Edward II

Edward II (1284–1327), king of England (1307–27). Tall and good‐looking, Edward II had the right physical attributes for kingship, but few other qualifications. Contemporaries ridiculed the pleasure he took in rowing and working with craftsmen. His predilection for favourites, whether or not based on homosexual attraction, was politically disastrous.

The main issue in his first years on the throne was the role of Edward's favourite Piers Gaveston, exiled in 1308, to return in 1309. He was exiled once more by the Ordainers in 1311. When he returned, the king was unable to protect him from a baronial opposition increasingly dominated by Thomas of Lancaster, and Gaveston was savagely executed in 1312. The next twist in the saga came when the government was discredited by the defeat by the Scots at Bannockburn in 1314. That placed the earl of Lancaster in a dominant position, but he proved no more capable of effective rule than the king.

The earl of Gloucester had been a notable casualty at Bannockburn. He left three sisters, and the competition between their husbands for the lion's share of the inheritance was of major political significance. Above all, the ambitions of one of them, Hugh Despenser the Younger, husband of Eleanor, provided a new and divisive element. A political settlement of sorts was reached in the treaty of Leake of 1318, but by 1321 civil war had broken out in the Welsh marches. An alliance was struck between the marcher lords and the earl of Lancaster. The Despensers, father and son, were forced into a brief exile, but in the autumn of 1321 an astonishingly successful revival of royal and Despenser power took place. A brief campaign shattered the power of the Welsh marcher lords, and Lancaster marched north, only to be defeated at Boroughbridge and executed at Pontefract. An unprecedented bloodbath of his supporters followed.

The royalist triumph at Boroughbridge marked the start of one of the most unpleasant regimes ever to rule in England. The war with Scotland went badly. An ineffective English march as far as Edinburgh in 1322 was followed by a Scottish raid into England, in which the king himself was nearly captured. Conflict with France over Gascony in the War of Saint‐Sardos of 1324–5 further discredited the English. The queen, Isabella, was sent to France to assist in negotiating peace, but went into exile in Paris, where she took as lover Roger Mortimer, one of the rebels of 1321, who had succeeded in escaping from the Tower.

In the autumn of 1326, Isabella invaded with a small force. The Despenser regime collapsed like a house of cards. Edward and his associates fled to Wales, where they were captured. The Despensers were executed with barbaric ritual; Edward was removed from the throne by Parliament in January 1327, and murdered in Berkeley castle.