PART FOUR
CHAPTER 11
‘The Iron Virago’
Edward II was fond of low company. ‘Shunning the company of nobles, he sought the society of jesters, singers, actors, carriage drivers, diggers, oarsmen, sailors and the practitioners of other mechanical arts,’ sniffed Ranulph Higden. Though as Prince of Wales he had shown official support for the aristocratic pursuit of tourneying, taking personal care over the supplies and equipment of his jousters, his own leisure interests were startlingly eccentric for a king. He enjoyed digging ditches, rowing and swimming, even in winter, none of which were acceptable pastimes for a man of his status. In 1325, he entertained a bargemaster, Adam Cogg, in his own room for four days, and ten sailors and two carpenters dined with him on other occasions. Whether Edward took a sexual interest in the fourteenth-century equivalent of ‘rough trade’ can be neither proved nor disproved, but his contemporaries certainly linked his unsuccessful kingship with his love of ‘rustic pursuits’,1 which they attributed to sexual degeneracy. This explanation may, however, have provided a rationale for what might have been an even more shocking idea: that the King’s rejection of social convention was a matter of taste. Here was true heresy. Enjoying the company of a peasant was far more disturbing than buggering a favourite.
With the exception of his passion for music and mechanicals, Edward was ‘conventional and perhaps even rather dull’.2 He had inherited his love of music from his father, who always had his four harpists in attendance, but the young King preferred the newer, bowed instruments, such as the Welsh crowth, and sent his own minstrel, Robert the Rymer, to Shrewsbury Abbey to take lessons from a player there. It was suggested that Edward’s promotion of his clerk, Walter Reynolds, for whom he asked his stepmother Queen Marguerite to secure a post, and who eventually rose to become archbishop of Canterbury, was encouraged by Reynolds’ skill in devising the musical entertainments he so enjoyed. They corresponded about music, in one letter discussing two young trumpeters, a kettle-drummer named Franklin and a trumpeter called Jankin, who remained some years in royal service. Edward liked the organ, giving one as a present to his sister Mary and installing another at his favourite residence of Langley, where it was repaired with fifteen pounds of tin in preparation for a visit from his father and Queen Marguerite. He shared an enthusiasm for horses with his stepmother, receiving a present of foals from her, and even his enemies conceded he had a beautiful seat, though this did not compensate in the eyes of the peers for his sorry lack of military skills, the proper objective of the accomplished rider.
Edward was not, in fact, as ‘uncourtly’ as the chroniclers suggested. Recent research has confirmed that as well as being interested in music, he loved hawking and hunting with his greyhounds, and his early military career was worthy, if not brilliant. It was with hindsight, after Bannockburn and the deposition, that contemporary writers emphasised his inappropriate pleasures. Nevertheless, there was nothing innovatory about his court, nothing notable in terms of literary, artistic or architectural achievement, and the elegant manners to which his culture paid lip service, at least, was nowhere in evidence in his entourage, who were more given to gambling and drinking themselves into nightly stupors than to the practice of knightly courtesy. What place was there for Queen Isabella in Edward’s world?
During the ascendancy of Gaveston, Edward had largely ignored his young wife. That he fulfilled the minimal requirements of a husband is shown by the birth of Prince Edward, followed by John of Eltham in 1316, Eleanor in 1318 and Joan in 1321,but Edward took little more than a conventional interest in his queen’s life and the English court could not compare with the home Isabella had left. Paris, where she had spent much of her childhood, was the intellectual capital of Europe, and her mother, Queen Jeanne, had been a notable artistic patron, founding the College de Navarre as part of the city’s celebrated university. Isabella employed a minstrel, Walter, and collected painted panels of ‘Lombard work’; she had a library which included eight religious books, among them a French Apocalypse, eight volumes of romances and a collection of Arthurian legends bound in white leather, as well as the exquisite ‘Isabella Psalter’ which may have been a wedding gift. These surviving possessions suggest the young queen was literate (or least that she could read; it is not known whether she was able to write) and cultivated, and certainly had nothing in common with the companions her husband appeared to prefer. For a while after Gaveston’s murder, Isabella had enjoyed a warmer relationship with her husband, but in the year of her aunt Marguerite’s death it became clear to her that Edward’s tendency to blind passion for his favourites had merely been in abeyance. His vulnerability to ‘evil counsellors’ and his ‘unseemly works and occupations’3 were leading to another crisis. The King’s curious tastes, so alien to his elegant, educated French princess, were the first manifestations of a wilful political madness that Isabella could not share and which eventually she would be driven to destroy.
Roger Mortimer, the eighth Baron Wigmore, was a very different man from Edward. Knighted alongside the then Prince of Wales, and Gaveston, in 1306, he was married to Joan de Grenville, one of the ladies appointed to serve Isabella when she first arrived in England as Queen. Mortimer’s lands lay on the Welsh marches, between Wigmore and Ludlow, and his family had a history of service to the crown, in reflection of which Mortimer had carried the royal robes at Edward’s coronation. From 1306 he had served as the royal governor in Ireland, and had also lent his considerable military skills to campaigns in Wales and the marches. Mortimer was a dynamic commander with a taste for luxurious living, accumulating rare furniture and carpets, plate and gorgeous clothes of silk and velvet. In the years of his ascendancy, he treated himself to silk sheets and the finest armour from Milan and Germany, but though he shared an appreciation of beautiful things with his master, there was nothing effete about him. He was a hard man, physically courageous and dominating, and it is unsurprising that Isabella, spurned and neglected for so long, eventually found him irresistible.
But how did the Queen, whose conduct had been irreproachable for nearly twenty years, come to be involved in an openly adulterous relationship which scandalised the whole of Europe? Her behaviour left such a ‘dark stain on the annals of female royalty’4that her prim nineteenth-century biographer Agnes Strickland could barely bring herself to write about it. Harridan, unnatural woman - she-wolf, even - are some of the epithets used by contemporaries and subsequent writers to describe the erstwhile virtuous French Princess who ruled England with her lover for three years. Much of Isabella’s conduct is inexcusable, but it is not inexplicable, and it may be argued that her actions, driven by desperate circumstances, ultimately protected and even saved the English crown during a period of great vulnerability, a state of affairs created in large part by the behaviour of the King himself.
In August 1318, Edward agreed to the treaty of Leake, which bound him to observe the Ordinances under a council of seventeen headed by the Earl of Pembroke. Included on this council were the Despensers, father and son, both able men with a particular talent for finance, but whose hold over the king was by now becoming a source of concern. Hugh Despenser the younger had joined Edward’s household when he was Prince of Wales, and Edward favoured him enough to marry him to his niece Eleanor de Clare, the sister of Gaveston’s wife Margaret and one of the most eligible heiresses in England. In 1313, three years after the death of Eleanor’s father, the Earl of Gloucester, at Bannockburn, his inheritance was finally divided between his three daughters, Margaret, Eleanor and Elizabeth, but not equally: Edward permitted Hugh to take Glamorgan, the lion’s share of the lands, and it was not long before Hugh was scheming to get his hands on the whole Gloucester inheritance. Edward had no objection to this, as he was by now apparently as besotted by Hugh as he had been by Piers Gaveston. Despenser had become ‘the King of England’s right eye and his chief counsellor against the earls and barons, but an eyesore to the rest of the kingdom. His every desire became a royal command.’5Hugh’s current desire was the lordship of Gower, which was the property of John Mowbray, and in 1320 he persuaded Edward to confiscate Mowbray’s lands and add them to his own affinity of Glamorgan.
