Edward II, King of England 1307-27, subverted political expectations from the very beginning of his reign. Whereas kings were expected to rule reasonably and diligently for the common good, focusing in particular upon maintaining order through the provision of both effective external defence and impartial internal justice, Edward chose not to do these things. Instead he pandered to his own indolence and whims, and was impossibly distracted by favourites, infamously the enervating Piers Gaveston and, later, the rapacious and sociopathic Hugh Despenser the Younger.
The king’s subversion of political norms both prompted and permitted subversions by others: great lords, led for a time by the self-absorbed Thomas, earl of Lancaster, who took up arms against the king and Gaveston, judicially murdering the latter in 1312; and a wider constituency of lords, knights and ordinary people, who reacted to the steady breakdown of political order under kingly and lordly misrule by engaging in political resistance, in some cases taking the law into their own hands. The situation reached a nadir during Edward II’s so-called ‘tyranny’ of 1322-27, when the king and Hugh Despenser sought to exercise something close to a reign of terror, but in fact found themselves opposed and stymied by pockets of fierce resistance right across the realm. This was finally led by Edward’s queen, Isabella of France, and backed by the king’s brother, Edmund, earl of Kent. Subversion reached a shocking culmination in 1327 when Edward was forcibly removed in the first post-Conquest deposition of an English king.
While exploring in detail exactly how the drama of the reign unfolded, this course will also address key structural questions about the nature of the constitution, kingship, opposition and tyranny.
