Edward Plantagenet, known to history as Edward II, King of England and Lord of Ireland, was the father of Edward III and grandfather of Lionel, Duke of Clarence. Lionel, via his daughter Philippa, was in turn the ancestor of quarrelsome hordes of Mortimers, Percys and bearers of other illustrious names. Later, one of the less illustrious Percys married into the north English gentry, and the much-thinned Plantagenet bloodline, long extinct in the direct descent, passed through generations of Gascoignes, Talboys and Ingilbys. In the 18th century an Ingilby daughter married one James Carr of Skipton, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. James was the ancestor of William Carr, my grandfather, who came to Australia in 1911.
So when I talk about Edward II, I am talking family. No-one is going to trifle with the reputation of my 20-times-great-grandfather. Which is why I will be keen see what Derek Jarman does with the life and death of my royal forebear in his new film, Edward II. Given some of Jarman's other efforts, I feared the worst, but having seen the extracts which were aired on SBS in March, I think the film will be powerful and provocative, if a little limited by its narrowly political focus (it is intended mainly as a commentary on the homophobia of Thatcherite Britain). But since the film is based on Christopher Marlowe's 16th century play, which romanticises and rearranges Edward's life for dramatic purposes, historical accuracy will not be one of its strong points. So it might be worthwhile looking at what historical evidence there is that Edward II was indeed queer.
The historian Paul Johnson, in his History of the English People, writes that "The English have always loathed homosexuality in public men, and punished it savagely." The life and death of Edward II would seem to bear this out. Like the other four allegedly queer kings of England (William II, Richard I, James I and William III), he was subject to violent abuse for his sexual preferences (real or alleged) both in his lifetime and posthumously. But we need to be aware of a certain circularity in the evidence here. A king may have been alleged to be queer because he was unpopular, rather than the other way around. Certainly William II, Edward, James and William III all aroused powerful animosities for political reasons, and their enemies made up many nasty stories about them to weaken their political positions. So we cannot assume that Edward II was queer without some solid evidence to support the claim.
"An indissoluble bond of affection"
Edward II's father, Edward I, was one of the great English kings, and his son had the usual problems of those who grow up under the shadow of a dominant father. Young Edward (1284-1327) was born in Caernarvon Castle and named Prince of Wales as a symbol of English rule there. He grew up to be handsome, athletic and a talented poet, but also (like many royal sons) lonely and somewhat cut off from reality. In 1298 his loneliness was eased by the appointment of Piers Gaveston, then aged 15, as one of his pueri in custodia, or official friends. The two became inseparable: "When the King's son saw him he fell so much in love that he entered upon a compact with him, and chose and determined to knit an indissoluble bond of affection with him, before all other mortals," wrote an anonymous contemporary chronicler.
We need to be careful in interpreting such statements. The term "love" was thrown around fairly carelessly in a romance-obsessed age, and need not imply anything sexual. The literature and letters of the time are full of flowery declarations of love between men, including Kings, Lords and Bishops, and between women. As John Boswell has shown, some of these effusions reflected sexual relationships, but most did not. Close male friends at this time were known as leals amants (loyal lovers) and male relationships termed fyne amours, without implying the sin of Sodom was being committed. Had the chronicler wished to suggest that the Prince and Piers were linked sexually, he would have said so more directly.
Nevertheless, as Edward grew older, the handsome and dashing Piers became the centre of the prince's life, and rumors soon began to spread. Old King Edward soon began to dislike Piers's influence, and in 1305 he forbad his son to see him. He relented only after the intercession of the Queen. By 1307 the King was seriously alarmed, and Piers was banished from England, but a few months later Edward I died and his son succeeded to the throne. His first act as King was to recall Piers from Ireland, create him Earl of Cornwall and make him his closest companion and adviser.
The following year Edward went to France to marry Isabella, the daughter of the French king, to whom he had been betrothed since childhood. The marriage produced a son, but the King and Isabella were soon estranged and she became the favorite's bitterest enemy. Gaveston had plenty of enemies, since most of the English magnates resented his power over the King: power which Edward formalised by making him his Regent while he was abroad. Unfortunately, his new position seems to have gone to Gaveston's head, and he displayed such arrogance that the House of Lords (then the more powerful part of the Parliament) demanded and secured Gaveston's dismissal and banishment. The next year Gaveston was allowed back, but Edward had to agree to the creation of a committee of 21 peers, called the Lords Ordainers, to supervise the government and keep the favorite's influence under control. By 1312 Gaveston was as powerful as ever, and this time the Lords rebelled, supported by the Church and Queen Isabella.