The lordships of the Welsh marches had traditionally enjoyed a unique position in English law. Marcher lords governed their lands as mini-kingdoms, exempt from many of the obligations of their peers, in return for keeping the peace on the ever-fractious border. John Mowbray had followed tradition when he acquired Gower, which he had bought from his father-in-law without obtaining formal permission, but in order to justify the confiscation, Hugh claimed he had acted illegally. When Mowbray objected, Edward sent men to take Gower for Hugh by force. Outraged by what they perceived as an attack on their rights, a group of Marchers, which included Roger Mortimer, ‘made a sworn conspiracy with the Earl of Lancaster to banish, persecute, condemn and perpetually disinherit the Despensers, father and son’.6 Mortimer was at Westminster in November 1320 to try to make Edward see reason but, as he had done over Gaveston, Edward dithered, and by the spring, he was preparing for war.
Whatever her own feelings about the Despensers may have been, Isabella, like her husband, was not prepared to countenance any attack on the royal prerogative. Neither she nor Edward seemed to understand that the Marchers were staunch royalists, and that in many respects the situation mirrored that of the Gaveston debacle, with Edward’s heedless promotion of his favourite making unwilling enemies of those most bound to support him. Isabella demonstrated her commitment to Edward by handing Marlborough Castle to Hugh Despenser the elder, though she could not join her husband on his campaign to meet the Marchers as she was approaching the delivery of her last child, Joan, who was born in the Tower of London that July. As Isabella waited out the last months of her pregnancy, the Marcher forces, commanded by Mortimer, moved steadily eastwards, taking Newport, Cardiff, Caerphilly and laying waste to much of Gloucestershire. By the time the Queen’s baby was born (a more than usually miserable experience since her apartments in the Tower had been neglected and the roof leaked on to her bed), the Marchers were moving on London. On 29 July, the citizens of London closed the city gates. Mortimer’s response was to encircle the walls, and when Despenser sailed up and down the Thames in a show of bravado, the ‘contrariants’ threatened to torch every ward of the city between Charing Cross and Westminster. Edward was anxious enough to hand over the custody of the Great Seal to Isabella and two royal clerks, but when Parliament met he refused to listen to the contrariants’ demands that the Despensers be banished. Edward’s obduracy had brought the country to the very brink of war, but the Earl of Pembroke now suggested that Isabella might make a gesture of intercession, through which Edward could back down without too great a loss of dignity. The Queen obliged by going through the ceremony of pleading on her knees with the King ‘for the peoples’ sake’.7 Her action here was not an emotional appeal but a political formula, an example of the ritualisation of the intercession dynamic. Edward was not moved to change his mind out of affection for his wife, rather Isabella’s performance was a device, understood by all, by which he could appear to change it as a gesture of mercy. On 19 August, the Despensers were duly proscribed and disinherited and a pardon was issued to the contrariants at Westminster the following day. Hugh Despenser made the best of his exile by becoming a pirate, a ‘sea-monster’ as the Vita describes him, but again, as in the case of Gaveston, Edward was determined to restore his favourite and have his revenge on those who had dared to challenge his power. This time, he made direct use of Isabella.
Bartholomew of Badlesmere was a substantial Kentish baron who had until recently been among Edward’s supporters (indeed, on Queen Marguerite’s death, Leeds Castle in Kent, which she had held in dower and which had for some years been promised to Isabella, had been cavalierly granted to him), but who had now declared for the contrariants, possibly as a result of the marriage of his daughter to Mortimer’s son. In October, Queen Isabella set off with an armed escort on a ‘pilgrimage’, taking an unusual route to Canterbury. She stopped near Leeds Castle and had her men inform Lady Badlesmere that she wished to rest there for the night. Lord Badlesmere was away, which presumably Isabella knew, and his wife refused to admit her, probably because, as a rebel, Badlesmere had equipped all his castles for defence and his treasure was being stored at Leeds. Isabella then advanced on the castle and ordered her escort to force an entry, at which Lady Badlesmere had her archers fire upon them, killing six members of the Queen’s party. If Isabella had been fully party to the plot, she now behaved disingenuously, writing to Edward to request that Lady Badlesmere be punished for the murder of her servants and the insult to her as Queen. Edward responded by sending Pembroke to besiege Leeds. The real point, of course, was not to seek retribution for Lady Badlesmere’s impertinence but to provoke the contrariants, and Mortimer fell neatly into the trap by setting off to relieve the castle. This was an open gesture of defiance against Edward. By 27 October Mortimer was at Kingston-on-Thames, where Pembroke wisely met him to dissuade him from advancing any further, and four days later the castle fell. Lady Badlesmere and her children, including Mortimer’s daughter-in-law, were lucky. They ended up in the Tower. The constable of Leeds and thirteen of his garrison were hanged in front of the castle gates on Edward’s orders.
Mortimer now moved north to join his ally the Earl of Lancaster, but in December the Marchers were forced to return to their own lands, which were threatened both by the Welsh, who had taken advantage of the situation to begin raiding, and the King, who was gathering an army at Cirencester. While Isabella kept Christmas at Langley, Edward, accompanied by his half-brothers Edmund and Thomas, led his troops north along the bank of the Severn, crossing at Shrewsbury in mid-January. Assailed from both sides, the Marcher resistance crumbled and Mortimer’s men began to desert. By 22 January Mortimer and his nephew were in chains, and the remaining contrariant castles were quickly taken. For once, Edward had proved himself a shrewd and dynamic commander, but he had displayed these qualities with a total disregard for the law and the need for consensus among his magnates. In the background, Archbishop Reynolds had been working to overturn the Despensers’ sentence, and by mid-January father and son were back in England, though Edward did not issue their formal recall for some weeks. The only lord with any power left to object to the reinstatement was Lancaster and, bolstered by his uncharacteristic success against Mortimer, Edward now officially named the Earl as a rebel and pursued him north.
Again, Isabella played her part. She ordered provisions for the castles of York and Carlisle and, according to the Reading chronicler, wrote to the sheriffs of Westmoreland and Yorkshire asking them to move troops to the south to halt Lancaster who, with the royal army behind him, was making for Scotland. Lancaster had been involved in negotiations with Robert the Bruce and his messenger had been granted two safe-conducts by the Scots. This treachery, discovered when Edward’s forces raided his abandoned castle of Tutbury, played perfectly into the King’s hands.
The period known as the ‘tyranny’ of Edward II began with the battle of Boroughbridge on 16 March 1322. After a day’s fighting, Lancaster surrendered and was tried as a traitor in his own castle of Pontefract. Edward had waited a long time to avenge the death of Gaveston, and Lancaster was sentenced to the full, horrific penalty of hanging, drawing and quartering before Edward conceded that, out of respect for his rank, he might be beheaded. Even so, to execute a great earl set a dangerous precedent. Lancaster died, contemptuously forced to kneel in the direction of Scotland, on 22 March, and in the following days Edward suppressed any remaining rebels with punishments so severe that no one was tempted to rise against him. Over a hundred people were executed, banished or imprisoned, and the Despensers profited eagerly from fines and sequestered lands. In early May, at York, where Isabella had joined him, Edward had the satisfaction of hearing the hated Ordinances finally repealed. ‘The harshness of the King has increased so much,’ commented the Vita Edwardi Secundi, ‘that no one . . . dares to cross his will. The nobles of the realm are terrified by threats and penalties . . . whatever pleases the King, though lacking in reason, has the force of law.’ Edward was now free to lavish favour on the Despensers, and made Despenser the elder Earl of Winchester, but increasingly it was Hugh the younger who was seen as dominating the King. Indeed, it was Hugh, people said, who was the true governor of the country.
