Authors: Lisa Hilton
Mortimer now moved north to join his ally the Earl of Lancaster, but in December the Marchers were forced to return to their own lands, which were threatened both by the Welsh, who had taken advantage of the situation to begin raiding, and the King, who was gathering an army at Cirencester. While Isabella kept Christmas at Langley, Edward, accompanied by his half-brothers Edmund and Thomas, led his troops north along the bank of the Severn, crossing at Shrewsbury in mid-January. Assailed from both sides, the Marcher resistance crumbled and Mortimer’s men began to desert. By 22 January Mortimer and his nephew were in chains, and the remaining contrariant castles were quickly taken. For once, Edward had proved himself a shrewd and dynamic commander, but he had displayed these qualities with a total disregard for the law and the need for consensus among his magnates. In the background, Archbishop Reynolds had been working to overturn the Despensers’ sentence, and by mid-January father and son were back in England, though Edward did not issue their formal recall for some weeks. The only lord with any power left to object to the reinstatement was Lancaster and, bolstered by his uncharacteristic success against Mortimer, Edward now officially named the Earl as a rebel and pursued him north.
Again, Isabella played her part. She ordered provisions for the castles of York and Carlisle and, according to the Reading chronicler, wrote to the sheriffs of Westmoreland and Yorkshire asking them to move troops to the south to halt Lancaster who, with the royal army behind him, was making for Scotland. Lancaster had been involved in negotiations with Robert the Bruce and his messenger had been granted two safe-conducts by the Scots. This treachery, discovered when Edward’s forces raided his abandoned castle of Tutbury, played perfectly into the King’s hands.
The period known as the ‘tyranny’ of Edward II began with the battle of Boroughbridge on 16 March 1322. After a day’s fighting, Lancaster surrendered and was tried as a traitor in his own castle of Pontefract. Edward had waited a long time to avenge the death of Gaveston, and Lancaster was sentenced to the full, horrific penalty of hanging, drawing and quartering before Edward conceded that, out of respect for his rank, he might be beheaded. Even so, to execute a great earl set a dangerous precedent. Lancaster died, contemptuously forced to kneel in the direction of Scotland, on 22 March, and in the following days Edward suppressed any remaining rebels with punishments so severe that no one was tempted to rise against him. Over a hundred people were executed, banished or imprisoned, and the Despensers profited eagerly from fines and sequestered lands. In early May, at York, where Isabella had joined him, Edward had the satisfaction of hearing the hated ordinances finally repealed. ‘The harshness of the King has increased so much,’ commented the
Vita Edwardi Secundi
, ‘that no one … dares to cross his will. The nobles of the realm are terrified by threats and penalties … whatever pleases the King, though lacking in reason, has the force of law.’ Edward was now free to lavish favour on the Despensers, and made Despenser the elder Earl of Winchester, but increasingly it was Hugh the younger who was seen as dominating the King. Indeed, it was Hugh, people said, who was the true governor of the country.
As Hugh became more and more powerful, Isabella slipped from what narrow place she held in Edward’s affections. Robert of Reading claimed that the King’s ‘illicit and sinful unions’ caused him to reject the Queen, and it does appear that sexual relations between them ceased after 1321, as Joan was Isabella’s last child. But it cannot be inferred from this that Edward and Hugh were having a sexual relationship. The King’s accounts for this period show no evidence that Edward was anything other than heterosexual in his tastes, and if he was having an affair, it could equally well have been with Hugh’s wife, his niece Eleanor de Clare. Incestuous adultery was certainly ‘sinful and illicit’, and Eleanor had always been
treated very generously by Edward. In 1319, he ordered medicines for her when she was ill, and sugar to make sweets; later he gave her a present of caged goldfinches and, along with money for her expenses, a significant present of one hundred marks. Historians keen to see Edward as homosexual have interpreted these gifts as Edward ‘buying off’ his lover’s wife, but the alternative explanation, that Hugh was prepared to countenance the relationship in order to maintain his hold over the King, is just as plausible. It should also be remembered that Edward had an illegitimate son, Adam, who fought (and died) with him on the Scottish campaign in 1322. Obviously homosexual men can and do have children, but the fact that Edward had willingly entered into a heterosexual relationship, as opposed to confining himself to doing his duty with Isabella, suggests that he had been attracted to women when younger, and perhaps still was. Maybe he was attracted to both men and women. The nature of Edward’s sexuality is far from clear; what is relevant, as has been noted, is the way in which it was perceived and the implications drawn by contemporaries with regard to its effect on his kingship. When the time came, Isabella would be able to play on the sympathy of those who sensed there was something unsavoury about the relationship between Edward and Hugh, and she manipulated her position as a slighted wife to great effect.
