Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England

by Alison Weir

  There is no evidence that the Prince replied to this letter. Later evidence, which will be examined in due course, strongly suggests that the young Edward did indeed suffer from a guilty conscience concerning his father “all the days of [his] life.” Yet it is clear that he also felt chivalrously protective toward his mother. He hated the Despensers as much as she did,166 doubtless on her account, and probably also because of the shameful hold they had over the King. The poor boy was at an impressionable age and must have felt outraged at the disruption the Despensers had caused in his own life and in the world he inhabited. Yet he did not like Mortimer either and perhaps felt that, in keeping company with him, he was betraying his father. All in all, it was an impossible situation for a boy of thirteen to cope with.

  At the same time as he wrote to his son, Edward also sent further letters of appeal to the Bishop of Beauvais and to Charles IV. The latter, which reeks of desperation, sought to apportion to Charles some of the blame for Isabella’s behavior and called upon him to display solidarity with a brother monarch. It read:

  Most dear and beloved brother, we would wish to remind you that we have at different times signified to you by our letters how improperly your sister, our wife, has conducted herself in withdrawing from us and refusing to return at our command, while she so notoriously has attached to her company, and consorts with, our traitor and mortal enemy, the Mortimer, and our other enemies there, and also makes Edward, our son and heir, an adherent of the same, our enemy, to our great shame, and that of everyone of her blood. And if you wish her well, you ought, both for your own honour and ours, to have these things duly redressed.

  Edward here begs Charles once again to send back Prince Edward,

  who is of too tender an age to guide and govern himself, and therefore ought to be under our paternal care.

  But these things are as nothing; it is the herding of our said wife and son with our traitors and mortal enemies that notoriously continues, insomuch that the said traitor Mortimer was carried in the train of our said son publicly to Paris at the solemnity of the coronation of our very dear sister, the Queen of France, at the Pentecost last past, to our great shame, and in despite of us.

  Dearest brother, you ought to feel for us, and so should all men of our estate, for much we are, and much we have been, grieved at the shameful despites and great injury which we have so long endured. Nay, verily, brother-in-law, we cannot bear it longer.

  The Holy Spirit have charge of you.167

  Frantic now to have his son back and the threat of invasion removed, the King sent copies of these letters to the Pope, advising him that the Queen was sharing her lodgings with Mortimer and beseeching him to intervene with King Charles on his behalf. He also complained of Richmond, who, he said, had been consorting with and aiding his enemies.168

  From now on, in order to save face and avoid the humiliating admission that the Queen had left him, Edward and his advisers maintained the pretense that the French King was detaining Isabella against her will.169 But around this time, Edward granted some of the Queen’s lands in Cornwall to Bishop Stapledon,170 a sure sign that he no longer expected to be reconciled with her. Gawain Cordier’s pension was cut off,171 and on 28 June, the King was present when Isabella’s treasury in the Tower was broken into and ordered that money be taken from it for his own use.172

  In July, in order to preempt his enemies, and as an expression of disapproval at Charles’s harboring of Isabella, Edward declared war on France. On the fifth, his arrayers in East Anglia were ordered to recruit three thousand men to man the fleet on the east coast.173 On the sixth and the eighteenth, he issued a command to his fleet to intercept and attack French vessels in the Channel,174 and on the twenty-first, he arranged for a surveyor of French goods to be appointed in every shire.175 Several orders were issued for the arrest of any Frenchman found in England.176 At the end of the month, the King established a system of array in every county and commanded that his castles in Wales be refortified.177 Mortimer’s Welsh enemy Rhys ap Gruffydd was ordered to raise troops against him.178

  In England, the Despensers were now more unpopular than ever, and there were vicious attacks on their adherents,179 yet the Younger Hugh was rising ever higher in the King’s favor: “the influence of Sir Hugh le Despenser, and the affection the King felt for him, increased every day. He had such a hold on the King that the whole country was amazed. Nor could anything be done at court without the agreement of Sir Hugh. And he behaved cruelly and wickedly, for which he was well hated. But nobody dared to mention or raise any complaint.”180

