Edward II: His Sexuality and Relationships

By Kathryn Warner

Edward II is one of the most unsuccessful and unconventional kings in English history, and is well-known for having passionate and probably intimate relationships with men. In modern times, he has often been considered an LGBT+ icon of sorts. Edward II: His Sexuality and Relationships looks at the men in the king’s life and examines the relations he had with them in the context of medieval notions of sexuality and the famous, albeit almost certainly mythical, idea that he was murdered with a red-hot poker as punishment for having sex with men.

It also investigates Edward’s associations with women. Though often thought of as a gay man, it is more likely that Edward was bisexual: he fathered an illegitimate son in his early twenties, at the age of forty had an intimate encounter with a woman in London which is recorded in his household account, and might even have had an incestuous relationship with his own niece.

Edward’s marriage to the king of France’s daughter Isabella, arranged when they were children, has often been depicted as a tragic disaster from start to finish. Edward II: His Sexuality and Relationships takes a detailed look at the royal marriage and at all the evidence that it was in fact a happy and mutually supportive partnership for many years, and at Isabella’s important though over-romanticized association with the baron Roger Mortimer.

Because Edward is often assumed to have been solely attracted to men, numerous modern authors have depicted him as a grotesque caricature of a camp, weak, foppish gay man. Edward II: His Sexuality and Relationships reveals him as he truly was: as a chronicler puts it, ‘one of the strongest men in his realm.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: May 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9781399098182

Kathryn Warner

Kathryn Warner holds a BA and an MA with Distinction in medieval history and literature from the University of Manchester, and is the author of biographies about Edward II and his queen Isabella. Kathryn has had work published in the English Historical Review, has given a paper at the International Medieval Congress, and appeared in a BBC documentary. She runs a popular blog on Edward II and is an expert on Edward II, Isabelle of Castille and Richard II.

Book preview

Edward II

Edward II

His Sexuality and Relationships

Kathryn Warner

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by

PEN & SWORD HISTORY

an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire – Philadelphia

Copyright © Kathryn Warner, 2024

ISBN 978-1-39909-817-5

epub ISBN 978-1-39909-818-2

mobi ISBN 978-1-39909-818-2

The right of Kathryn Warner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Contents

Introduction

1. Underplaying Edward’s Relationships (1)

2. Underplaying Edward’s Relationships (2)

3. One of the Strongest Men in His Realm

4. Acts of Intercession

5. Love Made Him Do It

6. Itineraries and Royal Children

7. In All the Sweetness of True Love

8. Flaunting an Affair? Isabella and Mortimer

9. Our Very Dear and Very Sweet Lord and Friend

10. Flawed by Her Infatuation

11. Profound Revulsion and Excessive Familiarity

12. Narratives and Conspiracies

13. An Illegitimate Son

14. Secretly Taking His Pleasure

15. Treated as His Queen

16. A Heterosexual Courtly Lover

17. A Sodomitical Vice

18. A Burning Spit

19. Elevated from Almost Nothing

20. Adored with a Singular Familiarity

21. Men Who Stir Up Discord

22. Through Him Everything Was Done

23. The King and His Husband

24. Trivial Occupations

25. Bought by the King Himself

Conclusion

Notes

Further Reading

Bibliography

Introduction

Edward II, king of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Aquitaine, prince of Wales, count of Ponthieu and earl of Chester, was born in April 1284 in Caernarfon, North Wales. He was at least the fourteenth and perhaps the fifteenth or sixteenth, and youngest, child of Edward I (b. 1239, r. 1272–1307) and his first, Spanish, wife Leonor of Castile (c. 1241–90). Strongly associated with his birthplace, Edward was and is often known, in his own lifetime and ever since, as Edward of Caernarfon. Born as the son of a reigning king and the grandson of two other kings, and himself crowned king of England at the age of 23, he could hardly have had more illustriously royal ancestry, yet his reign of nineteen and a half years from July 1307 to January 1327 proved utterly disastrous.¹ Edward was a highly unconventional person by the standards of the world and the society in which he lived, a man who took delight in the company of his lowborn subjects and enjoyed taking part in their activities such as digging ditches and thatching roofs, a man who lived far more by his heart than by his head, and who had little interest in ruling unless his emotions and personal feelings were involved.

