireland, but probably in fact by his wife, Elizabeth Cary, may have been composed in 1626/7, but was not published until the time of the Exclusion Crisis in 1680. It was then provided with a thoughtful introduction by Sir Winston Churchill (father of the future duke of Marlborough), displaying sympathy for Edward II,⁹⁸ and was republished in 1689, after the deposition of James II.⁹⁹ In the same year there also appeared Sir Robert Howard's Historical Observations upon the Reigns of Edward I, II, III, and Richard II, in which the virtues and achievements of Edward I and Edward III are treated in parallel and contrasted with the errors and failings of Edward II and Richard II.¹⁰⁰ Howard also had something to do with a work published in 1713, The History of the Life and reign of Edward II,¹⁰¹ while a further reminder of Edward and Gaveston was provided in an anonymous pamphlet, published in London in 1720, The Prime Minister and King.¹⁰²

A significant contrast to the general condemnation of Edward II is The History of Edward III, by Joshua Barnes, which was published early in 1688 and dedicated to James II, and which is also distinguished by the amount of original research undertaken by its author. Having argued that Edward II was, at the last, truly repentant of ‘all his former vanities’, he noted the worthy things which Edward II had done in his lifetime, such as the foundation of Oriel College and St Mary's Hall at Oxford, and the houses of Carmelite friars at Oxford and of the Dominicans at King's Langley in Hertfordshire, ‘and might have done more, had he not been so miserably interrupted’.¹⁰³

EDWARD II IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES

The fascination with Edward II and his fate lived on into the nineteenth century when it became part of an increasingly public debate on the nature of male sexuality, fuelled by such episodes as Marcus Stone's painting of Edward II and Gaveston, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1872, and the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895. In 1887 Havelock Ellis had published the first modern unexpurgated edition of Marlowe's play, Edward II, which drew attention, although in a somewhat defensive way, to the sexual implications of the text. Despite a growing interest in the play among literary societies from the 1880s, it remained unperformed until 1903; and as late as 1908 the Board of Education ‘advised that in school history lessons the story of Edward II “be passed over in discreet silence”’.¹⁰⁴

The serious academic study of the reign of Edward II which began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was influenced by the increasing availability of both administrative records and chronicle narratives, the growth of history as an academic discipline, and by the progress of political reform, and tended to concentrate on the implications of Edward II's reign for the constitutional development of England. Over and above the constant political crises and the chaos and bitterness of civil war, the reign was seen by historians such as William Stubbs, T.F. Tout and J.C. Davies as exhibiting a struggle between the king and the magnates on issues of constitutional principle, with the king seeking in the last resort to build up the power of his household as an inner bastion of government secure from baronial control and with attempts by the magnates to reform the royal administration and to manage royal policy in the interests of some greater ideal of constitutional liberty. The importance of parliament was also seen as being greatly enhanced by its role in the operation of the Ordinances, in the Statute of York and in the final deposition of Edward II.¹⁰⁵ Edward's perceived ineffectiveness was, in turn, seen almost as a blessing: ‘A strong successor to Edward I might have made England a despotism; his weak and feckless son secured the permanence of Edwardian constitutionalism.’¹⁰⁶ The ‘constitutional’ view of the reign held sway until the 1970s when it was challenged in detailed studies of two of the leading magnates, Thomas, earl of Lancaster (Edward II's first cousin and his most bitter opponent) and Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke (also a cousin of Edward II and generally a loyal ally).¹⁰⁷ These and other studies¹⁰⁸ have shown the complexity of the politics of this period, and the importance of understanding individual behaviour and motivations, as well as wider problems and issues of policy. As a result many of the earlier certainties have largely dissolved.¹⁰⁹

Edward II has not however been the subject only of recent specialized research monographs. The range of interest in and of reference to him is extraordinary. A number of writers have produced accounts of the reign for a general audience;¹¹⁰ and there have been some notable historical novels on the period.¹¹¹ In Italy there are plaques to commemorate Edward II's ‘presence’ at the castle of Melazzo, north of Genoa, and another at the former Benedictine abbey of Butrio, marking the supposed ‘tomb’ of Edward II.¹¹²Edward II has been made the subject of medical analysis, one early twentieth-century medical author going so far as to argue that the incompetence and peculiarities of behaviour of Edward II were the result of a physical degeneration of the brain.¹¹³ There has been particular interest in Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, which has been staged many times both in its original form, and also in Bertolt Brecht's adaptation made in 1922–23.¹¹⁴ Sidney Lumet's 1966 film of a John le Carré spy novel set in London, The Deadly Affair, reached its climax during a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Edward II.¹¹⁵ The sexual connotations of the play have made it the focus of numerous doctoral theses and of much other critical writing,¹¹⁶ and were emphasized in Derek Jarman's very explicit 1992 film version of the play.¹¹⁷ More recently, the depiction of Edward and of Gaveston in Mel Gibson's film Braveheart (1995) has brought the story of Marlowe's play to an even wider audience. In the late 1980s the English composer Peter Tranchell (1922–93) projected an opera on Edward II,¹¹⁸ while David Bintley used Marlowe's play for his full-length ballet, Edward II, which he produced for the Stuttgart Ballet in the Württemberg State Theatre in April 1995 and again for the Birmingham Royal Ballet in Birmingham in October 1997. The music for the ballet was written by John McCabe, who also reworked the music in his symphony number 5, ‘Edward II’ (2000).¹¹⁹ Edward's modern musical associations also extend to a ‘folk/reggae’ band, variously known under the evocative name of Edward II and the Red Hot Polkas or simply as Edward II, which was appropriately formed in Gloucestershire and was active between 1985 and 1999. In Rome there is even a nightclub named after him, La Taverna di Edoardo Secondo, ‘formerly a medieval torture chamber theme bar’, and in San Francisco an Edward II hotel.¹²⁰

EDWARD II TODAY

Part of the problem of Edward II, and therefore also a major problem for any modern biographer, is that he has in a sense been in the ‘possession’ of so many people both in his own day and down to the present time. While he was alive he was the subject of much criticism, some of it justified but much of it unfair. At the time of his deposition in 1327, and in the seventy years or so following, his reputation was manipulated both by those who wished to blacken his name in order to justify the change of regime and by others who sought to present him as a holy figure and even as a candidate for canonization. Even today Edward II is one of the few English kings (together with ‘bad’ King John and Henry VIII and his six wives) about whom nearly everyone still ‘knows’ something: in Edward's case that he was homosexual and that he was murdered with a red-hot iron. Whether either piece of information is necessarily true and whether it is possible for the historian faced with so many centuries of received opinion and prejudice to reach a more balanced conclusion on Edward II and his reign is another matter entirely.¹²¹

¹ For a discussion of the value and the authorship of the chronicles of the reign of Edward II see Gransden, ii, esp. ch. 1, ‘Chroniclers of the reign of Edward II’, but also chs 2, 3, 4, passim. There is also some material in Gransden, i, esp. ch. 19, ‘Chronicles in the reign of Edward I’, and chs 20, 21, passim. Two other very valuable studies of historical writing are J. Taylor, English Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1987), and C. Given-Wilson, Chronicles (London & New York, 2004).

