edocsil wrote:IDK if this is true, but in grade school we would talk about some king of England that was executed publicly by inserting a tube into his ass and then having a glowing metal rod slid up the tube and into his lower intestines. Sounds horrible to me. We always used to joke around that it was because the king was gay, it was a Catholic school, go figure.
Probably not true, but it is a common belief about the death of Edward II.
How exactly did Edward II die?
The only actual contemporary account of Edward's death that makes any reference to this question was the work of Adam of Murimuth who simply says that the king was suffocated by Thomas Gourney and John Mautravers and dates the deed to the 22nd September. However the more famous version, the one that everybody believes, first appeared in the set of chronicles known as The Brut which tells us that;
when that night the king had gone to bed and was asleep, the traitors, against their homage and their fealty, went quietly into his chamber and laid a large table on his stomach and with other men's help pressed him down. At this he woke and in fear of his life, turned himself upside down. The tyrants, false traitors, then took a horn and put it into his fundament as deep as they could, and took a pit of burning copper, and put it through the horn into his body, and oftentimes rolled therewith his bowels, and so they killed their lord and nothing was perceived.
This is the origin of the story that Edward II died from having a red hot poker inserted into his rectum and that he was killed in this manner in order that "no appearance of any wound or hurt outwardly might be once perceived". A tale that was elaborated on and repeated by later chroniclers such as Ralph Holinshead and Thomas More. But death by anal insertion does not appear to have been a common method of medieval execution and it seems a rather over-complicated method of killing someone just to avoid leaving any obvious signs of the crime when a simple suffocation would have done just as well.
It is also worth noting that kings at the time were routinely embalmed, that is eviscerated and wrapped in cerecloth as soon as practicable after death, as indeed was the case with Edward II. Indeed as far as Edward was concerned his body was placed in one coffin of lead inside another of wood and it is therefore difficult to see how it would have mattered one way or another how he was killed, as no one would have been any the wiser in the circumstances.
The largely unquestioned acceptance of the traditional story may well be influenced by the perceived connection between the manner of Edward's death and his alleged homosexuality. Although it should be noted that the exact nature of Edward's relationship with Piers Gaveston remains a matter of debate and that the king's homosexuality or bisexuality is a supposition rather than a fact.
It would seem most likely that Edward died by suffocation.
