Long Live the King

The Mysterious Fate of Edward II

Kathryn Warner

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780750983273
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Edward II's murder at Berkeley Castle in 1327 is one of the most famous and lurid tales in all of English history. But is it true? For over five centuries, few people questioned it, but with the discovery in a Montpellier archive of a remarkable document, an alternative narrative has presented itself: that Edward escaped from Berkeley Castle and made his way to an Italian hermitage.

In Long Live the King, medieval historian Kathryn Warner explores in detail Edward's downfall and forced abdication in 1326/27, the role possibly played by his wife Isabella of France, the wide variation in chronicle accounts of his murder at Berkeley Castle and the fascinating possibility that Edward lived on in Italy for many years after his official funeral was held in Gloucester in December 1327.

PART I

THE RELUCTANT KING

1

THE MAKING OF THE
RELUCTANT KING, 1284–1314

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. His parents were both in their 40s at the time of his birth, and in April 1284 had been married six months short of thirty years. They were Edward I, King of England, Lord of Ireland and Duke of Aquitaine, born in June 1239 and then almost 45 years old, and his Spanish queen Leonor of Castile, who was probably born in late 1241 and was thus 42 when she gave birth to Edward, her youngest child. Edward I had recently conquered North Wales, and had just begun building the magnificent and massive stone castle which still stands in Caernarfon. Edward II was therefore probably born in the middle of a muddy building site, unless Queen Leonor had decided to take more comfortable lodgings in the town itself. Edward II has always been strongly associated with his birthplace, and in his own lifetime and ever since has generally been known as Edward of Caernarfon. He was the first of three Kings of England born in Wales (the others are Henry V, born in 1386, and Henry VII, born in 1457) and the first of two English monarchs with a Spanish parent (the other is Mary I, born in 1516 as the daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon).

Edward I had succeeded his father Henry III as King of England in November 1272. He and Queen Leonor were on crusade in the Holy Land at this time, where Edward survived an assassination attempt by Sultan Baibars on his 33rd birthday in June 1272, and returned to England in August 1274. Queen Leonor was the twelfth of the fifteen children of a great warrior-king: Fernando or Ferdinand III, King of Castile and Leon (two of the four kingdoms of medieval Spain), who died in May 1252 in Seville, where his tomb still exists in the cathedral. Fernando had recaptured much of southern Spain from its Muslim rulers the Almohad dynasty in the 1230s and 1240s, and was canonised as St Fernando four centuries after his death in 1671; his feast day is 30 May, the date of his death in 1252, and he is the patron saint of the city of Seville. Edward II’s grandfather was a Spanish warrior-saint, and his many Spanish uncles included the Archbishops of Seville and Toledo, a senator of Rome, and King Alfonso X, known to history as ‘the Wise’ or ‘the Learned’ and a law-maker, musician and astrologer; the Alphonsus crater on the Moon is named after him. 15-year-old Lord Edward, elder son and heir of Henry III of England, married Alfonso X’s much younger half-sister Doña Leonor in Burgos, northern Spain, on 1 November 1254, when she was 13 or shortly to turn 13. Over the next thirty years the couple had at least fourteen children together and perhaps as many as sixteen, though more than half of them died in childhood. By the time their fourth son and youngest child Edward of Caernarfon was born in April 1284, only six of his thirteen or more older siblings still lived: Eleanor, Joan of Acre (who was born in the Holy Land in 1272), Margaret, Mary, Elizabeth, and the only surviving boy, Alfonso.