It is beyond all doubt that Edward II was one of the kings of England who loved men, and he did so openly. Piers Gaveston, the first and foremost of the men who rose high in Edward’s affections, was a nobleman of Béarn in the part of southwest France ruled by the kings of England from the middle of the twelfth century to the middle of the fifteenth. Gaveston was placed in Edward’s household by Edward I in c. 1298/1300 when Edward of Caernarfon was about 14 or 16 years old and Gaveston somewhat older. He was probably not too many years older than Edward; however, chroniclers referred to the two men as ‘contemporaries’ or ‘peers’.² Some years later, Edward I grew concerned about the intense relationship between his son and heir and Gaveston, and in April 1307, banished the latter from England.

The elderly king died some months later, and as soon as he heard the news on c. 11 July 1307 that his father had died a few days earlier and that he was now the king, Edward II brought Gaveston back to England. Almost 300 years later, the playwright Christopher Marlowe began his c. 1592 play about Edward with Piers Gaveston reading a letter from the new king, which states: ‘My father is deceased. Come, Gaveston, and share the kingdom with thy dearest friend.’ Edward made Gaveston earl of Cornwall in early August 1307 and brought him into the royal family some months later by marriage to one of his many nieces. Gaveston was exiled from Edward II’s territories again in 1308 and for a third time in 1311, but Edward recalled him on every occasion, and restored him to his lands and income. Finally, a group of English barons, sick of the way the king treated Gaveston virtually as his co-ruler, captured and executed him in June 1312.

They surely believed they were doing the right thing, but emotional reliance on men was an important part of Edward II’s make-up, and in 1315, within months of his finally having Gaveston’s embalmed body buried two and a half years after his death, the king began relationships with three more male favourites: Sir Roger Damory, Sir Hugh Audley, and Sir William Montacute. In 1318/19, these men were gradually ousted from court and from Edward’s side by another favourite, the king’s nephew-in-law and recently appointed chamberlain, Hugh Despenser the Younger, lord of Glamorgan. Despenser would prove to be the most ruthless and ambitious of Edward II’s male favourites or lovers, and spent the next few years making himself the richest and most powerful man in Wales and England. His appalling behaviour, and his alienation of Edward’s queen, Isabella of France, ended up bringing down both himself and Edward in 1326/27. Despenser was executed, and for the first time in English history, a king was forced to abdicate his throne, after Edward’s own wife Queen Isabella rebelled against him. In early 1327, the royal couple’s 14-year-old son was crowned king of England while Edward still lived. News of the former king’s death at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire was taken to his son during the night of 23/24 September 1327, and the former king was buried at St Peter’s Abbey in Gloucester, later Gloucester Cathedral, on 20 December that same year. Even his supposed death, however, was far from being the end of the story of this most unconventional of rulers, and in 1329/30 some important men, including Edward’s half-brother the earl of Kent and friend the archbishop of York, acted on their belief that Edward was still alive and in captivity.

For centuries, societal norms made it hard to discuss Edward II’s sexuality and his relationships with men honestly, and, although in more recent times he has been depicted in certain quarters as a gay icon and an LGBT+ hero of sorts (or a martyr), there remains a tendency among many historians of the fourteenth century to underplay the significance of his same-sex relationships. On the other hand, there are writers who tend to underplay the significance of the evidence that Edward loved and had intimate relations with some women and assume that he was gay, and argue that his relationships with women demonstrate only that Edward lived in a heteronormative society and was forced to sleep with the opposite sex on occasion, whether he truly wished to or not. The fact remains, however, that Edward II not only loved four or five men, he also fathered at least one illegitimate child sometime between c.1305 and 1310 when he was in his early or mid-twenties, left the Tower of London in October 1324 and ‘took his pleasure’ with a woman in a house he had acquired opposite the Tower, and perhaps even had an incestuous affair with his own eldest niece. Piers Gaveston also had an illegitimate child, as did, most probably, Hugh Despenser the Younger, who fathered at least ten legitimate children as well. The fact that Edward II had four surviving children with his wife Queen Isabella probably says nothing very much about his sexuality, because like all other kings, he needed heirs, but it is beyond doubt that he had sexual relationships with at least two other women as well, women he did not have to have sex with because they would never be the mothers of his heirs but had sex with because he wanted to.