As Hugh became more and more powerful, Isabella slipped from what narrow place she held in Edward’s affections. Robert of Reading claimed that the King’s ‘illicit and sinful unions’ caused him to reject the Queen, and it does appear that sexual relationsbetween them ceased after 1321, as Joan was Isabella’s last child. But it cannot be inferred from this that Edward and Hugh were having a sexual relationship. The King’s accounts for this period show no evidence that Edward was anything other than heterosexual in his tastes, and if he was having an affair, it could equally well have been with Hugh’s wife, his niece Eleanor de Clare. Incestuous adultery was certainly ‘sinful and illicit’, and Eleanor had always been treated very generously by Edward. In 1319, he ordered medicines for her when she was ill, and sugar to make sweets; later he gave her a present of caged goldfinches and, along with money for her expenses, a significant present of one hundred marks. Historians keen to see Edward as homosexual have interpreted these gifts as Edward ‘buying off’ his lover’s wife, but the alternative explanation, that Hugh was prepared to countenance the relationship in order to maintain his hold over the King, is just as plausible. It should also be remembered that Edward had an illegitimate son, Adam, who fought (and died) with him on the Scottish campaign in 1322. Obviously homosexual men can and do have children, but the fact that Edward had willingly entered into a heterosexual relationship, as opposed to confining himself to doing his duty with Isabella, suggests that he had been attracted to women when younger, and perhaps still was. Maybe he was attracted to both men and women. The nature of Edward’s sexuality is far from clear; what is relevant, as has been noted, is the way in which it was perceived and the implications drawn by contemporaries with regard to its effect on his kingship. When the time came, Isabella would be able to play on the sympathy of those who sensed there was something unsavoury about the relationship between Edward and Hugh, and she manipulated her position as a slighted wife to great effect.
It was not long after Boroughbridge that Isabella began to feel herself persecuted by Hugh Despenser. His plans for the future may have included his own wife, but there was no place for the King’s. Isabella was both inconvenient and irrelevant, and as soon as his enemies were destroyed, Hugh allowed her to feel it. He stopped bothering to pay her the 200 pounds a year he owed her for the farm of Bristol, and the two castles she had made over during the contrariant uprising were not returned. Worse was to come. In a curious parallel to Gaveston’s flight in 1313, Isabella once again found herself abandoned at Tynemouth Priory while Edward escaped with his favourite. The King had pompously marched into Scotland in August 1322, but by October it was plain that this time he would not even be able to raise a battle, as Bruce’s forces had so devastated the countryside that the only available provision was a single elderly cow. Edward recrossed the border tomuster more troops and supplies, andwas with Despenser at Rievaulx monastery when the news came that the Scots had advanced as far as nearby Northallerton. Isabella and Eleanor de Clare were at Tynemouth, and their husbands rushed off to York, leaving them at the mercy of Bruce’s advancing army. Edward wrote Isabella two shoddy letters, assuring her weakly that he was sending men to protect her, but the Scots were closer than the relief troops, and the Queen of England had no one to defend her but the knights of her household. Swiftly, a ship was commandeered and, after a dreadful voyage, during which one of her ladies drowned, Isabella landed at Scarborough. While Edward and Hugh were running away, Bruce had seized the royal treasure abandoned by Edward at Rievaulx and concluded his campaign by defeating the English at Byland. Not only did Isabella have to bear the shame of her husband’s cowardice and incompetence, but it had been proved once more that Edward cared more for his favourite than for his wife.
When war broke out with France in 1324, Hugh’s attack on Isabella’s resources continued. Philip V had died in 1322, to be succeeded by Isabella’s youngest brother, Charles IV. Charles immediately requested that the English monarch come to France to pay homage, but Edward used the situation in his kingdom as an excuse, and Charles agreed to postpone the ceremony for two years. When the time came, fighting had erupted in the Agenais, and in the face of Edward’s continued refusal to perform the homage, Charles threatened to invade Gascony. When Edward sent his younger half-brother, Edmund, Earl of Kent, to Gascony as his lieutenant, Kent suffered numerous defeats by the French and was gulled into signing a truce which leftmuch of the territory in Charles’s hands. Isabella’s position as a foreigner was used against her, and her estates were sequestered (as Queen Marguerite’s had been in 1317) but, unlike Marguerite, Isabella received no compensation. Edward had ceased to pay certain debts to his wife that spring, and now her allowance was reduced to just 1,000 marks annually. Parliament then ordered the expulsion of all French subjects, which meant Isabella was deprived of members of her household, some of whom had accompanied her to England and had been with her ever since her marriage. Twenty-seven of her servants who dared to remain were imprisoned. In October, Edward diverted her queens-gold to his own household. Isabella was now dependent on Despenser’s goodwill for her maintenance, as officially payments to her were now to be managed by the exchequer, which in practice meant that the Despensers doled out her allowance as they saw fit.
Isabella wrote angrily to her brother, describing her condition as no better than that of a maidservant, but Edward was deaf to any remonstrance. Smarting over the invasion of Gascony, he had another reason to resent Charles: the French King was harbouring England’s most wanted man, Roger Mortimer. In August 1323, Mortimer had made an adventurous escape from captivity in the Tower, involving drugged wine, a secret passage, rope ladders and a hidden boat. To explain her brother’s willingness to harbour the rebel, it has been suggested that Isabella was in some way privy to Mortimer’s plan, but this is to overstate the inferences that may be drawn from the evidence. Although Charles and Edward were not yet officially at war, relations were contentious, and Charles had every reason to keep a rebel baron about him as a potentially useful card to play in the future. (Agnes Strickland’s claim that Isabella and Mortimer were already lovers at this point and that it was the Queen who provided the sleeping draught used to overpower Mortimer’s guards is a good story, but nonsense.)
As England and France prepared to fight, Pope John XXII suggested that Isabella go to her brother to attempt to find a peaceful resolution. The Pope was aware of the attacks Despenser had made on Isabella’s prestige, and had written a stern letter condemning him for sowing discord between princes. Isabella was ‘pleased to visit her native land and her relatives, delighted to leave the company of some whom she did not like’,8 and when she departed for her brother’s court in March 1325, it was already believed by many that she would not return as long as Hugh held sway in England. That the French embassy marked the beginning of Isabella’s political prominence is attested to by the Vita Edwardi Secundi. Interestingly, having been almost entirely absent for three quarters of the chronicle, from this period Isabella gradually moves towards centre stage and becomes the chief protagonist, dramatically holding England’s fate in her hands.
Froissart gives a moving, if somewhat embroidered, account of Isabella’s reunion with her brother, who refused to allow her to kneel to him and ‘took great pity on her’ for ‘all the injuries and felonies committed by Sir Hugh’. Charles welcomed his sister with every courtesy, and on 1 April the English Queen made a formal entry into Paris, fashionably dressed in a voluminous black velvet riding habit, black-and-white checked boots and a spun-gold headdress. The peace treaty signed in June was not a notable triumph for Isabella, as her attempts to encourage Charles to reach a settlement were no more successful than those of any other envoy, but he did agree, it was said out of affection for his sister, to prolong the truce until August. Officially, her task was now accomplished, and there was nothing to prevent her from going home - indeed, the English exchequer stopped paying her considerable expenses in mid-June - but Isabella clearly had no intention of returning to her degraded conditions under Despenser. Instead she spent the summer touring the royal properties in the Ile de France, including St Germain, Fontainebleau and Châteauneuf. Possibly she expected to join Edward, for the payment of the overdue homage had been implicit in the terms of the extended truce, and it had been decided that the ceremony would take place at Beauvais, but Edward, too, was prevaricating. The rapacious Despensers were now so unpopular that they feared losing the King’s protection if he left England - in his absence ‘they would not know where to live safely’9 — and they persuaded him to make yet another excuse, this time that he had fallen ill and could not travel.
