Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, Tuesday 20 January 1327
Edward II wore black and swooned. Pale-faced and surrounded by his enemies, had you not known he was the king you would never have guessed it from his demeanour or that of the bishops, barons, knights, abbots and others who had come to Kenilworth from parliament in London to do what had never been done in England before. Hostile, angry, uneasy, they demanded that the king abdicate his throne to his fourteen-year-old son.
They hurled accusations at Edward. He was incompetent to govern and allowed evil counsellors to rule for him, he had lost Scotland and lands in France and Ireland, he had imprisoned, exiled, killed and disinherited many noblemen and churchmen, he neglected the business of his kingdom and pursued worthless hobbies fit only for peasants. Powerless, in captivity and with his closest friends dead, there was little Edward could do but consent to their demand, and so for the first time in English history, a son succeeded to the throne while his father still lived. In tears, Edward knelt and begged his subjects’ pardon for his trespasses.1 Aghast at what had become of him and his reign, he declared passionately, ‘I greatly lament that I have so utterly failed my people, but I could not be other than I am.’2
I could not be other than I am. Edward II’s entire life was a battle against what was expected of him. Entirely unconventional by the standards of his time, even eccentric, he had neither the temperament nor the ability to fill the position he had been born into, to the great unhappiness of himself and his subjects. His reign of nineteen and a half years, July 1307 to January 1327, was a turbulent history of constant threats of civil war, endless conflicts and quarrels with his barons, failed military campaigns and dependence on male favourites. Before his accession, no English earl had been executed since Waltheof in 1076. During Edward’s reign and its immediate aftermath, the regime of his queen and her own male favourite, an earl counted himself lucky to die in his bed. No fewer than six were executed between 1312 and 1330, and two died in battle.
Edward’s reign ended in his own wife rebelling and launching an invasion of his country, his forced abdication in favour of his son and, according to traditional accounts, in his atrocious murder. Subject to scathing criticism in his own lifetime, Edward has fared even worse since. ‘A more complete ninny than Edward II has seldom occupied a throne’; ‘Brutal and brainless … incompetent, idle, frivolous and incurious’; ‘A scatter-brained wastrel’; ‘A weakling and a fool’; ‘Weak-willed and frivolous’; ‘A coward and a trifler’; ‘Worthy never to have been born’ are just some of the harsh judgements passed on this most maligned of monarchs.3 That Edward II was an utter failure as a ruler and war leader is very hard to deny. After all, no king ends his reign wandering around Wales with a mere handful of followers, pursued by an army, without making a long series of truly horrible mistakes. However, Edward had the misfortune to be born in the wrong era. Many of the character traits and behaviour that made him such a disastrous king, and were incomprehensible and even shocking to his contemporaries, would be judged differently today. In many ways, Edward was ahead of his time. He was openly a lover of men, he enjoyed the company of his lowborn subjects and their activities such as thatching roofs and shoeing horses, he bought his own fish and bread, he spent much time near the end of his reign living in a cottage rather than in one of his luxurious palaces, he once had to pay compensation to his jester for accidentally injuring him while swimming in the Thames in winter, he went on a swimming and rowing holiday with a large crowd of ‘common people’, he watched fishermen fishing and ditchers digging and sometimes joined in, he loved the outdoors and physical exercise, he is one of only two people in history to found colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge.4
Edward inspired polarised opinions in his own lifetime and afterwards. Many people despised him. A few adored and were passionately devoted to him. Edward was a complex and difficult man, and a bundle of contradictions. Fiercely emotional, he loved and hated to extremes, could nurse a grudge for many years and never forgave a betrayal, though on the other hand he was remarkably generous and kind to people he loved and those who pleased him. Although often amiable and good-natured, with a highly developed sense of humour, he had a vile temper and could be unpleasant and spiteful. He reacted, and frequently overreacted, emotionally rather than with his intellect, and his personal likes and dislikes entirely dominated his policy throughout his reign. He showed little in the way of determination or ambition, except when his male favourites were threatened. Then, he acted with great energy and astuteness, to the intense frustration of his contemporaries; he had plenty of ability when he chose to use it, but directed it to the wrong ends. His indecisiveness was also infuriating, and he had a tendency to believe and act on whatever the last person had said to him. His great-grandson Richard II made unsuccessful attempts to have him canonised as a saint, and the fourteenth-century chronicler Geoffrey le Baker depicted him as a Christlike figure nobly suffering the torments of lesser people. On the other hand, the Westminster chronicler spoke at length of his ‘insane stupidity’ and his ‘wicked fury’, and other contemporaries despaired of him and his inability or unwillingness to be what his subjects wanted and needed him to be.
This biography is not intended to whitewash a deeply flawed man or skate over his numerous errors and failings and the miseries heaped on his subjects during his reign, but it is intended to provide a more vivid and personal portrait of Edward than has been seen before, and to demolish some of the myths invented about him which have come to be widely and wrongly seen as historical fact. Edward II was far more than the disastrous king who came between two great ones, his father Edward I and son Edward III, even if many people are only aware of him as the gay foppish prince who was cuckolded by William Wallace in the Hollywood film Braveheart and who had a lover named Piers Gaveston, who may or may not have been thrown out of a window by Edward’s father. The one thing that almost everyone is sure they know about Edward II is that he died at Berkeley Castle with a red-hot poker thrust inside his anus. It is beyond all reasonable doubt, however, that this story is a myth, and the tale that Wallace slept with Edward’s wife and was the real father of his son Edward III is sheer modern invention.
He was passionate, brutal, kind, generous, capricious, indolent, spiteful, obsessive, good-humoured, affable, foolish, erratic, gracious, shy, charming and vengeful. He was Edward II, and this is his life and death.