Authors: Lisa Hilton
In November, Isabella had communicated with the Londoners proposing that they elect a new mayor to replace the unpopular ‘royalist’ Hamo de Chigwell. The man they had chosen was one Richard de Bethune, an old crony of Mortimer’s. One theory about Mortimer’s escape from the Tower in 1323 has Bethune among the prominent
Londoners who helped him. Certainly Bethune was Mortimer’s man and it would be interesting to know how big a part Mortimer’s influence played in his election. Isabella and Mortimer recognised that the support of London would be imperative if they wished to push through the deposition of the anointed king, and Bethune was ideally placed to help them paint a gloss of legality over the solemn pantomime of the January Parliament. The consent of the capital would suffice to present their actions as an expression of the common will, and the clamour for the deposition has been described as having ‘a distinct London accent’.
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in return, the oath sworn at the Guildhall included a promise to respect the liberties of the city, and in March 1327 it was granted a charter exempting citizens from the military service whose obligations had provoked such resentment of Edward II.
After the oath-swearing, the sitting resumed at Westminster. Archbishop Reynolds, the clerk for whom Edward had once petitioned a prebend, preached a stirring sermon, then declared that Edward II was deposed, to cries of enthusiasm. A list of Articles of Deposition was read aloud, then Prince Edward was led in and presented as the new King. Queen Isabella was in floods of tears, whether of joy or of sorrow who could say? Several chronicles now concur that the prospective Edward III, misunderstanding his mother’s sobs, threw a spanner in the works by refusing to accept the crown in his father’s lifetime without his consent. The writers in question were working some time after the events, and though it was obviously preferable that Edward III should be seen to have acted with absolute probity, there is no more reason to suppose that he refused the crown than there is to accept that his imprisoned father refused to come to Parliament. Isabella and Mortimer were making up procedure as they went along. There was no post-Conquest pattern for the deposition of an English king, as no one had ever done it. The processions, deputations, ceremonies and oath-swearings were little more than improvisations, and the roles of the players — sorrowing wife, reluctant prince — were part of the masquerade.
At Kenilworth on 20 January 1327, Edward was informed by Bishop Orleton that unless he accepted the ‘invitation’ to renounce the throne in recognition of the charges in the Articles of Deposition, he risked his son’s inheritance. It was even hinted that Mortimer himself might be invited to take the crown (though the Earl of Lancaster might have had something to say about that), but again, the reports of such persuasions may have been made to give Edward a noble motive for renunciation. Dressed in black, sobbing and finally fainting, Edward gave his consent. The reign of
his son officially began five days later. On 30 January, at York, Edward III was married, as his mother had arranged, to the Count of Hainault’s daughter Philippa, who had arrived in England in December, and on 1 February he was crowned at Westminster.
However one judges Isabella’s methods, and the degree of Mortimer’s involvement in her achievements, she had managed to do something practically unthinkable: to depose an anointed king. Her journey from passive, obedient daughter to dutiful wife to vengeful lover required an extraordinary personal transformation, and whether she is celebrated or condemned, she remains exceptional. She had outsmarted the Despensers and succeeded in escaping to France, she had employed diplomacy and raised an invading army, pursued a campaign and seen her son crowned while his father lived. Throughout she had remained alert to the importance of public opinion and had attempted as far as possible to control her ‘image’ so that she would be perceived sympathetically. If history has been very hard on Isabella, recent attempts to rehabilitate her reputation have veered too far towards the positive. Just because she was brave, intelligent and resourceful does not mean that she could not be devious, ruthless and cruel. And now she was faced with one final problem. What was to be done with her husband?
The answer forms one of the most notorious episodes in English history. In September 1327, Edward II died in Berkeley Castle. Of two contemporary accounts, the
Annales Paulini
is terse: ‘The same year, on the Eve of St Matthew … King Edward … died in Berkeley Castle where he was held in custody.’
Adam Murimuth gives more detail: ‘Afterwards on 22nd September 1327 died Edward King of England in Berkeley Castle, in which as was said before, he was committed to prison or detained unwillingly. And although many abbots, priors, knights and burgesses of Bristol and Gloucester were called to view the body whole and so looked at it superficially, nevertheless it was commonly said that by the orders of John Maltravers and Thomas Gourney he was craftily killed.’
