Edward, to whom his wife and her lover had professed such loyalty, was now a prisoner in the keeping of Henry of Lancaster at Monmouth Castle. In his person the gulf between the rhetoric and the reality of their invasion was made dangerously real. The practical fact of the matter was that he could not be allowed to regain his liberty, let alone the power of his crown. At the same time, they had rallied the country against Despenser as an enemy of both the kingdom and its king – and the king had now been liberated from his destructive influence.
But seeds had already, carefully, been sown for a process by which Edward’s loss of legitimacy could be made explicit. The fruitless days he and Despenser had spent at sea between Chepstow and Cardiff had allowed Isabella and Mortimer to proclaim that Edward had abandoned his realm, and that the young Prince Edward had, ‘with the assent of the whole community of the realm’, been appointed keeper of the kingdom in his father’s place. Meanwhile, the bishop of Hereford had preached a sermon before the queen at Wallingford, taking as his text a phrase from the Book of Kings – ‘my head aches’ – from which he extrapolated an argument for removing the head of a kingdom altogether if it were found to be diseased.
Now, however, the time had come for action, not argument. And there was no precedent for what had to be done. Never before had a king been unmade. The fact of Stephen’s kingship – his consecration and anointing – had stood baldly in the way of Matilda’s efforts to assert her own right to the throne, and, though Stephen’s heir had been pushed aside to make way for the succession of Matilda’s son, Stephen’s kingship had been ended only by death. Now Isabella sought to achieve the opposite: to uphold the direct line of succession, but to do so prematurely; to set aside an old king to make way for a new while the former still lived.
She already had the great seal, which had been taken from Edward at Monmouth by the bishop of Hereford on 20 November. While her husband was a prisoner, of course, she and Mortimer could control his public pronouncements, and so it was declared that the king had sent the seal of his own free will ‘to his consort and son’, with orders that they should do ‘not only what was necessary for right and peace, but also what should please them’. This was the same freedom of action that Eleanor of Aquitaine had enjoyed when she ruled England for her son Richard – ‘the power of doing whatever she wished in the kingdom’. Then, it had been an expression of trust; now, a step on the road to depriving the king of his crown.
The language in which that extraordinary proposition might be couched had, after all, been spoken within months of Edward’s accession nearly twenty years earlier: ‘Homage and the oath of allegiance are more in respect of the crown than in respect of the king’s person,’ his lords had told him in 1308. And now, at a parliament called to meet at Westminster in January 1327, the ways in which the king had forfeited that allegiance were enumerated. Edward ‘had as good as lost the lands of Gascony and Scotland through bad counsel and bad custody’, reported one chronicler, ‘and likewise through bad counsel he had caused to be slain a great part of the noble blood of the land, to the dishonour and loss of himself, his realm and the whole people, and had done many other astonishing things’. In a carefully stage-managed piece of political theatre, the bishops, lords and selected representatives of the wider realm, with excitable crowds of Londoners gathered outside, declared that they would have Edward’s son wear the crown instead of a king whose failings and oppressions were manifest and incorrigible. The archbishop of Canterbury spoke on the proverbial saw ‘vox populi, vox Dei’ (‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’) – a text that would normally be a contentious proposition for a royal administration, now suddenly rendered a valuable political tool. And Prince Edward was ushered forward, a sombre-faced fourteen-year-old, to receive the acclamation of his newly acquired subjects.