Alfonso, named after his uncle and godfather Alfonso X of Castile, was born in Bayonne, southern France in November 1273 and had been heir to the English throne since the death of his 6-year-old brother Henry in October 1274. Edward I and Queen Leonor’s first son John had died at the age of five in 1271 during the lifetime of his grandfather Henry III. Edward of Caernarfon was not born next in line to his father’s throne, but in August 1284, four months after his birth, his brother Alfonso of Bayonne died suddenly at the age of 10. The three elder brothers he never knew having all died young, Edward of Caernarfon became heir to the throne, and luckily for his father was a healthy boy who survived childhood. His mother Queen Leonor died in November 1290 when he was only 6, and nine years later his father married a second wife, Marguerite of France, daughter of King Philip III (who was Edward I’s first cousin) and half-sister of Philip IV. With Marguerite, Edward I had two more sons, Edward of Caernarfon’s half-brothers: Thomas of Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk, born in June 1300, and Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, born in August 1301 and seventeen years Edward’s junior. Only six of Edward I’s seventeen or nineteen children outlived him: Margaret, Mary, Elizabeth and Edward II from his first marriage, and Thomas and Edmund from his second.¹

Edward I died on 7 July 1307 at the age of 68, in the village of Burgh-by-Sands near Carlisle in the far north-west of his kingdom, on his way to yet another military campaign in Scotland. Edward’s brother-in-law King Alexander III of Scotland had died in 1286, having outlived all three of his children and leaving as his sole heir his 3-year-old granddaughter Margaret ‘the Maid’ of Norway, daughter of King Erik II of Norway and Alexander’s daughter Margaret. Margaret the Maid, Queen of Scotland in her own right, was betrothed in 1289 to her cousin Edward of Caernarfon, but she died the following year without ever setting foot in her kingdom. In 1292 the Guardians of Scotland, who had asked Edward I for his aid and counsel, chose John Balliol as their king, but in 1296 Balliol allied with Philip IV in his war against Edward I. Edward thus invaded Scotland and removed Balliol from the throne. The candidate with the second best claim to the throne in 1292 had been Robert Bruce, and Bruce’s grandson of the same name had himself crowned King of Scots in March 1306 following a ten-year interregnum. Edward I, whose counsel to the Scottish Guardians had come with a price attached – that the kings of Scotland thereafter would acknowledge him and his successors as their overlords for the kingdom – set out on a campaign against Robert Bruce, but died before he reached Scotland. His son and successor Edward II was a very different kind of man to his father, and although he had been raised to believe that he was the rightful overlord of Scotland, he was never able to impose the slightest authority on Bruce. Indeed, his merely sporadic and always unsuccessful forays into the northern kingdom allowed Bruce to entrench his position, defeat his enemies and gain numerous new allies.

Edward II was 23 years old when he became King of England and Lord of Ireland in July 1307. He already held several titles: he was Duke of Aquitaine in southern France, territory he had inherited from his father and ultimately from his great-great-grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of England; he had been Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester since 1301 (he was the first heir to the English throne to receive the title of Prince of Wales); and he had been Count of Ponthieu, a small county in northern France bordering Normandy, since the death of his mother Queen Leonor in 1290. Although Spanish, Eleanor had a French mother, Joan of Ponthieu, Queen of Castile, and had inherited the county from her. It passed to Edward as Leonor’s only surviving son. He was thus a peer of the realm of France as well as King of England, and owed homage for his French lands to his overlord the King of France; this was to create huge problems for Edward in 1325, and he was unfortunate that during his reign of nineteen and a half years there were no fewer than four kings in France, to all of whom he owed the ceremony of homage. Although still called Dukes of Aquitaine, the Kings of England no longer held the entire duchy but only a part of it, Gascony.

It is entirely probable that Edward II’s very first act as king was to recall a man named Piers Gaveston from the exile imposed on him by Edward’s father some months before. Gaveston was a nobleman of Béarn in the far south of France near Spain, part of the area ruled by the Kings of England, and had lived in England since 1297. Edward I placed Gaveston in his son’s household in or before 1300, and he was, almost beyond a shadow of a doubt, the great love of Edward II’s life. Concerned about the two men’s relationship, and unable to send his own son and heir out of the kingdom to separate them, in April 1307 Edward I exiled Gaveston from England instead. As soon as he could when his father died only a few weeks later, Edward II brought Gaveston back, gave him the Earldom of Cornwall, and made him a member of the royal family by marriage to his niece Margaret de Clare, second daughter of his second-eldest sister Joan of Acre and the oldest unmarried female member of the English royal family in 1307.

