# Edward II — Character guide

> Key figures in Edward II by Christopher Marlowe.

- [King Edward II](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/edward_ii_se/characters/king_edward_ii.md): A king who would rather dote on his favorite than govern, Edward turns a royal court into a battlefield of wounded pride and jealous love.
- [Younger Mortimer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/edward_ii_se/characters/younger_mortimer.md): A proud baron who despises the king's favorites, Mortimer channels his ambition into rebellion and his resentment into a dangerous intimacy with the neglected queen.
- [Queen Isabella](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/edward_ii_se/characters/queen_isabella.md): Edward's French queen, publicly humiliated and privately furious, Isabella watches her husband lavish affection on Gaveston while she is left to pine and plot.
- [Younger Spenser](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/edward_ii_se/characters/spenser.md): Younger Spenser rises to fill the intimate place Gaveston left vacant, becoming the king's confidant and reader of dangerous dispatches. Where Gaveston charmed with masques and music, Spenser counsels severity, pressing 
- [Baldock](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/edward_ii_se/characters/baldock.md): Baldock enters the play as a servant seeking employment and is taken on by Edward for the plain reason that his gentry comes from Oxford rather than heraldry. He quickly becomes a voice in the king's ear, applauding the 
- [Earl of Kent](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/edward_ii_se/characters/kent.md): Kent first pleads with Edward to banish Gaveston for the realm's sake, and is called traitor for his pains. He then presents himself to Lancaster, Warwick, and Mortimer as a convert to their cause, offering his honor as 
- [Earl of Warwick](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/edward_ii_se/characters/warwick.md): Warwick pursues Gaveston with the cold certainty of a man who believes he is executing public justice rather than private vengeance. When Pembroke's men protest that taking the prisoner dishonors their lord, Warwick answ
- [Earl of Pembroke](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/edward_ii_se/characters/pembroke.md): Pembroke stands among the earls who scale Tynemouth's walls and swear homage to the prince's right, but he is the one whose word is questioned when Warwick snatches Gaveston from his men. His protest through James that W
- [Prince Edward](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/edward_ii_se/characters/prince_edward.md): Prince Edward returns from Flanders in the armed retinue of Isabella, Mortimer, and Sir John of Hainault, the nominal right in whose name the rebels swear homage and fealty. His father's lament that his 'little boy' is t
- [Matrevis](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/edward_ii_se/characters/matrevis.md): A jailer who measures a king's endurance like a farmer weighing rain, Matrevis guards Edward in Berkeley's flooded vault and finds the body harder to break than the mind.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/edward_ii_se/characters