Authors: Lisa Hilton
Whereas the King’s affairs and the affairs of the realm have been directed until now to the damage and dishonour of him and his realm and to the impoverishment of his people … he wills that all men shall know that he will henceforth govern his people according to right and reason as befits his royal dignity and that the affairs that concern him and the estate of the realm shall be directed by the common counsel of the magnates of the realm and in no otherwise …
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Mortimer was hanged for treason on 29 November. Isabella was sent to Berkhamsted after his arrest, but by Christmas she had joined Edward and Philippa at Windsor, where she spent the next two years under house arrest. Edward supplied her with money and permitted her to retain a household, but it was quite clear that she was in disgrace. The loathing she had provoked posed a difficulty for Edward. His French ambitions depended on his mother’s respectability, and he had been urged by the Pope not to expose her shame. The recasting of Isabella’s relationship with Mortimer is connected with Edward’s need to rehabilitate his father’s memory, and sheds much light on the vexed question of Edward II’s alleged homosexuality.
The ‘anal rape’ narrative of Edward II’s death gruesomely highlights the way in which his downfall was sexualised, and links his deposition with the atavistic correspondence of sexual potency and kingship in which the sexuality of the queen also played a potentially destabilising part.
Just as later representations of Isabella were ‘demonised’ to rehabilitate Edward,
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so, in the 1320s, Edward had to be presented as sexually degenerate to provide grounds for her rule. In her reply to the bishops in 1325, Isabella had emphasised that ‘someone has come between my husband and myself. In the same way as Eleanor of Aquitaine cast doubt on Louis of France’s virility to justify a divorce that was in fact desired by both parties, Isabella may have chosen to sexualise her dissatisfaction with Edward in order to rationalise not only the deposition, but her refusal to return to Edward afterwards despite the pleas of the Pope and the bishops. The fact that Edward was presented as a ‘political sodomite’
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does not or course exclude the possibility that he did engage in anal sex, but it is notable that the first reference to such acts was made in the sermon preached by Isabella’s ally Bishop Orleton in 1326, in which he referred to Edward as ‘a tyrant and a sodomite’. That Edward was obsessed with Piers Gaveston and loved him, in whatever manner, seems beyond doubt, but the specific nature of his relationship with Gaveston, and, by implication, Despenser and others, may be ‘entirely and exclusively due to the sermons which Adam of Orleton preached in 1326’.
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Of the fourteen chronicles that suggest Edward was murdered, eight specifically mention the story of the red-hot horn or poker (though the Bridlington writer claims not to believe it), and of these eight, all were written after 1333.
However Edward II died — and in fact, if only for reasons of practicality and discretion, it is unlikely to have been at the end of an iron brand — the fictionalised versions of his demise may be interpreted in a variety of ways that illustrate contemporary anxieties about the role Isabella played in his deposition. Some scholars have seen the anal rape narrative as a grisly poetic justice, playing on Orleton’s unsubstantiated accusations of sodomy to fashion a fitting end for a degenerate King and to shore up Isabella’s legitimacy as a ruler. However, given the timing of the story’s emergence and its source in the northern and Midlands writers (no London chronicler mentions it), it may also be interpreted as evidence of Isabella’s unspeakable, unfeminine cruelty in the context of opposition to her governance from 1329. In this light, the account serves as both an explanation of and a balance to Edward’s deposition, preserving the royal dignity to some extent by affirming that the office of King could be attacked only by extreme, inhuman violence, but also locating the King’s vulnerability in his own unmasculine practices. Thus, even if the story is read as anti-Isabella, it still confirms Edward’s unfitness to rule.
After Mortimer’s downfall, Edward’s death took on different connotations. Edward III was faced with the need to play down his mother’s
role in the scandal and simultaneously recover the ‘masculinity’ of his office. The heterosexual normality of the royal marriage therefore had to be emphasised, but if his father was to be portrayed as sinned against, it left Isabella as the sinner. The solution was to represent Isabella in a more traditional feminine role, as a weak woman led astray by a vile seducer: ‘To suggest, as was now done in 1330, that Mortimer had prevented a reconciliation between the royal partners was to ascribe to him the dominant role in the adulterous affair.’
