A melange of accusation and confusion surrounds the death of Edward II. The king, a weak monarch perhaps best remembered for losing the Battle of Bannockburn to the Scots, had been deposed early in 1327, the year he died, by his own wife, Queen Isabella, and her lover, Sir Roger Mortimer. He was then imprisoned in Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire – where, according to contemporary chroniclers, he was subject to extensive indignities, ‘including being starved and thrown into a pit of rotting corpses.’ [Mortimer 2003] Finally, in September of the same year, Edward died, and there is little agreement as to how.

Ian Mortimer, who has studied the subject more extensively than anyone else (and who actually supports the theory that Edward, far from dying in 1327, escaped from England to live out his days in exile, a strange tale with a surprisingly large body of evidence to support it), notes that the earliest surviving account, from the Anonimalle Chronicle (a version of the French Brut chronicle, but one dating to before 1330), attributed his death to illness, while others suggest the king died of a broken heart or was strangled. Most notoriously, however, another version of The Brut, or the Chronicles of England, dating to after 1333, has Edward murdered with a red-hot iron or copper rod. Again, the method said to have been employed is convoluted, but Kathryn Warner summarises it as follows: "On the night of 21 September 1327, he was held down and a red-hot poker pushed into his anus through a drenching-horn. His screams could be heard for miles around."

Warner points out that this story should not be accepted at face value. For one thing, it emerged only in 1330, after the fall of Roger Mortimer, at a show trial designed to place the disgraced baron in the most wicked possible light. For another, if – as the chronicles suggest – the purpose of employing the horn and the red-hot rod was to kill the king in such a way that his body would bear no external sign of wounds, why do so by so violent a means that half the population of Berkeley supposedly heard his hideous screams? Why not use poison or some other, quieter method? Why not just smother him?

Mortimer, who refers to the iron rod account as the ‘anal rape narrative,’ has one plausible answer: he suggests it may have arisen as a deliberate slur on the part of chroniclers well aware that Edward II was reputed to be a passive homosexual. This would certainly chime with the French chronicler Froissart’s detailed description of the execution of Edward’s reputed lover, Hugh Despenser the Younger; this, uniquely, comments that as Despenser mounted the ladder to be hanged, on li copa tout les premiers le vit et les coulles – that is, he was castrated. [Sponsler p.152] On the other hand, Mary Saaler, a biographer of Edward, has another ingenious suggestion: that the contemporary comment of the chronicler Adam Murimuth that Edward was killed per cautelam, by a trick, may have become corrupted to per cauterium – that is, by a branding-iron. [Saaler p.140] Whatever the truth, it seems it would certainly be wise not to believe the Brut account implicitly.

Sources

Ian Mortimer, ‘A red hot poker? It was just a red herring.’ Times Higher Education Supplement, 11 April 2003.

Ian Mortimer, ‘Sermons of sodomy: a reconsideration of the sodomitical reputation of Edward II.’ In Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson (eds), The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2006 pp.48-60.

Mary Saaler, Edward II: 1307-1327. Norwich: Rubicon Press, 1997.

Clare Sponsler, ‘The king’s boyfriend: Froissart’s political theater of 1326.’ In Glenn Burger and Stephen Kruger (eds), Queering the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001 pp.143-67.

Kathryn Walker, Edward II: the Unconventional King (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2014)