"Surpassed the love of women"
Jarman's film, following Marlowe, portrays Edward and Gaveston simply as the victims of homophobia. This is an over-simplification. The issue at stake was not whether Gaveston was the King's lover, though no doubt hostility on these grounds played a part, but the power that this upstart had usurped from the peerage. Seen in constitutional and historical terms, we must concede that the Lords Ordainers were right: Edward was defying both tradition and (more importantly in the long run) the trend towards greater parliamentary power by attempting personal rule through favorites. Nevertheless, these political facts need not prevent us seeing the events that followed as a personal tragedy for a man who found it impossible (to quote a later Edward's abdication broadcast) to carry the heavy burdens of responsibility and to discharge his duties as King without the help and support of the man he loved.
Without any powerful allies, Edward and Piers fled to the north. At Newcastle they separated, Edward going to York to attempt negotiations, while Piers holed up in a castle near Scarborough. Besieged without provisions, Gaveston surrendered to the Earl of Pembroke on 19 May 1312. Pembroke then took his prisoner south, intending to hand him over to Parliament. In Oxfordshire, however, Gaveston was seized from the protesting Pembroke by the militant Lords, led by the Earls of Warwick and Lancaster. They took him to the town of Warwick, where he was summarily sentenced to death. On 19 June Piers Gaveston, aged 29, was beheaded at Blacklow Hill outside the town. Lancaster took his head as a souvenir, and the corpse was left to the birds (it was later rescued by peasants).
The King was shattered. "In the lament of David upon Jonathan love is depicted which is said to have surpassed the love of women," wrote the contemporary chronicler. "Our King also spoke thus, and further he planned to avenge the death of Piers." This, given his political weakness, he was unable to do. Lancaster and Warwick formally admitted their guilt, and Edward then pardoned them. But he did have revenge of a sort: Gaveston's body was taken to Windsor where, at the King's orders, it was given a magnificent burial presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury (who must have gritted his teeth all the way through). So ended the romance of Edward and Piers. It is impossible through the fog of history to get a clear picture of Gaveston's personality. He was undoubtedly arrogant and foolish, and exploited his power over a lonely and impressionable King. His murder was a dishonorable crime even by the standards of the time, but Gaveston had connived at plenty of murders of his own.
"Someone has come between my husband and myself"
Despite the romantic aura that has grown up around Edward and Gaveston, there is no direct evidence that Edward's preferences were homosexual in the sense we understand. The King's enemies were happy to make accusations, but these cannot, for obvious reasons, be taken at face value. Queen Isabella, despite the fact that Edward fathered four children by her, seems to have had no doubt about her husband's preferences. In 1325, when she refused Edward's order to come home from France, the Queen said that "marriage is a joining together of man and woman, maintaining the undivided habit of life, and someone has come between my husband and myself trying to break this bond. I protest that I will not return until this intruder is removed."
The intruder Isabella was talking about in 1325 was not of course the long-dead Gaveston, but Edward's new close companion, Hugh Despenser, the son of an old courtier and ally, the Earl of Winchester. Jarman, again following Marlowe, scates over Despenser's role and links Edward's death with Gaveston's in a very unhistorical way: in fact the King outlived Gavetson by 15 years. Hugh Despenser was the same age as Edward and had been at court all his life, but the two did not become close until about 1315. By the 1320s Hugh was as entrenched in the King's favor as Gaveston had ever been, and had been rewarded with huge estates in England and Wales. Hugh was, like Gaveston, handsome, athletic and a fine soldier. But he was a much shrewder politician than Gaveston, and knew not to over-reach himself. He gave sounder advice to the King than Gaveston had been able to do. With Hugh's help, Edward was finally able to avenge Gaveston's death: Lancaster was executed for treason in 1322.
But Edward and Despenser were unfortunate in that their rule was constantly undermined by military defeats at the hands of the Scots. Once again, the King's relationship with his favorite was used by his enemies to discredit his government. In 1321 the Earl of Pembroke, who was now Edward's ally, warned that "he perishes on the rocks that loves another more than himself." This is a very unromantic statement for a medieval Earl, and must be seen as a blunt warning about Edward's reliance on Despenser. By 1322 Queen Isabella was finally estranged from Edward (the last of their children was born in 1321), and conceived a violent hatred of Despenser that clearly had its origins in personal rather than political jealousy. In 1325 Isabella and the young Prince Edward went to France, where Isabella took a lover (Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, another ancestor of mine) and refused to return until Despenser was removed.