Still this de facto deposition needed more legitimating ballast. A deputation from parliament led by the bullish bishop of Hereford rode to Kenilworth, another of Henry of Lancaster’s castles, to which the imprisoned king had now been moved. One later account describes Edward, dressed all in black, weeping and fainting when he realised they had come to demand the renunciation of his throne. But in truth we know very little of Edward’s emotional reaction to the straits in which he found himself. His responsibilities as king had never claimed his full attention; this was the monarch, after all, who had offered to agree to anything his lords asked of him if it would secure the presence of Piers Gaveston by his side. Now Gaveston was gone, along with Despenser, the man who had helped Edward to avenge his death. He had neither the resources nor the means to fight on; it may be that he also lacked the will. We cannot know, but we might guess that despair was his overwhelming response as he listened to the bishop’s blandishments and threats. At last, on 20 January, faced with the utter hopelessness of his cause, Edward was brought to agree that he would resign his crown to his son. Once he had done so, the deputation formally renounced their homage, and the steward of Edward’s royal household solemnly broke his staff of office in two. By the double logic of deposition and abdication, then, the transformation effected at Edward’s coronation was undone. And at Westminster on 1 February 1327 his son was anointed and crowned in his stead as King Edward III, a slight figure in rich red silk amid an abbey ablaze with gold.
From this moment on the decrees of government carried the authenticating mark ‘by the king’, rather than ‘by the queen’, ‘by the queen and the king’s firstborn son’, or (with nice elision) ‘by the queen and her firstborn son’, as they had done in the months since the invasion. But that did not mean the young king was now ruling his kingdom for himself. Around him stood a formal council, made up of the great bishops and lords of the realm, with Henry of Lancaster restored to his brother’s lands and named as the ‘chief guardian of the king’. Behind the council, however, stood Isabella and Mortimer. Formally, their authority had been superseded by the coronation and the council; informally, they directed the entire administration. That was not necessarily and inescapably a problem, given the legitimacy attached to the queen’s role as mother of an underage king, and Mortimer’s leadership of the army that had ended the oppressions of the previous regime. But much would depend on what they did next.
And whatever they chose to do would be done under uniquely intractable pressure. Never before had England had to contend with the existence of an ex-king, alive and well in captivity, while a new king attempted to establish his rule. Isabella’s failure to discharge her matrimonial responsibilities by returning to Edward’s side now that the ‘intruder’ Despenser had been removed had been explained away by the bishop of Hereford, chief propagandist of the coup, who expatiated at length on the violence with which Edward had threatened his wife should he see her again. (He carried a knife with which to kill her, the bishop declared, and, if that failed, had announced his intention to despatch her with his teeth.) But what could not be so easily remedied was the threat to the nascent regime posed by the pre-existing claim of the old king as a means of justifying opposition to the new. Unity had been easy to establish in the heady days of September 1326, when Edward was inseparable from the hated Despenser, but much harder to maintain with Despenser dead and Edward deposed through a process of political improvisation and outright invention.
One plot to free Edward had already been foiled by April 1327, when he was moved from Kenilworth sixty miles south-west to Berkeley Castle, a stronghold a couple of miles inland from the Severn estuary that was, in its marshy remoteness, much less easily accessible than Lancaster’s midland fortress. It was held by Thomas Berkeley, son of the Lord Berkeley who had rebelled against Edward in 1322, and husband of one of Mortimer’s daughters – a much more reassuring custodian, from the point of view of the queen and her lover, than the increasingly powerful and independent-minded Lancaster. There Edward’s captivity became closer, to prevent further attempts at rescue, and perhaps less comfortable, in the hope that his robust health might take a convenient turn for the worse in the cold and damp of a less than royally furnished cell.
By the end of the summer, however, it was clear that neither expectation had been fulfilled. Edward remained unhelpfully alive; not only that, but in July a second conspiracy to liberate him had been thwarted, this time by a much narrower margin. Like the first plot, it was the brainchild of a Dominican friar, an order to which Edward had always shown particular favour and devotion – an attachment reciprocated by the friars years earlier in the tending and reverent burial of Gaveston’s broken body, and now in these demonstrations of diehard loyalism to a discredited king. This time it seems the conspirators succeeded in releasing Edward from his cell before the breakout was contained and the former king was returned to his prison quarters. But when a third plot was discovered in mid-September, it was obvious just how little hope there was that his continued existence might fade from public consciousness into political irrelevance.
