On the night of 1 August 1323 the Tower of London came silently to life. The Tower was full of Edward’s political prisoners, and chief among them were two men from the Marches: Roger Mortimer of Chirk, by now in his mid-sixties, and his nephew, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, who was twenty-six. These one-time contrariants had been imprisoned since surrendering to the Crown in the midst of the civil war. They had both been tried and condemned to death. Both had thus far escaped execution of their sentence. But with an unpredictable king in the grip of the two Despensers, who bore the whole Mortimer dynasty a grudge, they could not hope to live for much longer.
Their time in the Tower had been ruinous. The Mortimers had been helpless as their lands in Wales and the Marches were parcelled up and awarded to their enemies. But they were determined not to suffer indefinitely. During the months of their imprisonment they crafted a plan for one of them to escape. As darkness fell on the night of 1 August, the deputy constable of the Tower, Gerard d’Alspaye, slipped a sleeping draught into the drinks of the constable and the Mortimers’ guards. Then he hurried to Roger Mortimer of Wigmore’s cell, unlocked the door and led the knight through the castle kitchens and on to the Tower’s southern wall.
Once at the top of the wall, the two men unfurled a rope ladder. It rolled quietly down against the sheer stone towards the river Thames, directly below them, where several co-conspirators were waiting in a boat. Mortimer and d’Alspaye slid down the ladder, climbed into their escape vessel, rowed across to the south bank of the river and escaped on horseback to the south coast of England. Mortimer put to sea at Porchester and within days had evaded recapture and taken refuge in France.
It was a brilliantly realized escape, which threw Edward’s court into a state of paranoia. An inveterate opponent of the king had fled from what was supposed to be the greatest fortress in the capital. Rumours reached the royal household that this was part of a wider conspiracy to seize royal castles, and even to send assassins to murder Edward and the Despensers. From the autumn of 1323 onwards, spies across the Continent began to send reports back of plots and invasion attempts involving Mortimer. A devastating chain of events had begun.
Mortimer’s escape was a vital element in a political and diplomatic crisis that escalated steadily between 1323 and 1326. Driven by individual ambition and wider geopolitics, the crisis unfurled in a region that had caused little trouble to Edward since his accession: Gascony.
When Mortimer fled to France, he was welcomed to the country by a new king. Charles IV had succeeded his brother Philip V in January 1322. Like all new French kings he was eager to show the kings of England that he regarded their claims to the duchy of Gascony with a suspicion that bordered on hostility. When a violent dispute broke out over a French bastide (fortified town) built on English territory at St-Sardos in the Agenais, Charles used the ensuing quarrel as a pretext for an invasion of Gascony. The earls of Kent and Pembroke were sent to protest, and dismissed haughtily. Charles wanted to discomfit the English as much as possible. In August 1324 he moved thousands of troops to the borders of the duchy and began to besiege its major towns. Almost in a blink, England and France were once again at war.
Back in England the outbreak of war put Edward in a painful bind that exposed precisely why his aggressive, divisive approach to kingship could only lead to ruin. He could not trust his own subjects to obey his rule, for other than a small band of handsomely rewarded favourites, he had never given them reason to do so. He could – and did – arrest all Frenchmen in England and confiscate all lands held by French citizens, including the queen. But when he began to make plans to lead an army to Gascony in person, he faced a dilemma. Were he to leave England with an invasion force he would have to take with him most of the officials and magnates who were still loyal to him, and trust in the regency of his eleven-year-old son and heir Edward, earl of Chester. That would leave England highly vulnerable to plots, rebellions and invasion. If he left the Despensers behind him to keep order he risked losing them the way he had lost Gaveston. Furthermore, he feared rumours of Roger Mortimer’s plotting on the Continent, and imagined that either he or the Despensers could be kidnapped if they happened across Mortimer’s agents overseas.
Rather than cross the Channel, Edward sent more envoys to negotiate for peace. In the first instance he sent an embassy led by the bishops of Winchester and Norwich, the earl of Richmond and Henry de Beaumont. But in March 1325, a diplomat of altogether higher status was sent: Queen Isabella.
Both of Isabella’s two eldest brothers had been crowned king of France: Charles IV was the third and last. She had long enjoyed close links with her Capetian family, despite her involvement in the Tour de Nesle scandal of 1314, in which Charles’s wife Blanche had been imprisoned for adultery and her lover beaten to death in public. If anyone could appeal to Charles to end his aggression, reasoned Edward and the Despensers, it was Isabella.
