Edward II of England The Unhappy King Documentary
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Edward II is, I would say, one of the most obscure kings of England.
00:10When you compare the beards of the rulers, you can see that Edward II had a very fashionable beard.
00:19He was obviously very fashionable.
00:21I noticed that King Edward II had a dark image.
00:26A king who had to fight for his power, in a time full of court intrigues and brutal violence.
00:33A king of a highly dubious reputation.
00:37Whether or not it was a homosexual relationship, I don't think that was the actual root of the problem.
00:48Edward II is almost the paradigm of the foolish king.
01:07England in the High Middle Ages
01:14England in the High Middle Ages.
01:16Whoever is king here lives dangerously.
01:19It is a constant struggle for power.
01:22Rebels take advantage of every weakness.
01:24The king of England must be strong and convincing.
01:27Not only against the constant attacks of the scum and the self-willed lords in Wales with their many special rights,
01:33the power of England must be kept in view with strong fortifications.
01:47Also murdered, as has always been claimed.
02:03He reigned for 50 years and started the Hundred Years' War against France.
02:07So I think sometimes Edward II is somehow just this kind of unknown quantity in the middle of two much more famous kings.
02:14There are really two things that you can say that most people, if they know anything about Edward II at all, know or think they know.
02:21One is that he was homosexual.
02:23And the other is that he was murdered by having a red-hot iron pushed inside his bowels.
02:29Now, it is most unlikely that either of these things is actually true.
02:35Much of what happened behind the walls of the castle at that time is like a dark cloak around the king.
02:41In hardly any historical personality, private and political problems are limited, like with Edward II.
02:48Politics is a strategic game.
02:52Only that some moves end deadly.
02:55And that the king feels inescapable.
03:00The king is an anointed king.
03:03And medieval theory of kingship had it that kings, the power of kings, came from above, from God, as well as from below.
03:13The idea that the king has some kind of contract with his people to govern them well, but also the idea that his power comes from God.
03:21Well, he's a holy figure. I mean, he is, in effect, a priest.
03:24He's a kind of priesthood.
03:26The Middle Ages are still considered as an epoch of strict faith.
03:30But were the people really stranger than they are today?
03:33Were their deeds more Christian?
03:35Were their views of marriage and morality more secular?
03:39The fact is that religious ideas also take hold in the political sphere.
03:44Like all kings of his time, Edward II is considered to be legitimized by God.
03:51The fact that people reject the chosen and anointed king by God seems completely unthinkable.
04:08Well, there was the king, around him was the royal family.
04:11The royal family always tended to be on a pedestal.
04:15A pedestal.
04:17They were the greatest men of the land.
04:19They were usually the greatest landholders as well.
04:23And below them, as landholders, came the earls.
04:28Now, there were only ten earls in England.
04:31You can imagine what great men they were.
04:34Only ten earls.
04:36So they were at the very top of the political and social and landowning hierarchy.
04:44And below them were about 200 barons.
04:48These barons live across the entire empire, like the 21 bishops.
04:53Barons and high clerics meet more or less regularly in parliaments to advise the king.
05:00They are a power factor that Edward II has to reckon with.
05:06In order to exercise their power on the ground, the kings of this time travel around the country all the time.
05:12Only little by little, England's political and economic center grows with London.
05:18The royal administration concentrates here.
05:21Tax revenues make the king one of the richest men in the country.
05:25In the ring of power, the parliament tries to control the king more and more.
05:31It has been endlessly negotiated, mediated, negotiated.
05:35In the time, in part, so that you really ask yourself,
05:38people who actually had a shorter lifespan than we did,
05:41have conducted many negotiations in length and detail,
05:44which I think today would almost get on our nerves.
05:47Under these circumstances, Edward II becomes king on July 20, 1307, at the age of 23.
06:01People said that he was very good looking.
06:03He was apparently tall. He was very strong.
06:06Athletic, apparently a very good horseman.
06:09He was a good swimmer, which I imagine was unusual among the nobility at the time.
06:14He really had a very exalted image of himself.
06:19With about 4.5 million inhabitants, England dominates the British Isles.
06:24Scotland is still independent, combative and wild.
