To put it mildly, Edward II has received a bad press from his own day to the present. His name is a byword for incompetence and neglect of duty; and he has been used in England (and sometimes also in France) to demonstrate the folly of allowing power to accrue to irresponsible favourites and chief (or prime) ministers. Seemingly the only good thing to be said about Edward II was Tout's remark that Edward's very ineffectiveness was almost a blessing since ‘a strong successor to Edward I might have made England a despotism; his weak and feckless son secured the permanence of Edwardian constitutionalism’.

During the latter part of the twentieth century Edward II also became an icon for the gay community through, for example, Derek Jarman's very explicit 1992 film version of Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II. In the late 1980s the English composer Peter Tranchell (1922–93) projected an opera on Edward II; David Bintley's ballet Edward II, was first performed by the Stuttgart Ballet in April 1995, and then by the Birmingham Royal Ballet in October 1997. The music for the ballet was composed by John McCabe, who also reworked the score in his symphony no. 5, Edward II (completed in April 1997). Edward's musical associations also extend to a ‘folk/reggae’ band, Edward II, active since the late 1980s, one of whose albums has the evocative title of Edward II and the Red Hot Polkas. In a sense, Edward II has become everybody's property, making an assessment of him and his reign even more problematic.