The previous year, Charles had suggested that Prince Edward might be sent to perform the homage in his father’s place, and now Isabella realised that she had a means of redressing the balance of power against the Despensers. She held a dinner for John deStratford, the bishop of Winchester, who then put her suggestion to Charles and, with his agreement, returned to England with a safe-conduct for the Prince. Pleased that her plan enabled the King to remain in England, the favourites were stupid enough to fall for it. Though other magnates voiced misgivings, the Despensers’ word ruled, and the boy was duly invested as Duke of Aquitaine, to allow him to perform the homage, before sailing for France on 12 September. Mother and son were reunited at Boulogne and, despite the King’s strict instructions that they were to depart for England as soon as the ceremony was over, Edward was never to see his wife again.
On the Prince’s arrival, Englishmen who objected to the Despenser regime began to coalesce around Isabella into a rebel party, among them Sir John Maltravers, a survivor of Boroughbridge, Lord Ros, the Earl of Richmond, Henry de Beaumont, Lord Cromwell, Richard de Bury and the King’s half-brother Edmund of Kent. Initially, Isabella insisted that her only quarrel was with the Despensers. In November, a furious Edward ordered her home, but Isabella wrote to him declaring: ‘I feel that marriage is a joining of a man and a woman, maintaining the undivided habit of life, and that someone has come between my husband and myself trying to break this bond; I protest that I will not return until this intruder is removed, but, discarding my marriage garment, shall assume the robes of widowhood and mourning until I am avenged of this Pharisee.’10 As good as her word, the formerly fashionable Queen now adopted plain black garments and a modest veil. It was an extremely public manifestation of her self-declared status as a wronged wife, designed to call attention to her predicament and engender sympathy. Isabella was a far shrewder manipulator of public opinion than her husband. In casting herself in the role of a weak woman in need of protection, she appealed to the chivalrous ethos of her supporters and emphasised her own quasi-nun-like humility and virtue. Showing an awareness of the language of diplomacy, she even threatened Edward, claiming that she and her sympathisers had no wish to do anything that would be prejudicial to him and that any action they found it necessary to take would pertain solely to Hugh’s destruction. Essentially, she was warning Edward that she could raise the forces to invade if he did not get rid of the Despensers.
The situation was now so serious that Edward had to address Parliament on the matter of his wife’s continued absence. Isabella had declared that she feared for her life if the Despensers got their hands on her, and Edward tried to counter this allegation by maintaining that she had not seemed ‘offended’ with Hugh when she departed, but that now ‘. . . someone has changed her attitude. Someone has primed her with inventions. For I know she has not fabricated any affront out of her own head. Yet she says that Hugh Despenser is her adversary and hostile to her.’11 Edward went on to claim that Hugh was surprised and hurt by the Queen’s behaviour, but that he was prepared to prove his innocence. Isabella’s refusal to return was now a public scandal and, at Edward’s urging, the bishops of England wrote to her, reminding her of her duty: ‘Most dear and potent Lady, the whole country is disturbed by your news and the answers which you have lately sent to our Lord King: and because you delay your return out of hatred for Hugh Despenser everyone predicts that much evil will follow.’ Hugh’s defence is repeated, and the letter goes on:
Wherefore, dearest Lady, I beseech you as my Lady, I warn you as a daughter to return to our Lord King, your husband, putting aside rancour. You who have gone away for the sake of peace, do not for the sake of peace delay to return. For all the inhabitants of our land fear that many evils will result from your refusal to return . . . Alas! If things turn out thus it may happen that we shall regard as a stepmother her whom we hoped to have as patron. Alas! Clergy and people with complaining voice reiterate their fear that they and theirs will be utterly destroyed through the hatred felt for one man. Wherefore, my Lady Queen, accept wise counsel and do not delay your return. For your longed-for arrival I will restrain the malice of men and restrict all opportunities for evil.12
The language of the letter is interesting in the way it formulates Isabella’s position when the King is confronted with the prospect of her power. She is reminded of her duty as wife, lady and queen, but also as ‘daughter’, and threatened with the prospect of becoming a wicked stepmother instead of a good mother or ‘patron’. The bishops’ plea is in effect a reversal of the intercession trope - the male supplicating, the female resisting - and the focus on the Queen’s various feminine roles may be read as an order to demonstrate her abandonment of the power she has adopted and return to those offices. In other words, the bishops were telling Isabella to act like a woman. Their request forms the last section of the Vita Edwardi Secundi. Ominously, the writer concludes: ‘But notwithstanding this letter, mother and son refused to return to England.’
What were Isabella’s intentions as 1325 drew to its close? Her meetings with disaffected Englishmen suggest that her previous loyalty to the royalist cause had been seriously undermined by her determination to oust the Despensers, but was she planning, or being urged on to, more drastic action? In December, she attended the funeral of her uncle, Charles of Valois, in Paris, where among her gathered relatives she met her cousin, Valois’s daughter Jeanne of Hainault. Roger Mortimer had been in the county of Hainault on the Flemish border, for the past year, attempting to rally support for an invasion of England, and the acceptance of his presence by the Count and Countess lends credence to the idea that Jeanne proposed an alliance to Isabella. In return for reviving the idea of marriage between Isabella’s son Prince Edward and one of Jeanne’s daughters, which had been considered in 1319, and an agreement of trading regulations between their two countries, the Count of Hainault would provide the Queen with troops and funds. Isabella had no mandate to negotiate Edward’s marriage, and the boy had promised his father that he would accept no such union without the English King’s permission. If a Hainault affiance was mooted at this juncture, Isabella may well already have been considering replacing her husband with her son. The reappearance of Mortimer proved a catalyst to her decision.
Mortimer had arrived in Paris in December, possibly accompanying Countess Jeanne, and it was not long before it was common knowledge that ‘Mortimer secretly came first in the household of the Queen’.13 Isabella was not the first English queen to be accused of adultery, nor would she be the last, but she is unique in being the only one of them to live flagrantly with her lover. The scandal was such that the relationship was largely referred to in the most discreet, euphemistic terms, but by the following February, Edward himself was obliged, albeit obliquely, to acknowledge it. In February, mustering troops to set a guard on the coast of England, the King declared: ‘The Queen will not come to the King, nor permit his son to return, and the King understands that she is adopting the counsel of the Mortimer, the King’s notorious enemy and rebel, and that she is making alliances with the men of those parts and with other strangers with intent to invade.’14
In May, Isabella showed just how much she cared for her husband’s remonstrations, appearing publicly with Mortimer at the coronation of Queen Jeanne and permitting her lover the considerable honour of carrying the robes of Prince Edward. Isabella was well aware of the impact such a gesture would have on public opinion, and could only have been mindful of the conclusions that opinion would draw. It was not until July that Edward was drawn into a declaration of war, but Isabella had already made her choice, and displayed it to the world in the Saint-Chapelle.
The Queen was prepared not only to defy her husband, but the Pope. Edward had written to Rome to complain of her behaviour, and that of her brother, who was harbouring an adulteress, and the Pope had written to the King of France in no uncertain terms, threatening him with excommunication if he continued to support his sister. Publicly, Charles was obliged to censure Isabella, and ordered her out of his kingdom. Isabella and Mortimer decided that Hainault should become the base from which they would launch the attack on Edward. Isabella made her way there via Ponthieu, and was busy in the county throughout much of August, making use of her dower lands to raise money and support in her own affinity. She spent eight days at the court of the Count and Countess of Hainault at Valenciennes and on 27 August, at Mons, she signed an agreement for her son’s betrothal to one of the Count’s daughters, requesting a dowry of men, money and ships and promising to hold the wedding within two years and to ratify a new trade agreement between the countries. Already she was acting like a ruler.