Isabella now became the instrument of Edward's downfall. She arranged for Prince Edward to be married off to Philippa of Hainault on condition that Philippa's father supply her with an army. With the connivance of the rebel English Lords, Isabella landed in England in 1326, and rapidly advanced on London. Edward, supported only by Despenser, fled to Wales, where Edward and Hugh were captured on 16 November. Hugh Despenser was given a perfunctory trial, then executed at Hereford on 24 November. "His member and his testicles were first cut off, because he was a heretic and a Sodomite, even, it was said, with the King," a contemporary writer recorded. This public degradation of Edward's second favorite to be murdered by his enemies was clearly intended to be a prelude to the King's own demise, and so it proved.
"This brave knight"
In January 1327 Parliament met and formally deposed Edward as King, replacing him with his 15-year-old son. This was the first time an English Parliament had assumed the right to remove the Lord's Anointed from his throne and replace him, and is thus seen in historical terms as an important advance in the replacement of absolute royal rule by a government based on law. Few of Edward's enemies, however, were interested in political theory. They wanted to be rid of a King they despised because he lost battles, interfered with their privileges and disgraced their order by giving power to his male companions. There is no doubt that homophobia played a large part in the decision of the Lords to murder Despenser and to depose Edward, rather than merely to remove effective power from him, as had been done with other unpopular or incompetent kings.
The irony of this was that Despenser (unlike Gaveston) was of noble birth and a competent soldier: his influence on the King was generally used in favor of moderation. The evidence that he was sexually involved with the King is weaker than it is in Gaveston's case. It may be, as some writers have suggested, that Despenser was a cunning heterosexual who exploited the King's loneliness and his liking for a handsome face to gain power. But what was important was the appearance, not the facts. Although none of the contemporary records say explicitly that Edward was sexually involved with Despenser, it is certain that many of the peers and bishops who decided the King's fate believed that he was, and this counted heavily against him.
Friendless and heartbroken, imprisoned at Kenilworth and threatened with further abuses, Edward agreed to abdicate. He was told that if he did not, the obnoxious Mortimer would seize the throne for himself and extinguish the Plantagenet line. But there was no precedent for an abdicated king to live honorably after leaving the throne, nor was their any way Edward could be tried by his subjects for his alleged crimes. It was almost inevitable that Edward would be murdered: the political system of the time allowed no other resolution of the crisis the country had got itself into. There were several conspiracies to rescue Edward, but all were exposed.
Geoffrey le Baker, writing a few years later, gives the best contemporary account of the King's gruesome fate at the remote fortress of Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. "Firstly he was shut up in a secure chamber, where he was tortured for many days. . . But when his tyrannous warders perceived that [this] was not alone sufficient to kill him, they seized him on the night of 22 September as he lay sleeping. . . There with cushions they held him down, suffocating him. Then they thrust a plumber's soldering iron, guided by a tube inserted into his bowels, and thus they burnt his innards. . . As this brave knight was overcome, he shouted aloud so that many heard his cry both within and without the castle and knew it for a man who suffered a violent death."
Even after so foul a crime, Mortimer and Isabella did not feel able to defy convention in the matter of the ex-King's funeral: Edward was given a full state funeral at St Peter's Abbey in Gloucester. Interestingly, the tomb became within a few years a busy site of pilgrimage, and Edward became a popular martyr. The tomb survived the ravages of Reformation and Civil War and the serene features of Edward's burial effigy can still be admired today. By Elizabethan times Edward's memory had been sufficiently romanticised for Marlowe (himself believed, on fairly thin evidence, to be queer) to write his play, which put the King and Gaveston in a favorable, if tragic, light. The Marlowe play has in turn inspired another play by Berthold Brecht and now Derek Jarman's film, which uses Marlowe's fine dialogue in modern dress and settings.
Finally, it is comforting to note that Edward's son, young King Edward III, had a very bad conscience about his father's fate. In 1330, after he had reached his maturity and rid himself of his mother's advisers, he had Mortimer hanged, drawn and quartered as a traitor, and Queen Isabella was banished from Court and sent to live in a remote castle in the Norfolk fens. In later times the names of Edward and Piers survived in tragic romance (from which Despenser was conveniently omitted) while those of Lancaster and Mortimer were forgotten, and Isabella was left with the unfortunate tag "the she-wolf of France." So Edward II has had his revenge in the long run, as queers always do.
What Edward might have thought about being used as an icon by 20th century radicals is another matter: he was, after all, an absolute monarch who died in defence of the prerogatives of his kingship. I doubt that Derek Jarman or Peter Tatchell (the British activist who had a hand in the film and appears as an extra) really want to persuade us that a ruler has the right to make his boyfriend an Earl, a general and Regent of the Kingdom without reference to Parliament or anybody else. Portraying Edward as a martyr to his sexuality may make good drama, and recruiting him in the battle against Thatcherism and homophobia may make good politics. It is doubtful that either of these are good history.