The Birth of Edward II at Caernarfon

On this day in 1284 Edward II was born at Caernarfon in north-west Wales. The previous year Wales had been conquered by his father, Edward I. The story goes that the king asked the Welsh whether they would like a new prince born in Wales who spoke no English. The Welsh, thinking that this must mean they were going to get one of their own to rule over them, as before the conquest, readily agreed. Edward then presented the crowd with his new-born namesake - who, of course, couldn't speak at all. In some versions of the story, Edward presents the baby by raising him up on a shield.

 

(from the Ladybird Kings and Queens of England)

 

 

Any truth in the story? Well, more than you might at first think. The bit about Edward junior not speaking English sounds like the kind of laboured joke that someone thought of after the event - it first occurs in a late-sixteenth-century history of Wales.

 

But, at the same time, there is no doubt that Edward II's birth at Caernarfon was deliberate, contrived by his father for political purposes.

 

The king had returned to Wales from England in the spring of 1284, taking with him his queen, Eleanor of Castile. For all that they were pretty much inseparable as a couple, Eleanor, well into what was probably her sixteenth pregnancy, might well have preferred to remain in England in some comfortable castle like Windsor. Instead, she accompanied her husband back into Wales, recently a war-zone, to the building site that was Caernarfon Castle. Edward II was born in well-appointed wooden chambers that had been built especially for the purpose.

 

Although he did not invest him as prince of Wales until 1301, Edward I clearly intended that his son would play some future role in Wales from the moment of his arrival. Caernarfon was a place associated with imperial rule in Welsh legend. It was reputedly the burial place of the Roman emperor, Magnus Maximus. In 1283, the year before his son's birth, the king had 'discovered' the body of the emperor in Caernarfon and ceremoniously reburied him. The castle he built there, with its polygonal towers and banded masonry, seems to evoke the walls of Constantinople.

 

Of course, what nobody could know before his arrival in 1284 was whether Edward II would turn out to be a boy. In 1282 Eleanor had given birth to her previous child at Rhuddlan, then the most important new English castle in Wales. In this instance it had turned out to be a girl, who was named Eleanor.