13

Catastrophe in Gascony

A bizarre plot to kill Edward II and the Despensers by necromancy was discovered in the spring of 1324, when John of Nottingham admitted that a group of people from Coventry had asked him to make wax figures of the three men. John and his assistants tested their method by driving a leather bodkin or a sharpened feather two inches into the figure of Richard de Sowe, who was supposedly discovered soon afterwards out of his mind and unable to recognise anyone. After they removed the bodkin from the figure’s forehead and drove it instead into the heart, Sowe died within a few hours. Before they could try out the wax figures of Edward and the Despensers, John’s lodger Robert gave the game away to the authorities.¹ Despenser wrote to the pope to complain about the ‘magical and secret dealings’ threatening him, and received an unsympathetic response.² Despenser, all-powerful at court and supremely rich, was living in a nightmare world of fear and paranoia; well aware of how much he and his father were hated, for good reason, his frantic, desperate pleas to Edward in 1325 not to leave him behind in England to travel to France were ultimately to bring about his and the king’s downfall.

On the verge of war with France and in need of allies, Edward reached out to the Spanish kingdoms, and wrote to King Jaime II of Aragon regarding a marriage between Edward of Windsor and Jaime’s daughter.³ Edward also sent envoys to his kinsmen in Castile, asking the twelve-year-old King Alfonso XI and his regents to give credence to what the envoys told them. The regents included Edward’s first cousin Juan Manuel, lord of Peñafiel and one of the greatest Spanish writers of the Middle Ages; Felipe, lord of Cabrera and Ribera; Juan el Tuerto (‘the one-eyed’), lord of Biscay, and his mother Maria Diaz de Haro. Edward addressed Felipe and Juan el Tuerto as his nephews, though they were in fact his first cousins once removed.⁴

Edward spent Easter and his fortieth birthday, 25 April, at his favourite residence of Langley. A Household Ordinance issued in June 1323 stated that Edward should make an offering of five shillings before the Cross every Good Friday and that the coins should subsequently be made into ‘cramp-rings’, thought to be a cure against muscle cramps and epilepsy. He was also to make an offering of three shillings to the thorn of the Crown of Thorns, if he had the relic with him.⁵ Piers Gaveston was still on Edward’s mind, and in June 1324 he sent his confessor to Langley Priory to keep the twelfth anniversary of Gaveston’s death. He also sent Brother Robert Asessour to Langley in January 1325 with the large sum of five pounds for each friar, so they would remember his friend in their prayers.⁶

In early June 1324, Edward sent the experienced diplomat the earl of Pembroke – the ambassador he should probably have sent in the first place – to Paris to negotiate the Gascony problems and the question of homage. Unfortunately, Pembroke died before he reached the city, on 23 June, when he collapsed suddenly after dining and died unshriven in his servants’ arms.⁷ The Brut has a scurrilous story of Pembroke being murdered while sitting on the privy, which the writer thought was God’s vengeance, as Pembroke had been one of the men to condemn ‘Saint Thomas of Lancaster’ to death.⁸ Edward had forced Pembroke to swear on the Gospels in June 1322 that he would always be obedient and faithful to him, because ‘the king was aggrieved against him for certain reasons … and could not assure himself of the earl’, most probably because Pembroke had persuaded Edward to consent to the Despensers’ exile in August 1321.⁹ The childless Pembroke left as his heirs his nephew John Hastings and his nieces Joan and Elizabeth Comyn, whose father was murdered by Robert Bruce in 1306 and whose brother John was killed at Bannockburn. Edward’s undoubted affection for Pembroke, at least before 1322, did not prevent him allowing Hugh Despenser to harass the dowager countess and Pembroke’s heirs over his debts, lands and goods.¹⁰

At war with France and with his French lands confiscated, Edward ordered all French subjects in England to be arrested and their goods seized. The French complained that this seizure would be worth more than the revenues of Gascony.¹¹ Charles of Valois took his army into the Agenais (the modern department of Lot-et-Garonne) in early August, and demanded the surrender of its capital, Agen, from the earl of Kent, now Edward’s lieutenant in Gascony. Kent had already angered the residents by abducting a young girl and enforcing heavy levies of money.¹² Naively, he allowed himself to be boxed in at the castle of La Réole, and Valois, half-brother of the late Queen Marguerite and thus Kent’s own uncle, besieged him there for five weeks. Valois had always followed an anti-English line, and played an important role in the plot of 1294 which deprived Edward I of Gascony for almost a decade; a chronicler wrote that ‘he persecuted the English with an inveterate hatred’, although this didn’t prevent him desiring a marriage alliance between his children and Edward II’s.¹³ Hugh Despenser told Kent that the only reason for the late arrival of ships carrying money for his aid was that ‘a strong wind was against them, which we cannot turn by our own command’, a statement clearly intended humorously but which also demonstrates Despenser’s arrogance, with its implication that he controlled everything except the weather.¹⁴ On 22 September 1324, Kent signed a six-month truce with Valois.¹⁵