It would prove to be a fatal decision. Although she had been staunchly loyal to her husband during the convulsions of his reign, the queen had been rewarded, in the end, with little more than the same humiliation that she had suffered as a teenager, when she was sidelined by Gaveston at her own coronation. She suffered roundly at Edward and Despenser’s hands when war broke out: her lands had been confiscated, her servants exiled or imprisoned, and her maintenance payments from the king were both reduced and diverted via the younger Despenser. (She had written furiously to her brother Charles, complaining that she was treated like a maidservant.) On top of that, Despenser’s wife Eleanor de Clare was detailed to spy on Isabella’s correspondence. The queen had borne all this with public dignity, but she was clearly simmering with rage. Yet now the king and his ally decided that she was to be of some use to them after all, exploiting her relationship with the French king to try and dig her husband out of a situation in which he risked losing the last of the Plantagenet lands on the Continent.
Isabella was, unsurprisingly, very pleased to leave England. ‘The queen departed very joyfully,’ wrote the author of The Life of Edward II. She was ‘pleased in fact to visit her native land and her relatives, pleased to leave the company of some whom she did not like’. This was something of an understatement. Isabella could not leave the Despensers and her weak, unpleasant husband quickly enough.
A joyful reunion between the English queen and her brother took place at the end of March, and Isabella made her ceremonial entry into Paris on 1 April, dressed in striking fashion: a black riding habit, chequered black boots and a golden headdress. Her negotiating skills proved no more sovereign than any other English diplomat’s, but she did her duty and extended the fragile truce that held in Gascony.
With her work done she ought to have returned to England, but Isabella had no such intention. Rather, she spent the summer of 1325 in France, touring her brother’s properties and waiting for her husband to make his long-awaited journey to France to pay homage to the French king at Beauvais.
She waited and waited. But Edward would not and could not be tempted from England. Nothing had changed. He could neither leave his kingdom, nor be separated from the Despensers. And the prospect, in any case, of a demeaning ceremony at which Edward had to humble himself before the younger French king was hardly appealing on its own terms. Instead, the two sides compromised. It was agreed that the young Edward should be sent in his father’s place. He would be granted Ponthieu and Aquitaine in his own right, then travel to France to do homage to the king in person.
This was a solution that looked very good to Edward II. But it looked even better to Isabella. Her son, now twelve years old, arrived in mid-September 1325, having been appointed duke of Aquitaine by his father, and did homage for his new lands in a ceremony at Vincennes.
Here, finally, was a solution to the Gascon problem. With the crisis satisfactorily ended, Isabella and her son were expected to make a prompt return to England. Instead of coming home, however, Isabella and Edward adamantly refused to return to the troubled kingdom. In late November Isabella wrote to her husband explaining with venom the hatred and contempt in which she held the Despensers, and stating in bald terms her refusal to return. The author of The Life of Edward II reported the contents of her letter.
‘I feel that marriage is a joining of a man and woman holding fast to the practice of a life together,’ wrote Isabella. ‘[But] someone has come between my husband and myself and is trying to break the bond; I declare that I will not return until this intruder is removed, but discarding my marriage garment, shall put on the robes of widowhood and mourning until I am avenged of this Pharisee.’
And so she did. The queen stayed in France, with her brother’s satisfied support, taunting the king of England who had so abused her and drawing around her a coalition of disaffected English nobles and prelates. True to her word, she symbolized her disgust with and alienation from her husband by wearing the black robes of mourning and a veil over her face. It was a powerful political statement of the injustice she had suffered and the rotten condition of the country from which she had exiled herself.
In England, Edward raged. He wrote furious letters to his wife, and instructed all of the leading bishops of England to do the same, telling Isabella that her absence roused fears of a French invasion of England, and accusing her of wishing ‘to destroy a people so devoted to you for the hatred of one man’. But Isabella’s heart was unmoved. She held the heir to the Plantagenet realm, and she was protected by her brother, the king of France. And she was about to make her extraordinary position even more distressing to her husband. As 1325 drew to a close, Isabella committed what to Edward was the ultimate sacrilege. She delivered the sum of all the English king’s fears, and allied herself with the fugitive Roger Mortimer of Wigmore.