And so, with impeccable and implacable political logic, covert arrangements were put in train that resulted, during the night of 21 September 1327, in the death of the man already known to his former subjects as ‘Edward, the late king’. By its very nature, his end was a grim business that took place in shadows and secrecy. Officially, it was simply reported that he had died – whether by unfortunate accident or a sudden extremity of illness was left disconcertingly unspecified – but the suggestion that natural causes had claimed his life at forty-three in so abrupt a manner, and with such extraordinarily opportune timing, convinced no one. This impulsive and misguided man, who had understood so little about the power he had once wielded, died in an obscurity quite at odds with the royal spotlight in which he had lived – and the vacuum of information about his fate was rapidly filled with swirling dust-clouds of rumour, innuendo and conjecture.
Some of the myth-making about this political murder took the form of unsubtle allusion to the intimate relationships with his favourites that had proved so destructive. Edward was killed, later chroniclers would confidently assert, by a red-hot iron thrust violently into his anus, burning his intestines from the inside without a mark left on his body. Other whispers denied that the killing had taken place at all, and told instead of another corpse buried in his place, while the king himself escaped into exile under an assumed identity. Though these rumours acquired a little traction in the years (and even centuries) that followed, the truth was that such stories formed a familiar accompaniment to politically charged deaths that took place before their time or in mysterious circumstances. Tales already long in circulation included that of the Emperor Heinrich V, Matilda’s first husband, who had – so the legend went – faked his own death, substituted another body for his own at his magnificent funeral, and made his way to England to live in penitential poverty as a hermit in Chester. (Nor was he the only royal refugee to do so, according to inventive local tradition; near to his cell, it was said, lived a one-eyed anchorite named Harold who had made his home there after escaping from a battlefield near Hastings.) English folklore had found room for a German emperor: now the German Empire played host to a lost king of England. Edward’s tale, as it developed, was Heinrich’s in geographical reverse, with the king dodging a counterfeit funeral to arrive in Cologne in the guise of a wandering hermit, before ending his days in religious contemplation near Pavia in Lombardy.
The alchemical quality of Edward’s necessarily shadowy death was evident not only in this elaborate afterlife but in the transmutation of his reputation. Even the unlikely figure of Thomas of Lancaster had been transfigured by the shock of his violent end into a candidate for popular sainthood: within weeks of the earl’s execution miracles had been breathlessly reported at his tomb at Pontefract, where his hat and belt were reverently kept as healing relics. Now Edward too had his chance to become a political martyr. By the time the chronicler Geoffrey le Baker wrote his venomously partisan account of events some thirty years later, the former king had become a Christ-like figure – the description of the lamenting, swooning Edward at Kenilworth is Baker’s – whose noble spirit was betrayed and destroyed by those who owed him their loyalty.
Chief among these Judases, of course, was Edward’s wife. For Baker, Isabella was Jezebel – a tyrannical and sexually corrupt queen manipulating her husband and son to impose evil on the kingdom – and a ferrea virago, a woman who aped a man, abandoning her feminine virtues, to become as cruel and unyielding as iron. But this vilification of a queen who had been welcomed with open arms in the autumn of 1326 – a mother to England’s people as well as to its heir, come to rescue the realm from tyranny – was neither instant nor inevitable in the immediate aftermath of Edward’s death.