From the outset, it must be made clear that, 700 years later, there is no way of knowing the true nature of Edward II’s sexuality for certain. One would generally assume that he was, as we would understand it, some degree of bisexual – and perhaps also polyamorous – yet as Mark Ormrod correctly pointed out in 2006, to assign the king to a modern category of homosexuality, bisexuality or heterosexuality is

both anachronistic and futile: anachronistic because medieval attitudes to sexuality were so different to our own, and futile because the nature of the evidence makes it impossible to tell what Edward actually did – let alone what he thought himself to be doing – whether and when he engaged in emotional and physical contact with women or men.³

Another issue we must contend with is the lack of evidence regarding fourteenth-century people’s personal feelings and private thoughts; diaries did not yet exist, and even personal letters are few and far between. There is, therefore, not a single word written by Edward II himself on the nature of his sexuality or his relationships or his feelings for anybody. As Mark Ormrod rightly states in his essay referenced above, we can never know for sure what Edward did in bed and with whom, and by necessity, we are dealing with his reputation; what other people believed about his love life and sex life.⁴

We know that King Edward must have had intercourse with Queen Isabella approximately nine months before the births of their four children; we know that he must have had intercourse with the woman, whose identity is unknown, who was the mother of his out-of-wedlock son Adam; and we know from his own household account of October 1324 that he made love with a woman in a house next to the River Thames in London (or to be strictly accurate, we know that the clerk who wrote that entry assumed he was making love with a woman). This entry in the royal accounts is, as far as I have been able to ascertain, the only reference to the king’s sex life that either is not extrapolated from other evidence – i.e. we can state confidently that Edward and his wife must have had intercourse in or around February 1312 because a child was born to them in November that year – or is not a chronicle written by someone who had no personal experience of the king’s sex life. It is perhaps rather curious that we can only prove for certain that Edward II, who has a reputation as one of England’s most famous gay or bi rulers, had sex with women.

Edward’s queen, Isabella of France, was probably born in the second half of 1295 as the sixth of the seven children of Philip IV, king of France (r. 1285– 1314), and Jeanne or Juana I, queen regnant of Navarre (r. 1273–1305). All three of her older brothers, Louis X (b. October 1289), Philip V (b. c. 1291) and Charles IV (b. June 1294) ruled as kings of France and Navarre, her younger brother Robert died aged about 11 in 1308, and her two older sisters, Marguerite and Blanche, died in infancy in the mid-1290s; Isabella never knew them. When her future marriage to Edward of Caernarfon was first mooted in 1298, she was only 3 and Edward was 14, and it was her first, and only, betrothal and Edward’s fourth. Their wedding went ahead in Boulogne, northern France in January 1308. In late 1325 or early 1326, after many years of loyally supporting her husband, Isabella began a relationship or association of some kind with a baron named Roger Mortimer, lord of Wigmore (b. 1286 or 1287) and other English knights and noblemen in exile on the Continent who were enemies of Edward II and his powerful ‘favourite’, Hugh Despenser the Younger. After forcing Edward II’s abdication in January 1327, Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer wielded considerable influence over her underage son Edward III, and it is reasonable to assume – although direct evidence is lacking – that the two were the real rulers of England from early 1327 until the young king overthrew them and executed Mortimer in late 1330.

Although some chroniclers wrote about Edward II’s relationships with men, even if for no other reason that the relationships had far-reaching implications for Edward’s leadership in a clear example of ‘the personal is political’, they were not themselves the king’s lovers and had little if any genuine insight into Edward’s sexuality and sex life beyond rumours and gossip they had heard. The same necessarily applies to Edward’s queen, Isabella. Although some modern writers are prone to declaring that Isabella must have felt X, and must have thought Y, as though they have a telepathic connection to her through the centuries, we do not know how she felt about her husband’s sexuality or their intimate life. Assumptions that the queen fell passionately in love and lust with Roger Mortimer in the mid-1320s after being unhappy and unfulfilled in her marriage for many years are merely that, assumptions, no matter how often they may be written as though they are certain fact.

This book explores the king’s sexual behaviour and takes the view that his relationships with both men and women were important and worthy of consideration. It also examines Edward and Isabella’s own complex relationship, which was far more successful for far longer than is usually believed, though certainly it ended catastrophically badly, and Isabella’s own important though hugely over-romanticised association with a male favourite, Roger Mortimer. Another transgressive aspect of Edward II’s personality was his tendency to form close friendships with commoners such as fishermen and fisherwomen, carters, shipwrights, parkers, and sailors. Though this makes sense to a modern audience, who might well nod approvingly at a ‘king with the common touch’, it was viewed with horror by many of Edward’s contemporaries and was believed to go against the will of God. The evidence for these friendships and for Edward’s fondness for taking part in his companions’ ‘rustic’ pursuits is examined.