² B. Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1960), 9, 14(trans. is from her ch. 1, ‘The English public’); for full Latin text of the Commendatio see Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. W. Stubbs, ii, Rolls ser. (London, 1883), 3–21. See also B. Weiler, ‘The Commendatio Lamentabilis for Edward I and Plantagenet kingship’, in War, Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles, c. 1150–1500, ed. C. Given-Wilson, A. Kettle & L. Scales (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2008), 114–30; the Anglo-Norman ‘Lament on the Death of Edward I’ and the closely related English poem ‘Elegy on the Death of Edward I’ in The Political Songs of England from the Reign of John to that of Edward II, ed. T. Wright, Camden Soc. (London, 1839), 241–50 (Royal Historical Society edn with an introduction by Peter Coss, (Cambridge, 1996)).

The unidentified author of the legal treatise known as Fleta, which was written in the early 1290s, remarked: ‘How finely, how actively, how skilfully in time of hostilities our most worthy king Edward has waged armed war against the malice of his enemies there is none to doubt, for now his praise has gone forth to all the world and his mighty works to every border thereof, and marvellously have his words resounded far and wide to the ends of the earth’: prologue of Fleta, ed. H.G. Richardson & G.O. Sayles, Selden Soc., lxii, 1953 (London, 1955).

Similar praise was expressed between 1305 and 1307 by the French crusading propagandist Pierre Dubois when he dedicated his De Recuperatione Terrae Sanctae to ‘the illustrious and most Christian prince Edward, by the grace of God king of England and Scotland, lord of Ireland and duke of Aquitaine, renowned more for his military prowess than for all his titles’: P. Dubois, The Recovery of the Holy Land, ed. W. I. Brandt (New York, 1956), 70.

³ Smalley, 11, citing J. Evans, English Art, 1307–1461 (Oxford, 1949), 116, and T. Harwood, The History and Antiquities of the Church and City of Lichfield (Gloucester, 1806), 288–9. The scenes were painted after the death of Edward I, which would make the contrast between the two reigns even more pointed: Evans, 116; KW, i, 508, citing S. Erdeswick, Survey of Staffordshire, ed. T. Harwood (1844), 281; J. B. Hughes, ‘Walter Langton, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, 1296–1321, and his register’, Staffordshire Studies, ix (1997), 7.

⁴ On the Anglo-French war of 1294–1303 and its consequences see M. Vale, The Angevin Legacy and the Hundred Years War, 1250–1340 (Oxford, 1990), 224–8. On Scotland see M. Prestwich, Edward I (2^nd edn, London & New Haven, 1997), ch. 18, ‘The Scottish wars, 1296–1307’.

⁵ Le Bel, Chronique de Jean Le Bel, ed. J. Viard & E. Deprez, i (Paris, 1904), 4.

⁶ Le Bel, 4–6: my paraphrase of the text.

⁷ See the important study by A. D. Hederman, The Royal Image (Berkeley, 1991).

⁸ A. Gransden, ‘The uses made of history by the kings of medieval England’, in Collection de l'Ecole française de Rome, lxxxii (Rome, 1985), 469; Gransden, ‘The continuation of the Flores Historiarum from 1265 to 1327’, in Legends, Traditions and History in Medieval England (London, 1992); A. Hollaender, ‘The pictorial work in the “Flores Historiarum” of the so-called Matthew of Westminster’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, xxviii (Manchester, 1944), 377 and plate 6.b (a representation of Edward II at his coronation). The author of the continuation of the Flores may have been the John of London (possibly to be identified with the Westminster monk John Bever) who also wrote the Commendatio Lamentabilis on the death of Edward I: Gransden, i, 457, 459–60. John Taylor suggests that the continuation may actually have been commissioned by Edward II: English Historical Literature, 79.

⁹ E.A.R. Brown, ‘The case of Philip the Fair’, in Persona et Gesta, Viator, xix (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1988), 222–30. See also M. Barber, ‘The world picture of Philip the Fair’, Journal of Medieval History, viii, no. 1 (Amsterdam, March 1982), 13–27.

¹⁰ Gransden, ‘The uses made of history’, 469. The role played in the affairs of the English monarchy by Westminster Abbey was even greater than that played by Saint Denis in France, since in the latter case coronations took place at the cathedral of Reims. Cf. D.M. Palliser, ‘Royal mausolea in the long fourteenth century (1272–1422)’, inFourteenth-century England, iii, ed. W.M. Ormrod (Woodbridge Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2004), 1–8.

¹¹ See esp. P. Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets (New Haven & London, 1995).

¹² See P. Doherty, The Great Crown Jewels Robbery of 1303 (London, 2005).

¹³ J.R. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 1307–1322 (Oxford, 1970), 85–6; Gransden, ii, 18 and n. 88. The source of this information is Flores, iii, ed. H.R. Luard, Rolls ser. (London, 1890) 191, which, as indicated below, is not favourable to Edward II. For further details of Burgoyne and its location see KW, ii, 508.

¹⁴ See Gransden, ii, 17–20, 22, citing Flores, 192–3, 201, 210, 214, 218, 221–2, 228.

¹⁵ Flores, 229; trans. from Gransden, 21.

The continuation of the Flores was not the only chronicle written in the capital city and its vicinity. Other important examples (which are also influenced by the Flores) are the Annales Londonienses (1301–16), usually attributed to Andrew Horn an alderman and chamberlain of London from c. 1320–28; the Annales Paulini (1306–41), written at St Paul's by an unidentified author or authors; and the Continuatio Chronicarum (1303–47) by Adam Murimuth, a canon of St Paul's: see discussion in Gransden, ibid., 23–31.

¹⁶ Flores, 173: cited in H. Johnstone, Edward of Carnarvon, 1284–1307 (Manchester, 1946), 130. The author makes it appear that Edward was behaving irresponsibly when he should have been preparing for the parliament that was to be held at Lincoln. In fact Edward had just come from an important meeting with the leading magnates at Lincoln at which they had discussed the defence of northern England and of Ireland against the Scots. The Lincoln parliament did not meet until late Jan. 1316, nearly five months after Edward's boating expedition.

¹⁷ Flores, 216–17.

¹⁸ Flores, 216, 213–15, 217.

¹⁹ Flores, 235; the translation is that in Gransden, ii, 17.