06:28Wales has just been subdued.
06:31And with France, England has a very special connection.
06:58What is often known nowadays is that the English kings in the Middle Ages
07:01owned and ruled a very large territory in the southwest of France.
07:06So Edward was the Duke of Aquitaine,
07:09and he also inherited a small county in the north of France from his mother,
07:13from his Spanish mother, very confusingly.
07:16So yes, Edward ruled over England, Ireland, Wales, Aquitaine and Pontia.
07:21It's quite interesting that 14th century Europe
07:24was perhaps a far more cosmopolitan place than we might realise nowadays.
07:28So the fact that we have a king of England, born in Wales,
07:32who inherited territory in France from his Spanish mother,
07:35that takes a bit of working out, yes.
07:38Edward II had optimal starting conditions.
07:41He took over a fortified kingdom from his father,
07:44in which he had the right to live.
07:47He took over a fortified kingdom from his father,
07:50in which he had the right to live.
07:55And within a relatively short period of time,
07:58he managed to play these sympathies.
08:08Edward was born in Carnarvon, a military fortress.
08:12Strategically well thought out, well defended.
08:16His father, the first Edward, had this castle
08:19and the city in front of it built as the capital of a new,
08:22dominated by English, Wales.
08:25The former settlement was brutally destroyed,
08:28the inhabitants expelled.
08:31The mother of Edward II is the Spanish princess,
08:34Eleonore of Castile.
08:37She married Edward I in 1254
08:40and entered the English history as a successful businesswoman.
08:44As the first self-financing queen.
08:47As the first self-financing queen.
08:50Her business with moneylenders and her insatiable hunger for land
08:54did not make Eleonore popular.
08:57But she kept her dynastic duties.
09:00After five daughters, on 25 April 1284,
09:03she finally gave birth to a son.
09:06The later Edward II.
09:09Edward survived.
09:17The father of Edward II is one of the most powerful English kings of the Middle Ages.
09:22Travels a lot.
09:24Like most royal couples of the Middle Ages,
09:27his parents are hardly present for the little Edward.
09:30They stay in France for three years.
09:33The little child only experiences ammonia and education.
09:36Eleonore dies when Edward is six years old.
09:54King Edward I wants to secure an optimal starting position for his successor.
09:59Kingdoms are family businesses.
10:02You have to think of the future management staff in good time.
10:05Edward I puts together a group of young men
10:08with whom his son will grow up.
10:11Almost all come from the English high nobility.
10:14But also parts of France belong to the English crown.
10:17From these possessions, the king gets the son of a nobleman from the Pyrenees.
10:21Pierce Gaveston.
10:25Edward II obviously has a clear sense
10:29that there are two outsiders in this group.
10:32He is the outsider because of his special role, because he is the successor.
10:36And the other outsider, Pierce Gaveston,
10:39is the one who does not come from England,
10:42who does not come from the English high nobility.
10:45Edward II does what his father certainly did not expect.
10:48He becomes very close friends with the other outsider in the group.
10:53And this friendship becomes so close that the others feel neglected.
10:58Pierce Gaveston is charming, sharp-witted and, as it should soon show,
11:02a talented strategist.
11:05But only for the expansion of his own power.
11:08A fatal mixture.
11:10Pierce and Edward are soon inseparable.
11:18Also strategic marriages are a political precaution for the future king.
11:24The fatherly choice falls on Isabella of France,
11:27daughter of the French king Philip IV.
11:31The engagement of the two royal children
11:33is supposed to bring peace between England and France.
11:36When Edward II finally marries his wife, she is 12, he is 23.
11:55This king's wedding becomes a major European event.
11:59Eight kings and queens take part in it.
12:03Among them, Isabella's brother Ludwig, king of Navarre,
12:07as well as Charles II, king of Naples, from the house of Anjou.
12:12It is like a fairy tale wedding.
12:15The queen and the prince are married.
12:18The king and the princess are married.
12:21It is like a fairy tale wedding.
12:23The queen has countless robes made of silk, silk and taffeta,
12:27two golden crowns and dishes made of gold and silver.
12:31Edward's father is not present.