Isabella’s invading army was small (the largest estimate is 2,500 men, the smallest 500), but oddly, this proved to be one of its strengths. Isabella had been corresponding with English magnates who resented the Despensers’ power and had been assured of the support of the earls of Leicester and Norfolk. When news of her arrival reached Edward and Hugh Despenser as they were dining in the Tower, it was her very lack of troops that dismayed them. ‘Alas, alas!’ reports the Brut Chronicle. ‘We be all betrayed, for certain with so little power she had never come to land but folk of this country had to her consented.’ After a stormy crossing, in weather so violent that the ships were lost for two days, Isabella had reached the Essex coast on 24 September 1326, spending her first night on dry land in a tent made of carpets. The Earl of Norfolk, Edward’s half-brother Thomas, then escorted her to his castle at Walton-on-the-Naze. From there she made her way, via Bury St Edmunds and Cambridge, to Oxford, which she reached on 2 October. Meeting no resistance, she then turned back to Baldock, where she issued a letter to the citizens of London, offering a reward of 2,000 pounds for Hugh Despenser’s head and calling on the people to support her in effecting his downfall. The letter was displayed for the public at the Eleanor cross in Cheapside, a significant choice of monument in that it associated Isabella with this emblem of pious queenship, her husband’s mother, suggesting that her actions were maintaining her fealty to her marital family and seeking to establish the rights of the true heir of Edward I.
By 15 October, Isabella was at Wallingford, where she put out a proclamation condemning the Despensers and explaining her plans. Despenser’ had ‘tarnished and degraded’ the country, ‘usurped royal power against law and justice’ and despoiled and dishonoured the Church. ‘We’, announced Isabella,
. . . who have long been kept far from the goodwill of our Lord the King through the false suggestions and evil dealings of the aforesaid Hugh . . . are come to this land to raise up the state of Holy church and of the kingdom and of the people of this land, against the said misdeeds and oppressions, and to safeguard and maintain so far as we can the honour and profit of our Holy Church and of our said Lord the King . . . For this reason we ask and pray you, for the common good of all and each of you individually, that you come to our help well and loyally . . . For be assured that we all, and all those who are in our company, intend to do nothing that does not redound to the honour and profit of the Holy Church and the whole kingdom . . .15
Officially, Isabella was careful to insist that she was acting as a loyal subject whose only aim was to cleanse the kingdom of the canker of the Despensers.
Edward’s attempts at mustering a campaign force provided dismal proof of the unpopularity of his favourite. On learning on 27 September of Isabella’s arrival, he attempted to raise resistance in London and had a papal bull proscribing invaders - it had actually been intended for use against the Scots - read at St Paul’s Cross. It was heard in telling silence. He wrote to Charles of France, to the Pope and to the university of Oxford; he sought out supporters in the countryside around London and sent envoys to Wales and East Anglia. When none of this produced much of a result, the King left London with as much money as he could carry and a small group of archers and made for the Despenser lands in Wales. En route, he tried once more to summon troops at Gloucester, but again met with very little success.
As Isabella issued her proclamation at Wallingford, riots broke out in London. The Tower was seized from Despenser’s wife, Eleanor de Clare, and Isabella’s ten-year-old son John of Eltham was installed as nominal warden. Any Despenser supporters were threatened, the mayor was forced to declare for Isabella at the Guildhall and Hugh’s clerk, John the Marshal, was torn to pieces. In the first in a series of horrible executions, Bishop Stapledon was beheaded with a knife at the Eleanor cross. His head was transported to Gloucester, which was by then in Isabella’s hands. According to some reports she received it with the relish of a latter-day Salome. By 18 October, the Queen’s forces were besieging Bristol, the headquarters of Despenser the elder. The town fell after a week and Isabella was reunited with her two daughters, Eleanor and Joan, who had been living in Despenser’s household in their mother’s absence. Her manifest joy at recovering her children did not distract her from her pursuit of her enemies, however, and the day she entered Bristol, Despenser the elder, who was tried without right of reply (as the Earl of Lancaster had been) was sentenced to be hanged immediately. His body was given no burial, but was reputedly chopped to pieces and eaten by dogs.
Edward and Hugh Despenser had travelled from Gloucester to Chepstow, arriving a few days before the fall of Bristol. Exhausted and desperate, they set off in a boat, possibly intending to make for Ireland, or simply for Lundy, the little island held by Despenser in the Bristol Channel. But the weather was against them, and they were forced to put back in at Cardiff after four days. This brief voyage, though, was all Isabella needed. Technically, the King had forsaken the country. In council at Bristol on 26 October, fourteen-year-old Prince Edward was made Keeper of the Realm. Edward’s Privy Seal was given to Isabella’s clerk, Robert Wyville, and she was now in a position to authorise acts in his name.
By mid-November, Edward was an isolated fugitive. Apart from Despenser, there had been only seven men with him when he was taken near Llantrisant in Glamorgan on 16 November. Despenser was immediately sent to Hereford, where Isabella had been staying since the beginning of the month. He tried to cheat her of her revenge by maintaining a hunger strike after his arrest, and at his trial on 24 November he was barely conscious as the long list of charges against him was read out. Two aspects of Despenser’s grisly end signal that his accusers were keen to highlight the corrupt sexual nature of his relationship with the King. While the Queen was at Oxford the previous year, Bishop Orleton had preached a sermon in which he accused Edward of sodomy, the first time such allegations had been made so explicitly. He repeated them three weeks later at Wallingford, adding that Isabella was in fear of her life from Edward, who claimed to carry a knife about him with which to kill her. Among the charges against Hugh, which he was not permitted to answer, was one of maliciously interfering with the royal marriage. And a refinement was added to his hideous traitor’s death of being hung, drawn and quartered: castration. His genitals were then burned before his eyes as Isabella watched. In conjuring this gruesomely symbolic connection between Despenser’s penis and Edward’s knife it was clear what Isabella wanted people to understand about Hugh’s crimes. Despenser’s execution in Hereford marketplace before a bawling crowd presents a repugnant image of Isabella, a vampiric, castrating beauty looking on impassively as her rival is literally hacked into spewing pieces. His head was delivered to London and lumps of his body distributed around the country.
Having disposed of Hugh, Isabella’s final challenge was to replace the rule of her husband with that of her son. But how could such an unprecedented revolution be brought about? She had been exercising official authority since writs had been issued in the names of the Queen and Prince Edward at Hereford in October. Bishop Orleton had been charged with recovering the Great Seal from the King, who was held first at Monmouth Castle then moved to Kenilworth. From 30 November, when Isabella and Edward were made joint Keepers of the Great Seal, the Queen was able to make out writs in her own name. Christmas was kept atWallingford, where Isabella was at last able to see all her children together, and Parliament was summoned at Westminster for 7 January. At this juncture, there was nothing to prevent Edward II being restored to both his realm and his wife, but though Isabella scrupulously maintained her façade of acting legally and in the King’s name, this was obviously the last thing she intended. There was some doubt as to whether it was legally possible to summon Parliament without the King. Isabella put out a story that she had sent two deputations of bishops to Kenilworth to ask Edward to join the session, but that he had responded by cursing them ‘contemptuously’ and ‘declaring that he would not come among his enemies’.16 Empowered by this convenient refusal, and whipped in by Mortimer, members of the Lords and Commons consented to attend the Guildhall, where the new mayor of London had invited them to swear an oath of loyalty to Isabella and the Prince, to depose Edward II and crown his son.
