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

by Alison Weir

  After visiting the shrine of Saint Edmund, and allowing her soldiers time to rest, the Queen moved another thirty miles west to Cambridge. Wherever she went, she “found favour with all,” and the common people flocked to her banner.17 The news of her arrival had rapidly “spread over the country until it reached those who had communicated with the Queen and invited her back. And they immediately prepared to come and see her, and her son, whom they wanted as their sovereign.”18

  At Cambridge, Isabella spent three days at Barnwell Priory, the principal royal hospice in the city.19 The Queen was joined at Cambridge by many magnates and several bishops, including Orleton of Hereford, Burghersh of Lincoln, Hotham of Ely, and Beaumont of Durham, as well as Alexander Bicknor, the Archbishop of Dublin.20 Orleton made Isabella a substantial donation of funds toward her expenses, while Burghersh persuaded his fellow bishops to give generously for the Queen’s cause, and Hotham helped to raise men.21 Baker, whose loyalties lay firmly with Edward II, later scathingly referred to these bishops as “priests of Baal, the accomplices of Jezebel.”

  The bishops had elected Orleton as their spokesman, and he reassured the Queen and her lords as to the rightness of their cause, “saying that it was to the advantage of the kingdom that the King should be forced to submit to the counsel of the great gathering of noblemen assembled there.”22

  By 27 September, word of the Queen’s invasion had reached London.23 The King and the Despensers were seated at table in the royal apartments of the Tower when some of his sailors came hurrying with news that the Queen had landed with a great army. This provoked little reaction; indeed, it was gratifying for Edward to hear that the Queen was apparently having to rely on the assistance of foreign mercenaries to achieve her aims; but when subsequent, better-informed messengers reported that Isabella had only seven hundred men with her, he was struck with consternation, and the Elder Despenser cried aloud, “Alas, alas! We be all betrayed, for certes, with so little power, she had never come to land but folk of this country had to her consented.”24

  The King immediately issued a general summons of array,25 wrote letters begging for aid from the Pope and the King of France, and appealed to the Londoners to resist the Queen. Only four people responded.26 The crucial factor was that Isabella had always been popular in the capital, while Edward had lost the love of its citizens in 1321, when he had rashly tried to curtail their jealously guarded liberties. Thus, they were demonstrably reluctant to assist him and would have preferred to have sent aid to the Queen, but they were obliged to ignore her letter “for fear of the King.”27

  The next day, Edward summoned men from the Home Counties to join him “wherever they found him,” which indicates that he was already thinking of leaving London.28 He also appealed to the Welsh for support and even offered pardons to prisoners and outlaws if they would rally to his cause; a hundred convicted murderers immediately offered their services.29 He issued a proclamation proscribing all who had taken up arms against him and urging all men to rise and destroy the Queen’s power, sparing only her life, her son’s, and Kent’s.30 He then sent one Robert de Wateville to East Anglia to raise a force to repel the invaders, but Wateville could muster only sixty men, whom he promptly led to the Queen.31

  The King also offered £1,000 to anyone bringing him Mortimer’s head,32 and on 30 September, he had Archbishop Reynolds read a papal bull against “invaders” at Paul’s Cross: it had in fact been intended for use against the Scots some seven years earlier. The Londoners listened in hostile silence.33 Meanwhile, members of the royal household and secretariats had begun to desert Edward. The only lords to stay loyal were Arundel, whose son was married to Despenser’s daughter, and Surrey.

  That day, full of consternation at the news that the invaders were making for Oxford, the King appealed to the town and university for assistance against them, offering generous privileges in return; the next day, he committed Mortimer’s three sons to the Tower and ordered Oxford to close its gates to the Queen.34 But when she arrived there, probably on 2 October, the burghers of Oxford came in procession and welcomed her joyfully, presenting her with a silver cup;35 this must have been a relief, as she had been anxious about her reception.36 After all, Oxford was the first major city she had approached, and Edward II had been the first monarch to extend his patronage to the university.

