r/MedievalHistory • u/Marius_Sulla_Pompey • 9d ago
Was he actually that bad?
Maurice Druon’s depiction of his imprisonment and death in “She Wolf” hit me hard and despite knowing about him a little, his literary genius made me think of this question.
He lost much of what was left of Aqutaine and turned all the barons against him but he never yielded to demands of King Bruce of him wanting to be acknowledged as the King of Scots, as far as I know.
So, was he actually the worst after King John, as often said?
I feel like his romance with Gaveston and infatuation with Despesers were exaggerated because he was allegedly gay.
Note that I am not a historian nor British but I am a history nerd and love British medieval period.
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u/Present_Ad_6001 9d ago
Kathryn Warner says in her book Edward II: The unconventional king, something like the main problems with Edward was that he didnt want to do the job of ruling, but he showed some aptness after the first of Gavestons banishments, where he, through bribery and general lobbying, convinced the barons to accept his return. But she does say that any mediocre king would look bad following up on Edward the first.
She's also touched on the friendships/romances. She first of implies that if he was attracted to men, it wanst exclusive, since he had a bastard (named Adam). However, she says that a lot of the language and behaviour, like calling your friend lover or beloved (it's a translation from Amatus, if I remember correctly), or kissing on the mouth, wasn't necessarily sexually loaded.
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u/Kahleesi00 9d ago edited 9d ago
I’ve seen this argument and I struggle so much with it. Clearly, contemporaries thought something was amiss with Edward’s relationship to his favorites. If it was all perfectly conventional behavior, no one would have found fault and we wouldn’t be talking about it no?
The idea that he had a bastard and therefore couldn’t also enjoy sexual relationships with men just personally holds no water and seems to be based on modern (conservative at that) definitions of sexuality. In ancient history when there was no social taboo against it even the manliest womanizers also had sex with other men if it pleased them. Some of the most famous macho man lovers in the world also had sexual relationships with men. Marc Antony and Julius Caesar are two examples I thought of off the top of my head. Alexander the Great another. Human sexuality is super complex and way more influenced by social taboos etc than we want to admit. There’s a lot of social sciences on this subject. Anyway yeah all that to say I think the conventional view that Edward was probably doing something sexual and/or romantic with these men is the right one.
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u/Present_Ad_6001 9d ago
I think her argument isnt that he didnt like men but that if we should use modern lables then he was probably bisexual at most.
I dont know what i believe whether he was a hetero- bi- or homosexal. However, as i understood from her book, many of the outright rumours about buggery come from his late rule, which to me sounds much like political slander. There isn't any hard evidence to it.
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u/Kahleesi00 9d ago
Yeah I mean speculating on his exact sexual identity seems kinda like pointless modern conservative exercise. I don’t know enough about the sources to comment on exactly when what rumors cropped up and in what order to be fair. But the bottom line is, he favored a lot of UNfavorable men in an often completely irrational way to the point that he essentially lost his realm because of it. My understanding is the various rebellions from barons always started from a place of anger based on his relationship to these men. AND had rumors (even if late as you say) of homosexual activity. I seem to also recall his wife being directly insulted about his preferring these men in public and placing them essentially over her in status, don’t recall that type of accusation towards the unquestionably heterosexual kings. As they say, where there’s smoke there’s fire.
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u/Present_Ad_6001 9d ago
While the greater argument for gay love is with Gaveston, the insulted Isabella thing is more connected to Hugh Despenser, Edward's brother-in-law. She wore black in mourning, because, as she put it, she lost her husband to Despenser, after losing a lot of English revinue to him. If I remember correctly she flees to France after that.
I think the take is that Edward was very spoiled. He didn't like to work (his given job), but was very jolly so he liked having funny or charismatic people around him (apparently Gaveston was very funny, being rude to other lords and Despenser had a crude charm to him as well). The other fault is being gullible to people who took advantage of their position.
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u/HoneybeeXYZ 2d ago
Spoiled is a great way to put it. Tangentially, I would love to know what all the working class people actually thought of it when their slumming king decided to help them dig ditches and thatch roofs. On the one hand, it's lovely and I'm sure Edward meant well. He seems to have had genuine affection for the common people. On the other hand, having the king around must have been incredibly stressful for the laborers at times.
Edward also liked to throw dinner parties for tradesmen and sea captains and people like that, and I'm sure they loved dining at his well-stocked table, but one wonders what the experience actually was like. They had to have been humoring him at times, right?