In November, Isabella had communicated with the Londoners proposing that they elect a new mayor to replace the unpopular ‘royalist’ Hamo de Chigwell. The man they had chosen was one Richard de Bethune, an old crony of Mortimer’s. One theory about Mortimer’s escape from the Tower in 1323 has Bethune among the prominent Londoners who helped him. Certainly Bethune was Mortimer’s man and it would be interesting to know how big a part Mortimer’s influence played in his election. Isabella and Mortimer recognised that the support of London would be imperative if they wished to push through the deposition of the anointed king, and Bethune was ideally placed to help them paint a gloss of legality over the solemn pantomime of the January Parliament. The consent of the capital would suffice to present their actions as an expression of the common will, and the clamour for the deposition has been described as having ‘a distinct London accent’.17 In return, the oath sworn at the Guildhall included a promise to respect the liberties of the city, and in March 1327 it was granted a charter exempting citizens from the military service whose obligations had provoked such resentment of Edward II.
After the oath-swearing, the sitting resumed at Westminster. Archbishop Reynolds, the clerk for whom Edward had once petitioned a prebend, preached a stirring sermon, then declared that Edward I I was deposed, to cries of enthusiasm. A list of Articles of Deposition was read aloud, then Prince Edward was led in and presented as the new King. Queen Isabella was in floods of tears, whether of joy or of sorrow who could say? Several chronicles now concur that the prospective Edward III, misunderstanding his mother’s sobs, threw a spanner in the works by refusing to accept the crown in his father’s lifetime without his consent. The writers in question were working some time after the events, and though it was obviously preferable that Edward III should be seen to have acted with absolute probity, there is no more reason to suppose that he refused the crown than there is to accept that his imprisoned father refused to come to Parliament. Isabella and Mortimer were making up procedure as they went along. There was no post-Conquest pattern for the deposition of an English king, as no one had ever done it. The processions, deputations, ceremonies and oath-swearings were little more than improvisations, and the roles of the players - sorrowing wife, reluctant prince - were part of the masquerade.
At Kenilworth on 20 January 1327, Edward was informed by Bishop Orleton that unless he accepted the ‘invitation’ to renounce the throne in recognition of the charges in the Articles of Deposition, he risked his son’s inheritance. It was even hinted that Mortimer himself might be invited to take the crown (though the Earl of Lancaster might have had something to say about that), but again, the reports of such persuasions may have been made to give Edward a noble motive for renunciation. Dressed in black, sobbing and finally fainting, Edward gave his consent. The reign of his son officially began five days later. On 30 January, at York, Edward III was married, as his mother had arranged, to the Count of Hainault’s daughter Philippa, who had arrived in England in December, and on 1 February he was crowned at Westminster.
However one judges Isabella’s methods, and the degree of Mortimer’s involvement in her achievements, she had managed to do something practically unthinkable: to depose an anointed king. Her journey from passive, obedient daughter to dutiful wife to vengeful lover required an extraordinary personal transformation, and whether she is celebrated or condemned, she remains exceptional. She had outsmarted the Despensers and succeeded in escaping to France, she had employed diplomacy and raised an invading army, pursued a campaign and seen her son crowned while his father lived. Throughout she had remained alert to the importance of public opinion and had attempted as far as possible to control her ‘image’ so that she would be perceived sympathetically. If history has been very hard on Isabella, recent attempts to rehabilitate her reputation have veered too far towards the positive. Just because she was brave, intelligent and resourceful does not mean that she could not be devious, ruthless and cruel. And now she was faced with one final problem. What was to be done with her husband?
The answer forms one of the most notorious episodes in English history. In September 1327, Edward II died in Berkeley Castle. Of two contemporary accounts, the Annales Paulini is terse: ‘The same year, on the Eve of St Matthew . . . King Edward . . . died in Berkeley Castle where he was held in custody.’
Adam Murimuth gives more detail: ‘Afterwards on 22nd September 1327 died Edward King of England in Berkeley Castle, in which as was said before, he was committed to prison or detained unwillingly. And although many abbots, priors, knights andburgesses of Bristol and Gloucester were called to view the body whole and so looked at it superficially, nevertheless it was commonly said that by the orders of John Maltravers and Thomas Gourney he was craftily killed.
These two reports initiated a deluge of speculation, incrimination and downright fabrication, including the famous detail of Edward being murdered by having a heated poker inserted into his anus. By the time Geoffrey le Baker was writing a generation later, the poker had become ‘a plumber’s iron, heated red hot [applied] through a horn leading to the privy part of the bowel’. This is the version immortalised by Christopher Marlowe in his glorious tragedy Edward II. Edward’s death has given rise to a parlour game of historical supposition, and at least two theories that propose he did not in fact die at Berkeley have received serious scholarly attention since the last quarter of the nineteenth century.18 Neither of these, however, proves conclusively that he was not killed at Berkeley, and scholars have also been attentive to the way in which reports of his death were produced, disseminated and manipulated for changing political purposes. In Isabella’s lifetime and that of her son, all chroniclers (however lurid and inaccurate their accounts) agreed that the King was dead, and that he died at Berkeley. Ordinary people certainly believed he was dead, so much so that a cult grew up around his tomb at Gloucester and proved so popular that it financed the rebuilding of the south transept and persisted until the sixteenth century.
In the spring of 1328, Isabelle and Mortimer negotiated the treaty of Northampton with the Scots. With Edward II disposed of they were now in a position to reconfigure England’s role in international politics, and they reasoned that a settlement with Scotland was a necessary step. In February, Isabella’s last surviving brother, Charles IV, had died, leaving Queen Jeanne pregnant. If the child were a girl, the English argued that legally the French crown should go to Edward III. The French Queen did indeed give birth to a daughter that April. In Parliament in May, Isabella and Mortimer argued that peace with Scotland was intrinsic to Edward’s claim to France, but the treaty, signed earlier in the month, was loathed by both the new King and his people. The independence of Scotland was recognised and the border restored to its limits under Alexander III, which left a group of English peers, known as the ‘Disinherited’, deprived of the land they had held on the marches. Robert the Bruce agreed to pay 20,000 marks compensation (which Isabella and Mortimer promptly spent) and to the marriage of his son David to Isabella’s six-year-old daughter Joan. Edward III was so appalled by this ‘shameful peace’ that he refused to attend the wedding, which took place on 16 July. He also baulked at returning the Stone of Scone, one of the provisions of the treaty, and popular feeling was reflected in the riot that ensued when the abbot of Westminster, on Isabella’s orders, tried to give it up.
On 14 April an assembly of the twelve peers of France elected Philip de Valois, Isabella’s cousin, as their King. The Plantagenet claim to the French crown has often been seen as an artifice, a mere prop to territorial aggression, but Edward’s legal position in 1328 is worth considering, not only in relation to the conflict which became known as the Hundred Years War, but in terms of his relationship with his mother and his actions in 1330. The notion of Salic law, whereby women were excluded from dynastic succession, was not quite as entrenched in French practice in the fourteenth century as is commonly assumed; indeed, the first reference by a Capetian writer to its application in any matter other than the transfer of private property occurs in 1413, and the two precedents for its employment were as recent as 1316 and 1322, on the deaths of Isabella’s brothers Louis X and Philip V. The English argued that Edward III’s standing after Charles IV’s death was unique, that because this was the first occasion on which there was a proximate male heir to France whose entitlement derived from a woman, the assemblies that had produced the statutes of 1316 and 1322 were irrelevant, since they had not anticipated a cognate (i.e. maternal family) claim. This created a question which would become highly relevant to Edward III at the end of his own life. Was the claim of the son of a younger brother stronger than that of a grandson of an elder brother? In 1340, when Edward assumed the title of King of France, the English favoured the latter argument. Yet in 1328, when Edward was still a minor, he was in no position to exercise his right. Moreover, the eminently sensible decision of the French peers to choose an experienced Frenchman over an English boy was also affected by the compromising circumstances of Edward’s mother. Internationally, Edward was perceived as the pawn of a pair of adulterers, a horribly humiliating role to inhabit. Added to the shame of Northampton, the election of Philip VI was another confirmation that Edward would have no control over his kingdom as long as Mortimer controlled his mother.