²⁰ The request from Westminster is referred to in T.F. Tout, ‘The captivity and death of Edward of Caernarvon’, in Collected Papers of Thomas Frederick Tout, iii (Manchester, 1933–34), 168, n. 1, and 169, n. 1, citing Westminster Abbey Munimenta 20344. See further discussion of this episode in ch. 11 of this book.

²¹ Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, ed. J.R. Lumby, viii, Rolls Ser. (London, 1882), 298–300. Since Higden did not finish writing until the 1340s this allows for the possibility that his own opinions about Edward II were influenced by Edward's developing reputation as well as influencing those of other writers: on Higden's work see Gransden, ii, 43–5, 55–7.

²² The passage in the chronicle (begun in about 1390) of the Augustinian canon Henry Knighton of St Mary's abbey, Leicester, is identical to the Polychronicon: Knighton, i, 407; Gransden, ii, 159–60. The passage in the chronicle of Meaux abbey in Yorkshire, composed by one of its monks Thomas Burton before 1399, is also derived from thePolychronicon: Chronica Monasterii de Melsa, ed. E.A. Bond ii, Rolls Ser. (London, 1867), 286; Gransden, ii, 355–7. The version which is in the chronicle written by a canon of Bridlington towards the end of the reign of Edward III differs considerably from that of the Polychronicon in some places and slightly in others: Gesta Edwardi de Carnarvon Auctore Canonico Bridlingtoniensi, in Chronicles, ed. Stubbs, ii, 91; Gransden, ii, 9, 113. The translation in Gransden, i, which is described as of the Polychronicon passage, is in fact of the Gesta version.

²³ My translation.

²⁴ Scalacronica, xviii–xix, 65, 77, 229, n. 17, 95, 226, n. 1, 234, n. 66.

²⁵ Lanercost, 236: trans. from Gransden, 13. This passage forms part of the account of the appearance of the impostor John of Powderham at Oxford in 1318. Some of those present believed John's claim to be the king since Edward II was so different in character from his father: Lanercost, 256. On Thomas of Otterbourne and the Lanercost chronicle see Gransden, 12–13. On Edward II's pastimes see A. Richardson, ‘“Hedging, ditching and other improper occupations”’, in Fourteenth Century England, iv, ed. J.S. Hamilton (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2006), 26–42, esp. 29–32; W.R. Childs, ‘“Welcome my brother”’, in Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages, ed. I. Wood and G.A. Loud (London, 1991), 160–1.

²⁶ Brut, i, 208. The original text is:

Maydenes of Engelande, sare may ye morne,

For tynt ye have [lost] youre lemmans at Bannokesborn with hevalogh.

What wnde the Kyng of Engeland have ygete Scotlande with Rombylogh.

The translation of the verses is cited from M. Prestwich, The Three Edwards (London, 1980), 81. ‘Heavalow’ and ‘Rumbalow’ were the chants used by oarsmen.

²⁷ Gransden, ii, 73–6. There is an extensive scholarly literature on the Brut. See esp. J. Taylor, ‘The French prose Brut’, in England in the Fourteenth Century, ed. W.M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1986); idem, English Historical Literature, esp. ch. 6, ‘The French prose Brut and its continuations’, and App. i.

²⁸ Gransden, 73–6. A continuation of the short French Brut from 1307 to 1334, which shows both a London and a northern interest, has been published from University of Leeds, Brotherton Ms. 29 by Dr W.R. Childs and Dr J. Taylor: The Anonimalle Chronicle 1307 to 1334, Yorkshire Archaeological Soc., Record ser., cxlvii, 1987 (Leeds, 1991).

²⁹ Gransden, 73–6; Brut, i, 221–4, 228–30. On the cult of ‘St’ Thomas of Lancaster see the very important unpublished Ph.D. thesis by A. R. Echerd, Jr., ‘Canonization and politics in late medieval England’ (Univ. of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, 1983); and J. T. McQuillan, ‘Who was St Thomas of Lancaster?’, in Fourteenth Century England, iv, 1–25.

³⁰ Brut, i, 242–7. For the importance of prophetic writings in forming the contemporary and posthumous reputation of Edward II, see J.R.S. Phillips, ‘Edward II and the prophets’, in England in the Fourteenth Century, ed. W.M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1986), 189–201.

³¹ These, and all the other chronicles discussed here, have long been in print, even if sometimes in inadequate editions. There are however several unpublished chronicles which throw light on particular aspects of the reign. These include the chronicle, 1287–1323 (BL, Cotton Ms. Nero D.X), attributed to Nicholas Trivet, which is particularly valuable for the events of 1321–2 and which was used in the sixteenth century by Holinshed for his Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland; the chronicle, AD 303 to 1385 (Trinity College Cambridge Ms. R.5.41), connected with Canterbury and apparently a continuation of the Chronica of Gervase of Canterbury, which is also well informed on 1321–2, has an otherwise unknown record of the deposition of Edward II, and was made use of in the 16th century by John Leland for his Collectanea; and the short annals, written in the early 1330s by a member of the Cistercian abbey of Newenham in south Devon (BL, Arundel Ms. 17), under the title Memorabilia facta tempore Regis Edwardi secundi in Anglia, which have valuable information on the events between 1326 and 1330.

³² The standard edition of the Vita Edwardi Secundi was until 2005 that by N. Denholm-Young (London, 1957). In his introduction, xxiv–xxvii, and more fully in ‘The authorship of the Vita Edwardi Secundi’, EHR, lxxi (1956) (repr. in his Collected Papers, Cardiff, 1969, 267–89), he suggested that the author could have been Master John Walwayn, DCL, a canon of Hereford and of St Paul's. Denholm-Young later suggested that Walwayn may have lived in retirement at Malmesbury abbey and that this would explain the erroneous belief of earlier scholars that the Vita was composed by a monk of that abbey: Denholm-Young, The Country Gentry in the Fourteenth Century(Oxford, 1969), 39–40. His conclusions about Walwayn's authorship are however cautiously rejected in Gransden, ii, 31–7. In his important study, ‘Vita Edwardi Secundi’, Professor C. Given-Wilson argues that ‘there are strong indications that on several occasions the author brought his narrative up to date before laying down his pen for a year or more’ (i.e. 1310–11; summer 1313; late 1315; late 1318; summer 1320; spring 1322;? 1323; and before Sept. 1326) Thirteenth-Century England, vi, ed. M. Prestwich, R. Britnell & R. Frame (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1997), 175–6. This view is broadly accepted by W. R. Childs in her new edition of the Vita Edwardi Secundi (Oxford, 2005), xix–xxiii. While not accepting Denholm-Young's conclusion that the author was John Walwayn, she agrees that ‘Walwayn fits a substantial number of the criteria in training, west country connections, and career. If it is not he, then someone with a career very like his is needed to fit the bill’: Childs, xxiv–xxv.

