Free The Realm: The True history behind Game of Thrones by Ed West

dysentery and expired.
    Even with his dying breath, the king demanded that servants carry his bones around Scotland until the rebels were crushed. His son ignored his wish, but the two had never had an easy relationship. According to Walter of Guisborough, Edward I once said to his son Edward, his sixteenth and last child by Eleanor: ‘You bastard son of a bitch! As the Lord lives, were it not for fear of breaking up the kingdom, you should never enjoy your inheritance.’
    Edward the Second’s reign would begin disastrously, and get worse. At the coronation a plaster wall collapsed, bringing down the high altar and royal scaffolding, killing a knight. The service was hastily completed.
    But the wedding, to the French princess Isabella, was even worse. While people often complained that the king’s countenance was unregal, that he preferred gardening to soldiering and to mingle with ‘harlots, singers and jesters’, his major problem was poor judgement in people. He had a lonely childhood, his mother having died when he was six and his father being a distant, brutal figure;‘Longshanks’ once threw his daughter’s crown in a fire, while on another occasion he ripped all his son’s hair out in a rage. The cause was Piers Gaveston.
    Gaveston had been Edward’s friend from a young age, and their relationship seemed to be intimate. The king put Gaveston in charge of his marriage ceremony, and they shocked the crowd by outward physical affection, even fondling (to make matters worse, Gaveston managed to ruin the catering with undercooked chicken). After the ceremony, in which the arms of Edward and Gaveston were displayed on the wall, he went and sat with his ‘minion’ rather than the queen.
    Edward and Gaveston even wore the same clothes when they were holding court, and his favourite made enemies by giving powerful barons acidic nicknames, such as ‘whoreson’ for the Earl of Gloucester, ‘the fiddler’ for Leicester, and ‘the black hound’ for Warwick. When a group of barons asked the king to get rid of him, he made Gaveston Regent of Ireland, but he soon returned uninvited. With the war in Scotland being lost, a group of barons, led by the king’s cousin Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, a man with an enormous private army, set up a committee of 28, called the Lords Ordainers, and demanded reform of the Crown. Again, in 1310, they told the king to exile Gaveston, and this time Edward made him Lord of the Isle of Man, but the following Christmas he again turned up at the king’s celebrations. The barons had enough and, led by ‘the dog’ Warwick, had Gaveston captured and executed.
    Edward II then came under the spell of Nicholas of Wisbech, a fraudulent friar who claimed to own a vial of holy oil given to Thomas Becket; the king believed that if he were re-anointed with this oil all the political troubles in England would end and he would also be able to conquer the Holy Land.
    First, Edward invaded Scotland, with disastrous results. In 1314 the Scots, under Robert Le Bruce, King of Scots, met an English army at least twice its size at Bannock Burn, fought in ‘an evil, deep and wet marsh’, and slaughtered them. Edward’s disastrous leadership was to blame: the country’s two leading noblemen had bickered over who would be in charge, and the king dithered, offering them joint command. Edward fled back south, lucky to escape with his life. Stunned by defeat, England plunged into violence, with armed barons set against the king’s supporters, led by another favourite, Hugh le Despenser. The same year, Europe was hit with freakishly high levels of rainfall, the crops failed and the continent was gripped by a terrible famine: a tenth of the population starved to death in 1315-1317, and at one point, on the road near St Albans, no food could be found for the king. There was misery ‘such as our age has never seen’, and people were reduced to digging up the newly buried to eat.
    In historical times the