12:33He died the year before.
12:52Marriage alliances are an integral part of peace.
12:59They also constitute a communicative network,
13:05because the queens are the king's first advisors.
13:14At the beginning of February 1308,
13:16Edward returns to London with his young wife Isabella.
13:20He is ready to be crowned in Westminster with her.
13:51The coronation ceremonies become a big deal.
13:55Edward's friend, Piers Gaveston, the only one he really trusts,
14:00is at the heart of the scandal.
14:21These acts were of profound ritual significance.
14:24After the ceremony, apparently Edward II sat on a couch like this
14:30with Gaveston all evening and virtually ignored his new wife.
14:35In fact, she was only 12 years old at the time of her marriage.
14:40This also explains why Edward II
14:44didn't pay much attention to the coronation ceremonies.
14:49This is not alienation of the husband and wife, it's quite normal.
14:53You marry, thereby securing the marriage alliance,
14:56and then, of course, wait with the birth of children
15:00until the time when a pregnancy of the mother's health,
15:04the health of the queen, would be acceptable.
15:07I think she can't have been very pleased
15:09to see his behaviour at the coronation,
15:11because Edward was actually quite rude to the French during his coronation.
15:15The sons of the French king were there,
15:18and they were absolutely disgusted by this.
15:22It is a time when there is everything to be proud of.
15:28Isabella's brothers report to the French king
15:31about the scandalous return of her sister,
15:34the English queen, at the banquet in London.
15:41The English king is the counterpart of the king of France.
15:45But in addition to being the counterpart,
15:47the king of England is the vassal of the king of France.
15:50Vassal for the simple reason that the king of England
15:54holds a duchy, the duchy of Aquitaine.
15:57And consequently, the kings of France are suzerains.
16:01This means that at the advent of a new king,
16:05the king of England is held,
16:07the suzerain of France,
16:09to pay homage to the king of France.
16:12Which was difficult for the English king,
16:15who was considered a strong king.
16:18It was difficult for him to lower himself
16:22to a level where he had to, as a king,
16:24put down his crown and bow his knees
16:26in front of his French counterpart.
16:29The scandal surrounding Gaveston's appearance and Edward's behaviour
16:32is becoming more and more political in England.
16:37And with that, we have exactly this constellation,
16:40which a skillfully acting king has to avoid.
16:43Namely, the nobleman becomes jealous
16:46of the special trust of a single favourite.
17:07Gaveston was a little bit older than Edward.
17:11He was probably very funny and witty.
17:14Gaveston was charming,
17:18a good soldier,
17:21vain, acquisitive,
17:24he wanted lots of things, he wanted to become rich,
17:27he wanted to become famous,
17:29and foolish.
17:31He became hated because he monopolised the king.
17:35And people said, there are two kings in England.
17:38He was arrogant.
17:40And Edward seemingly fell deeply in love with him.
17:43And then Gaveston, of course, he made it even worse.
17:47Because he was such a good soldier,
17:49he defeated some of the earls, the earls who hated him.
17:51And then he made up nicknames for them, which they hated.
17:54He called Warwick, the Earl of Warwick,
17:56he called him the Black Dog.
17:58And the Earl of Lancaster, he called him the Churl,
18:01which is like calling him a serf.
18:03But because he had the king's ear, no one could touch him.
18:34It was very common for kings of the Middle Ages
18:37to go jousting, for example, this typical sport,
18:40when 2 knights ride at each other on horseback with very long sticks
18:44and try to knock each other off the horse.
18:46And Edward showed very little interest
18:49in those sorts of, those traditional noble sports.
18:52He preferred doing things like thatching roofs.
18:55He used to like going out and digging ditches
18:59and going swimming with common people.
19:02All these completely unsuitable occupations for a king.
19:18You're never going to get a chronicler who says,
19:21and Edward and Gaveston went to bed and had sex with each other.
19:25You're not going to get a chronicler who says that.
19:28But you do get chroniclers who say,
19:31I never heard that a man loved another man
19:35as much as Edward II loved Gaveston.
19:59The concept of homosexuality that we have today
20:02did not exist at the time.
