Edward II has been accused of many things, few of them good. It has generally been recognized, however, that one of his more attractive qualities was loyalty to his friends and favourites, albeit often a superfluity of loyalty. That being said, it seems surprising that one of the recent criticisms levelled at Edward is his failure to inspire loyalty among his household knights, and particularly so in the later years of the reign. Michael Prestwich has bluntly stated that ‘there was rapid turnover of royal household knights, with few remaining in service for long’. Similarly, Alistair Tebbit has argued that ‘instability and disloyalty are two striking features of the king's knightly retinue’ in the period from 1314 to 1321. On the other hand, Seymour Phillips has recently stated that ‘Edward also inspired a remarkable degree of loyalty among the military members of his household, many of whom had served him when he was Prince of Wales or had known him well before he became king’. My purpose in this chapter is to reconcile these contrasting viewpoints through an examination of the military household throughout the reign, and then to account for any disloyalty, perceived or real.

One thing that can certainly be said about the composition of the body of household knights of Edward II is that the number of knights and bannerets fluctuated markedly throughout the reign. Although we do not have wardrobe books for every year – and it is particularly unfortunate that no lists of household knights survive for the first three years or the last three years of the reign – we do have sufficient data to reconstruct the composition of the military household in some detail.