Authors: Lisa Hilton
CHAPTER 11
ISABELLA OF FRANCE
‘The Iron Virago’
E
dward II was fond of low company. ‘Shunning the company of nobles, he sought the society of jesters, singers, actors, carriage drivers, diggers, oarsmen, sailors and the practitioners of other mechanical arts,’ sniffed Ranulph Higden. Though as Prince of Wales he had shown official support for the aristocratic pursuit of tourneying, taking personal care over the supplies and equipment of his jousters, his own leisure interests were startlingly eccentric for a king. He enjoyed digging ditches, rowing and swimming, even in winter, none of which were acceptable pastimes for a man of his status. In 1325, he entertained a bargemaster, Adam Cogg, in his own room for four days, and ten sailors and two carpenters dined with him on other occasions. Whether Edward took a sexual interest in the fourteenth-century equivalent of ‘rough trade’ can be neither proved nor disproved, but his contemporaries certainly linked his unsuccessful kingship with his love of ‘rustic pursuits’,
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which they attributed to sexual degeneracy. This explanation may, however, have provided a rationale for what might have been an even more shocking idea: that the King’s rejection of social convention was a matter of taste. Here was true heresy. Enjoying the company of a peasant was far more disturbing than buggering a favourite.
With the exception of his passion for music and mechanicals, Edward was ‘conventional and perhaps even rather dull’.
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He had inherited his love of music from his father, who always had his four harpists in attendance, but the young King preferred the newer, bowed instruments, such as the Welsh crowth, and sent his own minstrel, Robert the Rymer, to Shrewsbury Abbey to take lessons from a player there. It was suggested that Edward’s promotion of his clerk, Walter Reynolds, for whom he asked his stepmother Queen Marguerite to secure a post, and who eventually rose to become archbishop of Canterbury, was encouraged by Reynolds’
skill in devising the musical entertainments he so enjoyed. They corresponded about music, in one letter discussing two young trumpeters, a kettle-drummer named Franklin and a trumpeter called Jankin, who remained some years in royal service. Edward liked the organ, giving one as a present to his sister Mary and installing another at his favourite residence of Langley, where it was repaired with fifteen pounds of tin in preparation for a visit from his father and Queen Marguerite. He shared an enthusiasm for horses with his stepmother, receiving a present of foals from her, and even his enemies conceded he had a beautiful seat, though this did not compensate in the eyes of the peers for his sorry lack of military skills, the proper objective of the accomplished rider.
Edward was not, in fact, as ‘uncourtly’ as the chroniclers suggested. Recent research has confirmed that as well as being interested in music, he loved hawking and hunting with his greyhounds, and his early military career was worthy, if not brilliant. It was with hindsight, after Bannockburn and the deposition, that contemporary writers emphasised his inappropriate pleasures. Nevertheless, there was nothing innovatory about his court, nothing notable in terms of literary, artistic or architectural achievement, and the elegant manners to which his culture paid lip service, at least, was nowhere in evidence in his entourage, who were more given to gambling and drinking themselves into nightly stupors than to the practice of knightly courtesy. What place was there for Queen Isabella in Edward’s world?
During the ascendancy of Gaveston, Edward had largely ignored his young wife. That he fulfilled the minimal requirements of a husband is shown by the birth of Prince Edward, followed by John of Eltham in 1316, Eleanor in 1318 and Joan in 1321, but Edward took little more than a conventional interest in his queen’s life and the English court could not compare with the home Isabella had left. Paris, where she had spent much of her childhood, was the intellectual capital of Europe, and her mother, Queen Jeanne, had been a notable artistic patron, founding the College de Navarre as part of the city’s celebrated university. Isabella employed a minstrel, Walter, and collected painted panels of ‘Lombard work’; she had a library which included eight religious books, among them a French Apocalypse, eight volumes of romances and a collection of Arthurian legends bound in white leather, as well as the exquisite ‘Isabella Psalter’ which may have been a wedding gift. These surviving possessions suggest the young queen was literate (or least that she could read; it is not known whether she was able to write) and cultivated, and certainly had nothing in common with the companions her husband appeared to prefer. For a
while after Gaveston’s murder, Isabella had enjoyed a warmer relationship with her husband, but in the year of her aunt Marguerite’s death it became clear to her that Edward’s tendency to blind passion for his favourites had merely been in abeyance. His vulnerability to ‘evil counsellors’ and his ‘unseemly works and occupations’
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were leading to another crisis. The King’s curious tastes, so alien to his elegant, educated French princess, were the first manifestations of a wilful political madness that Isabella could not share and which eventually she would be driven to destroy.