  Edward’s favor extended also to Despenser’s wife, Eleanor de Clare, whom Knighton describes as being treated like a queen. William Cappellani, a chronicler writing in Hainault, claims that Eleanor was now Edward’s mistress, which echoes a similar assertion relating to 1322–23 in the somewhat unreliable Chronographia Regum Francorum. The King’s household accounts for 1326 show that he was visiting Eleanor frequently and sending her gifts of jewels and golden chaffinches.181 These rumors emanate only from hostile and uncorroborated Flemish sources. Furthermore, not only was Eleanor clearly Edward’s favored niece, but the period of her ascendancy corresponds exactly to that of her husband, who was the dominant influence in the King’s life. It is only to be expected, therefore, that, as a tribute to Hugh, and out of his own natural affection, Edward should treat Hugh’s wife with excessive consideration and accord her disproportionate importance. And it is also easy to see how such treatment could have been misconstrued by those who wished to believe ill of him. The alternative scenario is that Edward was involved in a weird sexual triangle with Hugh and Eleanor and had been for some time. If so, it is strange that there was no gossip about it in the English chronicles and that Isabella and Mortimer made no political capital out of it, as they were to do with every other aspect of Despenser’s life.

  Information about Isabella’s activities in France had been steadily filtering through into England, where many people had been feeling “disturbed” that the Queen was “delaying and keeping her son in France against his father’s wishes. Some maintained they were being held against their will, others argued that the Queen had been seduced by the illicit embraces of Roger Mortimer and that she had no wish to return, preferring to stay with him and others who had been exiled from England and who were now in France.”182

  News of the Queen’s alliance with Mortimer gave encouragement to those who were heartily sick of Despenser’s regime. “All the barons and thoughtful people in the country saw that it was not to be endured, and that they could no longer tolerate his wicked, outrageous behaviour.” Isabella was soon secretly corresponding with many of these disaffected persons; she had already secured the support of several nobles and bishops, prominent among whom were Lancaster and Norfolk,183 and had also sent agents to England to foment unrest. In June, the King panicked when he was informed that “secret conventions” were being held in East Anglia,184 which was Norfolk’s territorial power base. By the summer, thanks largely to the covert efforts of Mortimer’s friend Bishop Orleton, there had emerged in England a rapidly expanding Queen’s party that was committed to the overthrow not only of the favorites but also of the King.

  Around this time, Isabella received an urgent communication from some barons of England, who had been “debating amongst themselves secretly and decided to send for her and ask her to return. They wrote and put it to her that, if she could by any means contrive to raise an armed force, even a thousand men, and if she would bring her son and all her company to England, they would rally to her side and place him on the throne to govern under her guidance. For they could not, and would not, endure any longer the general disorder and the misdeeds of the King, which were all inspired by the advice of Sir Hugh and his followers.”185

  Upon reading this, Isabella must have become more than ever convinced of the rightness of her cause and justified in moving against a weak and tyrannical regime: in so doing, she would be liberating an oppressed
and resentful people from tyranny and herself from a hateful marriage and the persecution of the vengeful Despenser. Armed with her convictions, she consulted with King Charles, “who willingly listened to her and advised her to press on boldly, for he would help her and lend her as many men as she wanted, and he would also lend her all the silver and gold she needed.”186 But Charles’s offer cannot have been more than halfhearted: he had no desire to fight a war with England on two fronts, for he was heavily committed in Gascony and was already uncomfortable about sheltering his sister now that her relationship with Mortimer was becoming notorious.