³³ Vita, 4–5. References to the Vita Edwardi Secundi in this book are to the 2005 edition by Dr Wendy Childs.

³⁴ Vita, 68–9: this forms part of an assessment of Edward II in the year 1313. Edward II's apparent fondness for digging has a curious parallel in the career of his cousin, King Dinis of Portugal (1279–1325), whose nickname of ‘El Labrador’ is usually translated as ‘The Farm Labourer’. In the case of Dinis, however, the fondness for the soil related to his encouragement of agriculture rather than any personal involvement with the land of his kingdom: there is a brief discussion of him in R.S. Lopez, The Birth of Europe (New York, 1967), 308–9.

³⁵ See the discussion in Gransden, ii, 37–42; R.M. Haines, The Church and Politics in Fourteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1978), 102–5; and Haines, Archbishop John Stratford (Toronto, 1986), esp. 178–9, 264–5 (where the link with Stratford is indicated). The text of the Vita et Mors is published in Chronicles, ed. Stubbs, ii.

³⁶ For the text of the Chronicon see Chronicon Galfridi le Baker de Swynebroke, ed. E.M. Thompson (Oxford, 1889); for discussions of the text see Gransden, ii, 37–42; Haines, The Church and Politics, 102–11; Haines, Stratford, 178–80.

³⁷ E.g. Vita et Mors, 297–9, 301–2, 305–6; Le Baker, 4–6, 10–12, 16–17.

³⁸ Vita et Mors, 313–19; Le Baker, 25–34.

³⁹ Geoffrey le Baker claimed to have learned the details of Edward II's ill-treatment and murder ‘after the great plague [of 1349] from William Bishop, who was in charge of Edward's guards, which he confessed and repented, hoping for some mercy’: Gransden, 39, citing Le Baker, 31. There are several references to a William ‘Bisshop’, who was a sergeant-at-arms in the royal household while Edward III was in the Low Countries between 1338 and 1340: The Wardrobe Book of William de Norwell, 12 July 1338 to 27 May 1340, ed. M. Lyon, B. Lyon, H. S. Lucas & J. de Sturler (Brussels, 1983), 11, 281, 304, 351, 391.

Le Baker, 30–4, was the ultimate source of some of the information used in the 16th century by Holinshed for his historical writing and, via Holinshed, by Christopher Marlowe in his play Edward II: see Gransden, ii, 40, n. 248. Le Baker was not the only chronicler to record the story of Edward II's murder by means of a red-hot iron thrust into his bowels. It also appears in the Brut, i, 252–3; and in the Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden, 324. However, Higden mentions only that Edward was murdered with a hot iron, omitting the circumstantial details provided by Le Baker and the unknown author of the Brut. Even if Edward II was murdered, which is very likely, it is still questionable whether le Baker's story should be taken literally. See discussion in ch. 11.

⁴⁰ E.g., Le Baker, 27, 30, 34. This topic is discussed more fully in ch. 11.

⁴¹ Gesta Edwardi.

⁴² Gransden, ii, 113.

⁴³ Gesta Edwardi, 91–2. The verses, 18 lines in all, begin:

Transmittent Britones hircum sed non rationes,

Hircus barbutus erit in sensu quasi mutus.

Anglorum terra non regnabit sine guerra,

Dapsilis et gratus sed in actibus infatuatus.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 91.

⁴⁵ H. Johnstone, ‘The eccentricities of Edward II’, EHR, xlviii (1933), 264–7, citing the Memoranda Roll for 1315–16, E 368/86, m.32d. A modern observer might have commented that Edward should have been training for war rather than saying his prayers!

⁴⁶ Select Documents of English Constitutional History, 1307–1485, ed. S.B. Chrimes & A.L. Brown (London, 1961), 37.

⁴⁷ ‘de rege sinistra aliqua et inhonesta dixisse in contemptu regis’: PROME, Parliament of 1315, items 145, 120. See also ch. 6 of this book.

⁴⁸ P. Chaplais, Piers Gaveston (Oxford, 1994), 111–12, citing E 101/375/8, f. 29d. ‘Did he claim to be a blood-brother, in other words an illegitimate son of Edward I, or an adoptive brother as Gaveston had been? Was he a madman like those who from time to time went around the country pretending to be the true king?’: Chaplais, 112. On whether or not Gaveston was an adoptive brother of Edward II, as Dr Chaplais argues, see ch. 3 of this book.

⁴⁹ Memoranda Roll, 9 Edward II, E 368/86, m.94. The episode was first noted by H. Johnstone in Edward of Carnarvon, 130, where it is taken literally. See also ch. 6 of this book.

⁵⁰ A full account can be found in W.R. Childs, ‘“Welcome my brother”’. Chroniclers who reported the episode were influenced by Edward II's reputation for eccentricity. The Lanercost author remarked that many believed John of Powderham's claims ‘because Edward II was so manifestly different from Edward I’, while the abbot of Meaux ‘repeated the pretender's claims that his case was proved because Edward naturally enjoyed the work of countrymen which reflected the activities of his true father’: Childs, 152.

⁵¹ Smalley, English Friars, 325. It is possible that Holcot, whose home was in Northampton, witnessed the execution: ibid., n.3.

⁵² Scotichronicon by Walter Bower, ed. D.E.R. Watt, viii (Aberdeen, 1987), 331.

⁵³ See Haines, Stratford, 183, using the evidence of the Lanercost chronicler. The Canterbury chronicle, Trinity College, Cambridge, Ms. R.5.41, has a slightly different version of the texts employed: Haines, 185–6. It is more likely however that the three sermons were preached on the same day: see C. Valente, ‘The deposition and abdication of Edward II’, EHR, cxiii (1998), 858–60.

⁵⁴ Phillips, ‘Edward II and the prophets’, 191, n. 13.

⁵⁵ J.A. Watt, The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland (Cambridge, 1970), 185–6.

⁵⁶ L. Wadding, Annales Minorum, vi (Rome, 1733), 176; Materials for the History of the Franciscan Province of Ireland AD 1230–1450, ed. E.B. Fitzmaurice & A.G. Little (Manchester, 1920), 54–8. Malachy may have been the famous Malachy of Limerick who was the probable author of the treatise De Veneno on the seven deadly sins. It is not clear whether Malachy had the specific failings of Edward II in mind or was just issuing a general condemnation of the wickedness of the world. No precise occasion for this sermon has been identified.

⁵⁷ E.W. Kemp (the bishop of Chichester), ‘History and action in the sermons of a medieval archbishop’, in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages, ed. R.H.C. Davis & J.M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford, 1981), 349–53. See also ch. 6 of this book.

⁵⁸ Vita, 128–31. The text breaks off at this point. See also ch. 6 of this book.