Edward’s response to his half-brother’s truce six days later was once more to order the arrest of all French people in England, and also citizens of any Gascon towns which had surrendered to the French.¹⁶ Although the constable of Bordeaux had written in a panic on 1 September that the whole of Gascony was on the verge of falling, it did not: the French won the Agenais and part of the Gironde, Agen fell on 15 August, but Bordeaux and Bayonne, the most important cities, remained in English hands, as did numerous other towns.¹⁷ Edward wrote again to Jaime II of Aragon in September 1324 claiming untruthfully that he had not been summoned to pay homage to Charles IV, and grumbled about Charles’s ‘severity and malevolence’. He asked Jaime to send men to aid him against Charles, and sent the same letter to Alfonso XI of Castile and the regents Juan el Tuerto and his mother Maria Diaz de Haro.¹⁸ The following day, Edward appointed four men, including the earl of Kent, to negotiate a marriage between his son Edward and one of Jaime II’s daughters.¹⁹ In February 1325, Jaime declared that the marriage alliance between his family and Edward’s was ‘not agreeable … in the manner and form under which it was proposed’. Edward explained that he was eager to make ‘an alliance of love’ with Aragon, and sent two more envoys to negotiate any union ‘as shall seem suitable and opportune’.²⁰ He was forced in October 1325 to apologise to Pedro Lopez de Luna, archbishop of Zaragoza, for his envoys’ failure to present themselves or communicate their business to him, declaring himself annoyed by their error.²¹

Even before Jaime II rejected the marriage of Edward of Windsor, Edward began negotiating for his son to marry Alfonso XI of Castile’s sister Leonor, who was probably born in 1307 and was thus a few years older than young Edward (born in 1312), and had been abandoned on her wedding day in 1319 by Jaime II’s son.²² Thirteen-year-old Alfonso XI himself was betrothed to Edward’s elder daughter, six-year-old Eleanor of Woodstock, and Edward declared himself prepared to pay £15,000 as Eleanor’s dowry.²³Edward’s long and eager letters to the regents about the marriages go beyond mere diplomatic courtesy, and suggest that he, half-Castilian himself, was delighted at the thought of two of his children marrying into Castile. Carried away with enthusiasm for his young cousin and future son-in-law Alfonso XI, Edward wrote that he ‘rejoices greatly that providence has illuminated abundantly the boldness of Alfonsus’s youth by gifts of virtues and natural and gracious good qualities, as widely diffused fame has made known and is as now spread to the ends of the world’.²⁴

Jaime II did consent to a betrothal between Edward’s younger daughter Joan of the Tower and his grandson the future Pedro IV, who was born in September 1319 and was two years Joan’s senior.²⁵ Because Edward had heard that Jaime ‘is old and decrepit and it is not certain that he is not dead’ – in fact, Jaime lived until November 1327 – he corresponded instead with Jaime’s son Alfonso, Pedro’s father, though his letters to Aragon betray none of the ‘rejoicing’ of his letters to Castile. King Afonso IV of Portugal was also keen for a marriage alliance between his family and Edward’s, and wrote to the king proposing his daughter Maria, born in February 1313, as a bride for Edward’s son. Edward wrote to Afonso and Queen Beatriz, both of whom were his close relatives, explaining that his son was to be married elsewhere, but as he desired friendship between the countries, he was willing to arrange another marriage between their children.²⁶ In the end, because of Edward II’s deposition, none of his planned marriage alliances went ahead.

Edward’s diplomatic efforts in fact did him little good as regards his war with France. Jaime II and his parents had endured a long struggle with Charles of Valois and his great-uncle Charles of Anjou over control of Sicily, and Jaime had no desire to go to war with France on England’s behalf, though he did declare himself willing to act as an intermediary between the two sides.²⁷ Castile proved more amenable to Edward’s requests for military aid than Aragon, and Juan el Tuerto informed Edward in early 1325 that he was willing to raise 1,000 knights and 10,000 footmen and squires for a year, or longer if Edward required, if the king of England paid their expenses.²⁸ Hugh Despenser, keen for Edward not to leave England to lead an army into Gascony in the belief that his life would be in danger in the king’s absence, was hoping that Castilian and Aragonese soldiers would fight a war on England’s behalf.²⁹ Ralph Basset, steward of Gascony, advised Despenser to have the English treasury searched for ancient documents pertaining to Castile, because he had heard from ‘some old people’ that the kings of Castile had often claimed homage for the part of Gascony as far north as the River Dordogne. Alfonso X had incited a rebellion in Gascony in 1253 with a view to invading and taking over the duchy, though he renounced his claims to it the following year when his half-sister Leonor or Eleanor married the future Edward I. Presumably Basset was hoping that, seventy years after the wedding of Edward II’s parents, Castile would decide to fight France for a share of the duchy, an unrealistic proposition to which Despenser did not even bother to respond in his next letter to Basset.³⁰ Charles IV of France, unhappy with Edward’s search for allies in Spain, said that Edward was acting ‘against the crown of France’ and deemed it a ‘crime of treason’.³¹

Walter Reynolds, archbishop of Canterbury, believed in autumn 1324 that Roger Mortimer and the other English exiles were ready to attempt an invasion of England with armed men from Hainault, France and Germany, while Hugh Despenser thought that the exiles would soon lead an invasion force into Norfolk and Suffolk, with the aid of the count of Hainault and the king of Bohemia.³² This invasion never came about – the English exiles had no chance of striking at Edward as early as 1324 – but it may have been the threat of it which prompted Despenser to withdraw almost £2,500 from his Italian bankers between 31 October and 3 December, paid to him in ‘florins of Florence’.³³ This suggests that Despenser was considering fleeing abroad, though when the invasion finally arrived, two years later, he stayed with Edward. The atmosphere of fevered suspicion in England at this time is nicely illustrated by two panicked letters to Despenser in September 1324, telling him that a fleet of foreign vessels with a hundred armed men aboard each ship had been seen in Falmouth and mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the night. This turned out to be a group of Genoese merchants making their annual trip to the Netherlands, with armed men to guard their valuable cargo.³⁴