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The records of Mortimer’s trial are discreet about his relationship with Isabella, but one of the charges states: ‘The said Roger falsely and maliciously sowed discord between the father of our Lord King and the Queen his companion … Wherefore by this cause and other subtleties, the Queen remained absent from her said Lord, to the great dishonour of the King and of his mother.’ By representing Mortimer as the guilty party and Isabella as his victim, the Queen was confined to an appropriately submissive role, and the regency conflict reconfigured as an assertion of the King’s rights over a rebellious male subject.
Some writers accept that a Norman French poem, known as the ‘Song’ or ‘Lament’ of King Edward, was in fact written by Edward II himself during his captivity. In conventional language, the poem reflects on the cruelty of fortune:
The chiefest sorrow of my state
Springs from Isabelle the fair
She that I loved but now must hate
I held her true, now faithless she;
Steeped in deceit, my deadly foe
Brings naught but black despair to me
And all my joy she turns to woe.
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Adversity can produce surprising capacities, but it is debatable, to put it mildly, that the ditch-digging King became a poet in Berkeley Castle. The ‘Lament’ may more plausibly be seen as a product of the court of Edward III. While the poem emphasises Isabella’s guilt, it also casts Edward in the role of the courtly — heterosexual — lover, and may be interpreted as ‘a kind of admonition to Isabella to accept her subordinate status following the coup of 1330’.
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After her release from Windsor, Isabella lived mainly at Castle Rising, which had been built by Adeliza of Louvain’s widower William d’Aubigne
around 1150, and which Isabella had bought from the widow of Robert de Montalt, one of her supporters during the deposition, in 1327. Initially, she spent little time in London, though she travelled between Eltham and Havering and was present in the capital on a few special occasions. She continued to correspond with Edward about her lands, and in January 1344 was at Westminster on estate business. In November that year she was at the Tower to welcome Edward back from France. Relations with Edward were cordial: they celebrated his birthday together at least twice, once at Castle Rising (Isabella called in eight carpenters to make ready for the visit), and in 1341 Edward ordered a daily Mass to be said for his mother in the chapel at Leeds Castle. Isabella participated in family events such as the Mass for the Round Table feast at Windsor in 1344 and in 1354 she kept Christmas at Berkhamsted with her eldest grandson, Edward, known as the Black Prince.
Isabella’s household accounts show that at the end of her life, far from being marginalised, she had been restored to a prestigious diplomatic position. In September 1356 the Black Prince defeated the French at Poitiers, and the French King, Jean, was taken prisoner. He remained in English custody, on the most chivalrous of terms, until 1358. One consequence of Poitiers was the release of King David of Scotland, who returned home after more than ten years with his mistress, Kate Mortimer, in tow. His Queen, Edward III’s sister Joan, was so disgusted that she returned to England, where Edward gave her the castle of Hertford in 1357 and an allowance of 200 pounds. Hertford had been in Isabella’s possession since 1327, and she had stayed at the castle in the 1340s. Now she and Joan were able to spend much time there together.
In October 1357, Isabella left Hertford on pilgrimage for Canterbury, and on her return entertained Edward, Queen Philippa and the Black Prince at her new house in London. In November and December, she received many high-ranking members of King Jean’s entourage, including Jacques de Bourbon, Comte de la Marche, the Comte de Tancarville, Hankyn de Oreby, the marshal of France, Arnaud d’Audrehem, and the seneschal of Toulouse, Regnaut d’Aubigny. She also lent the French King two romances,
The Holy Grail
and, appropriately,
Sir Lancelot
. The royal family kept Christmas at Marlborough, but Isabella remained at home, nearer to London, and the accounts show she kept the feast in style. Her role at this point appears to have been as a mediator in the peace process and the discussions over Jean’s ransom. In February, the two main negotiators on these issues in Parliament were her guests Tancarville and Audrehem. While Parliament was in session, Edward and Philippa were
staying at King’s Langley, and Isabella’s base at Hertford conveniently placed her halfway between the King and Westminster. In April, Tancarville was Isabella’s guest in London, and on the nineteenth she dined with the chancellor and the treasurer, then held a meeting with Edward and the Black Prince. They all joined the Queen and the royal children for what was the most significant diplomatic and cultural event of the decade, the Garter Feast on St George’s Day.