Given the clandestine circumstances in which he died, almost nothing could be known for certain about what exactly had happened or where responsibility lay. Nor has the passage of time made answers any easier to find. Was Isabella the instigator of her husband’s murder, or did Mortimer decide that he must be removed? Did one initiate and the other resist, or were they partners in this, as in so much else? In public, the proprieties were carefully observed. The king’s corpse was embalmed, and his heart sent in a silver vase to his royal widow. The body lay in state, first at Berkeley, then in the abbey of St Peter at Gloucester, the coffin draped in cloth of gold embroidered with the arms of England. On 20 December, Edward was laid to rest in a ceremony full of elaborate ritual. Isabella and her son knelt before an exquisitely carved and gilded hearse bearing not only the coffin but a fine wooden effigy of the king dressed in royal robes and a copper-gilt crown. Mortimer too, clad respectfully in black, took his place among the mourners. Then, the following day, the court left Gloucester to spend Christmas at Worcester and to prepare for the young king’s marriage to Philippa of Hainaut. Newly arrived in England, she was welcomed into London on Christmas Eve with lavish civic festivities, before travelling north to York for a wedding joyfully celebrated amid a snowstorm in the half-built minster.
Whatever view we take of Isabella’s role in her husband’s murder, therefore, it has to be noted that his death did not cause a moment’s disruption to the part she played in the regime she and Mortimer had created, or to her conduct as a queen and a mother. She had always evinced a conventionally observant piety – but faith, however genuine, might also be as flexible and accommodatingly complex as the person who professed it. Isabella’s religious belief had so far proved able to encompass personal and political rebellion against her husband and king, to the point of adultery and deposition; and by September 1327 it was already two years since she had begun to style herself a widow. It is hardly unimaginable, therefore, that Isabella might have brought herself to contemplate the irresistible political imperative of her husband’s death, particularly given the depths to which Edward’s rule had sunk and the degree of political legitimacy that Isabella’s resistance to his oppressions, and her possession of the unquestioned heir to his throne, had conferred on her claim to power. God, after all, had smiled on her actions and vindicated her every move by granting her overwhelming victory.
Much would depend, then, on whether the queen could maintain that legitimacy now that Edward had been removed from the political stage. Whatever happened, the regime over which she and Mortimer presided could not last indefinitely. The young king had just turned fifteen, and, though he had so far been no more than a pawn in the political process, it could not be expected that he would be content to remain forever in the shadow of his mother and her lover. The power that Isabella and Mortimer now enjoyed therefore depended on their continuing claim to be conscientious guardians of the realm until her son was old enough to rule for himself.
But here the limitations of Isabella’s world view, and of her political understanding, were revealed for the first time. She was an intelligent woman, and a political animal through and through, whose acute tactical sense had enabled her to play her hand with masterful skill in the critical moment of 1326. But now it emerged that her overwhelming sense of entitlement – which had driven her resistance to her husband from the moment he had allowed Despenser to displace her from her hard-won position at his side – also prevented her from understanding that constraints on her freedom of action remained, despite the power she had achieved. Of course a royal daughter of France and a queen of England would expect to command the reverence and enjoy the luxury appropriate to her exalted rank, but the acquisitive arrogance that Isabella now displayed blunted her vision as a ruler in a manner that was alarmingly reminiscent of her feckless husband.
It was indisputable that the queen should retrieve the valuable dower lands, worth £4,500 a year, that had been stripped from her by the rapacious regime she had overthrown. But the award made to Isabella on the day of her son’s coronation tripled that already generous endowment. With her new estates worth an astonishing annual sum of twenty thousand marks – or £13,333 – she enjoyed an income greater even than that of Thomas of Lancaster in his pomp. Among the many properties of which she now took possession were her dead husband’s favourite manor of Langley, where Gavestonlay beneath a gilded tomb; Leeds Castle, from the gates of which she had been turned away with such bloody results; Bristol Castle, where the older Despenser had died; and the earl of Lancaster’s fortress at Pontefract, which the younger Despenser had seized after his execution, and Isabella now appropriated for herself despite the prior claims of the earl’s brother Henry. Meanwhile, with a series of cash grants – needed to pay her army of mercenaries as well as to establish her glittering supremacy at her son’s new court – she drained the gold that Despenser had stockpiled in the royal treasury.