On 18 September 1324, Edward took Queen Isabella’s county of Cornwall into his own hands, supposedly because it lay on the coast ‘in the more remote parts of the realm’ and might be invaded by the French. The king also seized all of Isabella’s other lands and castles, though he failed to explain how inland counties such as Wiltshire and Oxfordshire might be vulnerable to a French invasion.³⁵ Edward assigned Isabella instead an income from the Exchequer, said by several fourteenth-century chroniclers to be merely a pound a day, a gross underestimate: in fact she was granted 3,920 marks, or £2,613, six shillings and eight pence, annually, a little over seven pounds a day, considerably lower than her pre-September 1324 income of £4,500 but hardly a ‘fraction’ of it, as sometimes stated.³⁶ Sophia Menache points out that it is doubtful if Isabella ‘suffered a substantial economic setback’ in 1324, though the queen was, understandably, outraged at the loss of her lands.³⁷ She and her household could certainly live on the amount: the earl of Lancaster had in 1314 reduced Edward’s expenses to ten pounds a day for a household more than twice the size of the queen’s, and Edward’s father, during one of their quarrels in 1305, allowed him only £155 a month or just over five pounds a day for his household costs.³⁸ Edward had taken his stepmother Queen Marguerite’s lands and castles into his own hands in late 1317, so the move was not unprecedented, yet Edward soon restored Marguerite’s lands to her, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that his seizure of Isabella’s estates was intended punitively.³⁹ Precisely what Edward’s motives in punishing his wife were is uncertain, though the queen herself blamed Hugh Despenser and his ally Walter Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter and treasurer of England. Isabella’s French attendants, excepting her chaplain, were not exempt from the arrest of Charles IV’s subjects – although Edward did permit other French people to remain in England – and were either imprisoned or forced to return to their homeland.⁴⁰ Charles IV was justifiably furious at the treatment of his subjects.⁴¹ Supposedly Isabella managed to smuggle a letter to her brother complaining that she held no higher position at court than that of a servant and that Edward was a ‘gripple miser’, i.e. mean to her but generous to another, although this was only recorded at the end of the fourteenth century by the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, who had no access to Isabella’s correspondence.

At an indeterminate date before 6 February 1325, Edward set up a household for his and Isabella’s daughters, six-year-old Eleanor and three-year-old Joan, under the care of Isabel Hastings and her husband Ralph Monthermer. This has often been misunderstood in the last few years to mean that Edward was further punishing his queen by cruelly removing her children from her. The girls remained in Isabel Hastings’ care until 19 February 1326, and the following day Edward appointed Joan Jermy, sister of his half-brother the earl of Norfolk’s wife Alice Hales, to be in charge of the girls’ household.⁴² Isabel Hastings was Hugh Despenser’s sister, but evidently a trustworthy, maternal type: when Edward’s niece Elizabeth attended his funeral years later, she left her two young daughters in Isabel’s care, despite her understandable hatred of Isabel’s brother, who had treated her appallingly.⁴³ Isabel’s husband Ralph Monthermer was the widower of Edward’s sister Joan of Acre, whom he had married in early 1297 when the future king was twelve, and thus had a claim to being the uncle of the royal daughters. Also at an uncertain date, Edward and Isabella’s second son John of Eltham (born 1316) was placed in the care of Edward’s niece Eleanor Despenser, though this is only known from an undated membrane of Eleanor’s expenses for looking after him and an entry in Edward’s chamber account of June 1326 stating that the two had travelled to Kenilworth together.⁴⁴ Eleanor’s care of John might have lasted only a few weeks, and there is no evidence at all that it began in September 1324, as is almost inevitably stated nowadays.

When Isabella later accused Hugh Despenser of persuading Edward to reduce her income and of dishonouring her in numerous other ways, she said nothing about her children being ‘removed’ from her. Nor is there any evidence that she believed her husband had deprived her of her children, or that anyone else, including the pope and the king of France, thought that Edward had done anything out of the ordinary. No chronicler waxed indignant about the king’s establishment of separate households for John, Eleanor and Joan either.⁴⁵ Yet it is often unfairly used nowadays, in a world with very different cultural and familial norms, as a stick to beat Edward for his supposed nastiness towards his wife. All the people Edward appointed to look after his children were members of his extended family: his niece, his niece’s sister-in-law, his former brother-in-law, his half-brother’s sister-in-law. It is hard to see how any of them were an inappropriate choice.