⁵⁹ Trokelowe, 98–9.

⁶⁰ J.R.S. Phillips, Aymer de Valence Earl of Pembroke, 1307–1324 (Oxford, 1972), 131–3, 146.

⁶¹ This summary of the poem is in the words of Dr J.R. Maddicott in his important paper, ‘Poems of social protest in early fourteenth-century England’, in England in the Fourteenth Century, ed. W.M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1986), 132–3. See also Maddicott, ‘The English peasantry and the demands of the crown, 1294–1341’, Past & Present, Supplement No. 1 (Oxford, 1975), 13–14.

Other valuable discussions of poems of protest can be found in Taylor, English Historical Literature, ch. 12, ‘Political poems and ballads’; in the introduction by Peter Coss to the reissue (Cambridge, 1995) of Political Songs, ed. T. Wright and in T. Turville-Petre, England the Nation (Oxford, 1996), esp. 11–13, 131–4, 195–6. The text of thePoem on the Evil Times of Edward II is published in Political Songs, xxxvii–xli, 323–45.

⁶² G. Pépin, ‘Le sirventés El dugat … Une chanson méconnue de Pey de Ladils sur l'Aquitaine Anglo-Gasconne’, Les Cahiers du Bazadais, clii (Bazas, 2006), 5–28. The sirventés was a form of poetry used to discuss current events and was often highly critical.

⁶³ Political Songs, xxxv, 258–61; 262–7. The knight was Bartholomew de Badlesmere. The poem, On the King's breaking his confirmation of Magna Charta, which Wright dated to late 1311, was probably composed in 1306–7, as a commentary on Edward I's failure to observe his promises rather than on Edward II: Political Songs, xxxiii, 253–8; and Anglo-Norman Political Songs, Anglo-Norman Texts, xi, ed. I.S.T. Aspin (Oxford, 1953), 53–66.

⁶⁴ Scotichronicon by Walter Bower, D.E.R. Watt, vi (Aberdeen, 1991), 367. The Latin text, with a facing translation, is published in ibid., 366–75.

⁶⁵ Political Songs, xxxvi–xxxvii, 268–72. See Echerd, ‘Canonization and politics’ (Ph.D.).

⁶⁶ W. C. Jordan, The Great Famine (Princeton, 1996), 177, 258, n. 4; citing K. Smith, ‘History, typology and homily’, Gesta, xxxii (1993), 147–59.

⁶⁷ Maddicott, ‘Poems of social protest’, 135–6. These two men are not however suggested as the authors of the particular poems mentioned here.

⁶⁸ E.g. Vita, 48–51, 168–71 (Lancaster); 170–5 (ills of the times); 76–83 (papal curia).

⁶⁹ Select Documents, 37–8: the original text is in French. In some respects similar remarks were made about Philip IV of France, Edward II's father-in-law and supposedly a ‘successful’ king. In his account of Philip's death in 1314 the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani says that, although Philip was ‘a wise and good man, for a layman’, he devoted himself to his pleasures, chiefly those of the hunt, neglected the work of government, leaving it to others, and was badly advised: Calmette, Textes et documents d'histoire, ii: Moyen Age, 2nd edn, 166. On his deathbed Philip IV of France allegedly admitted that he had committed many errors as a result of bad counsel, but that he was to blame for that bad counsel: cited in a report preserved in the archives of the kingdom of Aragon: C. Baudon de Mony, ‘La Mort et les funerailles de Philippe le Bel’, Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Chartes, lviii (1897), 42. Contemporaries expected a king to rule in person and found it very difficult to draw a line between a king's need for advice and assistance from his councillors and professional administrators and the influence and possible dominance of favourites: see J.R. Strayer, ‘Philip the Fair – a “constitutional” king’, in Strayer, Medieval Statecraft and the Perspectives of History (Princeton, 1971); and E.A.R. Brown, ‘The case of Philip the Fair’, 219–46.

⁷⁰ This theme is more fully discussed in ch. 4. See Binski, Westminster Abbey; and two important unpublished papers by J.C. Parsons, ‘Saints' cults and kingship’, and ‘Rethinking English coronations, 1220–1308’. I am grateful to Professor Parsons for allowing me to see these papers.

⁷¹ F.M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1955), 367–8; C. Fell, Edward, King and Martyr (Leeds, 1971). One wonders if the appearance of Corfe in the stories both of Edward the Martyr and of the supposed survival of Edward II after 1327 is more than just a coincidence.

⁷² Phillips, ‘Edward II and the prophets’, 191–4. The text of the poem, from Bod., Laud Misc. Ms. 622, was edited by F.J. Furnivall, in Five Dreams about Edward II, Early English Text Society, old ser., lxix (1878), 7–16. The most detailed discussion of the subject is V.J. Scattergood, ‘Adam Davy's Dreams and Edward II’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, ccvi (Braunschweig, 1970), 253–60, repr. Scattergood, Reading the Past (Dublin, 1996). It is not known whether Adam Davy, who describes himself as the marshal, of Stratford-at-Bow, just outside the city of London, did present his poem to Edward II.

The author of the Lament on the Death of Edward I, also writing at the start of the new reign, ended his poem: ‘The young Edward of England is anointed and crowned king: may God grant that he follow such counsel, that the country may be governed; and so to keep the crown, that the land may be entire, and himself to increase in goodness, for his father was a worthy man’: Political Songs, 244–5. This was clearly an expression of hope for the future rather than any real assessment of Edward II.

⁷³ BL, Arundel Ms. 57, ff4v–5v. See discussion in Phillips, ‘Edward II and the prophets’, 194–6, and idem, ‘Edward II and Ireland (in fact and in fiction)’, IHS, xxxiii, no. 129 (May 2002), 1–18.

⁷⁴ Presumably a reference to the Scottish invasion of Ireland led by Edward Bruce, between 1315 and 1318.

⁷⁵ I.e. Edward of Windsor, the future Edward III, and his mother, Queen Isabella.

⁷⁶ Phillips, ‘Edward II and the prophets’, 194–6. This was a period of intense crusading propaganda, often featuring the king of France as a likely crusading leader, but also involving the English monarchy, especially Edward I. Edward II was an unlikely crusader, but he did take the cross, together with Philip IV of France and his sons, in Paris in 1313. See S. Schein, Fideles Crucis (Oxford, 1991) and N. Housley, The Avignon Papacy and the Crusades, 1305–1378 (Oxford, 1986). Whoever wrote the Verses of Gildas appears to have been deeply hostile to the papacy. Possibly the author was one of the Spiritual Franciscans who were then in conflict with the pope over the question of apostolic poverty: see Lambert, Franciscan Poverty.

⁷⁷ Phillips, ‘Edward II and the prophets’, 196–201.

⁷⁸ C 70/4, m.6d.