Isabella was not present for the signing of the eventual peace treaty, in which Jean agreed to a ransom of four million gold crowns and recognised Edward III’s claims to Isabella’s dower counties of Ponthieu and Montreuil, as well as Gascony, Guisnes and Calais. Isabella heard the news in a letter from Queen Philippa on 10 May, and was so delighted she rewarded the messenger with ten crowns. She and Philippa had a celebratory dinner together the next day and on 13 May she entertained the King of France. Isabella’s status may have been ‘subordinate’, but it was certainly not negligible. Nor does it show any sign of mental instability. Nineteenth-century writers depicted a deranged Isabella, howling her sins from the battlements of Castle Rising, but though physician’s bills from the first phase of a confinement at Windsor suggest she may have had some sort of nervous collapse after Mortimer’s execution, her subsequent activities are very much those of the active, intelligent woman she had always been.
This is not to suggest that Isabella was not penitent. As she grew older, her household acounts show that she had not relinquished her passion for jewellery or given up music or wine, but she was increasingly attentive to spiritual matters. She undertook frequent pilgrimages, including a last visit to Canterbury with her daughter Queen Joan a few months before her death, acquired religious relics, such as a ring which belonged to St Dunstan, and developed her family association with the Franciscans. In 1344, the Pope granted her request for the admission of William of Pudding Norton and twelve other priests to benefices without examination. The fact that the pontiff was prepared to accept Isabella’s judgement indicates that her public pieties had gone some way to restoring her reputation.
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During her period of government with Mortimer, her extravagance and rapacity had been infamous; now, under the guidance of the Franciscan rule, she took a greater interest in the poor. Thirteen poor people were fed each day at her expense and three more on Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays, while she distributed alms to 150 on holy days of obligation and maintained a number of ‘poor scholars’ at Oxford University. Fourteen paupers were paid twopence a day to pray over her corpse as it lay in state and five were given robes and money by her son to pray for her soul.
Isabella’s most distinctive act of contrition was her request to be laid to rest in her wedding cloak alongside a silver casket containing Edward ll’s heart. Her funeral procession through London three months after her death, on 27 November 1358, was accorded all the dignity befitting a widowed queen. She was interred at Greyfrairs, where Marguerite of France already lay and where Queen Joan of Scotland would be buried, as would Edward III’s daughter Isabella. The Dowager Queen’s tomb therefore became honoured element of a commemorative site for Plantagenet women. Although her reputation has until recently been almost universally maligned, her queenship was in many ways a success. She deposed a dreadful king and replaced him with an exceptional one. She has been blamed for starting the Hundred Years War, but it was not her vanity that prosecuted it, and it should not be forgotten that the English pursuit of the French crown into the fifteenth century produced Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, which, fairly or not, have contributed more to the reputation of English kings and the English identity than the forgotten corpses of its battlefields. Perhaps Isabella was a bad woman, but she was rather a magnificent queen.
CHAPTER 12
PHILIPPA OF HAINAULT
‘Good angel of Edward and of England’
P
hilippa of Hainault’s queenship had a difficult beginning. Her arrival in London in December 1327 was marred by the mood in the wake of Edward II’s funeral, which had taken place four days earlier, and her wedding, held at the unfinished, leaking cathedral church of St William, York, on 30 January 1328, was a shabby affair, redeemed only by the bride’s money. The Londoners had put on a good show, presenting her with a valuable gift of plate during her four days’ residence at Ely Place, Holborn, but her long, icyjourney north was a lonely one for the young woman who had left her family far away in Valenciennes. Since Lent intervened, Edward and Philippa did not fully celebrate, or consummate, their marriage until Easter, and although Philippa’s new mother-in-law staged three weeks of festivities, the presence at the wedding of a hundred Scots who had come to negotiate the ‘shameful peace’ was a reminder that her adopted country was deeply troubled and divided and that her husband was still the instrument of his adulterous mother and her lover.