The establishment of separate households for the royal children certainly does not mean that the queen never saw her children again or that Edward intended this, and granting custody of young royals to noblewomen and setting up their own households was entirely normal. Edward I ordered in 1301 that his eldest grandchild, ten-year-old Gilbert de Clare, be sent to live with the boy’s step-grandmother Queen Marguerite, even though Gilbert’s mother Joan of Acre was alive. Eleanor de Bohun, another grandchild of Edward I, also lived in Marguerite’s household and later at Amesbury Priory at her uncle Edward II’s expense, though her mother Elizabeth lived until 1316 and her father the earl of Hereford until 1322.⁴⁶ In the summer of 1340, Edward III set up a household for his children Isabella, Joan, Lionel and John, aged eight, six, twenty months and four months, under the supervision of the lady de la Mote, and Joan had previously been in the care of the dowager countess of Pembroke. Edward II and Isabella’s elder daughter Eleanor of Woodstock was in the custody of her sister-in-law Queen Philippa in 1331, not her mother.⁴⁷ Edward I set up a household for his younger sons Thomas and Edmund when they were still babies in 1301, and they did not live with their mother Queen Marguerite.⁴⁸ No one ever accuses Edward I or III of cruelty to their wives on this account, however; Edward II is judged differently for doing the same thing as other kings by some modern commentators determined to put a negative spin on everything he did.

Lanercost and Flores say that Edward and Despenser appointed Eleanor Despenser as a kind of guardian over Isabella in 1324, charged with spying on her, carrying her seal and monitoring her correspondence.⁴⁹ This may have some truth in it, though far from being foisted on the queen, as is sometimes claimed, Eleanor had been her lady-in-waiting since at least 1311 and probably since Isabella’s arrival in England in 1308. In July 1311, Isabella paid for ale for Eleanor’s breakfast when they were staying near Durham, and in October that year had to make alternative arrangements for transporting Eleanor’s possessions, ‘because the lord Hugh le Despenser her husband stole away from her her sumpter-horses and other carriage’.⁵⁰ Eleanor was with Isabella at Tynemouth in 1322 when Edward supposedly abandoned his queen to danger at Hugh Despenser’s instigation, and with her in the Tower in early 1323 when they both wrote letters on behalf of Roger Mortimer’s wife. There is nothing to indicate hostility between the two women in 1324/25, either because Eleanor had been given custody of Isabella’s son John to punish the queen or because she had been appointed some kind of spy over her, and Isabella sent letters to the justice John Stonor on behalf of Eleanor’s chaplain John Sadington in early 1326, after her refusal to return to England.⁵¹

Parliament opened on 20 October 1324 in London and Westminster, its aims to discuss the war in Gascony. Edward’s opening address, delivered in French, is the only one of his parliamentary speeches to survive. He began,

Lords, I have shown you certain things which concern the Crown which have come under debate, as one who is your chief and who has the sovereign keeping of it, and as one who is ready to maintain the Crown in all its rights, with your counsel and aid, and to defend it as far as a man can, by the power of all your might, on which matter I have always asked for your counsel, and have done nothing in the said business without counsel, in which I believe that I have done my part,

and asked for advice from every man present (and then, one hopes, took a breath after such a long sentence). Parliament decided that Edward must lead an army into Gascony in February or March 1325, on the grounds that the king of France had maliciously deprived him of his inheritance.⁵²

Hugh Despenser’s dominance of the English government is obvious from the many letters between England and Gascony during the St-Sardos war, which were mostly sent to and from him rather than Edward. His correspondents addressed him in fawning terms: ‘To the very noble and wise man, his very dear and very honourable lord’, ‘To the very puissant, very noble, very honourable and wise lord, if it please him’ and ‘My very dear and very dread lord’ are typical examples.⁵³ Even Despenser’s social superiors were not immune from the desire to flatter him. In a letter of May 1325, the earl of Surrey carefully addressed him as ‘very dear cousin’ five times in five sentences. The earl of Kent, for his part, called Despenser ‘very dear nephew’ or ‘beloved nephew’ no fewer than seven times in four sentences in one letter, and in another, told Despenser that he had heard news of his good health, ‘for which we devoutly thank God’.⁵⁴ Despenser’s self-importance, arrogance and certainty of his hold over the king are evident from the many letters where he speaks for himself and Edward: ‘It seems to the king and to us that…’ and ‘the king and ourselves think that…’ appear frequently.⁵⁵ An interesting light is thrown on standards of literacy among the nobility of the early fourteenth century by Despenser’s statement in letters to two men that he had read their previous correspondence out loud to the king in detail.⁵⁶

In the end, Edward did not take an army to Gascony, and although he never visited his duchy, the Scalacronica thought it was ‘the country and nation which he loved best’.⁵⁷ As it was the homeland of Edward’s beloved Piers Gaveston, the chronicler’s statement may be correct. Despenser informed Ralph Basset that Edward would go to Gascony with ‘a great and noble array’ and, interestingly, with Robert Bruce, if the ‘business’ between them went well. The draft of this letter reveals that Despenser at first named Bruce as ‘king of Scotland’ (le roi Descoce), then ordered his scribe to cross that part out.⁵⁸ Edward opened negotiations with Robert Bruce again in 1324, probably because he was worried that Bruce would join with France against him, and offered safe-conducts to Bruce’s envoys.⁵⁹ They arrived in England in November, and presented Bruce’s demands that ‘Scotland should be forever free from every English exaction’, that the Scottish king should be restored to the barony in Essex which he had forfeited to Edward I in 1306, and that England should return the Stone of Scone to Scotland (it remained in London until 1996, exactly 700 years after Edward I had removed it). Bruce also proposed that Edward’s son Edward of Windsor marry one of his daughters. Edward responded, in a fascinating illustration of how he had been raised to think of Scotland as part of his inheritance and subject to England,

How without prejudice to our Crown can we surrender the right we have in Scotland, which from the coming of the Britons to the coming of the Saxons and down to our own time, is known always to have been subject to our ancestors; which, although in rebellion it often spurned our authority, was, nevertheless, as no one doubts, reduced to its due state of servitude, though unwillingly?