⁷⁹ Polychronicon, 300. Cf. Annals of Osney, Annales Monastici, iv, ed. H.R. Luard, Rolls ser. (London, 1889), 348.

⁸⁰ See Le Baker, 9, 27, 30–4. This theme is discussed further in ch. 11 of this book.

There are two literary curiosities which also at first sight appear to be part of a posthumous rehabilitation of Edward II. The first is the English poem Somer Soneday (Summer Sunday), which has sometimes been identified as a lament for Edward II, written soon after his deposition: see Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. R. H. Robbins (New York, 1959), 98–102, 301–3, from Bod. Ms. Laud Misc. 108, f. 107. However there is no reason to connect the poem, which is based on the theme of the wheel of fortune, either with Edward II or with any particular king: see D. Gray, ‘Songs and Lyrics’, in Literature in Fourteenth-century England, ed. P. Boitani & A. Torti (Tübingen & Cambridge, 1983), 85; and T. Turville-Petre, Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages (London, 1989), 140–7. The wheel of fortune is given both verbal and pictorial expression in the genealogy of English kings known as the Chaworth Roll which was produced in the closing years of the reign of Edward II, but again only as a general theme:The Chaworth Roll, ed. A. Bovey (London, 2005), frontispiece and 14, 17.

The second poem is The Lament of Edward II, written in French (entitled De le Roi Edward le Fiz Roi Edward, le Chanson qe il fist mesmes) and supposedly composed by Edward himself while in prison. In the poem Edward laments his fate and shows repentance for his past misdeeds. The poem exists in two separate 14th-century versions, in Longleat Ms. 26, ff. 76v–77r, published in Aspin, Anglo-Norman Political Songs, no. 9; and in BL, Royal Ms. 20. A.II, f. 10r, 10v, published in T. Smallwood, ‘The lament of Edward II’, Modern Language Review, lxviii (1973), 521–9. There is also a closely related Latin version in a 15th-century manuscript, College of Arms, Arundel Ms. 48, ff. 153r-154r, part of which was cited in the 16th-century chronicle by Fabyan: see Johnstone, 20; D. Tyson, ‘Lament for a dead king’, Journal of Medieval History, xxx, no. 4 (Dec. 2004), 359–75, esp. 360–1, 363, 367–70; and Cl. Valente, ‘The “Lament of Edward II”’, Speculum, lxxvii (2002), 422–39. As in the case of Summer Sunday, the idea of the wheel of fortune may lie behind the poem, although it is possible that the author was also consciously trying to cast Edward II in a sympathetic light. There is also an Italian edition of the poem by A. Benedetti, ‘Una canzone francese di Edoardo II d'Inghilterra’, Nuova studi medievali, i, part 2 (1923), 283 ff.

⁸¹ Smalley, English Friars, 211–15, 219, 338. As Dr Smalley points out, the story clearly originates in the events of 1305, but must be apocryphal since, although Edward did follow his father around in 1305, their quarrel and final reconciliation took place in the summer and autumn, not in winter.

⁸² Edward's tomb effigy contrasts sharply with another depiction of him, the drawing of a king and queen, possibly intended to be Edward II and Isabella, looking at one another with unhappy expressions. This appears in Walter de Milemete's treatise, De Nobilitatibus, Sapientiis, et Prudentiis Regum, composed early in 1327(shortly after the deposition of Edward II but before his death) and presented to Edward III: Christ Church, Oxford, Ms. 92, f. 4v. There is a reproduction of this drawing in the edition of The Treatise of Walter de Milemete edited by M.R. James for the Roxburghe Club (Oxford, 1913), plate 8; and also in E. Hallam, The Plantagenet Enyclopaedia (London, 1996), 105.

⁸³ D. Welander, The History, Art and Architecture of Gloucester Cathedral (Stroud, 1991), 144–50. See also Evans, English Art, 164–5, and most recently Palliser, ‘Royal mausolea’, 8–9; and R.M. Bryant, G.N.H. Bryant, and C.M. Heighway, The Tomb of Edward II (Stonehouse, Glos., 2007). Although it is assumed that Edward III approved the making of his father's tomb, it is not known whether he actually commissioned it; neither is it known who paid for it. For further discussion of the tomb see ch. 11 of this book.

⁸⁴ The best and most detailed study of the reign is N. Saul, Richard II (New Haven & London, 1997): see esp. ch. 13, ‘Piety and orthodoxy’. See also C. Given-Wilson, ‘Richard II, Edward II, and the Lancastrian inheritance’, EHR, cix (June 1994), 553–71.

⁸⁵ E. Perroy, L'Angleterre et le Grand Schisme d'Occident (Paris, 1933), 301, 330, 341–2.

⁸⁶ Polychronicon, 298–300; Knighton, i, 407. The Augustinian canon Henry Knighton of St Mary's abbey, Leicester, began writing in about 1390: Gransden, ii, 159–60. Melsa, 280–1, 286. The chronicle of Meaux abbey in Yorkshire was composed by one of its monks Thomas Burton before 1399: Gransden, ii, 355–7. Gesta Edvardi, 91. TheGestawas written by an unidentified canon of Bridlington towards the end of the reign of Edward III: Gransden, ii, 9, 113.

⁸⁷ ‘Ipse quidem Edwardus in vitio sodomitico nimium delectabat, et fortuna ac gratia omni suo tempore carere videbatur’: Melsa, 355. Burton introduced these remarks expressly to contradict the opinion that Edward II's cruel death suggested to some people that he was a saint.

⁸⁸ See W.M. Ormrod, ‘The sexualities of Edward II’ and I. Mortimer, ‘Sermons of sodomy’, in The Reign of Edward II, ed. G. Dodd & A. Musson (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2006).

⁸⁹ Saul, Richard II 157–8, 418–19, 430–4. The Kirkstall abbey chronicler and Adam of Usk also made pointed comparisons between the failings of Edward II and Richard II: M. Lawrence, ‘“Too flattering sweet to be substantial”’, in Hamilton, ed., Fourteenth Century England, iv, 146, n. 2.

⁹⁰ It is possible, and indeed likely, that a local cult survived around Edward II's tomb in St Peter's abbey, Glos., but there is nothing to indicate anything of wider significance.

⁹¹ Jean Boucher, Histoire tragique et memorable de Pierre de Gaverston, gentilhomme Gascon jadis le mignon d'Édouard 2 Roy d'Angleterre (Paris, 1588). Boucher used the chronicles of Thomas Walsingham as his source. Cf. J.S. Hamilton, Piers Gaveston: Earl of Cornwall, 1307–1312 (Detroit & London, 1988), 130–1.