20:05Love and friendship between men is not only allowed,
20:08but is to a certain extent the basis of social order.
20:12On the other hand,
20:15we have a very strict ban on same-sex activity,
20:20starting from the Old Testament,
20:23where it says you should not lie with a man like with a woman.
20:27Certain sexual acts are forbidden and are referred to as sodomy.
20:32But did the relationship between Edward and Pierce
20:35appear to be in any way immoral in moral terms?
20:38Tight affective bonds between men were completely normal.
20:42They formed the basis on which
20:44the late-medieval aristocracy functioned.
20:47Homosexual acts, on the other hand, were considered a deathly act.
20:51I mean, both Edward and Gaveston were married.
20:54They both had children.
20:56And whatever relationship there was between them,
20:59which was clearly a very close one,
21:01I don't think was a homosexual one.
21:03So if we wanted to put a modern label on him,
21:06it might be more accurate to call him bisexual.
21:09We have no evidence for either of the two.
21:12I think that the word I would use
21:15for Edward's attitude to Gaveston is infatuation.
21:18I think he was completely infatuated with Gaveston.
21:22It was not possible to live without homosexuality.
21:25Neither of them could have done that.
21:29Was the accusation of homosexuality perhaps propaganda
21:33spread by Edward's opponents to denounce him?
21:38The first unequivocal reference that we have,
21:42which is calling Edward II a sodomite,
21:46is from sermons that were given at the end of 1327.
21:52The term sodomite seems to have emerged
21:56in a sermon that should justify the abrogation.
22:00But it is an accusation that is only written down
22:04in the sources much later.
22:07And it is understandable that those who abrogated Edward II
22:12did not operate with the accusation of sexual misconduct.
22:16Simply because they were concerned
22:20with replacing Edward II with his son, Edward III.
22:25That is, the king had to be abolished
22:29without harming the son.
22:50The fact that he listened to only Gaveston.
22:54It was that intensity and the fact that these relationships
22:58excluded other advisers.
23:05The noble leadership has long been involved
23:08in political decision-making processes
23:11and does not want to let their co-government's rights be taken away.
23:15England has long been on the way to a constitutional monarchy.
23:19And yet it promotes it unwittingly.
23:44The sharpest opponent in the meantime is Thomas of Lancaster,
23:48who is very closely related to the royal family.
23:51And it is quite interesting to see
23:54that there are the sharpshooters among the barons.
23:57The contemporaries had the suspicion
24:00that he wanted to make himself king.
24:03Thomas of Lancaster is the king's cousin.
24:06In addition, Lancaster owns extensive lands
24:09and is one of the richest and most powerful men in the country.
24:13Gaveston is a thorn in his eye, like other nobles.
24:17He has an influence and Gaveston's luxurious lifestyle.
24:21In 1318, they go armed to Parliament
24:24and demand the removal of this nobleman from the court.
24:28What happened with Gaveston?
24:31He was driven into exile in 1308 to Ireland.
24:34He came back in 1309. Nothing had changed.
24:37He was still dominating the king.
24:40So he was driven into exile again towards the end of 1311.
24:44This is one of the few times in the reign
24:47when almost all the nobility of England
24:50were united in one common cause.
24:53They realised Gaveston must be got rid of.
24:59The Earl of Warwick is one of the closest associates
25:02of Thomas of Lancaster.
25:04He manages to capture Gaveston in 1312.
25:07Warwick ensures Gaveston's physical integrity
25:11and a parliamentary review of his case.
25:14But none of these assurances should be kept.
25:42They took him out of the dungeons of Warwick Castle.
25:46They led him several miles onto the Earl of Lancaster's lands
25:50between Warwick and Kenilworth's castles.
25:53And a soldier ran Gaveston through with a sword in his body
25:58and as he lay dying on the ground, they cut his head off
26:02and left his body lying on the ground.
26:05Here's Gaveston, the minion of a hateful king.
26:09The minion of a hateful king? Good grief.
26:13The barons rose up against him and the king
26:16and they couldn't do much about the king at the time,
26:19but they certainly could do something about Gaveston, and they did.
