Edward II
Edward II of England (1284 – 1327), son and successor of Edward I, one of England’s greatest monarchs, was a disappointment to both his father while the latter lived, and to his subjects, after he succeeded Edward I to the throne in 1307. A weak and flighty king, Edward II relied on and elevated favorites who misgoverned the realm in his name, and compounded the problem by doing little to counter the perception that those favorites were his gay lovers. Poor government and perceived effeteness in a homophobic age earned Edward the widespread hatred and contempt of his barons and subjects and brought him to grief in the end.
Early in his reign, Edward II angered his barons by elevating to an earldom a frivolous favorite, and rumored lover, Piers Gaveston. The barons demanded that Edward banish Gaveston and assent to a document limiting the king’s power over appointments and finances. Edward caved in and banished Gaveston, but allowed him to return a short while. The barons responded by seizing and executing Gaveston.
In 1314, Edward led an army into Scotland, but was decisively defeated at the Battle of Bannockburn, and at a stroke lost all the gains his father had made with years of toil and great expense to assert English control of Scotland. Humiliated, Edward was unable to resist his magnates when they formed a baronial committee that sidelined the king and ruled the realm. It lasted until Edward found another favorite, another rumored lover, Hugh Despenser, and elevated him. As with the king’s earlier favorite, the barons demanded that Edward banish Despenser, but this time he fought back, and with the Despenser family’s support, Edward defeated the opposing barons and regained his authority in 1322.
However, his public displays of affection for Hugh Despenser humiliated and alienated Edward’s queen, Isabella. While on a diplomatic mission to Paris in 1325, she became the mistress of Roger Mortimer, an exiled baronial opponent of the king. In 1326, the couple invaded England, executed the Despensers, deposed Edward II, and replaced him with his 14-year-old son, who was crowned Edward III in January 1327, with Roger Mortimer acting as regent during the new king’s minority.
Edward II’s bizarre death came later that year. Roger Mortimer, hearing that his opponents were plotting to free the deposed king, had him moved in April 1327, to Berkley Castle in Gloucestershire, a more secure location. Reports of fresh plots to free Edward caused Mortimer to order him moved to various locations during the spring and summer of 1327 before he was finally returned to Berkley Castle. The continued political instability, and the uncertainty whether one of those plots might finally succeed, determined Mortimer to end the problem once and for all, and put Edward II beyond rescue, by having him killed.
Not wishing to leave visible marks of murder on the body, and contemptuous of Edward and his perceived effeminacy and homosexuality, his killers did him in on the night of September 21, 1327, by holding him down and shoving a red hot poker up his rectum to burn his bowels from the inside. Another version has it that a tube was first inserted in his rectum, and a red hot metal bolt was then dropped down the tube into his bowels. Either way, his screams were said to have reverberated around the castle, and were heard far beyond its walls.