⁹² After telling the story of Edward II's murder, with the usual details of the ambiguous letter and the hot iron, Holinshed makes the following remarks: ‘Hee had surely good cause to repent his former trade of lyving, for by his undiscreete and wanton misgovernance, there were headed and put to death during his raigne (by iudgement of law) to the number of XXVIII barons and knights, over and beside such as were slaine in Scotlande by hys unfortunate conduct. And all these mischiefes and many more happened not only to him, but also to the whole state of the realm, in that he wanted iudgement and prudent discretion to make choyse of sage and discrete counsaylers, receyving those into his favour, that abused the same to their pryvate gaine and advantage, not respecting the advancement of the common wealth, so they themselves might attaine to riches and honour, for which they onely sought, insomuch that by their covetous rapine, spoyle and immoderate ambition, the heartes of the common people and nobilitie were quite estranged from the dutifull love and obedience which they ought to have shewed to their soveraigne’: Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 2 vols (London, 1577), ii, 883–4.

Holinshed's Chronicles are also distinguished by their use of original material, such as the still unpublished chronicle ascribed to Nicholas Trivet (BL, Cotton Ms. Nero D.X), which is an important source for the events of 1321–2.

⁹³ ‘through whose company and societie hee was suddainely so corrupted, that he burst out into heinous vices … he gave himself to wantonnes, passing time in voluptuous pleasure and riotous excesse … [and] filthy and dishonourable exercises’: Holinshed, Chronicles, ii, 847.

⁹⁴ Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus and other Plays, ed. D. Bevington & E. Rasmussen (Oxford, 1995), Intro., xxi–xxiv. See, for example, the opening of the play with Gaveston reading what amounts to a love letter from Edward (I. i, ll. 1–15), and Gaveston's speech in ll. 49–70.

Although Shakespeare did not write a play of his own about Edward II, some scholars have argued that the play Edward III, composed in the mid-1590s, was the work in part or as a whole of Shakespeare. The play does not have anything to say about the end of Edward II's reign and the accession of his son, but concentrates on Edward III's campaigns in France during the 1340s and 1350s. The only reference to Edward II is to present him and his wife, Isabella of France, ‘as solemn sureties of sovereignty over both realms’. See Shakespeare's Edward III, ed. E. Sams (New Haven & London, 1996), 1–3, 147–51.

⁹⁵ The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. M. Drabble (Oxford, 1995), 295. See also B.H. Newdigate, Michael Drayton and his Circle (Oxford, 1961). Drayton had also published a poem on Gaveston, c. 1593.

⁹⁶ F. Hubert, The Deplorable Life and Death of Edward the Second, King of England, together with the Downefall of the two Unfortunate Favorits, Gavestone and Spencer, Storied in an Excellent Poem (London, 1628).

⁹⁷ Anon., The People Informed of their Oppressors and Oppressions with a Remedy Against Both. Unto which is added the sentence of Deposition against King Richard the Second, and Edward the Second; with the happiness that ensued to this Nation thereupon, 4, 7–8: ‘Upon the deposing of these two Kings, I shall make this observation, That it pleased God to place in their Thrones (as a sure sign of his approbation) two such Princes, as were not else in all Europe to be found; Edward the third, and Henry the fourth, the latter of which (besides the great advantage that His reign brought to the Kingdom in general) was the happy father of Henry the fift. That Kings may be deposed, is clear by the forementioned Precedent, and that Precedents are Law will not be denyed by any man that deserves to wear a bare gown.’ See also D. Clarke, ‘“The sovereign's vice begets the subject's errour”’, in Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, ed. T. Bettridge (Manchester, 2002), 46–64.

By coincidence Edward II and Gaveston were alluded to at about the same time in France, in an anonymous warning addressed to Cardinal Mazarin, in the 15-page pamphlet, Anon., Histoire Remarquable de la vie et mort d'un favory du roy d'Angleterre (Paris, 1649). On the theme of rulers and favourites in general see J.H. Elliott, ‘Introduction’, inThe World of the Favourite, ed. J.H. Elliott & L.W.B. Brockliss (New Haven & London, 1999).

⁹⁸ E. Cary, The History of the Most unfortunate Prince King Edward II, with Choice Observations on Him and his unhappy Favourites, Gaveston and Spencer (London, 1680): a book of 77 pages, plus the Preface by Sir Winston Churchill.

On Henry and Elizabeth Cary see the separate entries in the Oxford DNB.

⁹⁹ Published as E. Cary, The History of the Life, Reign, Deposition and Death of King Edward the Second, with an Account of his Favourites, P. Gaveston and the Spencers (London, 1689). (A note at the end indicates that this was first written by E.F. in 1627, published in 1680, and then again in 1689.)

¹⁰⁰ R. Howard, Historical Observations upon the Reigns of Edward I, II, III, and Richard II. With Remarks upon their Faithful Counsellors and False Favourites. Written by a Person of Honour (identified in the BL catalogue as Sir Robert Howard); licensed 17 Jan. 1688/9 (just in time for the Convention which assembled at Westminster on 22 Jan. 1689).

¹⁰¹ Howard, The History of the Life and Reign of Edward II, containing a Full Account of the Tyrannical Government of his Favourites and Minions. The several Struggles of the Barons for Liberty in his Time. The Bloody Executions when the Minions prevail. Their ill Treatment of the Queen and the Prince. The Deposing of Edward II and the Election of Edward III, By the Author of the Life and Reign of Henry VI. To which are added the Political Reflections of a Person of Quality (p. 63 names him as Sir Robert Howard) (London, 1713).

¹⁰² Anon., The Prime Minister and King, with Political remarks, by way of Caution to all Crowned Heads and Evil Ministers, 43. The Preface begins: ‘The Subject of the following Sheets is the infamous Life and deserved Death of PIERCE GAVESTON, that overgrown Favourite and evil Prime Minister to that unfortunate Prince, KING EDWARD the Second; who for his immoderate Love to him, was hated by the Nobles and despised by the Commons.’

¹⁰³ Joshua Barnes (Bachelor of Divinity and one of the senior fellows of Emmanuel College, Cambridge), The History of that Most Victorious Monarch Edward III etc., etc. (Cambridge, 1688). The Preface is dated at Emmanuel College, 16 April 1688. Barnes goes to great lengths to clear Edward III of any responsibility for his father's murder and describes in detail the splendours of Edward II's tomb at Gloucester: Barnes, 3, 22–3.The account of Edward II's deposition, imprisonment, death and burial is on pp. 18–23. After printing a translation of the Lament supposedly composed by Edward II after his deposition, Barnes comments: ‘Thus did this poor King repent all his former Vanities most heartily, no way repining at this punishment and heavy stroak of Gods Hand; but made so good use of these Afflictions that 'tis more than hoped, he fitted himself for a Kingdom more durable: to which his Enemies long'd to send him’: Barnes, 19.

