Following the King’s removal, the new King’s guardians – Isabella, Edward II’s queen, and her lover Roger Mortimer – had to decide what to do with him. Initially it was decided to keep him a prisoner. But by the summer, after a failed bid to release him, it was felt that he was safer dead. As part of our Kings and Queens series, medieval historian Kathryn Warner tells you everything you need to know about Edward II, king of England and lord of Ireland. This article was first published in May 2014. Edward II lacked the royal dignity of his father and failed miserably as king. He inherited his father's war with Scotland and displayed his ineptitude as a soldier. Disgruntled barons, already wary of Edward as Prince of. Directed by Richard Marquand, Toby Robertson. With Ian McKellen, Timothy West, Diane Fletcher, James Laurenson. The reign of Edward II, King of England, is troubled from the start when he brings his male lover, hated by the. The grisly tale of Edward II’s murder may have been nothing more than a medieval con job, argues Ian Mortimer. A note on the deaths of Edward II. There is no doubt that Edward II was a controversial monarch. In character and deed he was a disappointment to many of his contemporaries, not just his father. He shall to prison, and there die in bolts. Ay, to the Tower, the Fleet, or where thou wilt. For this offence, be thou accurst of God! Convey this priest to the Tower. Edward II / is a leader who fails to lead – a king who loses everything because of his addiction to another man. Newly crowned and convinced he’s invincible, he flaunts his affair and in doing so, affronts the nation. Everyone knows how Edward II died. He was murdered at Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire on 21 September 1327 by being held down and having a red-hot poker. On the night of September 2. Berkeley, he was brutally murdered. Following the King’s removal, the new King’s guardians – Isabella, Edward II’s queen, and her lover Roger Mortimer – had to decide what to do with him. Initially it was decided to keep him a prisoner. But by the summer, after a failed bid to release him, it was felt that he was safer dead. On the night of September 2. Berkeley, he was brutally murdered. Or was he? This is the intriguing question raised by these two books. Mortimer and Doherty both believe that Edward’s death was faked. The two studies are very different. One is the exceedingly racy life of Edward’s queen, and the other a full- length biography of her magnate lover. But they both have the King’s fate as their climax. Mortimer’s is the weightier of the two books. It is a superb study of the man who was effective ruler of England from 1. It is not easy to write the life of a medieval magnate. The sources are few, and it is hard to bring them to life. Too often, an attempted biography degenerates into a . But not so here: Roger is kept firmly to the fore. Ian Mortimer sees the king- making Marcher lord as a man who was a courtier by instinct, driven to opposition, as were so many of his peers, by the rise of the Despensers. In Edward’s early years he had been strongly royalist in sympathy: he had stood by the King when Lancaster was demanding the removal of Gaveston, and he supported him after Bannockburn. In a brilliant chapter he shows how Roger reimposed English rule on Ireland in the wake of the Bruce invasion in 1. For Roger, he argues, the parting of the ways came with the rise of the Despensers from 1. The Despensers were engaged in empire- building in the Welsh Marches, Roger’s own part of the world. When in 1. 32. 1 the Marchers rose in rebellion, Roger was arrested and locked in the Tower. Two years later, however, he made a dramatic escape – aided, it is argued, by Isabella – and he fled into exile. By 1. 32. 5 Isabella herself had joined him on the Continent and the two became lovers. In 1. 32. 6 they invaded England and Edward’s regime collapsed. Edward II is an Elizabethan play written by Christopher Marlowe. It is one of the earliest English history plays. The full title of the first publication is The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the. Edward II (April 25, 1284–1327) of Caernarfon, was King of England from 1307 until he was removed from the throne in January 1327. His tendency to ignore his nobility, in favour of low-born favorites, led to political. For three years from 1. Roger and Isabella effectively ruled England under Edward III’s nominal authority. But Roger’s arrogance brought him down. When his airs and graces became too much, Edward had him arrested and executed. It conveniently summarises much of the material in his unpublished Oxford thesis of the 1. Mortimer draws extensively. He takes us at a cracking pace through Isabella’s early life, sketching the background to her marriage (a peace deal with France) and stressing her loyalty to her husband even during the years of Gaveston’s dominance. He argues that the breakdown between king and queen came with the rise of the younger Despenser. By the 1. 32. 0s there were three in this marriage (a phrase we have heard in our own time). If that was the case, no wonder Isabella was repelled. And no wonder she insisted on the most gruesome of deaths for him. For many readers this material, however salacious, will be no more than a warm- up for the real mystery: what happened to Edward II? Both Doherty and Mortimer are in agreement: Edward II did not die at Berkeley. Edward regained his freedom. The theory is admittedly not new. It was first floated in the nineteenth century, when a document known as the . In this curious narrative, recorded by a papal agent, Manuel Fieschi, who passed it on to Edward III, someone claiming to be Edward II recounted that he had escaped from Berkeley, fled to Corfe, then made it to Ireland, and thence to the Continent. Fieschi found this strange man living the life of a hermit in northern Italy – where he took down his story. What are we to make of this document? Scholars have generally discounted it, and perhaps rightly. Whenever a king in the Middle Ages was toppled, an impostor would pop up somewhere claiming to be him. Ian Mortimer, however, is impressed. He says that at many points the narrative can be substantiated from record sources: for example, in the statement that Edward fled from Chepstow in 1. No run- of- the- mill impostor would know this. Accordingly, on the basis of accepting the document’s authenticity, he offers an interpretation of the years 1. Edward was alive. His argument is that Roger and Isabella wanted him alive in order to control his son. Paul Doherty, by contrast, is distinctly unimpressed by the document. His demolition job on it is superb: he dissects it sentence by sentence, exposing its inaccuracies and ambiguities. No one could possibly take the document seriously after reading his pages. He says that one thing is true: the document has a ring of verisimilitude; but, he adds, we need to remember that Manuel Fieschi knew a lot about English affairs and had spoken to people involved in the deposition. Doherty argues that Fieschi concocted the yarn. Fieschi was greedy and avaricious, keen for preferment in the English Church. He wrote to Edward as a way of bringing pressure to bear on him. Doherty’s reading of the document is greatly to be preferred to Mortimer’s. But if we go along with him, accepting it as a forgery, where does that leave the argument about Edward II’s fate? Doherty reminds us that the government did once admit that Edward had escaped – in July 1. According to the government, he was quickly recaptured. But Doherty does not believe this. In his view, he remained at large, but just faded from the scene. And perhaps that was indeed the case: it is certainly possible. If Edward was not murdered at Berkeley, then Doherty’s hypothesis has much to commend it. But are Doherty and Mortimer actually correct in supposing that he was not murdered? Both authors agree that the official account of the King’s death and the arrangements for his burial raise difficulties. But they may be jumping too quickly to a sensationalist conclusion. They argue, for example, that Edward III took no interest in commissioning a tomb for his father at Gloucester. This simply is not true. The magnificent tomb over the burial place, with its shrine- like features, is court art: court art carried from Westminster to Gloucester. And the same can be said of the remodelling of the choir: this early Perpendicular masterpiece too is court art. Edward III apparently believed that his father was buried at Gloucester. It is not entirely clear that we should believe the opposite. Nigel Saul is the author of Death, Art, and Memory in Medieval England: The Cobham Family and their Monuments 1. Oxford University Press, 2.
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