  Unconscious of Charles’s dwindling support, Isabella continued to “make what provision she could for the future. And she secretly sought the help of the greatest barons in France whom she trusted most, and who would voluntarily support her—the ones, that is, whom she thought she could depend on. Then she sent a message to the barons in England who had communicated with her. But this could not be kept secret from Sir Hugh le Despenser,” and there would be repercussions for Isabella.187

  In July, it was rumored in France that, on the advice of the Despensers, Edward had outlawed the Queen and the Prince as rebels and traitors and had them proclaimed as such in London, declaring that, if they returned to England now, they faced execution. Another rumor claimed that the King had ordered Richmond to murder Isabella and her son, but that God had restrained him from doing so. There was no foundation for these stories, but it is true that the King had warned that, if Mortimer returned to England, he faced certain death.188 On top of this, Isabella was soon to receive the crushing news that the Pope had abandoned her; Edward’s appeal had moved him, and given the scandal that the Queen’s affair with Mortimer was causing, he decided to make a stand in the interests of orthodox morality. To this end, he wrote to Charles IV, censoring him for harboring adulterers and commanding him, on pain of excommunication, not to countenance their sin nor offer them shelter any longer.

  The arrival of the Pope’s edict prompted Charles to take decisive action. There is some evidence that his sympathy for his sister had been waning for some time now, and he may well have been reaching the conclusion that events were spiraling out of control as a result of his support of Isabella. First, his conscience may have begun troubling him after he read Edward II’s letter. Not only was Isabella’s continued presence in France prejudicing any hope of a settlement with England over Gascony, but Charles also probably held strong personal views on queens who committed adultery; his first wife had been imprisoned and divorced for that crime, and he must have felt deeply uncomfortable about Isabella’s relationship with Mortimer.189

  Second, according to Froissart, Despenser, aware that Isabella’s dealings with the English dissidents and exiles spelled disaster for himself, had used bribes (sent through a wine merchant) to subvert the loyalty of Charles IV’s advisers to her and tried to persuade them to force her to return to England; he had even written to Charles himself, warning him that the Queen was plotting treason against her lord. This was one of the accusations later laid against Despenser by Isabella.190 That Edward was a party to Despenser’s bribes is suggested by an angry complaint he made to the Count of Hainault late in May, which possibly concerned the recent capture of a ship carrying Despenser’s silver to France.191 Most chroniclers believed that Despenser managed to persuade Charles IV to withdraw his support from Isabella and send her back to England; Froissart says that, “in a short space, the King of France and all his privy council were as cold to help the Queen in her voyage as they had before great desire to do it.”192 However, Charles’s later behavior suggests that he was playing a far more complex game.

  Third, Charles had perhaps learned how two of Mortimer’s agents had been arrested in England and had confessed to being involved in a plot to murder Edward II and the Despensers by means of witchcraft: they had already paid a magician in Coventry to stick pins in waxen images of their intended victims;193 nor was this the first time that Mortimer had sent assassins to England.

  And now the Pope had spoken out against Isabella.

  “When King Charles had read these letters he was greatly disturbed” and “withdrew his countenance from his sister,” ordering “that she be made acquainted with their contents, for he had held no conversation with her for a long time.” Then, abruptly, he summoned her to him and told her, “as definitely and clearly as he could, to stay quiet and abandon her project. When the Queen heard this, she was naturally amazed and astounded, and she saw that the King was now disposed against her, for nothing that she could say would alter his decision or help her case. And so she left him, sadly and sorrowfully, and returned to her lodging. But she did not abandon her plans, and the King was angry that she ignored his words,” and sent a message “commanding her to leave his kingdom immediately, or he would make her leave it with shame.

  “When the Queen received this stern and contemptuous message from her brother, she was greatly troubled.” Her turmoil increased when she heard that Charles had decreed “that whoever should speak in behalf of his sister, the Queen of England, should forfeit his lands and be banished from the realm. When the Queen heard this, she was sadder than before, and with reason. She did not know what to think or do, because everything was, and had been for so long, against her, and those who should have come to her help were failing her, through wicked advice. She became desperate, she had no comfort, and she did not know what to do or what would become of her. And she often prayed and beseeched God to give her help and guidance.”194

  Immediately, nearly all Isabella’s French supporters abandoned her. The only one to stay faithful was “her dear cousin, Robert of Artois,” who came secretly “in the middle of the night to warn Isabella of the peril in which she stood,” telling her “in all truth, that if she did not behave discreetly, the King her brother would have her sent back to her husband, and her son with her, because it did not please the King of France that she should stay away from her husband. At this, the Queen was more appalled than ever, because she would rather have been dead and dismembered than fall again into the power of her husband and Sir Hugh.”