Another work which also shows a certain sympathy for Edward II, while not ignoring his failings, is the play by William Mountford, performed in London in 1691, King Edward the Third, with the Fall of Mortimer Earl of March. In the dedication of the play to Henry, Lord Viscount Sydney of Sheppey, Mountford says it is ‘an English Story so fam'd for the reign of its Monarch, and the management of the few good Men about him, who with great difficulty preserv'd this Prince from the evill Machinations of Mortimer and his Faction, from the Potent Enemies of an Interested State; and the unnatural Connivance of a Mother (who design'd as much to usurp his Right as she really did destroy his Fathers) and the delivering their Country from the Tyranny and Oppression it had long been afflicted with, and which in all probability threatned the totall overthrow of the Established Liberties of the Subject.’

¹⁰⁴ P. Horne, ‘The besotted king and his Adonis’, History Workshop Journal, 47 (Oxford, 1999), 31–48, esp. 31–3, 42–5.

¹⁰⁵ W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, ii (Oxford, 1875), and in his historical introduction to the Chronicles, i. T.F. Tout expressed his views in his DNB article on Edward II (London, 1888); The Political History of England, 1216–1377 (London, 1905); the classic statement of his views in The Place of the Reign of Edward II; and finally in Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England, ii (Manchester, 1933). J.C. Davies, The Baronial Opposition to Edward II (Cambridge, 1918; repr. London, 1967).

¹⁰⁶ Tout, Place (1936), 30.

¹⁰⁷ Maddicott; Phillips. Although the work of earlier scholars, notably that of Tout and Davies, was based on a very thorough examination of the resources of the Public Record Office which were then becoming accessible, more material, some of it very important, has since come to light and has been fully used in recent work on the period.

¹⁰⁸ Haines, The Church and Politics; N.Fryde, The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II, 1321–1326 (Cambridge, 1979); J.H. Denton, Robert Winchelsey and the Crown (Cambridge, 1980);

M. Buck, Politics, Finance and the Church in the Reign of Edward II (Cambridge, 1983); Haines, Stratford; Hamilton; Chaplais. To this list should be added two of Michael Prestwich's books, The Three Edwards and Edward I. Among recent studies of the reign are R. M. Haines, King Edward II: Edward of Caernarfon, his Life, his Reign, and its Aftermath, 1284–1330 (Montreal & London, 2003); Prestwich's Plantagenet England, 1225–1360 (Oxford, 2005); and S. Raban, England under Edward I and Edward II, 1259–1327 (Oxford, 2000). A great deal of other important work has also been published in journals and collections of articles, such as The Reign of Edward II, ed. G. Dodd & A. Musson (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2006) and in the volumes published under various editors since 2000 in the Fourteenth Century England series (Woodbridge, Suffolk, & Rochester, NY).

¹⁰⁹ An important step towards the dissolution of earlier certainties was taken, by implication, in Johnstone's pioneering monograph, Edward of Carnarvon, in which she provided a detailed treatment of Edward's character and early career, making full use of the extensive archive sources for this period of Edward's life.

¹¹⁰ H. F. Hutchison, Edward II (London, 1971); C. Bingham, The Life and Times of Edward II (London, 1973); and M. Saaler, Edward II, 1307–1327 (London, 1997). Of these three books Bingham's is probably the best, although (like Hutchison's) it was written before the publication of most of the new research.

¹¹¹ See, for example, Paul Doherty's novel on the imprisonment, death and ‘escape’ of Edward II, The Death of a King (London, 1985). Since Dr Doherty is also the author of an important unpublished doctoral thesis, ‘Isabella, Queen of England, 1296–1330’ (Oxford, 1977), now partially published as Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II(London, 2003), this is a particularly well-informed novel. See also the series of six novels by the French author and member of the Académie Française, Maurice Druon, published under the general title of Les Rois maudits (Paris, 1955–60) (The Accursed Kings, London, 1956–61), and covering the period from 1314 to 1343. These well-written novels contain a great deal of material about events both in France and in England, and about the relations between the French and English courts. The novels were dramatized for a highly acclaimed series shown on French television in 1971–72, and are now available on DVD.

¹¹² The website for Melazzo states as a fact that Edward II stayed there between 1330 and 1333; the abbey of S. Alberto has been occupied by a modern religious community since 1899, while the local tourist website records the tradition that Edward II had also been there as a hermit. I have examined the subject in ‘“Edward II” in Italy’, 209–26. See also Ch. 11 of this book.

¹¹³ C. Robinson, ‘Was Edward the Second a degenerate?’, American Journal of Insanity, lxvi (1909–10), 445–64. Cf. V. Green, The Madness of Kings (Stroud, 1993), 47–53.

¹¹⁴ J. Willet & R. Manheim, eds, Bertolt Brecht Collected Plays, i, x–xi, and text of The Life of King Edward II of England (London, 1970).

¹¹⁵ D. Willis, ‘Marlowe our contemporary’, Criticism, xl, no. 4 (Detroit, 1999), 599–622, esp. 599.

¹¹⁶ For a selection of modern interpretations of Marlowe's play see Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, xxxiv.

¹¹⁷ Jarman gave further emphasis to this approach by his simultaneous publication of a book on the making of the film, Queer Edward II (London, 1991). Edward II and his reputation became a part of the sexual politics of the late 20th century.

¹¹⁸ Cambridge University Library, Ms. Tranchell 1.15. The opera would presumably have given emphasis to the relationship between Edward and Gaveston under the conventions of that time.

¹¹⁹ Notes on the website of Novello & Co. Ltd.

¹²⁰ M. Dunford, The Rough Guide to Rome (New York & London, 2005), 238; and hotel website.

¹²¹ The task is not made any easier by the fact that any characteristic of behaviour or event in the life of Edward II, from playing at dice for recreation and drinking with companions to his conduct of affairs of state and military campaigns, which can be interpreted to his discredit or disadvantage has usually been so interpreted. Two excellent illustrations of the problem can be found in the accounts of Edward II's chamber for 1326 when, on two separate occasions, he made a generous gift to a royal servant who had made him laugh: on 11 March he gave 50 shillings to his painter James of St Albans who had danced on a table; and on 30 July, while he was stag hunting near the royal lodge in Woolmer forest on the borders of Surrey and Hampshire, he gave 20 shillings to Maurice one of his cooks who was evidently not a good rider and had kept falling off his horse: SAL, Ms. 122, pp. 55, 79. These incidents could be interpreted simply as demonstrating Edward II's enjoyment of the society of low-born companions and his frivolity at a critical time in his reign when fears were growing of an invasion of England by his estranged wife Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer of Wigmore; or as showing that Edward had a sense of humour and could find relaxation even at stressful moments in his life; or as evidence of his concern with other people's welfare – in the first instance Edward gave the money in order to help James's wife and children.