Happy Birthday Edward of Caernarfon!

King Edward II of England was born on 25 April 1284, the fourth son of King Edward I and his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, but the eldest son to survive to adulthood.

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Most people know more historical myths about Edward II – that he was the embodiment of the limp-wristed pouf negative stereotype like in Mel Gibson‘s 1995 movie Braveheart, or that he gave his wife’s jewels to his male lover Piers Gaveston, or that he died from a red-hot poker shoved up his bunghole – than truths about him.

For one thing, he was probably “bisexual” as we understand it, rather than “gay”. Yes, he probably did do the nasty with Gaveston: “an anonymous chronicler in the 1320s who described how Edward “felt such love” for Gaveston that “he entered into a covenant of constancy, and bound himself with him before all other mortals with a bond of indissoluble love, firmly drawn up and fastened with a knot” and the Meaux Chronicle from the 1390s claims that the king enjoyed “too much to the vice of sodomy.” However, Edward was clearly having sex with women as well as men. Not only did he father four children with his wife, Isabella of France, he had at least one son before he married and was rumoured to have had an affair with his niece, Eleanor de Clare. 

Moreover, no one would have understood that to be a defining characteristic of his personality in the Medieval period. Homosexuality was condemned as a perversion and a sin, but it was considered a ‘kink’ rather than an identity. Having sex with another dude was something a sinful a man might DO, but it wasn’t who he WAS. 

Secondly, while Edward did wildly overindulged (to the detriment of his kingdom) his favorites and those he loved, he never gave away his wife’s jewels. In fact, he overindulged his wife as much as any of his other ‘lovers’. Rather than hating him, Isabella appears to have loved her husband. Her anger at the king’s favorite, Hugh Despenser the Younger, may have been as much from sheer jealousy over her husband’s affections as much as anything else. The only reason she was able to take their eldest son to France and stage a rebellion against her husband was because Edward had foolishly given in to her wishes (as he did with anyone he loved) to go back to her native land with the Prince of Wales. Even after Isabella raised an army to depose her spouse (allying herself to the exiled enemy of Hugh Despenser, Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, who coincidentally was also born on 25 April three years after Edward of Caerfanon), she continued to send her captive husband presents and love letters, and when she died, Isabella was buried with Edward’s heart in a casket on her chest. These are hardly the acts of a woman who had hated her cruel, gay husband!

Thirdly, there is ZERO evidence Edward died from an anal assault with a hot poker after Isabella and Mortimer deposed him. This rumour began spreading sometime in the mid-1330s and 1340, possibly as deliberate propaganda to make Edmund seem weak and suitably ‘punished’ for his sodomy. The tale grew in the telling, “supported in later years by Geoffrey le Baker‘s colourful account of the killing.” But if the rumour was to make the king less popular, it failed. “The King’s tomb rapidly became a popular site for visitors … Miracles reportedly took place at the tomb … chronicler Geoffrey de Baker depicted Edward as a saintly, tortured martyr, and Richard II gave royal support for an unsuccessful bid to have Edward canonised in 1395.”

There is also evidence to support the theory that Edward II didn’t die in 1327 at all. Some historians argue that the king, still beloved of his wife and teenage son, now Edward III, was secreted away (in a monastery?) until he died a natural death during Edward III’s reign. Most theories regarding Edward’s post-usurpation survival, “involve the “Fieschi Letter“, sent to Edward III by an Italian priest called Manuel Fieschi, who claimed that Edward escaped Berkeley Castle in 1327 with the help of a servant and ultimately retired to become a hermit in the Holy Roman Empire.”

Regardless of when, or how, he died, his inept reign was as much a product of circumstance as it was his poor kingship. Edward II came to the throne just as the 300 years of the Medieval Warm Period was coming to an end and the Little Ice Age (LIA) was gearing up. The most likely reason for these kinds of warming/cooling periods is the action of the Milankovitch cycles, which are periods of astronomical variations in the Earth’s orbit lasting about 10,000 that cause predictable changes in climate. (NB: we’re supposed to be in another LIA right now, and if it wasn’t for that global warming would be catastrophically worse.)

The LIA caused all kinds of havoc, including “poor crop growth, poor livestock survival, and increased activity of pathogens and disease vectors. Disease tends to intensify under the same conditions that unemployment and economic difficulties arise … generating a lethal positive feedback loop. Although these communities had some contingency plans, such as better crop mixes, emergency grain stocks, and international food trade, these did not always prove to be effective.” Sometimes supplies were so low even the king had trouble getting enough bread for his court. 

These periods of food crisis, plagues, and economic depression lead to social upheaval and crime. As people struggled to understand why their lives were going to shit, there was an increase in violence against marginalised groups (such as Jews and supposed witches) and political revolt against the ineffectual king suspected of bringing down divine displeasure on Britain.  Conditions were ripe for rebellion, and while a more charismatic, brutal, and war-like kings, such as Edward III, can survive troubled times, a gentle and not-very-politically-astute king like Edward II was toast.

Although King Edward II wasn’t the greatest of kings, and he made mistakes, he deserves as better legacy than the taradiddle that he was a wuss who had nothing better to do than give his wife’s jewels away to his catamites and then die skewered on a poker.