  Robert “strongly urged her to enter the imperial territories and to throw herself upon the protection of some of the independent German princes, especially William, Count of Hainault, whose consort was Isabella’s cousin,” and who had shown himself so friendly to Mortimer. “So she decided to leave France and go into Hainault to see Count William and his brother, Sir John, who were the most honourable knights of the highest reputation. She hoped to find in them every comfort and good advice.” The Queen “informed her people of her decision, ordered her baggage to be made ready as secretly as possible and, having paid for everything she had had, she left her lodging as quickly and quietly as she could, with her son, her husband’s brother, the Earl of Kent (at this time decidedly her partisan), Roger Mortimer and other English knights.”195

  It may be that there had been some prior arrangement for Isabella to seek refuge in Hainault if her remaining in France became untenable. It had been agreed by now that Hainault would be the springboard for the projected invasion, and as soon as they had left Paris, Mortimer went straight there, while Isabella, accompanied by Kent, made for her dower lands of Ponthieu, where she began raising money.196 She was obviously aware that, after leaving Ponthieu, she would be welcome in Hainault; furthermore, her presence would assist Mortimer in his preparations for the invasion.

  Some chroniclers assert that Isabella was warned by Richmond to flee from France after the Earl received a letter from King Edward in which the latter “privily” urged that both the Queen and Prince Edward should be “slain.” In view of Edward’s anxiety for his son, this claim sounds absurd, although it is quite possible that threats were made at this time against the Queen’s life. We have seen that, even before she left England, she had been warned that the Despensers wanted her dead, and she was later to assert that the King himself had threatened to kill her.

  Strangely, Cha
rles IV made no attempt to pursue Isabella, nor did he denounce her to Edward II or divulge her plans or her whereabouts. Instead, he deliberately built up an invasion fleet along the Norman coast in order to divert Edward from the real threat that was to come from Hainault;197 we may be sure that Charles knew all about the revived alliance between Count William and the Queen and would have been aware therefore that his sister would not lack for practical support. He need consequently do very little himself on her behalf.

  It would appear, therefore, that after being seen to heed the Pope’s commandments and deflecting both excommunication and scandal, Charles continued secretly to lend Isabella his support. His measures against her were probably a bluff to appease the Pope and mislead Edward II, and it was probably he who sent Robert of Artois to suggest that she now go to Hainault.198 And we may infer from what happened soon afterward that she was left in no doubt as to the role Charles was playing and that they remained secretly in communication with each other.

  It had seemingly been agreed that Isabella should attend to the details of policy while Mortimer looked after the practical arrangements for the invasion.199 By 24 July, Mortimer was in Zeeland “in the service of Queen Isabella”; on that day, Count William ordered his harbor masters to give him every assistance in gathering provisions and hiring a fleet of ships that was to be assembled by 1 September between Rotterdam and Dordrecht, ports that offered excellent facilities.200

  From Ponthieu, Isabella traveled east through Vermandois to Cambrai in the fertile and prosperous county of Hainault. “When she found that she was in the teritories of the [Holy Roman] Empire, she was more at her ease.” She then rode north to Ostrevant, where she lodged at the castle of Brigincourt, near Valenciennes. It belonged to “a poor knight called Sir Eustace d’Ambreticourt, who gladly received and entertained her in the best manner he could, insomuch that afterwards the Queen and her son invited the knight, his wife and all his children to England and advanced their fortunes in various ways.”201