Roger Mortimer, the eighth Baron Wigmore, was a very different man from Edward. Knighted alongside the then Prince of Wales, and Gaveston, in 1306, he was married to Joan de Grenville, one of the ladies appointed to serve Isabella when she first arrived in England as Queen. Mortimer’s lands lay on the Welsh marches, between Wigmore and Ludlow, and his family had a history of service to the crown, in reflection of which Mortimer had carried the royal robes at Edward’s coronation. From 1306 he had served as the royal governor in Ireland, and had also lent his considerable military skills to campaigns in Wales and the marches. Mortimer was a dynamic commander with a taste for luxurious living, accumulating rare furniture and carpets, plate and gorgeous clothes of silk and velvet. In the years of his ascendancy, he treated himself to silk sheets and the finest armour from Milan and Germany, but though he shared an appreciation of beautiful things with his master, there was nothing effete about him. He was a hard man, physically courageous and dominating, and it is unsurprising that Isabella, spurned and neglected for so long, eventually found him irresistible.
But how did the Queen, whose conduct had been irreproachable for nearly twenty years, come to be involved in an openly adulterous relationship which scandalised the whole of Europe? Her behaviour left such a ‘dark stain on the annals of female royalty’
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that her Prim nineteenth-century biographer Agnes Strickland could barely bring herself to write about it. Harridan, unnatural woman — she-wolf, even — are some of the epithets used by contemporaries and subsequent writers to describe the erstwhile virtuous French Princess who ruled England with her lover for three years. Much of Isabella’s conduct is inexcusable, but it is not inexplicable, and it may be argued that her actions, driven by desperate circumstances, ultimately protected and even saved the English crown during a period of great vulnerability, a state of affairs created in large part by the behaviour of the King himself.
In August 1318, Edward agreed to the treaty of Leake, which bound him to observe the Ordinances under a council of seventeen headed by
the Earl of Pembroke. Included on this council were the Despensers, father and son, both able men with a particular talent for finance, but whose hold over the king was by now becoming a source of concern. Hugh Despenser the younger had joined Edward’s household when he was Prince of Wales, and Edward favoured him enough to marry him to his niece Eleanor de Clare, the sister of Gaveston’s wife Margaret and one of the most eligible heiresses in England. In 1313, three years after the death of Eleanor’s father, the Earl of Gloucester, at Bannockburn, his inheritance was finally divided between his three daughters, Margaret, Eleanor and Elizabeth, but not equally: Edward permitted Hugh to take Glamorgan, the lion’s share of the lands, and it was not long before Hugh was scheming to get his hands on the whole Gloucester inheritance. Edward had no objection to this, as he was by now apparently as besotted by Hugh as he had been by Piers Gaveston. Despenser had become ‘the King of England’s right eye and his chief counsellor against the earls and barons, but an eyesore to the rest of the kingdom. His every desire became a royal command.’
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Hugh’s current desire was the lordship of Gower, which was the property of John Mowbray, and in 1320 he persuaded Edward to confiscate Mowbray’s lands and add them to his own affinity of Glamorgan.
The lordships of the Welsh marches had traditionally enjoyed a unique position in English law. Marcher lords governed their lands as mini-kingdoms, exempt from many of the obligations of their peers, in return for keeping the peace on the ever-fractious border. John Mowbray had followed tradition when he acquired Gower, which he had bought from his father-in-law without obtaining formal permission, but in order to justify the confiscation, Hugh claimed he had acted illegally. When Mowbray objected, Edward sent men to take Gower for Hugh by force. Outraged by what they perceived as an attack on their rights, a group of Marchers, which included Roger Mortimer, ‘made a sworn conspiracy with the Earl of Lancaster to banish, persecute, condemn and perpetually disinherit the Despensers, father and son’.
