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; although he was a good horseman he lacked knightly military skills. His predilection for favourites, whether or not based on homosexual attraction, was politically disastrous.
It was not easy to succeed Edward I. Not only was his reputation almost impossible to live up to, but he left a legacy of debt and unfinished war. The political honeymoon at the start of the reign was brief; there were signs of trouble at the time of Edward's marriage to
Isabella of France in January 1308, and at his coronation a new clause was added to the
coronation oath which threatened to limit his authority. The main issue in his first years was the role of Edward's favourite Piers
Gaveston. The scenes in the dispute were acted out against a backcloth of increasing difficulty in Scotland, and acute financial problems. Gaveston was 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. Gaveston was savagely executed in 1312. There was a real danger of civil war, but neither the king nor his opponents were in a sufficiently strong position to risk fighting. 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. His policy was to try to adhere strictly to the Ordinances of 1311; his inclination was to take as little part in public affairs as he could, while pursuing private profit by questionable means. Lancaster was formally made head of the council in 1316, but soon withdrew from active government, probably in protest at the methods being employed to raise troops for an increasingly hopeless Scottish war.
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 from 1316. 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, which imposed a council on the king, but by 1321 civil war had broken out in the Welsh marches as a result of the blatantly aggressive methods adopted by Despenser to gain yet more lands from his brothers-in-law Hugh Audley and Roger Damory. An alliance was struck between the marcher lords and the earl of Lancaster. Even Bartholomew Badlesmere, hitherto a staunch royalist, joined the coalition. 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. Badlesmere's castle of Leeds in Kent was taken, for Lancaster refused to allow assistance to a man he distrusted. A brief campaign shattered the power of the Welsh marcher lords, and Lancaster marched north from Pontefract, only to be defeated at
Boroughbridge. By the time the battle was fought, most of Lancaster's retainers had abandoned him. The earl of Hereford (
Bohun) was killed attempting to force a crossing of the bridge; Lancaster surrendered, to be executed at Pontefract. An unprecedented bloodbath of his supporters followed.
The royalist triumph at Boroughbridge marked the start of one of the most unpleasant and ultimately ineffectual regimes ever to rule in England. The king, the Despensers, the earl of Arundel, and Robert Baldock, an ambitious cleric, formed a narrowly based clique which controlled the country by means of semi-judicial terror and financial threats. The need for money was a motive force behind a highly successful programme of Exchequer reform, for which the treasurer, Walter Stapledon, was largely responsible. 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. Andrew Harclay, royalist hero of Boroughbridge, and newly created earl of Carlisle, was executed for treasonable dealings with the Scots in 1323. Conflict with France over Gascony in the War of Saint-Sardos of 1324–5 further discredited the English. The queen, Isabella, was alienated from Edward by the favour given to the Despensers, and by the way in which she was treated during the French war. She was sent to France to assist in negotiating peace, but went into exile in Paris, where a small but influential group of Englishmen gathered, and 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. She had the backing not of the French monarchy, but of the count of Hainault. The Despenser regime collapsed like a house of cards. London was in uproar, giving full support to the queen. Bishop Stapledon was caught by the mob, and beheaded with a butcher's knife. Edward and his associates fled to Wales, where they were captured. The Despensers and the earl of Arundel were executed with barbaric ritual. Edward's removal from the throne was effected in Parliament in January 1327 by means of a mixture of deposition and abdication. He was murdered in Berkeley castle; a surprisingly circumstantial account that he escaped, to end his days as a hermit in Italy, is unlikely to have been true.
Michael Prestwich
Bibliography
Fryde, N. , The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II, 1321–1326 (Cambridge, 1979);
Maddicott, J. R. , Thomas of Lancaster (Oxford, 1970);
Tout, T. F. , The Place of Edward II in English History (Manchester, 1936).
