‘Our King Edward has now reigned six full years’, the author of the Vita wrote in 1313, ‘and has till now achieved nothing praiseworthy or memorable, except that by a royal marriage he has raised up for himself a handsome son and heir to the throne.’ Amid the wreckage of England’s hopes, then, Isabella and her baby son embodied Edward’s sole accomplishment as king.
The arrival of the new prince – who was named Edward after his English father and grandfather, despite the efforts of a French delegation headed by Isabella’s eldest brother Louis to suggest Philippe as an alternative – was greeted with wild enthusiasm in the capital. Londoners caroused in the streets, inebriated not only by the free wine flowing from barrels set up at the roadsides but by sheer relief that riotous celebration was overtaking their city, rather than the riotous violence that had threatened to erupt during previous weeks. Then, tense negotiations had been taking place in a desperate attempt to avert all-out war between the king and the earls responsible for Gaveston’s death, whose fear for their own safety had taken steel-clad form when they arrived in London at the beginning of September at the head of a formidable army.
Now, at last, God had shown that he was willing to smile again on England and its unhappy monarch. The baby’s birth, in providing for the future of the royal line, served to strengthen Edward’s hand; he was as yet in no position to impose the vengeance he craved, but a ‘treaty of peace’ was finally patched together on 20 December 1312, under the auspices of envoys from the pope and the French court. The earls of Warwick and Lancaster were to submit to the king’s grace, and restore to him the jewels and horses Lancaster had seized when Edward and Gaveston fled from Newcastle. In return, the agreement stipulated, Edward would lay aside all rancour arising from Gaveston’s death.
The depths of hostility and suspicion that lay behind these ostensibly simple provisions were laid bare by the protracted manoeuvring over their enactment that occupied the uneasy months after the treaty was drawn up. It was hardly surprising that Warwick and Lancaster were reluctant to accept the settlement: Edward had proved many times before that his word was not to be trusted where Gaveston was concerned, and there was ample reason to believe that his offer of forgiveness was entirely disingenuous. Moreover, the treaty as it stood neither mentioned the ordinances, on the authority of which the earls claimed to have acted, nor identified Gaveston as a traitor – and, as such, it gave Warwick and Lancaster no protection in law beyond the offer of the king’s grace, fleetingly insubstantial as it was likely to be. Meanwhile, silence on the matter of the ordinances was, for Edward, merely a first step: he sought their revocation, and his own absolution from his oath to maintain them.
By the end of February 1313 Lancaster had finally agreed to return the king’s jewels, a dazzling hoard with a value to Edward that went beyond the financial, including as it did not only a golden cup that had been a gift from his mother, but four great rubies, an emerald and a huge diamond in an enamelled silver box that Gaveston had been carrying when he was captured. But still argument and counter-argument continued, while all the time the Scots continued to press home the advantage presented to them by the implosion of English politics. Bruce’s violent raids had already exacted thousands of pounds in tribute from the people of Northumberland and Westmorland, and his troops were now plundering the countryside as far south as Yorkshire.
Edward – whose inability to focus on the issues that most exercised his earls had not disappeared with Gaveston’s death – chose this moment to announce his departure for Paris. Isabella’s father, King Philippe, had invited his daughter and her royal husband to attend the French court for the knighting of his three sons, Isabella’s brothers Louis, Philippe and Charles. This lavish state visit – undertaken in casual defiance of the ordinances’ prescription that the king should not leave the country without the consent of his lords – presented Edward with a characteristically welcome opportunity to absent himself from the scene of conflict at home.
But it also marked the emergence of his wife as a political player in her own right. Newly a mother to the heir to the English throne, seventeen-year-old Isabella was returning to her homeland as a queen taking her rightful place beside her husband almost for the first time. Without Gaveston’s disturbing presence, Edward and Isabella once again looked every inch the golden couple they had appeared at their wedding five years earlier – and it now seemed possible to hope that, this time, appearances might be matched by reality.
The royal entourage sailed from Dover at dawn on 23 May, and made a ceremonial entry into Paris on 2 June, before dining with the French king at an elaborately staged banquet that evening. The next day, on the feast of Pentecost, the solemn ritual of knighthood was enacted at the great Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame (the foundations of which had been laid under the aegis of Louis VII a century and a half earlier, a few years after his divorce from Eleanor of Aquitaine). There Philippe and Edward bestowed the belt and spurs of a knight on Louis, the heir to the French throne – a prince who was already a king, since he had inherited the crown of Navarre from his mother Jeanne on her death in 1305. These three kings then made knights of the other young men before them, almost two hundred in all, including Louis’s younger brothers, Philippe and Charles, and their cousins Philippe of Valois and Robert of Artois.
Days and nights of celebration followed. The city was a riot of colour, the houses decked in hangings of red, blue, white, black, yellow and green; there was eating, drinking and dancing in the streets, with wine flowing from a great fountain around which coiled ornamental mermaids, civet-cats, lions, leopards and other fabulous creatures; and the citizens presented intricate tableaux of popular tales and biblical scenes. On one stage a hundred costumed devils enthusiastically tormented anguished sinners as pitch-black smoke poured from the pit of hell, while, on another, angels sang as souls trooped cheerfully into brightly painted paradise.
Amid this revelry, kings, queens and nobles faced a punishingly continuous schedule of feasts and functions. On Tuesday 5 June, it was Edward and Isabella’s turn to entertain their hosts at a banquet laid out in richly hung tents beside their lodgings at the abbey of St-Germain-des-Prés, with torches blazing ostentatiously in the midday sun while guests were served, in another showy conceit, by attendants on horseback. The following day, Edward returned to Notre-Dame, walking with Philippe and the flower of the French aristocracy on a forty-foot-wide pontoon bridge across the Seine to pledge themselves as crusaders to the future rescue of the Holy Land from the infidel. The day after that, Isabella missed her turn to take the crusaders’ cross with the rest of the royal ladies when, after yet another feast, she and Edward overslept – a faux pas which an eyewitness Parisian chronicler treated with amused indulgence, on the grounds that the king could hardly be blamed for tarrying in the bed of such a beautiful wife. (Isabella’s failure to wake her notoriously tardy husband may, in fact, have been the result of circumspection rather than the previous night’s excesses. When she did finally take the cross two days later, she proved a sceptical crusader-in-prospect, qualifying her commitment by securing a cardinal’s promise that she need only set out for the Holy Land if and when her husband did so, and – a crucial proviso, this, for a young woman who luxuriated in her lavish lifestyle – that she would be required to contribute only such sums of money as her own devotion suggested were necessary.)