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Mortimer was at Westminster in November 1320 to try to make Edward see reason but, as he had done over Gaveston, Edward dithered, and by the spring, he was preparing for war.
Whatever her own feelings about the Despensers may have been, Isabella, like her husband, was not prepared to countenance any attack on the royal prerogative. Neither she nor Edward seemed to understand that the Marchers were staunch royalists, and that in many respects the situation mirrored that of the Gaveston debacle, with Edward’s heedless promotion
of his favourite making unwilling enemies of those most bound to support him. Isabella demonstrated her commitment to Edward by handing Marlborough Castle to Hugh Despenser the elder, though she could not join her husband on his campaign to meet the Marchers as she was approaching the delivery of her last child, Joan, who was born in the Tower of London that July. As Isabella waited out the last months of her pregnancy, the Marcher forces, commanded by Mortimer, moved steadily eastwards, taking Newport, Cardiff, Caerphilly and laying waste to much of Gloucestershire. By the time the Queen’s baby was born (a more than usually miserable experience since her apartments in the Tower had been neglected and the roof leaked on to her bed), the Marchers were moving on London. On 29 July, the citizens of London closed the city gates. Mortimer’s response was to encircle the walls, and when Despenser sailed up and down the Thames in show of bravado, the ‘contrariants’ threatened to torch every ward of the city between Charing Cross and Westminster. Edward was anxious enough to hand over the custody of the Great Seal to Isabella and two royal clerks, but when Parliament met he refused to listen to the contrariants’ demands that the Despensers be banished. Edward’s obduracy had brought the country to the very brink of war, but the Earl of Pembroke now suggested that Isabella might make a gesture of intercession, through which Edward could back down without too great a loss of dignity. The Queen obliged by going through the ceremony of pleading on her knees with the King ‘for the peoples’ sake’.
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Her action here was not an emotional appeal but a political formula, an example of the ritualisation of the intercession dynamic. Edward was not moved to change his mind out of affection for his wife, rather Isabella’s performance was a device, understood by all, by which he could
appear
to change it as a gesture of mercy. On 19 August, the Despensers were duly proscribed and disinherited and a pardon was issued to the contrariants at Westminster the following day. Hugh Despenser made the best of his exile by becoming a pirate, a ‘sea-monster’ as the
Vita
describes him, but again, as in the case of Gaveston, Edward was determined to restore his favourite and have his revenge on those who had dared to challenge his power. This time, he made direct use of Isabella.
Bartholomew of Badlesmere was a substantial Kentish baron who had until recently been among Edward’s supporters (indeed, on Queen Marguerite’s death, Leeds Castle in Kent, which she had held in dower and which had for some years been promised to Isabella, had been cavalierly granted to him), but who had now declared for the contrariants, possibly as a result of the marriage of his daughter to Mortimer’s son. In
October, Queen Isabella set off with an armed escort on a ‘pilgrimage’ taking an unusual route to Canterbury. She stopped near Leeds Castle and had her men inform Lady Badlesmere that she wished to rest there for the night. Lord Badlesmere was away, which presumably Isabella knew, and his wife refused to admit her, probably because, as a rebel, Badlesmere had equipped all his castles for defence and his treasure was being stored at Leeds. Isabella then advanced on the castle and ordered her escort to force an entry, at which Lady Badlesmere had her archers fire upon them, killing six members of the Queen’s party. If Isabella had been fully party to the plot, she now behaved disingenuously writing to Edward to request that Lady Badlesmere be punished for the murder of her servants and the insult to her as Queen. Edward responded by sending Pembroke to besiege Leeds. The real point, of course, was not to seek retribution for Lady Badlesmere’s impertinence but to provoke the contrariants, and Mortimer fell neatly into the trap by setting off to relieve the castle. This was an open gesture of defiance against Edward. By 27 October Mortimer was at Kingston-on-Thames, where Pembroke wisely met him to dissuade him from advancing any further, and four days later the castle fell. Lady Badlesmere and her children, including Mortimer’s daughter-in-law, were lucky. They ended up in the Tower. The constable of Leeds and thirteen of his garrison were hanged in front of the castle gates on Edward’s orders.