  Yet the university offered Isabella its wholehearted support. From Saint Mary’s pulpit, Bishop Orleton preached an incendiary sermon in the presence of the Queen, the Prince, and Mortimer, taking his text from Genesis: “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: she will bruise thy head.” He explained that this referred not to the King but to Despenser, that snake in Eden and “the seed of the first tyrant, Satan, who would be crushed by the Lady Isabella and her son, the Prince,” who had come to put an end to misgovernment.37

  At Oxford, the Queen lodged in the house of the Carmelites, while Mortimer stayed with her other captains in Oseney Abbey, to the west of the city.38 This suggests that Isabella and Mortimer were deliberately maintaining a discreet distance from each other, wishing to avoid scandal. There were far wider and more important issues involved in Isabella’s enterprise than complicated personal relationships, and no scandal was to be allowed to prejudice the success, or the rightness, of her cause.

  On 2 October, realizing that he could not count on any support in the capital, and believing that “the whole community of the realm” would declare for the Queen, Edward left London with a small company, which included the Despensers; Arundel; Surrey; the Chancellor, Robert Baldock; and some of the royal clerks. The King took with him £29,000 in ready cash and a force of archers.39 They fled westward toward Wales, where Despenser held vast territories and was confident of raising support;40 Edward himself was optimistically hoping that the Welsh would rise in his favor, for, as their former Prince, he had enjoyed a degree of popularity with the people. The King left Stapledon as guardian of the City41 and Despenser’s wife in custody of the Tower.42 That night, he and Hugh stopped at Acton.43

  The Earl of Leicester had also risen in arms for the Queen, and on 3 October, he marched on Leicester, gathered a great force, and seized Despenser’s treasure, which had been deposited in the abbey for safety. Then he marched south to rendezvous with the Queen.44

  Edward was at Ruislip on 4 October and at Wycombe on the fifth. By the time he arrived at Wallingford on the sixth, he had decided to take a stand against the invaders at Gloucester. But he was greatly overestimating the support he would receive.

  By then, Isabella had marched south to Baldock, where she had the Chancellor’s brother Thomas arrested and his house ransacked. From there, on 6 October, she sent a second letter to the Londoners; this was of a vastly different tone from the first, for it was a summons to all good citizens to come to her aid in securing the destruction of Despenser or suffer punishment for defaulting.45 Doubling Edward’s price for Mortimer, she offered £2,000 for Despenser’s head.46 She then moved to Dunstable,47 only thirty miles from London, where she planned to muster her forces before advancing on the capital.

  On 7 October, Edward was at Faringdon and, on the eighth, at Cirencester. The next day, he reached Gloucester,48 where he issued an order for Leicester’s arrest and tried, without success, to rally men to his cause.49 No one, it was becoming clear, was prepared to fight for him,50 and the relatives and friends of the contrariants, whom he had punished so savagely, were actively moving against him.

  The Queen’s letter arrived in London on 9 October and was posted on the Eleanor Cross in Cheapside; its contents were widely circulated, and copies were soon being displayed in the windows of private houses to proclaim the support of their owners for the Queen. On the tenth, Edward learned to his dismay that Leicester, “with a great company of men-at-arms,” had joined the Queen at Dunstable. “And after him, from one place and another, came earls, barons, knights and squires, with so many men-at-arms that the Queen’s men thought they were ou
t of all danger. And as they advanced, their numbers increased every day.”51

  The King was still at Gloucester on the eleventh, when, in desperation, he announced that he would offer free pardons to any who would join him. He then rode on to Westbury-on-Severn in the Forest of Dean, arriving on 12 October, and to Alnington on the thirteenth. By the time he had reached Westbury, he had only twelve archers left and was reduced to making a pathetic appeal to them not to desert him.52

  On 13 October, Archbishop Reynolds urgently convened a conference of bishops at Lambeth to discuss plans for a peace summit at Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Among those present were Stratford, Stapledon, Airmyn, Hethe, and Stephen de Gravesend, Bishop of London. On 14 October, it was proposed that two of the bishops go to intercede with the Queen, but only Stratford was willing to volunteer. By then, it was becoming obvious that the Londoners were in an ugly mood, and Hethe warned the Archbishop not to cross the Thames or enter the City because the people believed him to be the King’s man.53