26:22So the rock that they used as an executioner's block
26:25to cut his head off, that's been turned into a memorial to him, I suppose,
26:30but the plaque on it isn't very nice about him,
26:33so maybe it's not so much a memorial to him.
26:40The news of Gaveston's unfair execution spread rapidly.
26:45Soon it reached Edward II, who was in London.
26:49This execution was to prove to be a major strategic mistake by the rebels.
27:03The king is absolutely furious and, of course, he's mortified.
27:07Gaveston's execution set the tone for the whole of the rest of the reign.
27:11A group of Dominicans from Oxford, Dominican priors,
27:15who were great friends and supporters of Edward II,
27:18they came and retrieved the body, took it to Oxford
27:22and embalmed the body and sewed the head back on.
27:26And Edward kept it there for the next 2½ years
27:29and refused to have Gaveston buried.
27:32Edward never forgave Thomas of Lancaster, his cousin,
27:36who he thought was the prime mover behind the execution of Gaveston.
27:41And he vowed that one day he would have his revenge.
27:45And, of course, he did.
27:48Gaveston's death was a major challenge for Edward.
27:53Scotland was another.
28:18The English kings thought that the Scots should be subservient to them.
28:24They didn't recognize Scotland as an independent country
28:28and they didn't recognize the Scottish king as an autonomous, independent monarch.
28:36Edward I had already fought against the famous Scottish king Robert the Bruce.
28:42In the end, he was unsuccessful.
29:12What followed was a process of 20 years of Scottish raiding into northern England.
29:43The decisive battle took place at Bennockburn,
29:46about 55 km from Edinburgh.
29:50On 23 June 1314, the enemy armies met there.
29:56The battle became a military catastrophe
29:59for England and for Edward II.
30:13CHANTING
30:22His army was about twice the size of Bruce's army, about 15,000 men,
30:27and he met Bruce just outside Stirling.
30:30Bennockburn is just a few miles from Stirling Castle.
30:33And the funny thing about the battle is it really hardly got going.
30:39Edward II chose a bad site between a wood and a marsh and the river
30:45at the bottom of a slope down which the Scots came.
30:49The Scots began to advance down the slope
30:52and the English army was too big to manoeuvre in this small space.
30:56And what led to the defeat was the English,
30:59they were all crushed against each other.
31:02They all became crushed together in this small space.
31:05So, really, it was hardly a battle, if you follow what I mean.
31:10You know, the classic medieval idea
31:12of these two armies charging at each other, that didn't happen.
31:16So this was a deep humiliation for him and also for his subjects
31:20who would have wanted to see their king being a great and mighty war leader,
31:24a successful war leader, who could defeat the Scots,
31:27who could win English glory in Scotland,
31:30and Edward failed on this count, absolutely.
31:33Disaster.
31:35It was a military humiliation for Edward
31:38and it was a political humiliation for Edward.
31:41He had to flee from a Scottish army twice, once after Bannetburn
31:45and once in 1322 when Robert Bruce invaded England.
31:49There was this picture of the English king running for his life
31:53away from the Scots, having to flee the battlefield like a coward.
31:57Edward II had to draw consequences.
32:27In the late 1320s, within ten years of Bannetburn,
32:30Bruce was in control of about 20% of England,
32:34the northern 20% of England.
32:37They were paying their tribute to Robert Bruce
32:40instead of paying taxes to the English king.
32:43And this was an absolute disgrace to the English,
32:46a king who could not defend his kingdom.
32:50Edward II thus failed on the most important task
32:53of a medieval king.
32:57It meant the loss of the moral authority
33:00of Edward II's kingship,
33:02the fact that he was made a fool of by the Scots.
33:07Then it also seems that heaven itself
33:10is turning against the country and its king.
33:13Rain falls over Europe.
33:15A true flood of sin.
33:17Consequences, harvests, droughts,
33:20the great famine of 1315 to 1317.
33:48The prices for grain are climbing to unbearable heights.
33:52People are grabbing at everything that still seems to be edible.
33:56Salvation does not help.
33:58Entire villages are dying out in England.
34:01And what is the king doing?
34:17There were consequences of this disaster.
34:20So in 1315 and again in 1316,
34:23he tried to fix the prices of basic foodstuff.
