Christopher Given-Wilson - Edward II: The Terrors of Kingship

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Christopher Given-Wilson

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Edward II

The Terrors of Kingship

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First published 2016

Copyright Christopher Given-Wilson, 2016

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design by Pentagram

Cover art by Hsiao-Ron Cheng

ISBN: 978-0-141-97797-3

For Rosalind, with love and gratitude

Son of a famous father, father of a famous son, Edward II (130727) presided over a twenty-year interlude of infamy bisecting a century during which the English monarchy established itself as the foremost military power in Western Europe. Edward I (12721307), conqueror of Wales and hammer of the Scots, came as close as any medieval king to uniting the British Isles under English rule. Edward III (132777) terrorized and humiliated both the French and the Scots, captured and imprisoned their kings and made English arms a byword for fame and glory abroad. It was by such standards that medieval kings were judged, but Edward II was a failure by any standards. The price he paid was to be the first English king since the Norman Conquest to be deposed.

That there was a tendency for strong and successful kings to be succeeded by weak and unsuccessful ones is one of the commonplaces of medieval English history: Edward I was followed by Edward II, Edward III by Richard II, Henry V by Henry VI, and so on. The anonymous author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi (Life of Edward II), in many respects the shrewdest of the early fourteenth-century chroniclers, contrived to see this as providential, enabling the brilliance of a great man to shine more brightly against a gloomy background. Modern historians are more inclined to ask how sustainable it was for the resources of the medieval English state to be mobilized in support of effectively unlimited expansionist policies. Although the population of England, at around six million, comprised 75 per cent of the inhabitants of the British Isles, it was only about a third of that of France. Edward I, Edward III and Henry V may have built their reputations on conquest, but what they left to their successors were unfinished and arguably unwinnable wars and a kingdom groaning under the burden of taxation. Edward IIs legacies from his father included debts of around 200,000, a burgeoning insurrection in Scotland and, after a decade of conflict, a precarious peace with France.

Yet, damnosa hereditas as this was, it was by no means untypical, for most kings faced not dissimilar problems. To overcome them they needed to cultivate the goodwill of the magnates, and in this respect the auguries at Edward IIs accession in 1307 were favourable. The new king was twenty-three no beardless youth, but still in the prime of life his fathers undisputed heir, and surrounded by a loyal and vigorous clutch of young earls. Always an exclusive group in the Middle Ages, the English earls numbered just ten in 1307, two of whom (Oxford and Richmond) were political lightweights. Of the remainder, Henry of Lincoln was fifty-six, but all the rest were between sixteen and thirty-five, broadly the same generation as the king. The greatest of them by birth and wealth were Edwards cousin, Thomas of Lancaster, and his nephew, Gilbert of Gloucester, and the remaining five Humphrey of Hereford, Aymer of Pembroke, Guy of Warwick, Edmund of Arundel and John of Warenne were no parvenus, each of their earldoms having been in the family for at least one generation.

The personal and political relationships between them and the king formed the keystone of the political edifice. To raise armies, secure taxes, maintain law and order in other words, to govern he needed their active co-operation. Not only were they his natural advisers, deputies and comrades-in-arms, they were also the pre-eminent peers of Parliament, an institution still in its infancy, which might or might not include the embryonic Commons but was at all times dominated by the Lords. Alongside the earls, sharing their dignity though not their private landed and military power, were the twenty-one bishops of England and Wales, several of whom combined high office in the royal administration with their pastoral duties, while below the earls in the lay hierarchy came the barons, a fluctuating group of up to two hundred men, only a small number of whom were politically active although most were militarily active. These were the men the earls, bishops and barons with whom a medieval king had to establish a modus operandi. It was his inability to do so that lay at the heart of Edward IIs failure.