The book also examines other writers’ takes on Edward and Isabella in both fiction and nonfiction and the way certain narratives about them, which are mostly or entirely inaccurate, have been constructed and repeated as fact. Historical fiction is not always taken as seriously as it should be, but because far more people are likely to read a novel about Edward II and Isabella of France than are likely to read a biography of one of them or watch a documentary about them, fiction has had a huge impact on popular perceptions of them (the same applies to numerous other historical figures as well, of course). Modern books, both fiction and nonfiction, about the couple usually follow a predictable pattern. They begin with Edward and Isabella’s wedding and Isabella’s subsequent shock that her handsome and seemingly perfect new husband loves men but not her; Edward gives his wife’s jewels to Piers Gaveston, who flaunts himself in front of the horrified young queen wearing them; Edward abandons Isabella while she is pregnant with their first child to save Gaveston, even though she tearfully begs him not to; Edward removes his and Isabella’s younger children from her custody and does not allow her to see them; Edward allows his male lovers to torment his wife and even, in one case, to sexually assault her; after years of neglect and unhappiness, Isabella falls into the arms of a lover, Roger Mortimer, who is far superior to Edward, and with his loving support takes her well-deserved revenge on her husband and his last male lover; Isabella goes mad with grief when her beloved is taken from her and asks to be buried alongside him; and so on and so forth.

The statements by a historian that Isabella ‘was largely neglected by her weak husband and cruelly slighted by his vicious favourites’ and ‘deeply in thrall to her lover’ Roger Mortimer sum up the typical modern stance on Edward II and Isabella of France’s marriage and Isabella’s association with Roger.⁵ All of these popular tales are, however, invented or at the very least grossly exaggerated, but are endlessly repeated in fiction and, unfortunately, in nonfiction as well. Sometimes, novelists’ inventions about Edward and Isabella find their way into books purporting to be factual. An example is the notion that Edward’s chamberlain and most powerful male favourite, Hugh Despenser the Younger, raped or sexually assaulted Queen Isabella in the 1320s. This idea, invented by a novelist 650 years later in the 1970s, has been discussed in works of nonfiction in the twenty-first century as though it is a serious proposition, and in this way has taken on the status of a ‘fact’ to the extent that some reviewers on Amazon and Goodreads criticise novels about Edward and Isabella that do not include it.

Chapters 1 and 2 examine the tendency of some modern writers to dismiss the significance of Edward II’s same-sex relationships, and of others to dismiss his opposite-sex relationships. Chapter 3 looks at all the fourteenthcentury evidence that Edward II was enormously physically strong, yet centuries later is frequently depicted as a feeble, frail weakling based on nothing except foolish modern stereotypes about sexuality. Chapters 4 to 7 examine Edward’s relationship with Queen Isabella, and Chapters 8 to 12 look at Isabella’s association with Roger Mortimer and the narratives that have been constructed around it and her relationship with Edward. Chapters 13 to 16 examine Edward’s relationships with other women, Chapter 17 looks at the charge of ‘sodomy’ and what this might mean, and Chapter 18 examines the narrative of the red-hot poker and its relevance to Edward’s sexuality. Chapters 19 to 23 examine the men in Edward’s life, and Chapters 24 and 25 look at his friendships with commoners.

Chapter One

Underplaying Edward’s Relationships (1): Same-Sex Relationships

The fourteenth-century chronicler Jean le Bel wrote that Hugh Despenser the Younger, executed in Hereford in front of Queen Isabella and her allies on 24 November 1326 during the revolution which swept Edward II from his throne, was ‘a heretic and a sodomite, even, it was said, with the king’, and ‘was alleged to be a pervert and a sodomite – above all with the king himself, which was why the king, at his urging, had driven the queen away’. The rather later chronicler Jean Froissart (b. c. 1337/38) used le Bel as a source for his own account of the last years of Edward II’s reign, and copied le Bel’s remarks about Despenser’s execution almost word for word.¹ In a book published in 2008, it is stated that we must take the two chroniclers’ statements regarding the king’s sodomy as evidence of their intent to highlight Edward’s passivity and his inability to control Despenser. Accusations of sodomy were, the author claims, ‘symbolic of his [Despenser’s] inferior masculinity and disempowerment as a result of his ignoble behaviour’ rather than meaning anything at all about Edward and Despenser’s sexual practices.²