Edward refused to restore Bruce to the Essex manor Edward I had confiscated, claiming, ‘It is not fitting that the son should make void what his father decreed,’ and said that he would be willing to return the Stone of Scone to the Scots ‘if their other demands were not beyond all reason’. He also declared that Bruce’s proposal that one of his daughters marry Edward’s son ‘is unsuitable for us’. However, both sides did agree to maintain the truce, and Robert Bruce did not join Charles IV.⁶⁰

The king spent Christmas 1324 at Nottingham, though whether Isabella was with him is uncertain. If the couple were together, it would be the last Christmas they ever spent in each other’s company. Edward moved on to Ravensdale in Derbyshire, where he gave an Epiphany gift of fifty shillings to his minstrels and two shillings to his piper Little Alein for his performance, and perhaps watched deer coursing, as Ravensdale had a course about a mile long and 80 feet wide enclosed by hedges.⁶¹ The king must have heard the sad news that his great-niece Joan, Piers Gaveston’s daughter, had died of an unspecified illness at Amesbury Priory on 13 January, probably the day after her thirteenth birthday.⁶² Edward had in 1317 arranged a marriage for Joan with John Multon, eldest grandson of the earl of Ulster, but she died before the wedding took place. The eccentric Edward spent much time in 1325 at Burgundy, his cottage at Westminster, and was there on 12 February 1325 watching two squires of his chamber, Berduk de Till and Giles of Spain, perform some kind of act for his entertainment involving fire. Unfortunately it went badly wrong, and both of them burnt their arms and, in Berduk’s case, his thighs too. Edward gave them the large sum of twenty pounds in compensation.⁶³He spent a month from mid-February to mid-March at the Tower of London, and gave a pound to Thomelyn the psalterer for playing for him there.⁶⁴

Two staunch allies of the king died in the early spring of 1325: Robert Umfraville, earl of Angus, and the king and Hugh Despenser’s brother-in-law Ralph Monthermer, who left sons Thomas and Edward and daughters Joan, a nun at Amesbury, and Mary, countess of Fife. Monthermer had married Edward’s widowed sister Joan of Acre in secret in early 1297, and Edward I, who had been negotiating for her to marry Count Amadeus V of Savoy, imprisoned Monthermer in fury. He married his second wife Isabel Hastings (née Despenser) in 1318 also without the king’s permission, and Edward II temporarily seized their lands and fined the couple 1,000 marks, though he pardoned the debt in 1321.⁶⁵ Edward’s daughters Eleanor and Joan remained in Isabel Hastings’ custody, and he granted her ‘the king’s houses’ within the walls of Marlborough Castle ‘for the safer dwelling of herself and the king’s daughters’.⁶⁶ The number of the king and Despenser’s supporters was dwindling rapidly, though Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, was still close to them, and his daughter Alice married Edward’s nephew John de Bohun in 1325.⁶⁷

Edward’s reign began to stagger towards its disastrous end in March 1325 when he sent Queen Isabella to France to negotiate a peace settlement with her brother Charles IV, a journey from which she would finally return eighteen months later with an invasion force. Given the ultimate result of Isabella’s trip to France, who first conceived the idea that she should go has been the subject of much debate. The often-repeated notion that Charles IV of France conceived the idea with the aim of helping his sister, Roger Mortimer and other enemies of Edward’s regime in some deep conspiracy to deprive Edward of his throne is implausible in the extreme.⁶⁸ The Lanercost chronicler and Geoffrey le Baker, with years of hindsight, turned the chaos of the end of Edward’s reign into a coherent narrative and invented a preconceived pattern and plan which never existed: Lanercost thought that Isabella had ‘astutely contrived’ to leave England with her son – who remained in England for six months after her departure – and Baker invented a conspiracy whereby the bishops of Hereford and Lincoln worked on the queen in order to persuade her to bring down the Despensers. The much later chronicler Jean Froissart, who wasn’t even born until about 1337 and is for the most part utterly unreliable for Edward II’s reign, presented Isabella as a persecuted victim expelled from Edward’s kingdom with her son at risk to their lives, escaping from Winchelsea to France after pretending to go on pilgrimage to Canterbury.⁶⁹ The Hainault chronicler thought that Edward had ordered the arrest of his wife and that she fled to Paris with the earl of Kent, while French chroniclers wrote that Isabella had been banished from Edward’s kingdom and ‘crowned the exiled queen, tortured by her cruel husband, with a martyr’s halo’.⁷⁰