And she was not alone in her acquisitions. Mortimer’s ambition had been no less apparent than Isabella’s at the young king’s coronation, when his three sons had knelt to receive the order of knighthood dressed in the cloth of gold and furs appropriate to the heirs of an earl. It was no surprise, therefore, to find that title soon among the rewards Mortimer amassed. In the winter of 1326 and during 1327 he accumulated in his possession the great lordships that Despenser had previously held in Wales and the Welsh marches, together with the estates of his uncle, Roger Mortimer of Chirk (disinheriting his cousin, the heir to Chirk, in the process), as well as the royal office of justiciar of the principality of Wales, to give him power there on a scale of which even Despenser would have been envious. These grants were mirrored by more in Ireland, and in the autumn of 1328 Mortimer was named earl of March, a new title created especially in his honour, to reflect his extraordinary dominance in the western territories of the young king’s realm.
Liberation from the oppressions of Edward II, it was becoming unnervingly clear, had delivered England into the hands of a queen mother determined to enrich herself beyond reason or precedent, and a domineering nobleman who aspired to the status of an uncrowned king, scarcely letting young Edward out of his sight and taking for granted his own right to speak on his behalf. The council, for Isabella and Mortimer, was no more than window-dressing, an irrelevance to the reality of their political control. But they, no less than the dead king and his favourite before them, failed to understand that the process by which they sought to consolidate their own power was also the process by which, piece by piece, they began to forfeit the legitimacy of the authority they claimed.
With alarming speed, cracks began to appear in the fragile facade of unity that still remained as the legacy of their invasion. Doubts were raised about Isabella and Mortimer’s capacity to govern not only by the rewards they lavished upon themselves, but also by their handling of the weightiest matters of policy. It had never been likely that the Scots would stand by and watch such violent upheavals in English politics from a gentlemanly distance, and in the summer of 1327 Scottish raids forced the muster of an English army and an advance against them into the northeast. But the English forces were caught ponderously flat-footed by typically agile and elusive Scots manoeuvres, and the teenage king – who had accompanied Mortimer, Lancaster and his uncles of Kent and Norfolk north on his first military campaign – was almost captured in one daring raid on the English camp. As the exhausted, dispirited soldiers and their bitterly frustrated king made their way disconsolately south, Isabella and Mortimer made the decision to pursue peace in the north, rather than war; and in the spring of 1328 a treaty was agreed, to bring a lasting settlement between England and Scotland.
It was not, in itself, a foolish or myopic plan, but it came at a heavy price. England now for the first time formally recognised Scotland as an independent kingdom, and Robert Bruce as its rightful sovereign. The dream that the Scots might be brought under English rule – pursued so ferociously by the first Edward, and never relinquished by the second, no matter how hapless his interventions there – was now abandoned in the name of the third. Not, however, with his consent. When Isabella’s seven-year-old daughter Joan travelled north to Berwick with her mother in July 1328 to marry Bruce’s son and heir, four-year-old David, in fulfilment of the treaty, Edward was not with them. Appalled and angry at the humiliation of the campaign and the subsequent jettisoning of what he saw as his rights over Scotland, the fifteen-year-old king refused to attend the wedding and obstructed his mother’s attempt to deliver the Stone of Scone – the sacred sandstone on which kings of Scots were traditionally crowned, which had been captured by Edward I thirty years earlier – back into Scottish hands.
Angry though he might be, the king was still too young to free himself from the enveloping arms of the government which Isabella and Mortimer had created around him. But this breach between mother and son brought widespread condemnation for the first time upon the head of the queen mother and her unofficial consort. The king, it was clear, rejected this policy made in his name. So did his subjects, who called it a turpis pax, a ‘shameful peace’. Meanwhile, the £20,000 which the Scots agreed to pay in reparation for their raids did little to soothe such discontent, given how rapidly it disappeared into the bottomless pit of Isabella’s coffers. And most immediately disquieting for Isabella and Mortimer was the fact that this growing resistance found public voice in the imposing person of Henry of Lancaster.