Seymour Phillips’ magisterial biography of Edward II, published by Yale University Press in 2010, says that an abbey annalist’s description of Edward and Hugh Despenser in 1326 as ‘the king and his husband’ (rex et maritus eius in the Latin original) should probably be understood ‘ironically or satirically rather than literally’.³ The French scholar Pierre Chaplais devoted a groundbreaking book of 1994, Piers Gaveston: Edward II’s Adoptive Brother, to examining the possibility that Edward adopted Gaveston as his brother and that the two men were probably not physical lovers. Chaplais spent three pages discussing Edward’s relationships with women, and concluded that his attitude towards them ‘does not appear to have been very different from that of other men of his time’. This, combined with the willingness of Edward’s father-in-law Philip IV of France to allow Edward’s marriage to Philip’s only daughter Isabella to go ahead, is deemed to make it unlikely that Edward ever had sexual relations with men. The notion that he might have been bisexual is dealt with in a single footnote, in which Chaplais states that this argument ‘cannot be answered’.⁴

These statements may well all be true, and certainly, the word ‘sodomy’ had a far wider application in the Middle Ages rather than simply meaning male-on-male penetration in every instance. It is also certainly the case that Jean le Bel and Jean Froissart had other motives beyond talking about the king’s sex life; they wished, as is discussed, to present Edward II as emasculated and passive, and his downfall as brought about by his wife and her allies as necessary, and were less concerned with the possibility that Edward had sex with his male favourites than they were with the political fallout of his relationships. It seems beyond doubt that the annalist who called Edward and Despenser ‘the king and his husband’ knew perfectly well that the two men were not really married, and of course they could not possibly have been until same-sex marriage was finally made lawful in the UK in the twenty-first century (and they were both already married to women, besides). Finally, it is certainly true that several fourteenth-century chroniclers, including the very well-informed and generally reliable author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi, tell us that Edward referred to Piers Gaveston in public as ‘my brother Piers’.

Yet these are just a handful of examples of how every piece of evidence that Edward II loved men and possibly (or probably) had sex with them is, 700 years later, examined in isolation and explained away as ‘really’ meaning something else. The notion that the king had sexual and romantic relationships with men is nit-picked out of existence by the insistence that all the evidence which suggests that he might have done means something else entirely. The possibility that, for example, Edward lived in a heteronormative society which condemned same-sex relations, and, unable to acknowledge Gaveston as his lover or partner and certainly not as his husband, might instead have chosen to present their close attachment in public as one of brothers, is not considered. The argument that Edward might have enjoyed sexual relations with, and been able to fall in love with, both men and women is either ignored entirely as though bisexuality does not exist or is dismissed in a single footnote; a statement that Hugh Despenser was a sodomite with the king is claimed to be of no significance or relevance to Edward II’s sexuality and the nature of the relationships he formed with men.

Historians who write about the early fourteenth century virtually never, however, demonstrate the same need to minutely examine every piece of evidence under a microscope, which they apply to Edward II’s associations with men, to the relationship which Edward’s wife Isabella of France had with the baron Roger Mortimer in the second half of the 1320s. Mortimer is invariably described as the queen’s ‘lover’, as though webcam footage of Isabella’s bedchamber exists and we therefore know beyond all possible doubt that the two had sex. Their association is frequently described in highly romanticised terms, such as ‘an all-consuming bond’ which was based on ‘fiery passion’, a ‘great romance’, and so on, as if this is a certain fact. There is barely any more evidence that Isabella and Mortimer were physical lovers than there is for Edward II and the men in his life, and little if any contemporary evidence for the claim that the two fell passionately in love and enjoyed one of the great love affairs of the Middle Ages, yet this is not apparent from the way many modern writers depict the relationship.

Had a contemporary chronicler or annalist referred to Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer as ‘the queen and her husband’, it seems unlikely that modern authors would attempt to explain it away as ‘ironic’ or ‘satirical’ and would surely instead take it as compelling evidence that the pair had an intimate relationship and were so close that they appeared to outsiders to be a married couple. Jean le Bel’s sharing of a rumour that spread through England in 1330 that Isabella was pregnant, and his statement that Roger Mortimer was considered the most likely candidate to be the putative infant’s father, is taken to mean