If you have traced your
ancestors back to European medieval aristocracy and royalty, you are almost
certainly descended from Edward III, king of England,
who reigned during the Black Death and 100 Years War with France. He has literally millions
of descendants. And who was Edward III’s father? Edward II. Who’s your daddy?
This guy!
Edward II, the
Unconventional King
© 2014 Kathryn Warner
King Edward II was born in Caernarfon, North Wales on 25
April 1284, the feast day of St Mark the Evangelist, in the twelfth year of his
father's reign as king of England.
He was at least the fourteenth and perhaps the sixteenth, and youngest, child
of Edward I and his first, Spanish queen Eleanor of Castile.
Five of his older sisters, Eleanor, Joan, Margaret, Mary and
Elizabeth, also survived into adulthood, but his three older brothers John,
Henry and Alfonso and at least five other older sisters died young. Edward II
was the first of three kings of England
to be born in Wales
(the others were Henry V in 1386 and Henry VII in 1457), and is one of only two
English monarchs in history (the other being Mary I, born in 1516) with a
Spanish parent. His much younger half-brothers Thomas of Brotherton, earl of Norfolk, and Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent,
were born in 1300 and 1301, the only surviving children of Edward I and his
second queen Marguerite of France. Edmund of Woodstock was, via his daughter
Joan, the grandfather of Richard II, who was also Edward II's great-grandson.
Edward II's maternal grandfather was a Spanish saint and
warrior: the great King Fernando III of Castile and Leon, later canonised as
San Fernando and made patron saint of the city of Seville, which he had
recaptured during the Reconquista of Andalusia in 1248. Leonor or
Eleanor of Castile, the twelfth of Fernando's fifteen children, married the
future Edward I of England
in 1254 when she was twelve or thirteen and he fifteen. Edward II's paternal
grandfather was Henry III, king of England from 1216 to 1272, the son
of King John of Magna Carta fame. Edward II took after this grandfather far
more than Fernando or his father Edward I in many ways - reliance on
favourites, military incompetence - and suffered the price for his ineptitude
as a leader when he was forced in January 1327 to abdicate his throne to his
fourteen-year-old son Edward III, who reigned for fifty years and began the
Hundred Years War with France.
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| Edward II alabaster effigy in Gloucester Cathedral |
Edward II was most unconventional for his time, and to the
disgust of many of his contemporaries, thoroughly enjoyed the company of his
low-born subjects and taking part in their activities such as digging ditches,
thatching roofs and shoeing horses. Contrary to the common modern image of him
as seen in Braveheart and much
historical fiction, he was tall, well-built, fit, healthy and enormously
strong: "physically he was one of the strongest men of his realm,"
said one chronicler, and many observers wrote much the same thing.
Edward II succeeded to the English throne on 7 July 1307,
when he was twenty-three, on the death of sixty-eight-year-old Edward I. He was
left an extremely difficult legacy by his mighty father: restless magnates,
hostile relations with France,
vast debts and an unwinnable war in Scotland, and sadly for his kingdom,
he was not the man to be able to cope with such issues. His reign of nineteen
and a half years lurched from one crisis to the next, with civil war constantly
threatening to break out and Edward's infuriated magnates threatening him with
deposition.
Edward II is perhaps best known for his love of and reliance
on male 'favourites,' most famously Piers Gaveston, whom Edward made earl of
Cornwall and who was executed by some of the English earls, including Edward
II's first cousin and greatest enemy, the earl of Lancaster, in June 1312. The
king's reliance on his last and most powerful favourite, Hugh Despenser the
Younger, was to bring both of them down, when they alienated Edward's queen,
Isabella of France, daughter of Philip IV, whom Edward had married in 1308. Despenser
was grotesquely executed in November 1326, while Edward was imprisoned at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire and in January
1327 forced to give up his throne to his son Edward III.
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| Stained glass in Gloucester Cathedral, of Edward III ordering a memorial tomb for his father, Edward II. |
Mystery surrounds Edward's death at Berkeley Castle in
September 1327, and although popular legend has it that he died screaming,
impaled on a red-hot poker, much evidence exists to demonstrate that many
influential people, including several earls, the archbishop of York and the
mayor of London, strongly believed that he
was still alive years afterwards, perhaps in Italy. Whatever happened to
the king - and it is entirely typical of this most unconventional of men that
we don't know for certain when, where or how he died - the tomb built for him
at Gloucester Cathedral still exists and remains one of the greatest glories of
medieval England.
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He is one of the most reviled English kings in history. He
drove his kingdom to the brink of civil war a dozen times in less than twenty
years. He allowed his male lovers to rule the kingdom. He led a great army to
the most ignominious military defeat in English history. His wife took a lover
and invaded his kingdom, and he ended his reign wandering around Wales with a
handful of followers, pursued by an army. He was the first king of England forced
to abdicate his throne. Popular legend has it that he died screaming, impaled on
a red-hot poker, but in fact the time and place of his death are shrouded in
mystery. His life reads like an Elizabethan tragedy, full of passionate doomed
love, bloody revenge, jealousy, hatred, vindictiveness and obsession.
He was Edward II, and this book tells his story. The focus
here is on his relationships with his male ‘favourites’ and his disaffected
wife, on his unorthodox lifestyle and hobbies, and on the mystery surrounding
his death. Using almost exclusively fourteenth-century sources and Edward’s own
letters and speeches wherever possible, Kathryn Warner strips away the myths
which have been created about him over the centuries, and provides a far more
accurate and vivid picture of him than has previously been seen.
The hardcover book is available October 28, 2014, on Amazon
UK, Amazon
US, Book
Depository, The
Guardian Bookshop or directly from the publisher, Amberley.
