‘No escape now from a life full of suffering’ : Edward II’s Sensational Fall

This chapter analyses accounts of Edward’s deposition and his subsequent imprisonment. I argue that early modern chroniclers exercised creative agency in selecting their sources for this period of Edward’s life, prioritising engaging anecdotes, emotionally compelling detail, and narrativity. In particular, they selected sources which facilitated the construction of Edward II’s reign as a de casibus narrative: a popular narrative structure characterized by the image of an ever-rotating ‘wheel of fortune’. Analysis of narratives of Edward II’s fall thereby enables us to appreciate the literary motivations of early modern chroniclers, and the way these motivations shaped their research process as well as their writing.