Edward II His Friends, His Enemies, and His Death
Naveen Kumar
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Abstract
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. 1 Prince Edward The Legacy: Edward I Edward I was a hard act to follow. By 1295, he had subdued Wales. He promulgated what Michael Prestwich calls a "majestic set of statutes" that led to his being called the English Justinian. 1 Though his relationships with the nobility were sometimes stormy, there was no doubt who was in charge. The same would not be said about his son. Prestwich sums up Edward I's character well in The Three Edwards: "Edward I was not the kind of king who was greeted by cheering crowds . . . Edward was a king to inspire fear and respect." 2 The fear developed before the respect. As a young man in the 1250's, Edward had gained a reputation for cruelty; the chronicler Matthew Paris records an incident when Edward and his men attacked a youth, cut off his ear, and gouged out his eye. Though by the time Edward became king, such youthful incidents were well behind him, he still could be brutal. In 1306, he ordered that Mary, sister of the Scottish leader Robert Bruce, and the Countess of Buchan, who had crowned Bruce King of Scotland, be imprisoned in open cages, albeit with privies. Such a punishment is probably much more shocking to people of our time than it was to Edward's contemporaries; nonetheless, the conventional treatment of high-ranking female prisoners was to confine them honorably in castles or in nunneries. (Robert Bruce's queen was confined in this 1 Prestwich, Edward I, p. 267. 2 Prestwich, The Three Edwards, pp. 37-38. It should also be remembered that Edward I had left his boyhood far behind him when he became king at age thirty-two, and the times had presented him with many learning opportunities during his youth and young manhood. The reign of Edward's ineffective father, Henry III, was dogged by crises, most famously the rebellion of Simon de Montfort, whom Edward himself defeated at Evesham after the royal forces had been defeated at Lewes. Edward had the opportunity-and, more important, the ability-to learn from his father's mistakes as well as his own, and his father needed all of the help he could get from his more able son. By contrast, Edward II would spend his young manhood under his father's domination, very much in the shadows. He was not good at learning from mistakes, his or other people's, and when he made them, it was with the weight of the crown upon his head.