The relative discretion among contemporary sources on the relationship between Mortimer and Isabella does not mean that Edward was unaware of it. Between 1328 and 1330, the young King seems to have been desperately trying to balance his affection for his mother with the need to maintain some stability in the realm, but Mortimer’s ambition was making this increasingly impossible. Mortimer was growing ever more unpopular, and Isabella found herself in a similar situation to that of her late husband, obliged to aggrandise her favourite to prevent his enemies from bringing him down, and heaping more disapproval on herself in the process. Mortimer was ‘in such glory and honour that it was without all comparison’.19 He sat in Edward’s presence, walked and rode beside, instead of respectfully behind him, and had become ‘so proud and high that he held no Lord of the realm his equal .20 Mortimer thoroughly alienated his former ally, Henry, Earl of Lancaster, the theoretical head of the regency council, who, along with Edward’s uncles Norfolk and Kent, was horrified at his increasing power. In London, the previously loyal citizens had re-elected their former mayor Hamo de Chigwell, and in a meeting at the Guildhall in September 1328, Isabella’s extravagance was denounced and there were calls for Mortimer to be banished from court to his own estates. Mortimer’s response to this was to have himself declared Earl of March by an increasingly bullied Edward, and it was once more rumoured that he himself had designs on the crown. In 1330, according to Froissart, it was whispered that the Dowager Queen was pregnant with her lover’s child. Scandal and discord were making Edward’s position shamefully untenable.
The King’s patience collapsed when Mortimer plotted the destruction of his uncle, the Earl of Kent. Mortimer later confessed to the ‘sting’, in which Kent, who had never shown himself to be terribly bright, was approached by two friars and informed that Edward II was alive and living in secrecy at Corfe Castle. (The fact that Corfe was in the custody of Edward’s former keeper Maltravers, and therefore possibly the least likely place for the deposed King to hide, did not stop Kent, or many subsequent writers, for that matter, from believing this tale.) Kent wrote a letter to his half-brother, reassuring him that he was planning to restore him to the throne, and gave it to two of the castle custodians, who had been instructed to send it at once to Mortimer. Kent was arrested for treason on 10 March 1330, and both Isabella and Mortimer cajoled and threatened Edward into signing his death warrant. Kent went to the scaffold at Winchester four days later. Such was the outrage at his execution that the public hangman refused to do his duty, and Edward I’s son was left shivering in his shirt until a felon could be found to dispatch him.
The Earl of Lancaster had been absent from politics since January 1329 when, after a series of attempts to undermine Mortimer, he had led his own men against royal forces in Leicestershire and Warwickshire. Lancaster had submitted to the King at Bedford and withdrawn from court, though the huge fine imposed against the retention of his lands had never been paid. Lancaster had been aware of Kent’s noble, if misguided conspiracy, but had not incriminated himself, though he, too, was working to overthrow Mortimer. He visited Edward on the birth of his first child in July 1330, and made another appearance for the Nottingham Parliament in October the same year. The Earl was not personally involved in the event that took place at Nottingham castle on 19 October, but twelve of the twenty-one men who helped Edward that night were his close associates, and it was Lancaster who publicly announced their success.
Edward had been planning to move against Mortimer since the summer. His close friend Sir William Montagu had advised him that it was ‘better to eat dog than be eaten by the dog’ and evidence from the wardrobe accounts shows that Edward acquired a set of matching aketon jackets, usually worn for tournaments, for himself and Montagu. Another batch was ordered later for supporters who had posed as members of Montagu’s retinue, and at court these jackets became a very visible emblem of the ‘team’ which had collaborated with Edward in his liberation. On the evening of 19 October, Edward crept out of his room and opened the door to Montagu, who fought his way into the Dowager Queen’s chamber, where Isabella and Mortimer were meeting with three ministers. To the delight of one chronicler, the chancellor, Bishop Burghersh, tried to make his escape down the privy shaft. Three men were killed, and Mortimer was seized by Sir John de Moleyns. Edward stayed outside the room, as it was vital that his life was safe; it was important, too, that Mortimer’s should be preserved so he could stand trial. Isabella knew her son was nearby, though she could not see him, and she tried to rush for the door, crying, ‘Fair son, have pity on noble Mortimer,’ but was pushed inside as Mortimer was led away. At dawn, Lancaster proclaimed:
Whereas the King’s affairs and the affairs of the realm have been directed until now to the damage and dishonour of him and his realm and to the impoverishment of his people . . . he wills that all men shall know that he will henceforth govern his people according to right and reason as befits his royal dignity and that the affairs that concern him and the estate of the realm shall be directed by the common counsel of the magnates of the realm and in no otherwise . . .21
Mortimer was hanged for treason on 29 November. Isabella was sent to Berkhamsted after his arrest, but by Christmas she had joined Edward and Philippa at Windsor, where she spent the next two years under house arrest. Edward supplied her with money and permitted her to retain a household, but it was quite clear that she was in disgrace. The loathing she had provoked posed a difficulty for Edward. His French ambitions depended on his mother’s respectability, and he had been urged by the Pope not to expose her shame. The recasting of Isabella’s relationship with Mortimer is connected with Edward’s need to rehabilitate his father’s memory, and sheds much light on the vexed question of Edward II’s alleged homosexuality.
The ‘anal rape’ narrative of Edward II’s death gruesomely highlights the way in which his downfall was sexualised, and links his deposition with the atavistic correspondence of sexual potency and kingship in which the sexuality of the queen also played a potentially destabilising part. Just as later representations of Isabella were ‘demonised’ to rehabilitate Edward,22 so, in the 1320s, Edward had to be presented as sexually degenerate to provide grounds for her rule. In her reply to the bishops in 1325, Isabella had emphasised that ‘someone has come between my husband and myself. In the same way as Eleanor of Aquitaine cast doubt on Louis of France’s virility to justify a divorce that was in fact desired by both parties, Isabella may have chosen to sexualise her dissatisfaction with Edward in order to rationalise not only the deposition, but her refusal to return to Edward afterwards despite the pleas of the Pope and the bishops. The fact that Edward was presented as a ‘political sodomite’23 does not of course exclude the possibility that he did engage in anal sex, but it is notable that the first reference to such acts was made in the sermon preached by Isabella’s ally Bishop Orleton in 1326, in which he referred to Edward as ‘a tyrant and a sodomite’. That Edward was obsessed with Piers Gaveston and loved him, in whatever manner, seems beyond doubt, but the specific nature of his relationship with Gaveston, and, by implication, Despenser and others, may be ‘entirely and exclusively due to the sermons which Adam of Orleton preached in 1326’.24 Of the fourteen chronicles that suggest Edward was murdered, eight specifically mention the story of the red-hot horn or poker (though the Bridlington writer claims not to believe it), and of these eight, all were written after 1333.
However Edward II died - and in fact, if only for reasons of practicality and discretion, it is unlikely to have been at the end of an iron brand - the fictionalised versions of his demise may be interpreted in a variety of ways that illustrate contemporary anxieties about the role Isabella played in his deposition. Some scholars have seen the anal rape narrative as a grisly poetic justice, playing on Orleton’s unsubstantiated accusations of sodomy to fashion a fitting end for a degenerate King and to shore up Isabella’s legitimacy as a ruler. However, given the timing of the story’s emergence and its source in the northern and Midlands writers (no London chronicler mentions it), it may also be interpreted as evidence of Isabella’s unspeakable, unfeminine cruelty in the context of opposition to her governance from 1329. In this light, the account serves as both an explanation of and a balance to Edward’s deposition, preserving the royal dignity to some extent by affirming that the office of King could be attacked only by extreme, inhuman violence, but also locating the King’s vulnerability in his own unmasculine practices. Thus, even if the story is read as anti-Isabella, it still confirms Edward’s unfitness to rule.
