Edward II

The first heir apparent to an English king to bear the title Prince of Wales, Edward II was born at Caernarfon Castle in 1284, the youngest son of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile. He received the Welsh title in 1301 and succeeded his father in July 1307. In January 1308 he married Isabella, daughter of Philip IV of France, a Capetian match intended to settle Anglo-French disputes over Gascony; through Isabella, the couple's son would later claim the French throne itself.

The reign was troubled from the outset by the king's reliance on favourites. His attachment to the Gascon knight Piers Gaveston, whom he made earl of Cornwall, provoked the baronial opposition that imposed the Ordinances of 1311, restricting royal power; Gaveston was seized and killed by magnates in 1312. Worse followed in Scotland, where Robert Bruce had revived the Scottish kingship. Edward's attempt to relieve Stirling ended in catastrophic defeat at Bannockburn in 1314, effectively ending English control of Scotland and leaving the north of England open to raids.

In the 1320s power passed to a new pair of favourites, Hugh Despenser the elder and younger, whose acquisitiveness in the Welsh march provoked civil war. Edward defeated his opponents at Boroughbridge in 1322 and executed his cousin Thomas, earl of Lancaster, but the Despenser regime that followed was widely hated. Queen Isabella, sent to France in 1325 to negotiate over Gascony, refused to return; allied with the exiled marcher lord Roger Mortimer, she invaded England in September 1326. The king's support collapsed, the Despensers were executed, and Edward was captured.

In January 1327 he was compelled to renounce the throne in favour of his fourteen-year-old son, Edward III, the first deposition of a crowned English king since the Norman Conquest. Held at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, he died there on 21 September 1327. Contemporaries and most later historians have held that he was murdered on the orders of the new regime, though the circumstances of his death were never established. He was buried at Gloucester Abbey, where his tomb became an object of pilgrimage.