34:26This probably was an attempt to try to stop prices,
34:29you know, going higher and higher
34:31and making it impossible for poor people to eat.
34:34But this didn't work because the sellers of the food
34:37refused to sell them at such low prices.
34:39And it had to be abandoned a year later
34:43was to encourage merchants
34:46to hoard more and more basic foodstuffs,
34:49you know, grain and so forth.
34:51And therefore prices just went even further up.
34:54It wasn't particularly a disaster for Edward personally.
34:57It was just one of the factors which led to his reign
35:00being kind of catastrophic.
35:02But it was completely out of his control, of course.
35:05It was a great natural disaster.
35:07The situation at the court developed more happily.
35:11After Pearse, there were no royal favourites for a while.
35:16Edward and Isabella met the expectations
35:19which were set for a royal couple at that time.
35:29For a few years, from 1312 until perhaps the early 1320s,
35:35it seems that Edward and Isabella actually had quite a successful marriage.
35:39They had three younger children.
35:41Their eldest son, Edward III, was born in 1312.
35:45They also had children, John, Eleanor and Joan.
35:49She passed on the peace with France, which strengthened her position.
35:54That means that for a few years,
35:56Edward II decided not to live as a favourite.
36:01And the royal court functioned as the nobles imagined.
36:18He was a much nastier man than Gaveston.
36:23He was probably charming in some way.
36:27He certainly managed to charm himself into the king's confidence.
36:33He was very greedy.
36:35He wanted to make himself very rich.
36:38He was deeply, deeply unpleasant.
36:41He was almost the ruler of the country
36:44for the last four years of Edward II's reign.
36:47He had such a forceful personality that he even told the king what to do.
36:52Isabella absolutely hated Hugh de Spenta the Younger.
36:55And she was determined that she was going to bring him down and destroy him.
37:00And she hated him, I think, on a personal level.
37:03Not merely because he was her husband's lover.
37:05I think she'd grown used to that at this point.
37:08But because he had done something which she found offensive, horrible.
37:13She even claimed that her life was in danger from him.
37:16She seems to have physically loathed him with a really visceral feeling of hatred.
37:23The tension between Edward II and the French king Charles IV grew.
37:29Isabella was to mediate and travel to France.
37:32She took the heir to the throne with her.
37:35She refused to return before Hugh de Spenta was banished from the court.
37:40But Edward did not intervene. On the contrary.
37:52He was in many ways a wonderful man, a kind and generous man.
37:56But someone who could also be quite cruel and malicious and vindictive.
38:00And who was a disastrous ruler by the conventions of the time you lived in.
38:05Edward II's age stands out as an age of visceral hatreds.
38:11I mean, let me tell you, before 1312, when Gaveston was beheaded,
38:17the English Earl had been executed for 250 years.
38:37There is this violent streak in Edward's character.
38:41After he executed Thomas of Lancaster in 1322,
38:46he indulged in a reign of terror in England.
38:49As well as Thomas of Lancaster, another 26 barons were executed without trial.
38:56Their bodies were left up for two years,
39:00so that everyone could see what happened if you opposed the king.
39:07Those who fall into unmercy are choked in the Tower of London.
39:12Even before former confidants, he did not stop.
39:15In 1323, after an unfortunate revolt, Roger Mortimer was imprisoned there.
39:43This was one of the very few times in history
39:46that anyone has managed to escape from the Tower of London.
39:49And he made his way to the Continent.
39:51And when Isabella herself offered an ultimatum to Edward II in late 1325
39:56that he must send Hugh de Spencer away from him, and he refused,
40:00Isabella saw no choice but to ally herself with Roger Mortimer
40:04and with various other English rebels, rebel barons,
40:08who had escaped from England as well.
40:11Isabella and Mortimer united the hatred of Hugh de Spencer.
40:14The queen allied herself with the leader of the king's opponents
40:18and assumed the suspicion that she had broken off with him.
40:24The construction, if I may say something bad,
40:27was that she found a partner in France
40:30and then killed her husband quickly so that they could live together.
40:34So that's how it actually went.
40:36That's actually very unusual for the time.