The wheel, it seemed, was turning full circle. This was not, after all, the first time that humiliation in Scotland had precipitated an earl of Lancaster into opposition. When parliament met at Salisbury in October 1328 – the same tame assembly that ratified Mortimer’s elevation to the earldom of March – Lancaster refused to attend, complaining of the failure to prosecute the king’s rights in Scotland, the sidelining of the regency council which he himself had been appointed to lead, and the plundering of the royal treasury to the private benefit of Isabella and Mortimer. If this was the reign of the king’s father revisited, it was abundantly clear who, this time, might be accused of usurping royal power.
In a process that had become horrifyingly, wearyingly familiar over the previous two decades, division spiralled quickly into armed confrontation. By winter troops were once again being mustered by England’s great nobles, who circled one another warily, trying to find a means to peace while preparing for war. In December Lancaster marched into London at the head of an army, where he was joined by the king’s uncles of Kent and Norfolk, who shared his anger at Isabella and Mortimer’s appropriation of their nephew’s government. But while Lancaster and his allies gathered in the capital, Mortimer’s army, accompanied by Isabella and Edward, outflanked them by moving north into the midlands and onto the attack. By 6 January, Lancaster’s manors in Warwickshire and Leicestershire had been sacked and burned, and his city of Leicester seized by Mortimer in the name of the young king.
In the face of this devastating reprisal, and confronted yet again with the imminent threat of civil war, the earls of Norfolk and Kent decided that discretion was the better part of principled resistance, and abandoned Lancaster to rejoin the court. Realising now that he could not hope to prevail – and also, at almost fifty, finding himself progressively disabled by his failing eyesight – Lancaster surrendered to his king, kneeling in the mud of a January morning to ask his young cousin’s forgiveness. His submission saved his life and his lands, albeit at the cost of crippling financial penalties. Thereafter, hobbled by these monetary bonds and by his increasing infirmity, Lancaster was in no further position to resist.
Opposition had reared its head, and it had been crushed. Like Edward II and Despenser before them, Isabella and Mortimer could have chosen to learn lessons from the resistance they faced. Instead, like Edward and Despenser before them, they clung tighter to the power they had achieved. Her son’s anger at the Scottish peace might have given Isabella pause for thought; she was an astute woman, after all, and her authority fundamentally depended on his – a fact which made his approach toward adulthood a challengingly complex political phenomenon. Perhaps she had a blind faith that her influence over her son could not be shaken; perhaps she was simply unable to see the ramifications of long-term strategy when confronted with the pressing imperatives of short-term gain. Perhaps – and unknowably – the dynamics of her relationship with Mortimer obscured any other consideration, political or personal, although it has to be said that Isabella had never before knowingly set her own interests aside. What is certain, however, is that she and Mortimer now sought to tighten their stranglehold on power with a narcissism and paranoia to rival that of the regime they had destroyed.
The web was drawn ever closer around a king who had shown such unsettling signs of independent thought. Not only had Edward been paraded as the figurehead of military action against Lancaster’s revolt, but his household was filled with placemen loyal to his mother and Mortimer. He could trust only a few of the servants around him, notably his secretary Richard Bury and his close friend William Montagu, through whom he smuggled a message to tell Pope John XXII that only letters bearing the words pater sancte(‘holy father’) in Edward’s own handwriting could be read as genuine communication from the king rather than dictation by those who controlled his government – clearly, now, against his will.
And Edward was right to be wary. In early 1330, a year after the failure of Lancaster’s rebellion, Isabella and Mortimer resolved to flush out any last traces of disloyalty. The king’s uncle of Kent had recovered enough of his position after his flirtation with Lancaster to be entrusted in February 1330 with the task of escorting Edward’s Queen Philippa – a small, pregnant figure decked out in the finest gold tissue – to her coronation in Westminster Abbey. But a month later Kent was arrested on suspicion of treason. Hedging and vacillation were by this stage second nature to Kent; while in Paris with Isabella before the invasion of 1326, the earl had covered his back by sending covert, panic-tinged messages to England to reassure the king that, despite all appearances to the contrary, he had done nothing that might damage his royal brother’s interests. He might now have felt that he had been lucky to escape his entanglement with Lancaster with his head and his estates intact, and yet he chafed at his loss of influence at court, and the dominance of the vauntingly arrogant Mortimer.
