Edward II: The Unconventional King (2 page)

It goes without saying that deliberate attempts to understand a medieval character, and to present his concerns and priorities in proportion, are fraught with difficulty. Too often attempts to write a sympathetic study end in a whitewash. Worse, there is a danger that an emotional credulity may seep into the narrative, and obscure the contradictions of the character. Such romanticism does not affect Kathryn’s work. When she says the king ‘swooned’ at the start of the book it is because she has an early-fourteenth-century source that says Edward ‘swooned’. What emerges from her work is an integrity which is both reassuring and refreshing. You know you can trust her because she passionately wants to understand the reality of the man’s life.

Edward II’s reign will always be regarded as a failure but as a result of studies like this, there is a hope that the man who was the centre of events will emerge in all his complexity, not simply as a weak king. He had his virtues – among them his piety, his loyalty to his friends and his generosity. As Kathryn observes, he was not devoid of strategic ability – I smiled when I read her line that the astuteness he showed when defending his favourites was ‘to the intense frustration of his contemporaries’. Reading this book I found myself asking the question, was there ever a ruler of England whose perception of his own virtues differed so much from those of his contemporaries? Where he saw virtue, they saw betrayal. Given that state of affairs, what could he possibly have done to make a success of his reign? He was, it seems, doomed by his inheritance.

Ian Mortimer

Rather than giving modern equivalents of incomes and prices in the early fourteenth century, which are almost impossible to calculate accurately and which, with inflation, date quickly, this page is intended to give an idea of the value of money in Edward II’s reign.

The only coin in general circulation in England was the silver penny, which could be broken in two to make a half-penny, or into four to make a farthing. The main unit of currency was the pound, consisting of 240 pence or twenty shillings, though it remained a purely theoretical notion for most people. Large sums of money could only be transported in barrels containing thousands of pennies. The mark was another unit of currency often used in accounting: it equalled two-thirds of a pound, or thirteen shillings and four pence, or 160 pence.

The average daily wage of an unskilled labourer was one or one and a half pence.

Skilled craftsmen of course earned more: Edward II’s carpenters were paid three pence a day, and his master carpenters six pence.

In Edward’s household, pages earned two pence per day, grooms and archers three pence, squires seven and a half pence, and sergeants-at-arms twelve pence (one shilling). His steward earned 200 marks per year, or £133, six shillings and eight pence.

The minimum annual income to qualify for knighthood was £40.

The annual gross income of the earl of Lancaster, the richest man in England, was £11,000.

A loaf of the cheapest bread cost a farthing (quarter of a penny). A chicken, two dozen eggs and a gallon of ale each cost a penny.

The cost of a trained warhorse was £50 to £80, a cow cost ten or twelve shillings, and a sheep cost twenty pence or less.

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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.

On Friday 7 July 1307, sixty-eight-year-old King Edward I of England, ‘fearless and warlike, in all things strenuous and illustrious’, came to the end of his long and eventful life in a remote corner of his kingdom, at Burgh-by-Sands near Carlisle.
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Appropriately enough for a man known as the Hammer of the Scots, he died with Scotland in sight across the Solway Firth, on his way to yet another military campaign there. Around three in the afternoon, the harsh and terrifying king, survivor of an assassination attempt in the Holy Land, conqueror of North Wales, and father of at least seventeen children, raised himself from his bed to take some food, and fell back dead in his attendants’ arms.
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Messengers set out immediately to inform his successor, and galloped the 315 miles to London in a mere four days.

Lord Edward of Caernarfon, prince of Wales, duke of Aquitaine, earl of Chester and count of Ponthieu, was staying at the palace of Lambeth. Edward had set out in mid-June to join his father in the north, but on reaching Northampton changed his mind and returned to London, apparently in no great rush to help chase Robert Bruce and his adherents around the south-west of Scotland. Before returning to the safety of the capital, he sent his father two barrels of expensive sturgeon, a thoughtful if not terribly useful gift for a man heading into a war zone.
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On 11 July 1307, Edward heard himself addressed as ‘my lord king’ for the first time, and although no chronicle or letter records his reaction, we may assume that he was pleased to succeed to the throne for one reason, at least. Ten weeks earlier, his father had sent his beloved friend, the Gascon knight Piers Gaveston, into exile on the Continent. Now free to do whatever he wanted, Edward recalled Gaveston, most probably the very first act he took as king.
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He thus immediately set out his main priority for the next couple of decades: dedication to his male favourites. Probably the royal messengers told Edward that his father, on his deathbed, had ordered him not to recall Gaveston to England.
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Edward, missing his friend terribly, took not the slightest notice.

The kingdom rejoiced at the news of Edward II’s accession, at least for a while; the new king was young, regal in appearance, a breath of fresh air after the thirty-five-year reign of his father, and ‘equal to or indeed more excellent than other kings’.
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His subjects were to become considerably less enthusiastic when they discovered what he was really like: a man with little desire to rule, finding the grind of government considerably less to his liking than gambling, thatching roofs and swimming, with little aptitude for warfare, and deeply in love with another man and determined to treat him as an equal. In July 1307, Edward II was twenty-three years old, at least the fourteenth and perhaps fifteenth or sixteenth child of Edward I, the fourth but eldest surviving of his six sons. He had been born in Caernarfon, North Wales, on the feast day of St Mark the Evangelist in the twelfth year of his father’s reign, 25 April 1284, and was baptised there on 1 May, with nineteen pounds paid out in alms to celebrate his birth and baptism.
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Edward is one of three kings of England born in Wales, the others being Henry V in 1386 and Henry VII in 1457, and he was the only one close to the throne at the time of his birth.

Edward I was almost forty-five in April 1284, born on 17 June 1239, and had been king of England since the death of his father Henry III in November 1272. Edward of Caernarfon’s Spanish mother Queen Eleanor was forty-two at the time of her youngest child’s birth; she was born in late 1241 as Doña Leonor de Castilla, twelfth of the fifteen children of the great warrior king Fernando III of Castile and Leon, later canonised as San Fernando.
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Born the son of a reigning king, grandson of two more kings, Edward of Caernarfon’s ancestry was impeccably royal on both sides. His parents had been married for just under thirty years at the time of his birth: their wedding took place in Burgos, northern Spain, on 1 November 1254. Edward was named after his father, who himself was named in honour of his father King Henry’s favourite saint, Edward the Confessor. Between 1066 when the Confessor died and Edward I’s birth in 1239, the Anglo-Saxon name Edward had fallen out of use in England and by the middle of the thirteenth century probably sounded as old-fashioned as Leofwin, Ethelred and Wulfnoth, but the fact that all the kings of England between 1272 and 1377 bore the name ensured its popularity for evermore.