On 10 June the English king and his queen followed her father to Pontoise, seventeen miles north-west of Paris, where the serious business of diplomacy would take place. There were the usual tensions over Gascony to be tackled, but Philippe was generous in the privileges he granted and the loans he proffered to his son-in-law. The French king’s munificence was far from selfless: the weeks of ceremony and celebration had confirmed his own position as the most powerful monarch in western Europe and the champion of Christendom in defence of the Holy Land. But for Edward, too, the visit had been a welcome interruption to the challenges and confrontations he had faced in England, demonstrating the grandeur of his sovereignty and his place among the royal leaders of Europe. And central to that reaffirmation of his authority was Isabella.
Thanks to Isabella, Edward could stand at the heart of the dynastic rituals of the French crown. Thanks to Isabella, he had a son to represent the future of his own dynasty. And, thanks to Isabella, the support he was offered in Paris was unquestioning. No word of criticism, no hint of past scandal or present conflict, attaches itself to ‘Odouart, roy des Anglois’ in the account of the eyewitness chronicler, a Parisian clerk with connections to the royal chancery. Instead, praise is heaped upon Isabella, ‘the wise and noble lady Isabeau’, ‘the beautiful Isabelot’, ‘the fairest of the fair, even as the sun surpasses the stars’.
For Isabella herself, the visit had been a heartening opportunity to see her father, her family and her childhood home for the first time in five years. The omens of their stay had not all been auspicious: at Pontoise, a fire broke out in the English royal pavilion during the night, destroying many of their possessions and leaving Isabella with a burn to the arm that was to trouble her for many months. But she returned to England ready to play the part for which she had been anointed and crowned: to intercede with her husband in the interests of peace and justice, and to support him in his duty to his people.
Not that his people were overly impressed, it had to be said, with the length of time that Edward had chosen to devote to his Parisian progress. The lords had assembled in London in the second week of July in anticipation of a parliament to be held on the king’s promised return, but when Edward failed to appear, or even to send word, they dispersed, ‘weary’, the Vita says, ‘of the trouble and expense to which they had been put’. It was through gritted teeth that they agreed to reassemble in September. By then, the search for a lasting settlement had become desperate. More than a year had passed since Gaveston’s death, and exhaustion had set in among a political community worn down by the accidental strategy of attrition that had been forged out of Edward’s stubbornness and his talent for procrastination.
Now, Isabella and her family helped make a final push for peace. Just as the threat of French intervention had secured Gaveston’s exile in 1308, so now the queen’s uncle Louis of Evreux drove forward the negotiations to resolve the consequences of his death. And Isabella herself (together with the young earl of Gloucester, Gaveston’s brother-in-law, who had stayed close to Edward and served as keeper of the realm during his absence in France) stepped forward to mediate between her husband and his nobles. The public intervention of the young queen made it possible for both sides to enter with dignity into a formal ritual of reconciliation, and on 14 October the great lords of England at last knelt before their king in Westminster Hall to submit themselves to his grace and receive his pardon for their part in Gaveston’s death. The next day, Edward dined with his cousin Thomas of Lancaster as evidence of their new-found harmony.
But there could be no mistaking that this peace was brittle and tenuous, its limitations exposed by what Edward did not say as much as by what he did. There was still no royal acknowledgement that Gaveston had been a traitor, nor of the force in law of the ordinances by which, the earls claimed, his death had been prescribed. The immediate danger of political conflagration had been averted, but the safety of England’s greatest men was left hanging by the slender thread of the king’s questionable integrity. And the mistrust behind the public smiles was made manifest all too soon, when Edward began to prepare for a major military campaign against the Scots – a mere six years too late to halt the consolidation of Bruce’s power in its tracks.
His army included contingents led by the earl of Gloucester, who had fought in the abortive campaign led by Edward and Gaveston in 1311; by the earl of Pembroke, Edward’s steadfast ally ever since his promise of safeguard to Gaveston had been so brutally overridden; and by the earl of Hereford, Edward’s brother-in-law, who had followed Lancaster and Warwick in engineering Gaveston’s execution but had taken a lead in the search for a settlement, and appeared now to have made his peace with the king. Not present in Edward’s company as he moved north in May 1314 were the three other earls responsible for Gaveston’s death: Lancaster, Warwick and Arundel.
These were men who, in other circumstances, would have stood to gain immeasurably from an English triumph in Scotland. Now, however, they knew that victory for Edward north of the border would free his hand to deal with those who had crossed him in England. Meanwhile, an army commanded by Edward seemed a dangerous place to be for men who had every reason to believe that he wanted them dead. The king’s forces were huge in number as they marched for Berwick, but, given the absence of these lords from their ranks, the scars of the recent conflict were clear upon them.
Isabella, meanwhile, was immersing herself in her new public role as her husband’s adviser and representative. At the end of February 1314, she accompanied the earl of Gloucester on an embassy to her father in Paris to discuss the affairs of Gascony. The eighteen-year-old queen did not suffer any false modesty in her sense of her own majesty; in England she maintained a household of almost two hundred servants, and spent money as freely as her extravagant husband. Her entourage and equipment for this, her first return to her French home without Edward, were so extensive that a fleet of twenty-seven ships and thirteen barges was requisitioned to transport the expedition across the Channel. All told, Isabella spent eight weeks in France, leaving costly gifts at holy shrines along her route and hunting with her team of fifteen greyhounds, as well as applying herself to the serious business of assisting Gloucester in his negotiations through her personal intercession with her father.
This embassy meant that she was also present to witness the eruption of a humiliating scandal by which the French court was overwhelmed that spring. Her three sisters-in-law – Marguerite, daughter of the duke of Burgundy, and Jeanne and Blanche, both descended from a collateral branch of the Burgundian house – had been dangerously indiscreet in dallying with some handsome young knights in their father-in-law’s service. The chastity of royal wives was a matter not only of honour and obedience but of dynastic security, and any shadow of suspicion cast on the royal succession was likely to provoke a violent and terrible reckoning. And so it proved: Marguerite and Blanche were convicted of adultery, and Jeanne found guilty of having concealed their liaisons. All three were imprisoned, Marguerite and Blanche in subterranean cells within the forbidding Norman fortress of Château Gaillard, their heads shaved as a mark of their transgression, while their supposed lovers died in excruciating agony, publicly tortured to death for their crimes.
Rumour had it that Isabella had suspected her brothers’ wives, and borne witness against them. Whether or not that was so, her poised hauteur certainly marked a stark contrast between her own seriousness of purpose and the recklessness that had precipitated these foolish young women into such appalling suffering.
And, as if to emphasise the gravity of Isabella’s royal duties, she had no sooner returned to London than she was preparing to set out once again, this time following the king and his army to Berwick. Travelling sometimes on horseback, sometimes in a covered wooden carriage filled with silk cushions and drawn by three black chargers, she reached Berwick’s great walls on 14 June, ready to witness from close at hand her husband’s inevitable triumph.
Robert Bruce had long avoided meeting an English army in pitched battle. Guerrilla warfare played much more to the Scots’ strengths – their intimate knowledge of the terrain over which they moved, and the speed with which they could strike – than the prospect of a set-piece confrontation involving English divisions of well-equipped cavalry and skilled archers that the Scots simply could not match. But in the summer of 1313 Bruce’s brother, who was then leading a siege of the strategically vital stronghold of Stirling, had accepted the terms of a truce by which the castle’s English garrison agreed to surrender if English troops failed to arrive within three leagues (nine miles or so) of Stirling by the next midsummer’s day, 24 June 1314. While Edward remained mired in conflict with his own lords, that proffer had seemed a good bet, and any English army unlikely to be more than a mirage – until in February 1314, with an uneasy peace agreed at home, the king suddenly announced his determination to take up the challenge.
By midsummer’s eve, 23 June, the English army was advancing rapidly on Stirling, and Bruce could no longer evade the confrontation he had feared. He drew up his infantry on the north side of the Bannock Burn, a stream flowing through marshy ground into the Forth river a couple of miles from Stirling Castle, while Edward’s troops halted to the south of it. The English forces outnumbered Bruce’s by a factor of two or three to one. They were better equipped, more experienced and more highly trained than the Scots footsoldiers. But, by the time battle was joined in earnest on the following day, they were also exhausted by their forced march, struggling with the seeping mud and uncertain footholds of the boggy landscape, and undermined by indecisive and divided leadership.
The earls of Hereford and Gloucester, it emerged on the morning of 24 June, were locked in bitter argument over their rival claims on the honour of leading the attack. In the heat of the moment Gloucester dashed forward against the Scots line to prove his mettle with a sudden assault. It took only an instant for the young earl to be thrown from his warhorse and hacked to death where he fell in the blood-churned mud. Hemmed in by the terrain and paralysed by consternation and confusion, the English ranks collapsed under the sudden onslaught of the Scots into a scrambling, bloody mêlée.
As Edward watched in horror, his inevitable triumph turned into an inexorable rout. Panic overwhelmed his despairing troops as the king fled, surrounded by a bodyguard of knights led by the earl of Pembroke, first to Stirling Castle and then, when he was refused entry to a fortress that the laws of war now ceded to the Scots, eastward to Dunbar, the coast and safety. Behind him he left men and horses spitted on pikes, speared with arrows and dismembered by sword blows, while others suffocated in the mire or drowned in the crimson-stained waters of the Forth. When Robert Bruce left the field, he did so as the unquestioned king of an independent Scotland. For Edward, defeat was total, and catastrophic.
By the time he rejoined his wife at Berwick, the consequences of this annihilation were only beginning to become apparent. The earl of Gloucester was dead and the earl of Hereford a prisoner, taken by the victorious Scots along with the keeper of Edward’s privy seal, his clerks, his archive and the seal itself. Within weeks, the Scots were cutting a swathe through northern England, their raids destroying lives and homes throughout Northumberland, Cumbria and Durham and deep into Yorkshire and Lancashire, while Robert Bruce made preparations to despatch his brother to invade English-ruled Ireland. And, if God’s judgement on Edward’s kingship were not already clear, in the aftermath of military disaster the heavens opened: torrential rains and a brutal winter destroyed crops in the ground, and Edward’s people began to starve.
Victory for Edward would have meant a chance to free himself from the shackles of the ordinances and to revenge himself upon the earls who had killed his beloved Gaveston. Defeat, in a realm harried from without and decomposing from within, meant the exact opposite. When the king finally laid Gaveston’s embalmed body to rest, on 2 January 1315 at Edward’s favourite manor of Langley in Hertfordshire, he did so in the bitter knowledge that power effectively lay in the hands of Gaveston’s executioner, Thomas of Lancaster, the great earl without whom northern England could not now be defended against the depredations of the Scots. And Lancaster, it was clear, would insist with every ounce of his strength on keeping the king shackled, since it was the ordinances that vindicated the killing of Gaveston.
Isabella, at not quite twenty, found herself facing the most thankless of tasks: to function as a queen within a profoundly dysfunctional kingdom. The king and his greatest magnate were locked into a mortal enmity that made the normal workings of royal government all but impossible. Isabella might give birth to more royal heirs – as she did to a son, John, in the summer of 1316, and a daughter, Eleanor, two years later. And she might use her symbolic role as intercessor in an attempt to secure the restoration of her husband’s power through an accommodation with her uncle of Lancaster. She was, as she had not been during Gaveston’s lifetime, the king’s companion and his trusted confidante, a loyal spouse and a shrewd political tactician. But, in practice, there was little she or anyone else could do to ameliorate the intractable divisions that now crippled English politics.
Lancaster was an increasingly isolated figure, more estranged than ever from his peers not only by his uncompromising instincts and his lack of political finesse but also by the unpredictable hand of fate. The earl of Warwick, Lancaster’s closest ally and the man with whom he shared ultimate responsibility for Gaveston’s death, had sought a prominent role in the direction of Edward’s government after the defeat that came to be known as ‘Bannockburn’ after the stream across which it was fought. In August 1315, however, Warwick died at the age of just forty-three, leaving a baby son – named Thomas, after Lancaster himself – as his heir. Some lords positioned themselves much more closely to the king: the earl of Pembroke remained unwavering in his loyal service to Edward, and the earl of Hereford (newly retrieved from Scottish custody in exchange for Robert Bruce’s wife, who had been captured by the English in 1306) continued his campaign to efface all memories of his presence at Blacklow Hill through his steadfast support of the king. Others were more wary of Edward, including the earl of Arundel who, with Warwick and Lancaster, had refused to fight at Bannockburn. But all, like the rest of the king’s subjects, were caught in no-man’s-land, trying as best they could to protect their own interests in a country debilitated not only by flood, famine and the raiding Scots, but by the pernicious stalemate between Lancaster and the king.
As always, the author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi was an acute observer of this political paralysis.
… whatever pleases the lord king the earl’s servants try to upset; and whatever pleases the earl the king’s servants call treachery; and so at the Devil’s prompting the familiars of each start meddling, and their lords, by whom the land ought to be defended, are not allowed to rest in harmony.
Political division was mirrored in physical distance: Lancaster increasingly kept himself apart from the dangers that lurked in the dark corners of his cousin’s court by retreating to his northern strongholds, and sought instead to control Edward from afar, at first through the ordinances, and then, after a treaty concluded at Leake in Nottinghamshire in 1318, through a standing council appointed to govern with the king.
But the inefficacy of these measures, in attempting to build flimsy bridges across chasms of profound mistrust, was obvious in the growing disorder that was engulfing public life. The earl of Surrey had been struggling for years to escape his loveless and childless marriage to Jeanne of Bar, one of the king’s nieces, in order to marry his mistress, the mother of his two sons. Thomas of Lancaster had been among the nobles who supported the Church in rejecting Surrey’s plans in 1314, and in 1317 – with the king’s tacit but obvious support – Surrey retaliated by abducting Lancaster’s wife, Alice Lacy. Their marriage had been no more happy or productive than Surrey’s, and it seems likely that she colluded in her own kidnapping. But the result of this public humiliation was yet more violence, in the form of a private war between Lancaster and Surrey that raged unchecked across the already disordered countryside of Yorkshire and north Wales.
More trouble, meanwhile, was stirred up by the fate of the earldom of Gloucester after the death of its young lord amid the carnage at Bannockburn. Once it became clear that his widow was not pregnant and that there would be no heir of his body to inherit his title, the earl’s rich estates were shared between his three sisters, Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth, whose husbands were precipitated to a startling new eminence by these sudden territorial gains. Margaret, who had once been the unhappy wife of Piers Gaveston, was married in April 1317 to Hugh Audley, and Elizabeth in the same month to Roger Damory – neither man born into the first ranks of the nobility, but both trusted members of Edward’s innermost household coterie. Eleanor, the eldest sister, was already married, but her husband too fitted this (for Edward) pleasing mould: Hugh Despenser the younger – who had entered Edward’s household when both men were in their teens – was the son and namesake of a courtier and confidant of the king whose loyalty had not faltered during the years of Gaveston’s dominance.
Now Audley, Damory and Despenser rose ‘in the king’s shadow’, one chronicler remarked bitterly. For Edward, these loyalists within his household offered him the promise of an alternative power base, the prospect of side-stepping (and one day, perhaps, destroying) the lords who had constrained his own authority and killed the man he loved beyond all others. For Audley, Damory and Despenser, meanwhile, the king’s favour presented the chance to enrich and empower themselves to heights of which before they could only have dreamed. This time, it seemed, there would be no second Gaveston: no all-encompassing personal devotion, no exclusive intimacy. But, while his desperate country suffered and starved, Edward spent money like water on men who cared only to advance themselves – and, as he did so, added fuel to the flames of his conflict with the earl of Lancaster.
It was therefore adding insult to self-inflicted injury when, in the summer of 1318, Edward was publicly accused of being not only a failure as king, but an impostor. That June, a man named John of Powderham walked into the King’s Hall in Oxford and announced that he was the rightful king of England. His real father, he said, was not the Exeter tanner who had brought him up but the great warrior Edward I. As a baby he had been substituted for a changeling in his royal cradle by a terrified nurse after suffering an injury in her care; and now he had come to reclaim his inheritance. Edward’s first response was to laugh. He welcomed the pretender, the chronicle of Lanercost records, with a derisive cry of ‘Welcome, my brother!’ But for the queen, struggling to maintain her husband’s dignity (and, with it, her own), and acutely conscious of the threatening consequences of Edward’s manifest failings, jokes did not come so easily. Proud Isabella was ‘unspeakably annoyed’, the Vita notes; and this challenge to a king whose resemblance to his mighty father had never been less apparent ended with Powderham’s rotting corpse swinging slowly from a gibbet.
The fact that Isabella was heavily pregnant when Powderham’s claim exposed her husband to public ridicule and scurrilous rumour – her daughter Eleanor was born at Woodstock, eight miles from Oxford, in July 1318 – cannot have helped her equilibrium. But it did add to the gravitas of any intervention she might make in the discussions between the king and his magnates – and, when the treaty of Leake was agreed on 9 August 1318, the queen was first among those credited by the Vita with the success of the negotiations.
This settlement was so successful, indeed, that when Edward launched another military assault against the advancing Scots in 1319 his army presented a more united front than at any previous time since his father’s death. The English position in the borders had deteriorated so disastrously in the wake of the slaughter at Bannockburn that even the great walled city and castle of Berwick, the spearhead and safeguard of north-eastern England, had fallen into Scottish hands in April 1318. The magnates of England who rallied to its defence when Edward mustered his army at Newcastle in June 1319 included an improbable gathering of earls, including both Lancaster and Surrey (who had finally settled their private war at the punishing cost to Surrey of handing over valuable lands to his enemy), together with Pembroke, Hereford and Arundel, as well as Hugh Despenser, Roger Damory and Hugh Audley, the three household men who had now shared the earldom of Gloucester between them. This was unity indeed, and Isabella settled herself at a manor house just outside York to wait for good news.
It did not come. Instead, the archbishop of York came galloping to her gate at the head of a host of armed men quickly gathered from the city, breathless with alarm and carrying a warning that Sir James Douglas – one of the most brilliant and brutal soldiers in Scotland, known as ‘the Black Douglas’ for the fear he inspired as well as for his dark colouring – was close at hand and planning to seize the English queen as a hostage. Isabella was bundled onto a horse and escorted at speed to York, from where she fled downriver to safety behind the massive walls of Nottingham Castle.
Meanwhile, Edward’s forces at the siege of Berwick – round whom Douglas and his men had skirted on their raid into Yorkshire – were faring little better. Lancaster’s participation was turning out to be so half-hearted that rumours were flying that he was in league with the Scots. Though sober assessment suggested that was unlikely, it was hardly surprising if the earl remained unconvinced that Bruce’s men were his only or even his most dangerous enemy. As the Vita reported, it was painfully obvious that Edward’s reconciliation with his cousin was skin-deep at best. ‘Peace between great men is to be regarded with suspicion when the eminent princes have arrived at it not through love but by force,’ the Vita’s author wrote, with an evidently heavy heart.
When siege had been laid to Berwick and it seemed that the matter was being pursued to no purpose, the lord king is said to have uttered some such words as these:
‘When this wretched business is over, we will turn our hands to other matters. For I have not yet forgotten the wrong that was done to my brother Piers …’
By the beginning of October Lancaster had withdrawn from the siege and the English army had broken up in disarray: for Edward, it was yet another opportunity squandered. While Lancaster retreated again to the fastness of his castle at Pontefract, the king was forced to agree a two-year truce with the Scots. It was an ignominious retreat (‘What best to do, indeed he did not know,’ remarked one unimpressed northern chronicler) – but it did at least allow him a breathing space in which to embark once again for France. His presence was required there to offer his homage for Gascony to the new king, Philippe V, and for Isabella the expedition offered a chance to be reunited with her family after years of absence and multiple bereavement.
Her father, Philippe the Fair, had died in November 1314 at the age of just forty-six, a few weeks after suffering a seizure while hunting. Her brother Louis, already king of Navarre, succeeded him as Louis X of France. The new king’s disgraced wife Marguerite still languished in Château Gaillard, and when she died in August 1315 (an end so convenient and obscure that rumour immediately began to cry murder) Louis remained a widower for a grand total of four days before marrying Clémence, granddaughter of the king of Naples. By the summer of 1316 his new wife was pregnant, and all seemed well in the French royal household at the beginning of June as the young king threw himself into his favourite pastime, a furiously exhausting game of jeu de paume (‘real’ tennis, played on an enclosed court). After the match, sweating and dehydrated, he drained cup after cup of cooled wine – an unwise choice of refreshment which either precipitated a dangerous chill or (as those of a more suspicious nature soon whispered) had been tainted with poison. The result, at least, was incontrovertible: on 5 June the twenty-six-year-old king died, leaving his kingdom in the grip of a sudden succession crisis.
The government of France was temporarily committed into the hands of Louis’s brother Philippe while the kingdom waited for the birth of the baby the widowed queen Clémence was carrying. It was a boy, born on 15 November 1316 and christened Jean (‘the Posthumous’, his subjects called him). But the reign of this king who acquired his crown with his first breath lasted only five days. When the baby died on 20 November, the surviving contenders for his throne were his half-sister Jeanne, Louis’s daughter by his tragic first wife – a little girl who was just four years old, and damaged goods because of her mother’s publicly confessed adultery – or his uncle Philippe, the adult prince in whose hands power already lay. Realpolitik dictated that there could be no contest between these competing claims, and so, in the absence of any support for little Jeanne’s cause, the coronation of Philippe V excluded female heirs from the French succession with an absolute clarity that had eluded Stephen on his similarly pragmatic accession to the English throne nearly two hundred years earlier.
Now Philippe was demanding that his English brother-in-law perform homage for the French territories he ruled, and Isabella was there in June 1320 to watch her husband kneel before her brother in front of the high altar of Amiens Cathedral, a Gothic marvel of riotously painted stonemasonry that lay halfway between Boulogne and Paris. The stalwart earl of Pembroke had been left as keeper of England when the royal couple took ship at Dover, while Lancaster remained in stubborn isolation behind the massive walls of his fortress at Pontefract. An unsteady peace was holding. Edward’s people were still starving, their suffering now compounded by the effects of epidemic disease among their flocks and herds; but at least there were grounds for hope that the king was applying himself to the business of government with a little more purpose. The bishop of Worcester, writing to the pope during the parliament held at Westminster on Edward and Isabella’s return from France, was moved to remark that the king ‘bore himself splendidly, with prudence and discretion’, and that, ‘contrary to his former habit’, he was now ‘rising early, and presenting a nobler and pleasant countenance to his prelates and lords’. ‘On that account’, the bishop added in another optimistic letter to a cardinal at the papal curia, ‘…there is considerable hope of an improvement in his behaviour and a greater possibility of unity and harmony.’
But in Edward’s train on his visit to France, and by his side when he returned to England, was a man who was about to precipitate the most destructive conflict Edward’s fractured rule had yet visited on his kingdom. The younger Hugh Despenser had been appointed chamberlain of the king’s household in 1318 – an office that had once been held by Piers Gaveston, and which allowed Despenser to spend increasing amounts of his time in Edward’s company. There is less suggestion in the surviving sources that Despenser was the object of the king’s private passion than there is of Despenser’s ravening hunger for all the public power that access to Edward could provide. But that meant merely that he represented a different sort of threat to Edward’s subjects – a menacing predator, as opposed to Gaveston’s distracting peacock.
And the first prey on which his talons fastened was one of his own brothers-in-law, his co-heirs to the earldom of Gloucester. The settlement of the Gloucester estates made in November 1317 had given Despenser vast tracts of land in south Wales, including the lordship of Glamorgan. But it had also served to spur, rather than satisfy, his ambition, and within weeks he had seized more of the dead earl’s Welsh properties from Hugh Audley, the husband of his wife’s sister, Gaveston’s widow Margaret. Despite Audley’s vociferous protests, Edward allowed Despenser to impose a territorial exchange which left Audley holding less valuable lands in the south-east of England and Despenser in unchallenged command of southernmost Wales and the Bristol Channel.
Soon, he set his sights further afield, on the lordship of Gower adjoining Glamorgan to the west, which belonged to a cash-strapped baron named William de Braose. By the time de Braose died in 1320 without a son to succeed him, several of the most powerful landowners in the region were already circling acquisitively in the hope of snapping Gower up at a bargain price, while his daughter’s husband, John Mowbray, who was determined to take over the lordship as his father-in-law’s heir, immediately took possession of the estates to ward off these challengers. Despenser, however, had other ideas, and in November 1320 he persuaded Edward that Gower should be seized into royal hands.
This was an unambiguous demonstration of Despenser’s influence over the king. It was also a mistake. The customary law of the Welsh marches – the frontier lands between England and the principality of Wales – did not, by long tradition, permit this kind of intrusive royal intervention. And this threat to the legal basis of marcher landholding, together with the manifest certainty that Despenser was now the power behind Edward’s throne, was enough to bind together an extraordinary consortium of lords who were prepared to resort to arms to defend themselves against the king and his favourite. John Mowbray, the prospective heir to Gower, was joined by his local rivals for that lordship: the earl of Hereford, whose loyalty to Edward had been so painstakingly reconstructed after the killing at Blacklow Hill, and a namesake uncle and nephew, Roger Mortimer of Chirk and Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, the latter a major landowner in Ireland as well as in Wales. Also standing alongside them to confront Despenser were his former associates in royal favour, now his deadly rivals, Hugh Audley and Roger Damory. And behind them all loomed a marcher lord with more reason than any to mistrust Edward’s intentions: Thomas of Lancaster, whose huge estates made him a neighbour of Despenser in Wales as well as the keeper of the north.
The mortal enmity between Lancaster and the king had been the fault-line in English politics for the last ten years. Edward had been unable to take decisive action against his cousin because of the power of Lancaster’s earldoms and their function as a bulwark against the Scots. Equally, Lancaster’s isolation, both politically and temperamentally, had allowed him to make little headway in consolidating formal checks on the king’s authority. Now, however, Edward’s increasing indulgence of Despenser’s aggression had created a new constituency for Lancaster – one where the competing interests of the marcher lords coalesced into a collective determination to restore the rule of law and free the king from the pernicious influence of Despenser, who was now, the Lanercost chronicler acidly remarked, ‘as the king’s right eye’. While Lancaster sought to rally support in the north, his allies began an assault on Despenser’s lands in Wales and England, leaving in their wake panic and devastation.
By the end of July, the forces of Hereford, Damory, Audley and the younger Mortimer – their troops arrayed in liveries of green with the right sleeve yellow – had all converged on London. Once again it was left to the earl of Pembroke to serve as the voice of loyal reason, pointing out to Edward that he would condemn his kingdom to the horror of civil war if he did not listen to the demands of his lords and send Despenser into exile. And once again, Edward’s queen took centre stage in her role as intercessor in the cause of peace. Isabella had given birth for the fourth time only a month earlier, to a daughter, Joan, known as Joan of the Tower because, with armies advancing on the capital, the queen had retreated for her confinement behind the protective walls of London’s great fortress. Now, Isabella went down on her knees before her husband, playing out the public ritual of queenly intervention so that he could accede to her entreaties in the name of his people without compromising his majesty as king. Her involvement had the desired effect, but it was with a markedly ill grace that Edward capitulated to the appeal of his queen and the advice of his lords and expelled Despenser and his father from England.
The younger Despenser did not go far, and while he prowled the waters of the Channel as a ‘sea-monster’ (the Vita says), preying on unsuspecting merchant ships to add to his fleet and his treasure, Edward gave no consideration to his own role in the chain of events that had left him once again cornered by a pack of enraged and fearful lords. Instead, as so often before, his thoughts were all of escape, and revenge. And this time it was Isabella who provided the momentary diversion that allowed him to spring the trap.