  This was no longer the case. Reynolds had been out of favor for some time, having quarreled with Edward over the vexing question of liturgical precedence, and had already secretly sent large sums of money to the Queen.54 Eastry had advised Reynolds not to offend the King but to lie low and wait upon events or to work for a compromise; to this end, he might perhaps “reverently go and meet” the Queen and her son, but if he failed to achieve a settlement, he should take sanctuary in his cathedral.55 The Archbishop would have liked to declare openly for Isabella, but he was reluctant to do so in case Edward emerged triumphant from this present struggle. Therefore, he heeded Hethe’s warning, and the meeting broke up, whereupon he and most of his colleagues, abandoning their plans to launch a peace process, fled the capital. Reynolds shut himself up with Hethe in his palace at Maidstone, and Stratford rode off in search of the Queen.56

  The King was at Tintern Abbey on the River Wye on 14 October, with Baldock and the Younger Despenser, the Elder having gone to occupy Bristol, where he received a less than enthusiastic reception.57 That day, Wallingford surrendered without resistance to Isabella. On coming to the castle,58 she liberated Sir Thomas de Berkeley, who, with his father, a fellow contrariant who had since died, had been imprisoned there in 1322.

  From Wallingford, on 15 October, Isabella issued a proclamation against the Despensers, which was at once a savage indictment of their misrule and a call to arms:

  We, Isabella, by the grace of God Queen of England, Lady of Ireland, Countess of Ponthieu; and we, Edward, elder son of the lord King of England, Duke of Guienne [Gascony], Earl of Chester, Count of Ponthieu and Montreuil; and we, Edmund, son of the noble King of England, Earl of Kent: to all those to whom these letters may come, greetings.

  Whereas it is well known that the state of the Holy Church and the kingdom of England is in many respects much tarnished and degraded by the bad advice and conspiracy of Hugh le Despenser; whereas, through pride and greed to have power and dominion over all other people, he has usurped royal power against law and justice and his true allegiance, and through the bad advice of Robert Baldock and others of his supporters, he has acted in such a way that the Holy Church is robbed of its goods against God and right, and in many other ways insulted and dishonoured, and the Crown of England brought low in many respects, through the disinheritance of our lord the King and of his heirs. The magnates of the kingdom, through the envy and wicked cruelty of the said Hugh, have been delivered to a shameful death, many of them blamelessly and without cause. Others have been disinherited, imprisoned, banished or exiled; widows and orphans have been unlawfully deprived of their rights, and the people of this land much hurt by many taxes, and held to ransom by frequent, unjust demands for money and by divers other oppressions, without any mercy; by virtue of which misdeeds, the said Hugh shows himself to be a clear tyrant and enemy of God and the Holy Church, and of our very dear said lord the King and the whole kingdom.

  And we, and several others who are with us and of our company, who have long been kept far from the goodwill of our said lord the King through the false suggestions and evil dealings of the aforesaid Hugh and Robert and their supporters, are come to this land to raise up the state of Holy Church and of the kingdom, and of the people of this land, against the said misdeeds and oppressions, and to safeguard and maintain, so far as we can, the honour and profit of the Holy Church and of our said lord the King and the whole kingdom, as is stated above. For this reason, we ask and pray you, for the common good of all and each of you individually, that you come to our help well and loyally, whenever the time and place are right, and by whatever means lie within your power, so that the above matters may be speedily put right. For be assured that we all, and all those who are in our company, intend to do nothing that does not redound to the honour and profit of the Holy Church and the whole kingdom, as you will see in the course of time, if it please God.