40:40That's a marriage break.
40:42The husband is still alive.
40:44A divorce was not possible, even legally.
41:01Isabella decided to take a spectacular chess move.
41:05She engaged the English heir to the throne, her son Edward III,
41:09with the daughter of the Dutch king.
41:12The alliance was immense.
41:14With this money, Isabella set up an invasion army.
41:36Edward II was in London at the time.
41:39He heard three days later.
41:41He realised that he could not hold his hostile capital
41:44against an invasion force,
41:46so with Hugh de Spencer the Younger, he fled towards Wales.
41:49Because Edward II was born in Wales,
41:51he had always been more popular there than in England,
41:54and Hugh de Spencer the Younger owned or controlled most of South Wales,
41:58so they thought that in South Wales they would be able to find more support.
42:02In fact, it didn't come.
42:04Their support simply evaporated.
42:06It's quite astonishing.
42:08Within a few weeks, the King of England was basically a fugitive in his own kingdom.
42:24He knew what was going to happen to him.
42:28He was under absolutely no illusion
42:30that he was going to suffer a horrible, horrible traitor's death.
42:33So he had been led from South Wales to Hereford,
42:37which is a distance of only about 60 miles.
42:39It took them over a week to take him that journey,
42:42so that the common people could see him
42:45and throw abuse at him and throw rubbish at him
42:48and all kinds of horrible things, yeah.
42:51Traitor was punished as cruelly as possible.
42:55This also included excommunication.
42:59They executed him on the 24th of November,
43:02eight days after he was captured.
43:05They got a ladder 50 feet high.
43:08They put it up in the centre of Hereford
43:11and they mounted Hugh de Spencer on top of this ladder
43:15so that everyone could see what they were doing to him.
43:24They castrated him.
43:26They castrated him.
43:28They disembowelled him.
43:30They slit his stomach open and pulled his entrails out.
43:35He was still alive.
43:37They brought him down and then they decapitated him.
43:52This is really the moment when his reign ended,
43:55although officially he remained king for a few more weeks.
43:59He was taken into the custody of his cousin,
44:02Henry of Lancaster, Earl of Leicester,
44:05whose brother, Thomas of Lancaster,
44:07Edward had had executed in 1322.
44:11And Henry of Lancaster treated Edward
44:13with great respect and consideration
44:16and took him to his castle of Kenilworth.
44:18He was kept there and the decision was made quite quickly
44:21that the king would not be put to death
44:24because this was an anointed king
44:27and they thought they just could not.
44:29The king of England had never been deposed before,
44:32so this was quite a... it was a real revolutionary act.
44:35And so it must have taken them considerable debate
44:38to reach that point and say, you know, how can we do this?
44:41How can we even achieve this legally?
44:43Is it even possible to depose a king?
44:46So a parliament was held in London in January 1327.
44:50They went back to Kenilworth
44:52and they told him that the people wanted the king's son to rule.
44:56And Edward was so shocked that apparently he swooned
45:00in the chamber, Kenilworth Castle,
45:03and when he revived, they said to him,
45:08if you abdicate, we'll have your son,
45:12we will make your son king.
45:14If you don't abdicate, we might make someone else king.
45:19Eventually, Edward II agreed that he would abdicate.
45:23Edward II gave the throne and kingdom to Edward III,
45:27who was only 14 at the time.
45:29The father of the king, as Edward II is now called,
45:33is held in Gloucestershire in Berkeley Castle.
45:41Karen Davidson is an archivist in Berkeley.
45:46We're in the room that, since at least the 18th century,
45:50has been shown to visitors to the castle as being Edward's cell.
45:54We don't know for certain whether he was held in here,
45:57although we have a lot of written evidence about his captivity here.
46:01We don't know.
46:04The first document that I've got to show you
46:08is an account roll from the Manor of Ham,
46:11which includes the town of Berkeley,
46:14and it sits to the west and the south of the castle,
46:18so it provided a lot of provisions for the people living at the castle.
46:23This document is quite remarkable
46:27because it tells us exactly when Edward arrived at the castle.
46:32The handwriting is very regular and very clear.