On 13 October, Isabella rode to the gates of Leeds Castle – a stronghold with mighty defences of stone and water, built on an island in a lake thirty miles from Dover and the Kent coast. Her public purpose was a pilgrimage to Canterbury, although Leeds lay off the beaten track that pilgrims usually trod, and her husband, who was also in Kent, was clearly preoccupied not at all with spiritual concerns but entirely with Despenser, who had just made landfall once again, despite the injunctions against him, in the east of the shire on the Isle of Thanet. Nor, in fact, was Isabella’s presence at Leeds Castle entirely innocent. Its owner, Bartholomew Badlesmere, had a long history of loyal service at Edward’s court, but just three months earlier – with his own alarm at Despenser’s belligerence intensified by the fact that his eight-year-old daughter was married to the son and heir of Roger Mortimer of Wigmore – he had suddenly thrown in his lot with the marcher lords. Badlesmere, Edward believed, was not only a traitorous ingrate but a weak link in the rebels’ ranks, since his last-minute defection to their cause had done nothing to reconcile him with Thomas of Lancaster, who had furiously objected to Badlesmere’s appointment in 1318 as steward of the royal household, an office to which the earl claimed a hereditary right. It seemed possible, therefore, that Badlesmere’s castles in Kent could be picked off without precipitating a general mobilisation of the marcher armies, and that feat, should Edward achieve it, would give him a strategic base from which to advance against Lancaster and his confederates.
The appearance of the queen as a pilgrim at Badlesmere’s gate – which would normally have been a signal honour, and a welcome opportunity to display the largesse of his hospitality – was therefore laden with unspoken menace. Badlesmere himself was not there, having left the castle with its treasure and garrison in the care of his wife with strict instructions that she was to admit no one – instructions which she followed to the letter, leaving Isabella incensed and without shelter. Her mood was not improved by the knowledge that the castle had been held by her aunt, Edward I’s queen Marguerite, until her death in 1318, and should therefore have passed into her own hands as part of her queenly dower, had her husband not chosen instead to grant it to Badlesmere. Irritated and imperious, she ordered her escort to force an entry. Lady Badlesmere responded by giving her archers the signal to shoot. Within minutes, six of the queen’s men lay dead.
Perhaps Isabella had been following a script to which she had agreed in advance, or perhaps she had been used as a pawn in a strategem planned by her husband and his favourite of which she was not fully aware. Either way, her presence at Leeds Castle served to precipitate a vertiginous descent from military posturing into the stark reality of war. Badlesmere’s violent reception of Edward’s anointed queen was not only an unforgivable insult but out-and-out treason, the king insisted, and he immediately despatched troops and siege engines to attack the castle. The Mortimers, uncle and nephew, and the earl of Hereford marched south from Oxford with Badlesmere himself, intending to relieve the small garrison at Leeds; but at Kingston-upon-Thames, southwest of the capital, they halted, stopped in their tracks by news that Lancaster was refusing to join them. The earl saw no reason to lift his sword for a man he despised, whose immediate cause had nothing to do with the campaign against Despenser. And while the marcher lords hesitated in consternation before wheeling north to consult their more powerful ally, Lady Badlesmere and the soldiers at Leeds opened the castle gates to throw themselves on the king’s mercy.
Ostensibly, Edward had made his point; Badlesmere’s castles in the south-east were now his for the taking. But in the wider and deeper conflict within which this was merely a skirmish, the king now had a choice. Lancaster was a unique and uniquely intractable opponent, but the fragility of the coalition gathered around him had just been painfully exposed to public view. If Edward now chose to affirm his commitment to the rule of law, to reassure the lords who had felt the intense threat of Despenser’s apparently unbridled self-aggrandisement, he might divide the rebels and re-establish his rule by offering the good government that all his subjects, Lancaster apart, had sought for the last decade.
But Edward had acquired no longer sight, no greater understanding of his own responsibilities, in the years since Gaveston’s death. Still he sought revenge for the loss of his soulmate and for his own inability to protect him. And now, in this moment, it seemed he had a chance to replay the traumatic events of a decade earlier, but this time in defence of a different favourite and in hope of a different outcome. He did not hesitate. When the defenders of Leeds Castle emerged before him, a sorry sight after two weeks under heavy siege, twelve men were immediately seized and hanged from the walls. And while the corpses kicked and swung, Lady Badlesmere and her young children were sent as prisoners to the Tower.
If execution without trial represented any kind of justice at all, it was the summary justice offered by martial law. Edward’s subjects could be under no illusion that once again they faced a stark choice: either fight for the king, or take up arms against him. With a heavy heart, the earl of Pembroke – now nearing fifty, and wearied by the years he had spent seeking to save the king from himself – summoned his men to Edward’s side. With him were Lancaster’s old enemy the earl of Surrey; the earl of Arundel, who had hitched himself to Despenser’s star by marrying his son to Despenser’s daughter earlier in the year; and the king’s young half-brothers Thomas and Edmund, the sons of Edward I’s second marriage to Isabella’s aunt Marguerite. As this royal army marched north-westward from London, the rebel lords – who were struggling now to maintain their brittle unity – fell back before its approach.
For once, momentum lay with the king, and it seemed that Edward might carry all before him. At Shrewsbury in January 1322 the Mortimers surrendered. The faith they had placed in Lancaster’s support had been destroyed by the earl’s failure to emerge from his fortresses in the north. But if they had hoped that Edward would look with favour on their submission, they were to be bitterly disappointed. Both uncle and nephew were despatched in chains to London, where they too were incarcerated in the Tower. The king pressed on northwards, determined now to seize this chance to destroy the man who had killed Gaveston and dismembered his kingdom. Support for Lancaster was ebbing away with every mile he retreated before Edward’s advance, and Isabella sent word on her husband’s behalf to Andrew Harclay, a veteran of the Scottish war and warden of the western frontier with Scotland, that he should move south to cut off Lancaster’s escape. The earl was still hoping to reach his newly built fortress at Dunstanburgh on the Northumbrian coast, but when his much diminished army arrived at Boroughbridge in Yorkshire on 16 March they found their way north across the river Ure blocked by Harclay and his men. With Edward’s forces not far behind, they had no option but to fight. While Lancaster tried to take the ford across the swollen water at the head of his cavalry, the earl of Hereford – who had joined Lancaster at Pontefract after the Mortimers’ surrender – led an assault on the narrow wooden bridge. But Harclay had stationed soldiers in hiding under the bridge, and one of them speared Hereford from below through a gap in the planks as he tried to cross. His screams as he died in gut-wrenching agony sowed panic among troops who were already buckling under heavy fire from Harclay’s archers. Lancaster was forced into retreat, and at daybreak the next morning Harclay’s men swarmed across the river to complete their victory.