  Given at Wallingford on 15 October in the 20th year of the reign of our very dear lord the King.59

  There was no hint in this letter of any criticism of the King, to whom the Queen constantly referred as her “very dear lord,” as became a loving wife. Yet almost as soon as it was written, encouraged by her welcome in England, she was emboldened to make clear her true intentions, which were revealed in another inflammatory sermon that Bishop Orleton preached at Wallingford that same day, taking his text from 2 Kings, 4:19, “My head, my head acheth.”60

  “When the head of a kingdom becometh sick and diseased,” he told his congregation, “it must of necessity be taken off, without useless attempts to administer any other remedy.” In other words, a feeble king should be removed “and not be protected by the support of flatterers.”61 The rest of the sermon was devoted to a scathing attack on Edward and to justifying the Queen’s invasion. Referring to the ill-treatment of Isabella, and the reason why she had been forced to leave her husband, the Bishop revealed “that the King had carried a knife in his hose to kill Queen Isabella, and he had said that, if he had no other weapon, he could crush her with his teeth.” As he had intended, his words incited much ill feeling against Edward.62

  That day, the Londoners had erupted in violence against the King and his favorites, the rioting citizens shouting their support of the Queen and viciously turning on all who had supported Edward and the Despensers. In the name of the Queen and Prince Edward, they seized the Tower from Eleanor de Clare, wresting the keys out of the Constable’s hands, and liberated all the prisoners, including Mortimer’s sons.63 Finding the ten-year-old Prince John in residence in the royal apartments—he had been in Eleanor’s care—the Londoners proclaimed him Warden of the City and the Tower. Then they marched their unpopular Mayor, Edward’s man, Hamo de Chigwell, who was “crying mercy with clasped hands,” to the Guildhall and forced him to declare his allegiance to Isabella and to warn that any enemies of the Queen and the Prince would remain in London at their peril. To demonstrate that this was no empty threat, the mob seized and butchered Despenser’s clerk, John the Marshal, whom they believed to be his spy.64

  After the abortive Lambeth conference, Bishop Stapledon, mindful of the King’s having left him as guardian of the City, had decided to return to London.65 His arrival coincided with the outbreak of the riots on 15 October, and he immediately fell foul of the Londoners, who identified him with the Despensers’ rule and detested him for his rapacity;66 they had already sacked his house in the Temple, stolen his valuables, and burned his episcopal registers. After spotting him, clad in armor, riding into the City attended by only two squires, a baying mob chased him nearly to Saint Paul’s. Before he could reach the sanctuary of the cathedral’s north door, they dragged him from his horse and manhandled him through the churchyard and all the way to the Eleanor Cross in Cheapside, where they pulled off his armor and brutally hacked off his head with a butcher’s knife. His squires were dispatched in the same gruesome way. The Bishop’s head was speedily conveyed to the Queen as a trophy, while his body was stripped and left nak
ed in the street. Later, after being refused burial in Saint Clement Danes Church on the Strand, it was interred under a rubbish dump “without the office of priest or clerk.”67

  The mob then went on to plunder and ransack properties owned by Arundel, Baldock, the Bardi, and other associates of the King and the Despensers. They would have lynched their own Bishop, Gravesend, too, but he managed to escape.68 Deprived of any effective government, London descended into near anarchy, with orgies of violence and looting raging unchecked for weeks to come, and its citizens terrorized and even forced into hiding. Trade, of course, came to a standstill, and normal daily life ceased.69

  Edward arrived in Chepstow in Monmouthshire on 16 October. Here, he optimistically appointed the Elder Despenser guardian of all the southwestern counties of England.70 The next day, in London, at the insistence of the mob, the tablet commemorating Lancaster and the Ordinances was set up again in Saint Paul’s Cathedral.71

  By then, Isabella, after learning of the unrest in London, had taken counsel with her barons and swung westward, aiming to intercept Edward and Despenser. Her pursuit of them, however, turned into a triumphant progress. “In every town they entered, they were honoured and feasted, and new supporters joined them from every side.”72 During their march, the Queen’s soldiers “did no harm to the country, but only devastated the manors of the Despensers.”

  At Gloucester, the Queen lodged in the castle, the city’s chief royal residence, which stood between the cathedral and the quay; its massive twelfth-century keep had been remodeled by Henry III in the thirteenth century with a great hall, a great chamber, and private chapels.73 Here, Isabella was joined by northern forces led by Henry, Lord Percy, Thomas, Baron Wake, and Henry de Beaumont, and by some Marcher barons and Welsh contingents.74 Isabella appointed Wake marshal of her army,75 which was now a formidable fighting force.