So when secret information reached him that the wild rumours were true – that the dead king Edward was still alive, and a prisoner in the Dorset castle of Corfe – he had responded with alacrity, setting in train plans for his brother’s rescue and a counterrevolution to restore him to the throne. But the messages came from agents of Mortimer and Isabella, sent to entrap him; and, having enthusiastically demonstrated his willingness to plot their downfall, Kent was brought before parliament at Winchester in March 1330 to be condemned by letters written in his own hand. On 19 March, this son, brother and uncle of kings, a foolish, vain man brought down by political ambition unmatched by political judgement, was led, shivering in his shirt, out of the gate of Winchester Castle to a scaffold erected beyond its walls. There he stood for long, agonising hours, until the daylight began to fade. Disillusion with the regime that had condemned him was now so widespread and so profound that no one could be found who was willing to spill such royal blood. At last a felon held in the castle’s jail agreed to wield the axe in return for a stay on his own execution; and when Kent’s severed head was raised, the crowd stood silent and stony-faced.
The circle was almost complete. It seemed, now, that Isabella and Mortimer were unassailable, their limitless power brutally demonstrated in the killing of the king’s uncle. But, as Edward II and Despenser had found after the execution of another royal earl, power based on fear, suspicion and ruthless self-enrichment might prove ephemeral when confronted with a challenge that could call on deep wells of legitimacy and loyalty. Edward II had been overwhelmed by the force of his wife’s betrayal; now it was Isabella’s turn to experience the sudden shock of rejection by the son in whose name she had deposed his father.
By the autumn of 1330, the earl of Kent’s lands had been parcelled out to supporters of the regime – many of them, with damning predictability, to Mortimer’s son and heir. Watches were set on the ports in case of invasion by those allies of the earl who had fled abroad, and everywhere Mortimer’s spies multiplied. By the time a parliament was called to meet at Nottingham in October the fog of rumour and suspicion curled so densely about the court that, when Mortimer and Isabella took up residence in the castle there, perched on a sandstone outcrop above the city, they did so with guards redoubled around them. The seventeen-year-old king, as always, was in their company, but that was no reason to be anything less than watchful. On 18 October Mortimer summoned a number of Edward’s household knights, the young king’s friend William Montagu first among them, to be interrogated on information that they were plotting against the regime. Mortimer’s spies had served him well, in all but one crucial respect: Montagu and his friends were not plotting against the king, but with him.
This time Mortimer, though clearly suspicious, was persuaded to let them go, and once their questioning was over they made much play of their public departure from the city. The following night, however, they returned without warning or fanfare, silent this time in the darkness. They gathered, Montagu and two dozen others, at the foot of the castle mound, well away from the torchlit gates and armed guards who both protected the king and imprisoned him. Montagu and his men felt their way into a hidden passageway carved into the rock, a secret which they, but not the garrison above, had learned from a sympathetic townsman. Carefully, with weapons in hand, they made their way up the pitch-dark tunnel, a steeply curving slope punctuated with rough stairs, until they emerged into the heart of the castle. As they had arranged, Edward was waiting to meet them. Mortimer and Isabella were surrounded before they knew what was happening, the queen forced back into her bedchamber, Mortimer struggling in shock and fury to draw his sword against his grim-faced assailants, but quickly disarmed and overpowered. After three years, the rule of Isabella and her consort was over.