Lancaster had come to believe that he was untouchable. Cousin to the king, uncle to the queen, an earl five times over, he could stand alone in condemnation of Edward’s failings and never fear the consequences of his wrath. Now, as he was escorted south as a prisoner to his own castle at Pontefract, he had time to consider the fate that awaited him: royal revenge, ten years in the making. Hereford was dead; so too was Despenser’s brother-in-law and Edward’s former confidant Roger Damory, who had been fatally wounded a few days earlier. Despenser’s other brother-in-law Hugh Audley was a prisoner, taken in Lancaster’s company at Boroughbridge, as was John Mowbray, whose claim to Gower had served to spark this conflagration; while the Mortimers, kept close in the Tower, awaited trial in London.
Edward’s victory was complete. That much was clear to Lancaster on the morning of 22 March, when he was brought into Pontefract’s great hall to face a hastily assembled tribunal of lords, including the earls of Pembroke, Surrey and Arundel and Edward’s young half-brother the earl of Kent. An indictment of his crimes was read, reaching backward from the immediate fact of his armed defiance, through charges of treasonous communications with the Scots, all the way to his seizure of the king’s jewels and horses at Newcastle in 1312. The royal pardons he had knelt to receive since then were now worthless, it was obvious, and Lancaster was not allowed to speak in his own defence, beyond a bitterly wry aside which the Vita puts into his mouth: ‘This is a powerful court, and great in authority, where no answer is heard nor any excuse admitted …’
Only one verdict was possible after such a trial. The earl was sentenced, as a traitor, to be hanged and then, while still alive, cut down and beheaded – although the king conceded that he should be spared the gallows in deference to his royal blood (and, according to one chronicler, out of respect for his niece, the queen). This was martial law enacted away from the battlefield, while banners were furled and arms sheathed, and, if it did not closely resemble due judicial process, it was Lancaster himself who had set the precedent by which he was condemned. As the Vita observed, ‘the earl of Lancaster once cut off Piers Gaveston’s head, and now by the king’s command the earl himself has lost his head. Thus, perhaps not unjustly, the earl received measure for measure.’
And there were unmistakable echoes of Blacklow Hill when Lancaster, dressed in penitential rags, was bundled onto a scrawny mule and led out from Pontefract’s great gate, through a freezing downpour of sleet, to a nearby hill. There he was made to kneel with his face turned towards Scotland, the enemy with whom he was accused of conspiring. He bent his head, as if in prayer; and with two or three clumsy strokes the executioner hacked it from his body. As Edward watched, the severed head was lifted into the air in public demonstration of its owner’s fate, before the monks of Pontefract Priory gathered up the bloodstained corpse for burial before the altar of their church.
Unhappy precedent there may have been, but, however shattering the repercussions of Gaveston’s death, they could not compare with the shock to the political system that Lancaster’s execution represented. Gaveston had been a peer of the realm in name, but not by hereditary right or territorial reach. And, crucially, his death had not been ordered by the king. Now, for the first time since the Conquest, a lord – and not just any lord, but the greatest of them all – had been executed as a traitor. The dreadful penalties that now faced anyone who dared to oppose Edward were rammed home in the minds of his subjects in the days that followed Lancaster’s death. Dozens of those who had joined the earl’s revolt, lords and knights and squires, met their deaths on gallows erected for the purpose in places where they had once been powerful. John Mowbray was hanged at York on 23 March, and his body left suspended in chains to rot under the spring skies. Three weeks later Bartholomew Badlesmere was dragged by a horse through the city of Canterbury and out to a crossroads where he was hanged and then decapitated, his head speared on a pike and set to stare down, hollow-eyed, on the cowed townspeople from the city’s east gate. Dozens more – including the sons of Mowbray and Badlesmere – now filled prison cells in royal castles around the country, and rebels’ wives and young children were among those who lost their liberty. Even Lancaster’s estranged wife, the perennially unfortunate Alice Lacy, and her elderly stepmother, the dowager countess of Lincoln, were taken into custody.
This was a new and frightening incarnation of a king whose failings had once been those of omission and distraction. The violence was authentically Edward’s, the emotional response of a man for whom revenge was no less immediately visceral for having been delayed for a decade. But the thoroughgoing ruthlessness was Despenser’s. The favourite and his father had been back at Edward’s side since the beginning of March. Two months later, after Boroughbridge and the bloodletting that followed, the elder Despenser was created earl of Winchester. That title was just the first of the spoils of victory that the two men now began to amass, using threats and force to supplement the royal favour in which they basked.
If Isabella was glad to see her husband restored to the fullness of his power, that joy was rapidly eroded by the realisation of the role Despenser now played in the direction of policy, and of the latitude that Edward was prepared to allow him. She had gone down on her knees to beg for his banishment in 1321 – an intervention that represented not personal enmity but her queenly duty in the search for peace, no more and no less. But now it became clear that all those who had sought to broker a settlement between Edward and the rebels were regarded as potential enemies of the new regime. In May 1322 the long-suffering earl of Pembroke was compelled to swear an extraordinary oath of loyalty to the king ‘for certain reasons he was given to understand’, the royal chancery tersely recorded; and Isabella found herself frozen out of Edward’s counsels, while her own properties, it soon emerged, were not immune from the Despensers’ covetous glances.
Edward was far from being a simpleton, but his favoured pastimes had always tended toward the obvious diversions of hunting, music, and drinking into the night with the lowborn companions who so disconcerted his subjects. Isabella, on the other hand, was more sophisticated in her tastes. Among her possessions was an exquisite chess set, its pieces carved from crystal and jade, that had once belonged to Edward’s mother, Eleanor of Castile. And Edward was about to discover just how apt that legacy to his wife had been.