It was not long after Boroughbridge that Isabella began to feel herself persecuted by Hugh Despenser. His plans for the future may have included his own wife, but there was no place for the King’s. Isabella was both inconvenient and irrelevant, and as soon as his enemies were destroyed, Hugh allowed her to feel it. He stopped bothering to pay her the 200 pounds a year he owed her for the farm of Bristol, and the two castles she had made over during the contrariant uprising were not returned. Worse was to come. In a curious parallel to Gaveston’s flight in 1313, Isabella once again found herself abandoned at Tynemouth Priory while Edward escaped with his favourite. The King had pompously marched into Scotland in August 1322, but by October it was plain that this time he would not even be able to raise a battle, as Bruce’s forces had so devastated the countryside that the only available provision was a single elderly cow. Edward recrossed the border to muster more troops and supplies, and was with Despenser at Rievaulx monastery when the news came that the Scots had advanced as far as nearby Northallerton. Isabella and Eleanor de Clare were at Tynemouth, and their husbands rushed off to York, leaving them at the mercy of Bruce’s advancing army. Edward wrote Isabella two shoddy letters, assuring her weakly that he was sending men to protect her, but the Scots were closer than the relief troops, and the Queen of England
had no one to defend her but the knights of her household. Swiftly, a ship was commandeered and, after a dreadful voyage, during which one of her ladies drowned, Isabella landed at Scarborough. While Edward and Hugh were running away, Bruce had seized the royal treasure abandoned by Edward at Rievaulx and concluded his campaign by defeating the English at Byland. Not only did Isabella have to bear the shame of her husband’s cowardice and incompetence, but it had been proved once more that Edward cared more for his favourite than for his wife.
When war broke out with France in 1324, Hugh’s attack on Isabella’s resources continued. Philip V had died in 1322, to be succeeded by Isabella’s youngest brother, Charles IV. Charles immediately requested that the English monarch come to France to pay homage, but Edward used the situation in his kingdom as an excuse, and Charles agreed to postpone the ceremony for two years. When the time came, fighting had erupted in the Agenais, and in the face of Edward’s continued refusal to perform the homage, Charles threatened to invade Gascony. When Edward sent his younger half-brother, Edmund, Earl of Kent, to Gascony as his lieutenant, Kent suffered numerous defeats by the French and was gulled into signing a truce which left much of the territory in Charles’s hands. Isabella’s position as a foreigner was used against her, and her estates were sequestered (as Queen Marguerite’s had been in 1317) but, unlike Marguerite, Isabella received no compensation. Edward had ceased to pay certain debts to his wife that spring, and now her allowance was reduced to just 1,000 marks annually. Parliament then ordered the expulsion of all French subjects, which meant Isabella was deprived of members of her household, some of whom had accompanied her to England and had been with her ever since her marriage. Twenty-seven of her servants who dared to remain were imprisoned. In October, Edward diverted her queens-gold to his own household. Isabella was now dependent on Despenser’s goodwill for her maintenance, as officially payments to her were now to be managed by the exchequer, which in practice meant that the Despensers doled out her allowance as they saw fit.
Isabella wrote angrily to her brother, describing her condition as no better than that of a maidservant, but Edward was deaf to any remonstrance. Smarting over the invasion of Gascony, he had another reason to resent Charles: the French King was harbouring England’s most wanted man, Roger Mortimer. In August 1323, Mortimer had made an adventurous escape from captivity in the Tower, involving drugged wine, a secret passage, rope ladders and a hidden boat. To explain her brother’s willingness to harbour the rebel, it has been suggested that Isabella was in some
way privy to Mortimer’s plan, but this is to overstate the inferences that may be drawn from the evidence. Although Charles and Edward were not yet officially at war, relations were contentious, and Charles had every reason to keep a rebel baron about him as a potentially useful card to play in the future. (Agnes Strickland’s claim that Isabella and Mortimer were already lovers at this point and that it was the Queen who provided the sleeping draught used to overpower Mortimer’s guards is a good story, but nonsense.)
As England and France prepared to fight, Pope John XXII suggested that Isabella go to her brother to attempt to find a peaceful resolution. The Pope was aware of the attacks Despenser had made on Isabella’s prestige, and had written a stern letter condemning him for sowing discord between princes. Isabella was ‘pleased to visit her native land and her relatives, delighted to leave the company of some whom she did not like’,
8
and when she departed for her brother’s court in March 1325, it was already believed by many that she would not return as long as Hugh held sway in England. That the French embassy marked the beginning of Isabella’s political prominence is attested to by the
Vita Edwardi Secundi
. Interestingly, having been almost entirely absent for three quarters of the chronicle, from this period Isabella gradually moves towards centre stage and becomes the chief protagonist, dramatically holding England’s fate in her hands.
Froissart gives a moving, if somewhat embroidered, account of Isabella’s reunion with her brother, who refused to allow her to kneel to him and ‘took great pity on her’ for ‘all the injuries and felonies committed by Sir Hugh’. Charles welcomed his sister with every courtesy, and on 1 April the English Queen made a formal entry into Paris, fashionably dressed in a voluminous black velvet riding habit, black-and-white checked boots and a spun-gold headdress. The peace treaty signed in June was not a notable triumph for Isabella, as her attempts to encourage Charles to reach a settlement were no more successful than those of any other envoy, but he did agree, it was said out of affection for his sister, to prolong the truce until August. Officially, her task was now accomplished, and there was nothing to prevent her from going home — indeed, the English exchequer stopped paying her considerable expenses in mid-June — but Isabella clearly had no intention of returning to her degraded conditions under Despenser. Instead she spent the summer touring the royal properties in the He de France, including St Germain, Fontamebleau and Châteauneuf. Possibly she expected to join Edward, for the payment of the overdue homage had been implicit in the terms of the extended truce, and it had been decided
that the ceremony would take place at Beauvais, but Edward, too, was prevaricating. The rapacious Despensers were now so unpopular that they feared losing the King’s protection if he left England — in his absence ‘they would not know where to live safely’
9
— and they persuaded him to make yet another excuse, this time that he had fallen ill and could not travel.
The previous year, Charles had suggested that Prince Edward might be sent to perform the homage in his father’s place, and now Isabella realised that she had a means of redressing the balance of power against the Despensers. She held a dinner for John de Stratford, the bishop of Winchester, who then put her suggestion to Charles and, with his agreement, returned to England with a safe-conduct for the Prince. Pleased that her plan enabled the King to remain in England, the favourites were stupid enough to fall for it. Though other magnates voiced misgivings, the Despensers’ word ruled, and the boy was duly invested as Duke of Aquitaine, to allow him to perform the homage, before sailing for France on 12 September. Mother and son were reunited at Boulogne and, despite the King’s strict instructions that they were to depart for England as soon as the ceremony was over, Edward was never to see his wife again.
On the Prince’s arrival, Englishmen who objected to the Despenser regime began to coalesce around Isabella into a rebel party, among them SirJohn Maltravers, a survivor ofBoroughbridge, Lord Ros, the Earl of Richmond, Henry de Beaumont, Lord Cromwell, Richard de Bury and the King’s half-brother Edmund of Kent. Initially, Isabella insisted that her only quarrel was with the Despensers. In November, a furious Edward ordered her home, but Isabella wrote to him declaring: ‘I feel that marriage is a joining of a man and a woman, maintaining the undivided habit of life, and that someone has come between my husband and myself trying to break this bond; I protest that I will not return until this intruder is removed, but, discarding my marriage garment, shall assume the robes of widowhood and mourning until I am avenged of this Pharisee.’
10
As good as her word, the formerly fashionable Queen now adopted plain black garments and a modest veil. It was an extremely public manifestation of her self-declared status as a wronged wife, designed to call attention to her predicament and engender sympathy. Isabella was a far shrewder manipulator of public opinion than her husband. In casting herself in the role of a weak woman in need of protection, she appealed to the chivalrous ethos of her supporters and emphasised her own quasi-nun-like humility and virtue. Showing an awareness of the language of diplomacy, she even threatened Edward, claiming that she and her sympathisers had no wish to do anything that would be prejudicial to him and that any action they
found it necessary to take would pertain solely to Hugh’s destruction. Essentially, she was warning Edward that she could raise the forces to invade if he did not get rid of the Despensers.