Mortimer’s fate was not in doubt. The scene had been played out too many times before in the bloodstained years that had been Edward II’s legacy to his kingdom: there was the proclamation of evident guilt – in this case, the murder of the last king and the usurpation of the power of the present one; the sentence of a traitor’s death; then, on 29 November, the scaffold at Tyburn. Just a year earlier, Roger Mortimer had styled himself King Arthur at a tournament of extraordinary magnificence where he sat crowned at a Round Table with Isabella playing Guinevere at his side. Now he was stripped of his clothes and strung up from the gallows, a man hanged like a common thief with a lack of ceremony that mocked the hollow vanity of his former pretensions.
For Isabella, Edward’s coolly executed coup had a very different outcome. She was, after all, his honoured mother, who had been deplorably diverted from her royal duty to her husband and son by Mortimer’s traitorous machinations. For several weeks she was kept under guard at Berkhamsted Castle until it became clear whether or not she would accept this revisionist account of her actions – but whatever doubt there might have been was quickly dispelled. Isabella had always been a realist, and she had learned at all costs to protect her own interests ever since the day she had stood at the altar as an uncherished bride twenty-two years earlier. We must assume that she mourned for Mortimer, given the evident intensity of their partnership, but she took care to leave no public traces of her grief. By Christmas she had rejoined her son’s court at Windsor Castle, where she remained for the next two years under the most luxurious house arrest Edward could provide. She had formally surrendered her vast estates to her son within a week of Mortimer’s death, and a month later she received in return a grant of £3,000 a year to provide for what would be a sumptuously appointed retirement. From 1332 her freedom of movement was gradually restored, and she spent much of her time at Castle Rising – a formidable keep set on top of mighty earthworks a few miles from the sea in north-western Norfolk – where she maintained a stately household and entertained royal visits from her son and his growing family.
She had discovered, in violent and painful fashion, that the will to power could be its own undoing. But perhaps this royal retirement was vindication of a different kind. The deference and luxury that were her due were now hers without question, and she could claim – albeit by a tortuous route – an extraordinary legacy in the person of her son. Edward had inherited his mother’s intelligence, but, more than that, whether by nature or traumatic nurture, he had developed the far-sighted political vision that both his parents had lacked. He understood that the power of his crown lay in law, not tyranny; in loyalty, not fear; and in commanding the consent of his realm, not cowing it into compliance. And by the time Isabella came to face her last illness in 1358, Edward was thirty years into a reign that would earn him an epitaph as ‘the flower of kings past, the pattern for kings to come’.
By then, the bloody events of her political life were distant memories for the sixty-three-year-old queen. That she had found some form of peace with that past seems a likely reading of her request that she should be buried in the crimson, yellow-lined mantle in which she had been married half a century earlier, with the silver vase containing her husband’s heart interred above her own. And perhaps that reconciliation had more to do with the queenship her marriage had brought her than it did with the man she had married. Isabella had fought for her rights as an anointed queen of England. She had shown – albeit for a brief moment – that female leadership could represent the legitimacy of the crown forcefully enough to depose an anointed king. And her political legacy to her son lay most powerfully in the lessons he learned about the nature of that legitimacy as he watched her do so.
There was one more way in which Isabella continued to shape English politics even after she had accepted her enforced retreat into gilded retirement. Nearly two centuries earlier, Henry II had succeeded to the throne of England as the heir of his remarkable mother Matilda. His descendant Edward III – who had now come into premature possession of the same crown through the intervention of another formidable woman – was hardly likely, therefore, to accept the wholesale exclusion of the female line that had been adopted across the Channel as an expedient rationalisation for the accession of Isabella’s brothers as kings of France. When her last surviving brother, Charles, who had done so much to support her rebellion against her husband, died in 1328, he too left only infant daughters, and the great lords of France hailed his cousin Philippe of Valois as their king. But Edward made it his life’s work to press the claim to the French throne that he inherited through his mother. Not only had Isabella overthrown a king; she had charted England’s course into a war that would last for a hundred years.