After Mortimer’s downfall, Edward’s death took on different connotations. Edward III was faced with the need to play down his mother’s role in the scandal and simultaneously recover the ‘masculinity’ of his office. The heterosexual normality of the royal marriage therefore had to be emphasised, but if his father was to be portrayed as sinned against, it left Isabella as the sinner. The solution was to represent Isabella in a more traditional feminine role, as a weak woman led astray by a vile seducer: ‘To suggest, as was now done in 1330, that Mortimer had prevented a reconciliation between the royal partners was to ascribe to him the dominant role in the adulterous affair.’25 The records of Mortimer’s trial are discreet about his relationship with Isabella, but one of the charges states: ‘The said Roger falsely and maliciously sowed discord between the father of our Lord King and the Queen his companion . . . Wherefore by this cause and other subtleties, the Queen remained absent from her said Lord, to the great dishonour of the King and of his mother.’ By representing Mortimer as the guilty party and Isabella as his victim, the Queen was confined to an appropriately submissive role, and the regency conflict reconfigured as an assertion of the King’s rights over a rebellious male subject.
Some writers accept that a Norman French poem, known as the ‘Song’ or ‘Lament’ of King Edward, was in fact written by Edward II him selfduring his captivity. In conventional language, the poem reflects on the cruelty of fortune:
The chiefest sorrow of my state
Springs from Isabelle the fair
She that I loved but now must hate
I held her true, now faithless she;
Steeped in deceit, my deadly foe
Brings naught but black despair to me
And all my joy she turns to woe.26
Adversity can produce surprising capacities, but it is debatable, to put it mildly, that the ditch-digging King became a poet in Berkeley Castle. The ‘Lament’ may more plausibly be seen as a product of the court of Edward III. While the poem emphasises Isabella’s guilt, it also casts Edward in the role of the courtly -heterosexual - lover, and may be interpreted as ‘a kind of admonition to Isabella to accept her subordinate status following the coup of 1330’.27
After her release from Windsor, Isabella lived mainly at Castle Rising, which had been built by Adeliza of Louvain’s widower William d’Aubigne around 1150, and which Isabella had bought from the widow of Robert de Montalt, one of her supporters during the deposition, in 1327. Initially, she spent little time in London, though she travelled between Eltham and Havering and was present in the capital on a few special occasions. She continued to correspond with Edward about her lands, and in January 1344 was at Westminster on estate business. In November that year she was at the Tower to welcome Edward back from France. Relations with Edward were cordial: they celebrated his birthday together at least twice, once at Castle Rising (Isabella called in eight carpenters to make ready for the visit), and in 1341 Edward ordered a daily Mass to be said for his mother in the chapel at Leeds Castle. Isabella participated in family events such as the Mass for the Round Table feast at Windsor in 1344 and in 1354 she kept Christmas at Berkhamsted with her eldest grandson, Edward, known as the Black Prince.
Isabella’s household accounts show that at the end of her life, far from being marginalised, she had been restored to a prestigious diplomatic position. In September 1356 the Black Prince defeated the French at Poitiers, and the French King, Jean, was taken prisoner. He remained in English custody, on the most chivalrous of terms, until 1358. One consequence of Poitiers was the release of King David of Scotland, who returned home after more than ten years with his mistress, Kate Mortimer, in tow. His Queen, Edward III’s sister Joan, was so disgusted that she returned to England, where Edward gave her the castle of Hertford in 1357 and an allowance of 200 pounds. Hertford had been in Isabella’s possession since 1327, and she had stayed at the castle in the 1340s. Now she and Joan were able to spend much time there together.
In October 1357, Isabella left Hertford on pilgrimage for Canterbury, and on her return entertained Edward, Queen Philippa and the Black Prince at her new house in London. In November and December, she received many high-ranking members of King Jean’s entourage, including Jacques de Bourbon, Comte de la Marche, the Comte de Tancarville, Hankyn de Oreby, the marshal of France, Arnaud d’Audrehem, and the seneschal of Toulouse, Regnaut d’Aubigny. She also lent the French King two romances, The Holy Grail and, appropriately, Sir Lancelot.The royal family kept Christmas at Marlborough, but Isabella remained at home, nearer to London, and the accounts show she kept the feast in style. Her role at this point appears to have been as a mediator in the peace process and the discussions over Jean’s ransom. In February, the two main negotiators on these issues in Parliament were her guests Tancarville and Audrehem. While Parliament was in session, Edward and Philippa were staying at King’s Langley, and Isabella’s base at Hertford conveniently placed her halfway between the King and Westminster. In April, Tancarville was Isabella’s guest in London, and on the nineteenth she dined with the chancellor and the treasurer, then held a meeting with Edward and the Black Prince. They all joined the Queen and the royal children for what was the most significant diplomatic and cultural event of the decade, the Garter Feast on St George’s Day.
Isabella was not present for the signing of the eventual peace treaty, in which Jean agreed to a ransom of four million gold crowns and recognised Edward III’s claims to Isabella’s dower counties of Ponthieu and Montreuil, as well as Gascony, Guisnes and Calais. Isabella heard the news in a letter from Queen Philippa on 10 May, and was so delighted she rewarded the messenger with ten crowns. She and Philippa had a celebratory dinner together the next day and on 13 May she entertained the King of France.Isabella’s status may have been ‘subordinate’, but it was certainly not negligible. Nor does it show any sign of mental instability. Nineteenth-century writers depicted a deranged Isabella, howling her sins from the battlements of Castle Rising, but though physician’s bills from the first phase of a confinement at Windsor suggest she may have had some sort of nervous collapse after Mortimer’s execution, her subsequent activities are very much those of the active, intelligent woman she had always been.
This is not to suggest that Isabella was not penitent. As she grew older, her household acounts show that she had not relinquished her passion for jewellery or given up music or wine, but she was increasingly attentive to spiritual matters. She undertook frequent pilgrimages, including a last visit to Canterbury with her daughter Queen Joan a few months before her death, acquired religious relics, such as a ring which belonged to St Dunstan, and developed her family association with the Franciscans. In 1344, the Pope granted her request for the admission of William of Pudding Norton and twelve other priests to benefices without examination. The fact that the pontiff was prepared to accept Isabella’s judgement indicates that her public pieties had gone some way to restoring her reputation.28 During her period of government with Mortimer, her extravagance and rapacity had been infamous; now, under the guidance of the Franciscan rule, she took a greater interest in the poor. Thirteen poor people were fed each day at her expense and three more on Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays, while she distributed alms to 150 on holy days of obligation and maintained a number of ‘poor scholars’ at Oxford University. Fourteen paupers were paid twopence a day to pray over her corpse as it lay in state and five were given robes and money by her son to pray for her soul.
Isabella’s most distinctive act of contrition was her request to be laid to rest in her wedding cloak alongside a silver casket containing Edward II’s heart. Her funeral procession through London three months after her death, on 27 November 1358,was accorded all the dignity befitting a widowed queen. She was interred at Greyfrairs, where Marguerite of France already lay and where Queen Joan of Scotland would be buried, as would Edward III’s daughter Isabella. The Dowager Queen’s tomb therefore became an honoured element of a commemorative site for Plantagenet women. Although her reputation has until recently been almost universally maligned, her queenship was in many ways a success. She deposed a dreadful king and replaced him with an exceptional one. She has been blamed for starting the Hundred Years War, but it was not her vanity that prosecuted it, and it should not be forgotten that the English pursuit of the French crown into the fifteenth century produced Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, which, fairly or not, have contributed more to the reputation of English kings and the English identity than the forgotten corpses of its battlefields. Perhaps Isabella was a bad woman, but she was rather a magnificent queen.