These wildly inaccurate accounts have been followed rather too slavishly by some later writers, and it is still sometimes written today that Isabella fled to Paris because of Edward’s mistreatment of her. It had been suggested as early as April 1324 that Isabella might intercede with her brother on Edward’s behalf.⁷¹ Charles IV’s counsellors suggested at the beginning of 1325 that Isabella and her elder son Edward of Windsor, earl of Chester, should travel to France, the queen to negotiate for peace and the earl to pay homage for Gascony and Ponthieu on his father’s behalf. Although happy enough for Isabella to travel to her homeland, Edward’s own counsellors ‘with one voice’ refused to allow young Edward to go, understandably unwilling to send the twelve-year-old heir to the throne to an enemy country until peace had been established.⁷² Geoffrey le Baker thought that the boy might fall prey to many misfortunes if he were exposed to ‘French cunning and greed’.⁷³ The suggestion to send the young earl of Chester to France has sometimes imaginatively been seen as evidence that Charles IV was planning a trap for Edward at the instigation of Isabella and Roger Mortimer, who were hoping to get her son out of the country to use him as a hostage. Pope John XXII, who called Isabella an ‘angel of peace’, wrote to her several times between April 1324 and January 1325 begging her to use her influence with her husband and her brother to bring about their reconciliation and declared that the hope of peace would be ‘greatly promoted’ if she went to France, and is in fact by far the most likely person to have suggested her journey.⁷⁴ Edward wrote in May 1325 that he had sent Isabella at the pope’s urging, and as this was six months before she refused to return to him, there is no reason to assume that he was not telling the truth.⁷⁵

It is often assumed, and stated as fact, that Isabella’s trip to France was the result of careful planning and manipulation, that she had behaved submissively to convince her husband and the Despensers that she was no political threat, while she secretly plotted with the English exiles and the bishops who had suffered at Edward’s hands to bring down the Despensers and perhaps even her husband. Although it is beyond all doubt that Isabella hated the Despensers, when she first decided to act against them cannot be known. She may well have decided to use her absence to impose conditions on Edward for her return, but it seems extremely unlikely that she knew as early as March 1325 that she would ultimately return at the head of an army with his deposition in mind. TheVita ends abruptly in late 1325 and is the only chronicle not written with the benefit of hindsight. The author said nothing about conspiracies cooked up between conniving bishops, ruthless exiles and disgruntled queens, and evidently it didn’t occur to him that Isabella might be plotting against her husband.⁷⁶

Lanercost claimed in the 1340s that Hugh Despenser ‘was exerting himself at the pope’s court to procure divorce between the king of England and the queen’ and to this end sent the Dominican friar Thomas Dunheved to the pope, and that this was the reason for Isabella’s willingness to ‘escape’ to France. The Annales Paulini repeat the rumour that Edward was trying to annul his marriage to Isabella.⁷⁷ Although it is just possible that Edward was contemplating this course of action in 1326, when Isabella was holding their son hostage and planning an invasion of his country, it is unlikely in the extreme that he would have attempted to annul his marriage in 1324 or 1325, at a time when offending her brother the king of France would have been disastrous. No proof of the chroniclers’ statement has ever been discovered in the Vatican archives, and Dunheved’s mission to the pope in fact concerned, according to a letter of John XXII himself, Edward’s grievances against the archbishop of Dublin.⁷⁸ As divorce in the modern sense was unknown, Edward could only have hoped to persuade the pope to grant an annulment, which would mean that their marriage had never been valid in the first place. Not only did Edward have no grounds for an annulment – the only possible reason would have been for consanguinity, for which they had received a dispensation – it would have made their children illegitimate, at a time when Edward was negotiating their marriages with the royal houses of Spain. Many rumours were flying around England in the final years of Edward’s reign, most of them untrue, such as the statements in various chronicles that Edward had it publicly proclaimed in 1326 that ‘the queen of England might not be called queen’ and that his wife and his son were his enemies.⁷⁹ The royal clerk and chronicler Adam Murimuth, who visited the papal court in 1324 and was therefore in an excellent position to know what was happening, does not say anything about Edward trying to get an annulment as he surely would if there were any truth to the story, and when Thomas Dunheved wrote to Edward in 1325, he did not mention it.⁸⁰

Ironically, given later developments, Edward was concerned that Roger Mortimer and the other English exiles on the Continent might hurt the queen in some way, and that ‘perils and dishonours’ might befall her.⁸¹ A few days before Isabella’s departure, Edward asked the Dominicans of Venice to pray for her, himself and their children.⁸² The queen and her retinue sailed from Dover – not a secret escape from Winchelsea, as invented by Jean Froissart – on 9 March 1325, and arrived at Wissant the same day.⁸³She travelled in great state: Edward gave her £1,000 for her immediate expenses and authority to withdraw more money from the Bardi in Paris as and when needed, and she received at least £3,674 from them.⁸⁴ The king did not accompany his wife to Dover, but remained at the Tower of London; he had no way of knowing that he would never see her again. In letters of December 1325, Edward wrote that Isabella and Hugh Despenser had always behaved amicably towards each other in his presence and especially before Isabella’s departure, and talked of ‘the great friendships that she held to him [Despenser] upon her going beyond sea’. Edward also claimed that he had seen no evidence of Isabella’s dislike of Despenser, saying, ‘When she departed, towards no one was she more agreeable, myself excepted,’ which has sometimes been seen as proof of the queen’s brilliant deception of her husband and his favourite, but is just as likely to represent Edward’s capacity for self-deception.⁸⁵