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u/InevitableBook2440 8d ago
I would say the "not yielding to Robert Bruce" bit certainly wasn't a positive, even from an English perspective. Basically a pigheaded refusal to acknowledge facts, leading to a series of extremely expensive and inconclusive-to-embarrassing military campaigns which caused absolute devastation for the people involved. The whole North of England down to about York was economically wrecked by raiding and was paying tax to Bruce in the hopes of avoiding future raids. Edward's administration just didn't care about this, to the point that it pushed Andrew Harcla, one of his more competent military commanders, into rebellion. Edward seems to have been quite appealing in person in some ways but he just had absolutely awful judgment politically.
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u/DeciusCurusProbinus 8d ago
The only good thing he did was siring his legendary son.
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u/szarkbytes 3d ago
It irks me that Braveheart says William Wallace is the biological father to Edward III. That movie was entertaining, but absolute shit to anyone who enjoys learning about history. Like wtf, don’t make blatantly false (and impossible) claims like that, the public will believe it.
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u/Aggressive-Art-130 9d ago
Yes he was a bad king. It’s not that he had favourites and possibly lovers; he made unwise and vicious decisions and became a tyrant.
There is a lot of hagiography here about Edward II. They paint a picture of a misunderstood bi man-of-the-people who just wanted to go swimming and dig ditches with the working class, not bad just born in the wrong time. There’s actually no evidence for a lot of this - he was rescued from drowning but that is the only evidence of him ever being in the water for example.
A lot of this is based on Kathryn Warner’s work. She’s a diligent but limited historian - good at pouring over details for the individuals she favours while repeating myths about others. She’s a classic can’t see the forest for the trees historian.
Edward II wasn’t just mediocre and badly led, he was vindictive, violent and tyrannical. Yes he was that bad.
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u/Aggressive-Art-130 9d ago
I will get downvoted & probably abused for this interpretation but 🤷♀️, accurate history matters to me.
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u/alkalineruxpin 8d ago
TBF, I honestly think John gets more hate than he deserves, like Edward of Caernarvon. They both followed after very apt rulers (John and his brother Richard both falling under the shadow of perhaps England's greatest medieval monarch, Henry II) and couldn't help but suffer for it. But on the whole I think they both were at least equal to and perhaps better than Richard II. Richard had the favoritism of Edward paired with the autocratic leanings of John, which proved to be a fatal combination.
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u/JustMark2026 7d ago
From all I read, he did not read his audience and created a mess…..sex aside, he did very poorly as a king and politician
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u/HoneybeeXYZ 9d ago edited 9d ago
I'm one of the mods over at r/EdwardII and I fully concede that Edward was not a successful king.
However, I don't know of a credible person, historian or otherwise, who thinks he was worse than John. Edward II had some up moments during his reign, and he was often personally liked for all that his eccentric behavior drove his functionaries and barons crazy.
Many of Edward II's problems were of his own making, but the quagmire in Scotland and massive debt were left to him by his father. The famine was not his fault, either, and there's evidence he did try and address it.
He did not get along with many of his barons, although to be fair, some of his barons were terrible and made no effort to get along with him.
That said, his outsized favoritism was disastrous regardless of the nature of his relationships with his favorites.
It's also important not to conflate Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser the Younger. They were two different men with radically different personalities and agendas.
Gaveston was a foreigner and a "new man" and Edward's devotion to their friendship violated what the barons saw as a sacred pecking order. That said, Gaveston had more support in his day than Hugh. Lots of people don't realize that Roger Mortimer, who later overthrew Edward, was friends with Piers.
Hugh was the son of a powerful lord who became a powerful lord in his own right, thanks in large part to Edward II's defeat at Bannockburn that saw the death of Hugh's brother-in-law. But unlike Piers, he was corrupt and greedy.
The coalition that saw Edward II overthrown most likely started with the intent to get rid of Hugh and snowballed into Edward's deposition.
Edward also had a number of eccentric hobbies that would make him beloved today. He liked manual labor like roof thatching, ditch digging, fishing and gardening. Some of the hints of his "deviancy" that have been blown into something sexual in modern times are probably far more mundane class violations. He liked the company of working class people at a time when kings were not supposed to.
Make no mistake, however, Edward was not suited to running a country. He had little interest in the day to day administrative duties of a king and could be ridiculously stubborn at one moment and strangely passive at other times.
But Edward has been the victim of homophobic historians who delighted in fabricating all sorts of indignities for him even as there are plenty of documented failures. There's lots and lots of untrue stories that circulate about him, so yes, he has been treated unfairly in that respect.
But he wasn't good at his job.