Not long after Gaveston’s wedding, Edward II himself married. His bride was Isabella of France, only surviving daughter of the powerful French king Philip IV and Joan I, who was Queen of Navarre – another of the Spanish kingdoms – in her own right. Edward and Isabella’s marriage had been arranged by the pope as far back as 1298 as a means of making peace between the warring kingdoms of England and France, and neither of them had the slightest choice in the matter. They married in Boulogne, northern France on 25 January 1308 – Edward also performed homage to his new father-in-law at this time as Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Ponthieu – and were crowned as King and Queen of England at Westminster Abbey exactly a month later. Isabella was probably born in late 1295, and was at least eleven and a half years Edward’s junior and only 12 when they married. Her mother Queen Joan I of Navarre died in 1305 and was succeeded by Isabella’s then 15-year-old brother Louis, who also acceded to the French throne as Louis X on the death of Philip IV in November 1314. Isabella’s other brothers were Philip V and Charles IV, the last kings of the Capetian dynasty which had ruled France since 987; as the three brothers all left daughters but no sons, they were succeeded by their cousin Philip VI, son of Philip IV’s brother Charles of Valois, and the first Valois King of France. Although it is often assumed that Edward II and Isabella of France’s marriage was an unhappy, unloving tragedy from start to finish, this is not the case: there is much evidence that for many years they showed each other considerable affection, support and loyalty, and it was not until the 1320s that Edward’s behaviour began to drive his wife and queen into opposition.

Within months of his accession to the throne, Edward II brought his kingdom to the brink of civil war by his passion for and favouritism towards Piers Gaveston. In 1308, a large group of English barons demanded that Gaveston be exiled. Edward refused for months, and both he and his opponents prepared for war; military confrontation seemed almost inevitable. Edward finally averted the threat when he agreed to send Gaveston out of England and appointed him lord lieutenant of Ireland, but then spent the next few months manipulating his barons and bribing Pope Clement V until Clement lifted the ban of excommunication on Gaveston if he returned to England, and the English barons consented to his return in June 1309.

Edward failed to learn his lesson; he continued to shower Gaveston with lands, gifts, appointments and favours, while Gaveston gave his baronial opponents insulting nicknames and acted with a haughtiness and superiority which they found unbearable. He was exiled from England for a third time in late 1311, this time leaving his royal wife Margaret de Clare behind in England, pregnant. Yet again early in 1312, Edward II brought Gaveston back to England, unable and unwilling to live without him, and restored him to the Earldom of Cornwall. A group of exasperated barons captured Gaveston in June 1312, just five months after the birth of his and Margaret de Clare’s only child Joan, and had him run through with a sword and beheaded at Blacklow Hill in Warwickshire. Their leader was the richest and most powerful earl in England, a man of high royal birth: Thomas of Lancaster, Earl of Lancaster, Leicester, Derby, Lincoln and Salisbury, who was Edward II’s first cousin (he was the elder son of Edward I’s younger brother Edmund of Lancaster) and Queen Isabella’s uncle (he was the younger half-brother of her mother Queen Joan I of Navarre). King Edward would never forgive Lancaster for this act of murder, and the hostile relations between the two cousins dominated English politics for the next decade.

Queen Isabella, now 16 or 17, was four months pregnant at the time of Piers Gaveston’s murder, and on Monday 13 November 1312 at Windsor Castle she gave birth to her and Edward II’s first child, the future King Edward III. Despite some modern speculation, there is no doubt whatsoever that Edward II was his son’s real father. The assumption that he was not is solely a modern idea first mooted in the 1980s, and is based entirely on the presumption that because Edward II was a lover of men, he was necessarily incapable of intercourse with women. This theory is disproved by the existence of Edward’s illegitimate son Adam, who was born sometime between 1305 and 1310 either before Edward’s marriage to Isabella or when she was still too young to be his wife in more than name only, and by the behaviour of contemporaries: there was clearly not the slightest doubt in anyone’s mind that Edward III was the true son of Edward II. Three more royal children were to follow: John of Eltham, Earl of Cornwall, in August 1316; Eleanor of Woodstock, Duchess of Guelders, in June 1318; and Joan of the Tower, Queen of Scots, born in the Tower of London in July 1321. The royal couple made a long and successful visit to Isabella’s homeland in the summer of 1313 to attend the simultaneous knighting of Isabella’s three brothers and her cousin Philip de Valois, an eventful stay during which Edward passed the first anniversary of Piers Gaveston’s murder by watching more than fifty entertainers dance for him naked and a little later saved Isabella’s life when a fire broke out in their pavilion one night. She may have suffered a miscarriage later that year.