Isabella made her way to Paris, visiting relatives, including her brother Louis X’s widow Clemence of Hungary, and holy sites. If she was in touch with her husband’s enemies, or in love with Roger Mortimer and desperate to see him, there is not the slightest sign of it. She wrote to Edward on 31 March 1325, addressing him five times in the letter as ‘my very sweet heart’ (mon tresdoutz coer), informing him that she had met her brother Charles IV at Poissy and found him very difficult to deal with. Isabella ended by writing, ‘My very sweet heart, may the Holy Spirit by his grace save and keep you always.’⁸⁶ Pope John XXII sent Charles IV a very strange letter a few weeks later, saying that Isabella had sent a messenger to him ‘about a story of a monk and an abbot and his nephews, which the king is not to believe’, which sounds more like the beginning of a joke than a papal letter.⁸⁷

Edward spent most of April 1325, including his forty-first birthday, at Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire, where his little half-sister Eleanor had been buried in 1311. He had, as late as 20 February, been intending to lead an army into Gascony on 17 March, but the campaign was cancelled.⁸⁸ An army finally departed at the beginning of April 1325 under the command of the earls of Surrey and Atholl, having once more been delayed by contrary winds, to Edward’s anguish; the truce Kent had negotiated with Valois on 22 September 1324 only lasted for six months.⁸⁹ The Vita criticises Edward for not paying his foot soldiers, who were perforce compelled to pillage the Gascon countryside for food, though one wonders how much they found, given that the clerk Nicholas Hugate told Hugh Despenser in December 1324 that ‘in this country, one will find nothing except wine’.⁹⁰

Thomas le Blount, formerly an adherent of Edward’s cousin Henry of Lancaster, replaced Richard Damory as steward of the royal household on 14 May, and the king appointed his loyal friend William Melton, archbishop of York, as treasurer of England on 3 July, replacing Walter Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter.⁹¹ Edward wrote a brusque letter to Walter Reynolds, archbishop of Canterbury, saying he had heard that Reynolds, ‘wishing to disturb the archbishop of York’, had ordered his suffragans not to celebrate divine service in Melton’s presence or even communicate with him.⁹² The king seems now to have become profoundly irritated with Reynolds, formerly his close friend, and asked the pope once again on 28 May, unsuccessfully, to depose Adam Orleton from his bishopric of Hereford.⁹³ The king dined with a barge-master called Adam Cogg several times in June 1325 – evidently he was as fond of the company of the lowborn as ever – and gave two shillings to a fisherman called Cock atte Wyk who presented him with a ‘great eel’ and other fish, and ten shillings to his chamber valet Robin Traghs, whose wife Joan had borne him a daughter.⁹⁴ Edward opened parliament at Westminster on 27 June, departed for the Tower on 14 July, and spent the rest of that month and the first half of August in Essex, where he received letters from his niece Joan of Bar, countess of Surrey, in France with the queen.⁹⁵ It was perhaps when Edward was staying at Portchester Castle in the early summer of 1325 that Hugh Despenser and his allies Robert Baldock and Robert Holden, respectively chancellor of England and controller of Edward’s wardrobe, imprisoned over thirty merchants at the castle for a week until they consented to buy a few dozen tuns of ‘rotten and putrid’ wine at many times its market value.⁹⁶Despenser, supremely rich, was able to make loans of £100 each to the abbots of Hailes, Leicester and Waltham, £400 to his father, 100 marks to his sister Isabel Hastings and 200 marks to the earl of Richmond.⁹⁷ Edward gave Despenser a present of eighty-four mares in July 1325, sent to his South Wales castle of Chepstow.⁹⁸

In France, Queen Isabella and her brother Charles IV drew up a draft peace treaty on 30 May and sent it to Edward. He ratified it on 13 June, ordering all his sheriffs to proclaim the news that England and France had made peace.⁹⁹ Its terms were catastrophic for Edward, which was not Isabella’s fault, and it is unlikely that any other envoy could have thrashed out better ones. The date for performing homage was postponed until 29 August.¹⁰⁰ If Edward failed to travel to Beauvais and perform homage, this would mean that Gascony would be forfeit to Charles IV, Edward would lose the duchy’s revenues and face enormous criticism; given his failures in Scotland and the accusations of losing that country, he simply could not afford to let Gascony go. Edward was reluctant to go to France, however, nervous at the thought of Roger Mortimer and the other exiles on the Continent and that they might kidnap or assassinate him. He was also afraid that he would be indicted in the French court for the death of Thomas of Lancaster, Charles IV’s uncle.¹⁰¹ And travelling to France presented Edward with another huge dilemma. He could not go with Hugh Despenser, as it was said that the favourite would be arrested and perhaps tortured if he set foot in France.¹⁰² Yet he could not leave Despenser behind either, surely remembering what had happened to Piers Gaveston in 1312 when he left him at Scarborough. Edward had backed himself into a corner: he could not go to France with Despenser, he could not go to France without Despenser, and he could not avoid paying homage. His only other choice was to send his son in his place, making Edward of Windsor duke of Aquitaine and count of Ponthieu and allowing him to perform homage to Charles IV instead. This alternative also had serious drawbacks. Edward would lose control of the lands and their income, and far more dangerously, the king was well aware that his enemies could capture young Edward, not to mention the more general risks of sending his heir to a hostile country. The king’s grandfather Henry III had in 1253 been equally reluctant to send his fourteen-year-old son, Edward II’s father, to Castile, in case Alfonso X took him as a hostage.¹⁰³

