I do not remember to have heard that one man so loved another. Jonathan cherished David, Achilles loved Patroclus.
The Vita Edwardi Secundi, on Edward II and Piers Gaveston
Edward II
parents: Edward I and Eleanor of Castile
date and place of birth: 25 April 1284 at Caernarfon Castle
wife: Isabella of France
date of marriage: 25 January 1308 at Boulogne
children: Edward (later Edward III), John of Eltham, Eleanor, Joan; one illegitimate son, Adam
years of reign: 1307-1327
date of coronation: 25 February 1308 at Westminster Abbey
date and place of death: 21 September 1327 (reported) at Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire
place of burial: Gloucester Cathedral
Edward of Caernarfon was the fourth son of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, born in the half-built castle his father was raising to hold down the newly conquered Welsh. His three elder brothers all died young, and by the age of four months he was heir to the throne. In 1301 his father made him Prince of Wales. He grew up tall, strong and good-looking, and his contemporaries were puzzled by what he liked to do. He enjoyed rowing, swimming, thatching roofs, digging ditches and the company of labourers, carpenters and actors, pastimes the chroniclers thought unworthy of a king's son. He showed little interest in the tournaments and war that his father lived for.
Piers Gaveston
Around 1300 Edward I placed a young Gascon knight named Piers Gaveston in his son's household. The two became inseparable. Whether they were lovers, sworn brothers in arms, or both, historians still argue; contemporaries compared them to David and Jonathan and hinted at more. What nobody disputes is that Edward put Gaveston before everyone else. In 1307 the prince asked his father to give Gaveston the county of Ponthieu. The old king, according to one chronicler, tore out handfuls of his son's hair, and he banished Gaveston from England.
Edward I died that July. One of his son's first acts as king was to recall Gaveston and make him Earl of Cornwall, a title normally reserved for members of the royal family, and to marry him to his own niece, Margaret de Clare. When Edward crossed to France in January 1308 to marry Isabella, the twelve-year-old daughter of Philip IV, he left Gaveston as regent. At the coronation that February, Gaveston carried the crown of St Edward, dressed in royal purple, and the new queen's uncles went home to complain to Philip that Edward preferred Gaveston's bed to hers.
The barons forced Gaveston into exile twice, in 1308 and 1311, and Edward brought him back each time. In 1311 they imposed the Ordinances, forty-one articles restricting the king's power over appointments, finance and war, and demanding Gaveston's permanent banishment. When Edward recalled him again at Christmas 1311, a group of earls led by the king's cousin Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, took up arms. They besieged Gaveston at Scarborough, and he surrendered in May 1312 on a promise of safe conduct. The Earl of Warwick, whom Gaveston had nicknamed "the Black Dog of Arden," seized him, and on 19 June 1312 Lancaster's men ran him through and beheaded him on Blacklow Hill, near Warwick. Edward never forgave them.
Bannockburn
While the English fought among themselves, Robert the Bruce recovered Scotland castle by castle. By 1314 the English garrison at Stirling had agreed to surrender unless an English army relieved it by midsummer. Edward marched north with the largest army an English king had led into Scotland, perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand men. On 23 and 24 June 1314 Bruce met him beside the Bannock Burn, south of Stirling. On the first day Bruce killed the English knight Henry de Bohun with an axe in single combat in front of both armies. On the second the Scottish spearmen, packed into schiltrons, pushed the English cavalry back into the boggy ground by the burn, where the English archers could not help them. The Earl of Gloucester died in the fighting, the English army broke, and Edward fled to Dunbar and took a boat home. It was one of the worst English defeats of the Middle Ages, and it secured Scotland's independence.
Famine
The following year the rain began. Wet summers ruined the harvests of 1315, 1316 and 1317 across northern Europe, and cattle and sheep disease followed. In England grain prices rose as much as eightfold, and chroniclers reported people eating dogs and cats, and worse. The Great Famine killed perhaps a tenth of the population. Scottish raiders under Bruce and James Douglas burnt and plundered the north of England almost at will. Edward's government, still at odds with Lancaster, could do little about any of it.
The Despensers
By 1318 Edward had found new favourites: Hugh Despenser the Younger, the royal chamberlain, and his father, Hugh the Elder. The younger Despenser had married Gaveston's sister-in-law, Eleanor de Clare, and set about building himself a vast lordship in South Wales by any means he could, including forcing widows to sign away their lands. In 1321 the Marcher lords whose territory he threatened rose against him and forced his exile. This time Edward fought back. He recalled the Despensers, and on 16 March 1322 his army defeated Lancaster at Boroughbridge in Yorkshire. Six days later Lancaster, the king's cousin, was beheaded outside his own castle at Pontefract, and more than twenty of his allies were hanged across the country. Within a few years pilgrims were visiting Lancaster's tomb as that of a saint.
For the next four years the Despensers ran England. Edward revoked the Ordinances, and the Despensers used the king's courts and the king's name to enrich themselves. The queen came to hate them. Isabella had borne Edward four children and stood by him through the Gaveston years, but in 1324 the Despensers persuaded Edward to confiscate her estates as a security measure during a war with France, dismiss her French servants and place Despenser's wife in her household.
Isabella and Mortimer
In 1325 Edward sent Isabella to Paris to negotiate peace with her brother, Charles IV, and then sent their son Edward to do homage for Gascony. Isabella refused to come home while the Despensers stayed in power. In Paris she found an ally, and a lover, in Roger Mortimer, a Marcher lord who had escaped from the Tower in 1323. On 24 September 1326 they landed in Suffolk with a few hundred mercenaries. Nobody fought for Edward. London rose in Isabella's favour, and the king fled west with the Despensers. The elder Despenser was hanged at Bristol in October. Edward and the younger Despenser tried to sail for Lundy or Ireland, were driven back by the weather, and were captured in South Wales in November. Despenser was hanged, drawn and quartered at Hereford on 24 November 1326.
Deposition
No English king had ever been removed from his throne, and nobody knew how to do it. In January 1327 Parliament met at Westminster and heard the case against Edward: he was incompetent, he had followed evil counsellors, he had lost Scotland and lands in France, and he had broken his coronation oath. A delegation went to Kenilworth Castle, where Edward was held, and told him that if he did not give up the crown to his son, the country might reject his whole family. Edward, in black and in tears, agreed. His fourteen-year-old son was proclaimed Edward III on 25 January 1327.
In April the former king was moved to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. Two attempts to rescue him that summer convinced Mortimer that he was dangerous alive, and on 21 September 1327 the court announced that he had died. The chronicle story of a red-hot spit thrust into his body, meant to leave no mark, first appears in accounts written years later and may reflect gossip about his sexuality rather than fact. He was probably smothered or strangled. A letter from an Italian priest, Manuel Fieschi, written around 1337, claims that Edward escaped Berkeley and ended his days as a hermit in Italy. Most historians reject it, though a few take it seriously.
Legacy
Edward's reputation reached its lowest point in the Tudor period, when Christopher Marlowe made him the subject of Edward II, a tragedy about a king destroyed by his love for Gaveston. Yet his death did more for one building than his life did for his kingdom. The monks of St Peter's Abbey, Gloucester, took his body when other abbeys would not, and pilgrims came to his tomb in such numbers that their offerings helped pay to rebuild the choir. The result, among the earliest large works of the Perpendicular Gothic style in England, is now part of Gloucester Cathedral, and his alabaster effigy still lies there. He also founded Oriel College, Oxford, in 1326.
His deposition set a precedent. Less than a century later, Parliament would use the same procedure against his great-grandson, Richard II.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "Edward II" https://englishhistory.net/middle-ages/edward-ii/, September 30, 2026