Edward II had led an unsuccessful military campaign in Scotland in 1310–11 when he failed to engage Robert Bruce in battle or to weaken his position at all. Still confident that he was the rightful overlord of Bruce’s kingdom, however, he waged a much more successful campaign against Bruce in the papal court: the popes Clement V (died 1314) and his successor John XXII (died 1334) were both firmly on Edward’s side in the matter, and frequently republished the sentence of excommunication on Bruce for the murder of his rival John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch, in 1306. In the summer of 1314, Edward finally led a great army north and faced Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn on 24 June. Only three of Edward’s earls accompanied him: his nephew Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, his brother-in-law Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and his cousin Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke. Edward had already alienated many of his powerful earls and barons to the extent that they were unwilling to fight for him. Young Gloucester, the greatest nobleman in England after Edward’s powerful and detested cousin Thomas of Lancaster, was killed during the rout, as was John Comyn of Badenoch’s son John Comyn the younger, and Edward himself had to be dragged protesting from the field by the Earl of Pembroke when Pembroke realised the battle was lost. Although the king had fought bravely in the middle of the field and acquitted himself well (one chronicler says he fought ‘like a lioness deprived of her cubs’), the loss at Bannockburn was a crushing humiliation which weakened his position even further. And over the next few years, things went from bad to worse.

2

THE KING AND THE
CONTRARIANTS, 1314–1324

A natural disaster occurred in England and elsewhere in northern Europe in the years 1315 to 1317: it hardly stopped raining from 1314 to 1316, and crops rotted in the fields. Prices for such foodstuffs as were available increased dramatically, beyond the reach of most people. Five or perhaps as much as ten per cent of the population starved to death, or perished as diseases swept the country, and one chronicler even claims that some desperate people resorted to cannibalism. Edward II finally had Piers Gaveston buried at Langley Priory in Hertfordshire, which the king himself had founded in 1308, at the beginning of 1315, two and a half years after Gaveston’s murder. That same year, a new man rose in Edward’s affections: a knight of Oxfordshire called Roger Damory, who had fought in the retinue of Edward’s nephew the Earl of Gloucester at the battle of Bannockburn. In the spring of 1317, Edward arranged Damory’s marriage to his twice-widowed niece Elizabeth de Clare, and another court favourite, Sir Hugh Audley, married Elizabeth’s sister Margaret de Clare, Piers Gaveston’s widow, at the same time. Elizabeth, Margaret and their eldest sister Eleanor were co-heirs to the vast fortune of their late brother the Earl of Gloucester (killed at Bannockburn in 1314), and in 1317 Gloucester’s lands in England, Wales and Ireland were divided among the three sisters and their husbands. Eleanor had been married to Hugh Despenser the Younger since 1306: he was the nephew of Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who had abducted Piers Gaveston in 1312 and imprisoned him before his assassination, and who died in 1315. Despenser’s father Hugh Despenser the Elder was, however, an ardent royalist who staunchly supported Edward II for his entire reign. Edward had apparently long disliked and distrusted Hugh Despenser the Younger, but after the barons appointed Despenser as his chamberlain in 1318 against his wishes, his feelings underwent a sea change. In about 1319/20, Despenser became the king’s great ‘favourite’, perhaps his lover, or perhaps a close friend and useful political ally. At any rate, Edward became so closely involved with Despenser that the latter was called ‘the king’s ...