Edward’s indecisiveness as to the correct course of action is painfully apparent. At first he resolved to go himself, without Despenser: the pope had heard by the end of June 1325 that Edward was ready to go to France, and he had started making preparations to depart by 20 July.¹⁰⁴ He told Robert Kendale, constable of Dover Castle, that he would go to France around the Assumption, 15 August, and ordered Kendale to provide as many ships as necessary for himself and the magnates accompanying him (the ship which would carry him personally was La Jonete of Winchelsea).¹⁰⁵ On 21 August, Edward began issuing letters of protection for his retinue, asking the Dominicans of Lincoln on the same day for their prayers on behalf of himself, Isabella and their children.¹⁰⁶ He received over £3,515 in French gold florins and silver plate worth £1,768 from his Italian bankers the Bardi, for his expenses and for gifts at the French court.¹⁰⁷ Edward changed his mind on 24 August and told Charles IV that he would not be able to travel to France as he had suddenly been taken ill, which was almost certainly feigned, given that Edward, healthy, strong and fit, rarely suffered a day’s illness in his life.¹⁰⁸ Six days later, the day after he should have performed homage at Beauvais, Edward changed his mind again and appointed his son, who was still only twelve – he would turn thirteen on 13 November – regent of England during his absence overseas.¹⁰⁹ On 1 September, Edward informed the bishop of Durham that he was ‘shortly going to France’.¹¹⁰ The very next day, however, Edward changed his mind yet again and appointed his son count of Ponthieu prior to sending him to pay homage, though evidently he was still unsure as to whether he was doing the right thing and continued issuing letters of protection for his own retinue to accompany him to France on 3 and 4 September. He waited until 10 September before making his son duke of Aquitaine.¹¹¹ Charles IV wrote to Edward on 4 September declaring that sending Edward of Windsor instead would be acceptable to him, but as Edward had known that since the beginning of 1325, it is debatable whether the letter affected his decision, and besides, he had already made his son count of Ponthieu by the time he received the letter.¹¹²

The king spent the second half of August and early September hovering in Kent, staying at the archbishop of Canterbury’s manor of Sturry, at Dover Castle and with his close friend William the abbot of Langdon, while he debated what he should do. According to Adam Murimuth, Edward and his councillors continued to discuss while at Langdon – the king was there from 24 August to 3 September, with, among many others, Murimuth himself – whether he should travel overseas.¹¹³ Possibly they continued the discussions during the meal they ate in the abbey garden on 30 August, when Edward, the Despensers, the earl of Arundel, the chancellor Robert Baldock and others dined on large quantities of fish and seafood including sole, crabs, whiting, codling, sea bass, mullets, bream and salted herring. Edward did his best to relax: he spent two pence playing dice, gave twenty shillings to twenty-two local men who played a ball game for his entertainment, and paid twelve pence to ‘three small children, brothers’ who sang for him in his garden. He also gave twenty shillings in compensation to a Thames fisherman named Colle Herron, whose goods had been burned, presumably in an accident, ‘when he was with the king the last time he was in Hadleigh’ in Essex. The king still enjoyed spending time with his lowborn subjects, and gave seven shillings to four Thames fishermen who spent time with him and four shillings and sixpence to a group of carpenters who travelled with him from 16 to 21 August.¹¹⁴

With hindsight, Edward’s decision to send his son to France, given that it resulted in Isabella’s seizing control of the boy and invading England, seems the most incredible folly, and many writers have assumed that he stupidly fell into his wife’s clever trap and that he was blind to the dangers. Edward’s indecisive behaviour in the autumn of 1325 in fact demonstrates that he was completely aware of the risks. If he had been as oblivious to the consequences of his actions as many commentators have assumed, he would have blithely sent his son to France without a second thought. That Edward was also well aware of the dangers of sending his son to the Continent unmarried, in the knowledge that someone could arrange young Edward’s marriage and use the girl’s dowry to pay for ships and soldiers to invade England, is obvious from his injunctions to his son, both in September 1325 and in subsequent letters, not to marry ‘without the king’s consent and command’.¹¹⁵ He made a very bad decision, but this does not mean that he made it blindly and unthinkingly, and if Edward had gone to France himself and been assassinated or captured by his enemies, historians would no doubt ask how he could have been so stupid as to travel abroad when he could have sent his son instead. Whichever decision Edward made in September 1325 is likely, in retrospect, to have been the wrong one. As for the alleged trap which Isabella and her supposed allies, the English exiles on the Continent, were planning for him, there is nothing at all to suggest that Isabella had ever been in contact with them or sympathised with them. It is more likely that in fact she was hoping for her husband to come to France so that she could talk to him without the constant irritation of Hugh Despenser’s presence and persuade him to treat her with the respect and courtesy she deserved as his queen.

It was Despenser who finally persuaded Edward not to travel abroad, and the Anonimalle says that he ‘lamented piteously to the king that if he passed beyond sea, he [Despenser] would be put to death in his absence’, a story confirmed by Adam Murimuth and the Vita.¹¹⁶ Edward, concerned about his friend’s safety and his own, therefore made the decision which would lead inexorably to the loss of his throne, the decision for which he has unfairly been criticised as a fool ever since.

He sent his son to France.