46:35It's really quite beautiful,
46:37and to know that it's coming up for 700 years old...
46:41This is the original document that was written in 1327,
46:46just at the time when Edward was here.
46:49The 5th of April, which was Palm Sunday in this year,
46:54which means 1327,
46:56the father of the king arrived at dinnertime.
47:00Almost certainly he had good food and wine and wax candles.
47:04He had access to a chapel.
47:06He even seems to have had servants attending him.
47:09So what we've got here is an account that says
47:13it was delivered to the household of the father of the king,
47:17Patris Regis, 11 pigs.
47:1911 pigs, that's quite a lot.
47:21When, I suppose, his household...
47:23He wasn't eating all of this himself, his household were also eating.
47:27But there are an awful lot of entries in not just this roll
47:32and not just this manor, but several rolls, several manors.
47:36It seems to have been quite the undertaking
47:40for Thomas Lord Barclay and his people to be maintaining the king here.
47:52In July, a group of would-be liberators
47:56probably managed to get him out of his cell at Barclay Castle,
48:00but not out of the castle.
48:02They didn't manage to get right out of the castle gates
48:05before they were stopped.
48:07And then, round about the middle of September,
48:10Mortimer, who was the lover of Queen Isabella
48:14and the effective ruler of England at this time,
48:17probably arranged for him to be murdered in his cell in Barclay Castle.
48:28He was murdered probably on the Monday, probably during the night,
48:32and then, by the Friday, Queen Isabella is distributing
48:37a huge amount of alms to the poor,
48:39much more than she usually did on any other day.
48:43The popular story is that Edward was killed
48:46in a particularly gruesome fashion,
48:48that he was killed by having a red-hot poker,
48:52you know, a long, a red-hot iron,
48:56inserted through a tube into his anus.
49:02His insides burned out.
49:04Thrusting a hollow instrument, like the end of a trumpet or glister pipe,
49:09into his fundament and threw it, a red-hot iron, up into his bowels,
49:14whereby he ended his life with a lamentable, loud cry,
49:18heard by many, both of the town and castle,
49:21which was on St Matthew's Day, the 21st of September.
49:33BELL TOLLS
49:42That is the legend of how Edward II met his end.
49:47We don't know if it really happened,
49:50but it was certainly being talked about,
49:53and rumours were certainly flying about,
49:56only six or seven years after he died.
49:59It's a parodic story, you know,
50:02a story which is deliberately meant
50:05to somehow fit in with the accusations of sodomy.
50:09It was a fairly eventful time in English history, let's put it that way.
50:16Having been God's representative on Earth, or believed that he was,
50:20because that was how people thought of kings,
50:22and ending his days in a prison cell,
50:24being smothered to death, or possibly worse,
50:27it must have been a pretty horrible last few months for him.
50:31And I think it's difficult not to feel sorry for somebody in those circumstances.
50:36He was a man who was not cut out for kingship.
50:39I wouldn't say he had any sympathy at all.
50:45Officially, it is known that the king died a natural death.
50:50He was buried near Barclay Castle, in the Benedictine Abbey of Gloucester.
50:55But is his body really in this grave?
50:58His half-brother, Earl of Kent, has doubts about the king's death.
51:02The Archbishop of York also.
51:07And in the 1330s, an Italian man called Manuele Fieschi,
51:12who was a nobleman, wrote a letter to Edward III,
51:16explaining in great detail how Edward II had escaped from Barclay Castle,
51:20and had supposedly made his way to Ireland,
51:24then from Ireland to Avignon, where the Pope lived at the time,
51:28and had visited Pope John XXII.
51:31He then made his way to the Duchy of Brabant in modern-day Belgium,
51:35where his sister Margaret still lived.
51:37He then made his way to Cologne,
51:39where he visited the Shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne,
51:42and then followed the Rhine down and over the Alps into Italy,
51:46visited Milan, and then ended up living at a hermitage
51:50about 100km south of Milan, called Sant'Alberto di Butria.
51:55And to this day, this hermitage of Sant'Alberto di Butria
51:59presents an empty tomb to the public,
52:02which they say was Edward II's original tomb.
52:20.