These two reports initiated a deluge of speculation, incrimination and downright fabrication, including the famous detail of Edward being murdered by having a heated poker inserted into his anus. By the time Geoffrey le Baker was writing a generation later, the poker had become ‘a plumber’s iron, heated red hot [applied] through a horn leading to the privy part of the bowel’. This is the version immortalised by Christopher Marlowe in his glorious tragedy
Edward II
. Edward’s death has given rise to a parlour game of historical supposition, and at least two theories that
propose he did not in fact die at Berkeley have received serious scholarly attention since the last quarter of the nineteenth century
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Neither of these, however, proves conclusively that he was not killed at Berkeley, and scholars have also been attentive to the way in which reports of his death were produced, disseminated and manipulated for changing political purposes. In Isabella’s lifetime and that of her son, all chroniclers (however lurid and inaccurate their accounts) agreed that the King was dead, and that he died at Berkeley. Ordinary people certainly believed he was dead, so much so that a cult grew up around his tomb at Gloucester and proved so popular that it financed the rebuilding of the south transept and persisted until the sixteenth century.
In the spring of 1328, Isabelle and Mortimer negotiated the treaty of Northampton with the Scots. With Edward II disposed of they were now in a position to reconfigure England’s role in international politics, and they reasoned that a settlement with Scotland was a necessary step. In February, Isabella’s last surviving brother, Charles IV, had died, leaving Queen Jeanne pregnant. If the child were a girl, the English argued that legally the French crown should go to Edward III. The French Queen did indeed give birth to a daughter that April. In Parliament in May, Isabella and Mortimer argued that peace with Scotland was intrinsic to Edward’s claim to France, but the treaty, signed earlier in the month, was loathed by both the new King and his people. The independence of Scotland was recognised and the border restored to its limits under Alexander III, which left a group of English peers, known as the ‘Disinherited’, deprived of the land they had held on the marches. Robert the Bruce agreed to pay 20,000 marks compensation (which Isabella and Mortimer promptly spent) and to the marriage of his son David to Isabella’s six-year-old daughter Joan. Edward III was so appalled by this ‘shameful peace’ that he refused to attend the wedding, which took place on 16 July. He also baulked at returning the Stone of Scone, one of the provisions of the treaty, and popular feeling was reflected in the riot that ensued when the abbot of Westminster, on Isabella’s orders, tried to give it up.
On 14 April an assembly of the twelve peers of France elected Philip de Valois, Isabella’s cousin, as their King. The Plantagenet claim to the French crown has often been seen as an artifice, a mere prop to territorial aggression, but Edward’s legal position in 1328 is worth considering, not only in relation to the conflict which became known as the Hundred Years War, but in terms of his relationship with his mother and his actions in 1330. The notion of Salic law, whereby women were excluded from
dynastic succession, was not quite as entrenched in French practice in the fourteenth century as is commonly assumed; indeed, the first reference by a Capetian writer to its application in any matter other than the transfer of private property occurs in 1413, and the two precedents for its employment were as recent as 1316 and 1322, on the deaths of Isabella’s brothers Louis X and Philip V. The English argued that Edward III’s standing after Charles IV’s death was unique, that because this was the first occasion on which there was a proximate male heir to France whose entitlement derived from a woman, the assemblies that had produced the statutes of 1316 and 1322 were irrelevant, since they had not anticipated a cognate (i.e. maternal family) claim. This created a question which would become highly relevant to Edward III at the end of his own life. Was the claim of the son of a younger brother stronger than that of a grandson of an elder brother? In 1340, when Edward assumed the title of King of France, the English favoured the latter argument. Yet in 1328, when Edward was still a minor, he was in no position to exercise his right. Moreover, the eminently sensible decision of the French peers to choose an experienced Frenchman over an English boy was also affected by the compromising circumstances of Edward’s mother. Internationally, Edward was perceived as the pawn of a pair of adulterers, a horribly humiliating role to inhabit. Added to the shame of Northampton, the election of Philip VI was another confirmation that Edward would have no control over his kingdom as long as Mortimer controlled his mother.
