Suggest an Edit — Edward II

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Biography

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Edward II was born on 25 April 1284 at Caernarfon Castle in north Wales, the son of King Edward I of England and Queen Eleanor of Castile. He was a younger son, but the deaths of his elder brothers left him heir to the English throne. In 1301 his father created him Prince of Wales, a style that thereafter became customary for the English heir apparent. Raised during Edward I's wars in Wales and Scotland, he was knighted and drawn into military and political life, though chroniclers already remarked on his taste for rustic pastimes and for companions of relatively modest birth rather than the conventional martial and chivalric interests of the higher nobility.

He succeeded on 7 July 1307. In January 1308 he married Isabella, daughter of Philip IV of France, a match intended to ease relations with the French crown. The early years of the reign were dominated by his attachment to Piers Gaveston, a Gascon whom he made Earl of Cornwall. Baronial hostility to Gaveston's influence produced the Ordinances of 1311 and, in 1312, Gaveston's seizure and killing by a group of magnates. Edward's authority was further damaged by the English defeat at Bannockburn in 1314, when a large royal army was broken by Robert I of Scotland.

In the later 1310s and 1320s the king came under the influence of Hugh Despenser the Younger and his father. Their accumulation of land and power in the Welsh Marches provoked a baronial coalition. After civil war, Edward and the Despensers prevailed in 1322, executing Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, and imposing a harsh settlement. The regime alienated Queen Isabella, who in 1325 went to France on a diplomatic errand and there allied with the exiled Marcher lord Roger Mortimer. In 1326 they invaded with a small force; Edward's support collapsed, the Despensers were executed, and the king was captured.

In January 1327 a parliament acting in the name of his young son deposed him. He was held first at Kenilworth and then at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, where he died on 21 September 1327. Near-contemporary accounts do not agree on the manner of death; a later story of murder by a red-hot poker is treated with caution by modern historians. His body was buried at the Benedictine abbey of St Peter at Gloucester, now Gloucester Cathedral, where a richly worked tomb drew pilgrims and offerings. A popular cult formed around the dead king and some regarded him as a martyr, but he was never formally beatified or canonized. His son reigned as Edward III.

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