The relative discretion among contemporary sources on the relationship between Mortimer and Isabella does not mean that Edward was unaware of it. Between 1328 and 1330, the young King seems to have been desperately trying to balance his affection for his mother with the need to maintain some stability in the realm, but Mortimer’s ambition was making this increasingly impossible. Mortimer was growing ever more unpopular, and Isabella found herself in a similar situation to that of her late husband, obliged to aggrandise her favourite to prevent his enemies from bringing him down, and heaping more disapproval on herself in the process. Mortimer was ‘in such glory and honour that it was without all comrison’.
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He sat in Edward’s presence, walked and rode beside, instead of respectfully behind him, and had become ‘so proud and high that he held no Lord of the realm his equal’.
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Mortimer thoroughly alienated his former ally, Henry, Earl of Lancaster, the theoretical head of the regency council, who, along with Edward’s uncles Norfolk and Kent, was horrified at his increasing power. In London, the previously loyal citizens had re-elected their former mayor Hamo de Chigwell, and in a meeting at the
Guildhall in September 1328, Isabella’s extravagance was denounced and there were calls for Mortimer to be banished from court to his own estates. Mortimer’s response to this was to have himself declared Earl of March by an increasingly bullied Edward, and it was once more rumoured that he himself had designs on the crown. In 1330, according to Froissart, it was whispered that the Dowager Queen was pregnant with her lover’s child. Scandal and discord were making Edward’s position shamefully untenable.
The King’s patience collapsed when Mortimer plotted the destruction of his uncle, the Earl of Kent. Mortimer later confessed to the ‘sting’, in which Kent, who had never shown himself to be terribly bright, was approached by two friars and informed that Edward II was alive and living in secrecy at Corfe Castle. (The fact that Corfe was in the custody of Edward’s former keeper Maltravers, and therefore possibly the least likely place for the deposed King to hide, did not stop Kent, or many subsequent writers, for that matter, from believing this tale.) Kent wrote a letter to his half-brother, reassuring him that he was planning to restore him to the throne, and gave it to two of the castle custodians, who had been instructed to send it at once to Mortimer. Kent was arrested for treason on 10 March 1330, and both Isabella and Mortimer cajoled and threatened Edward into signing his death warrant. Kent went to the scaffold at Winchester four days later. Such was the outrage at his execution that the public hangman refused to do his duty, and Edward I’s son was left shivering in his shirt until a felon could be found to dispatch him.
The Earl of Lancaster had been absent from politics since January 1329 when, after a series of attempts to undermine Mortimer, he had led his own men against royal forces in Leicestershire and Warwickshire. Lancaster had submitted to the King at Bedford and withdrawn from court, though the huge fine imposed against the retention of his lands had never been paid. Lancaster had been aware of Kent’s noble, if misguided conspiracy, but had not incriminated himself, though he, too, was working to overthrow Mortimer. He visited Edward on the birth of his first child in July 1330, and made another appearance for the Nottingham Parliament in October the same year. The Earl was not personally involved in the event that took place at Nottingham castle on 19 October, but twelve of the twenty-one men who helped Edward that night were his close associates, and it was Lancaster who publicly announced their success.
Edward had been planning to move against Mortimer since the summer. His close friend Sir William Montagu had advised him that it was ‘better to eat dog than be eaten by the dog’ and evidence from the wardrobe
accounts shows that Edward acquired a set of matching aketon jackets, usually worn for tournaments, for himself and Montagu. Another batch was ordered later for supporters who had posed as members of Montagu’s retinue, and at court these jackets became a very visible emblem of the ‘team’ which had collaborated with Edward in his liberation. On the evening of 19 October, Edward crept out of his room and opened the door to Montagu, who fought his way into the Dowager Queen’s chamber, where Isabella and Mortimer were meeting with three ministers. To the delight of one chronicler, the chancellor, Bishop Burghersh, tried to make his escape down the privy shaft. Three men were killed, and Mortimer was seized by Sir John de Moleyns. Edward stayed outside the room, as it was vital that his life was safe; it was important, too, that Mortimer’s should be preserved so he could stand trial. Isabella knew her son was nearby, though she could not see him, and she tried to rush for the door, crying, ‘Fair son, have pity on noble Mortimer,’ but was pushed inside as Mortimer was led away. At dawn, Lancaster proclaimed: