The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

  Part of the French king’s hostility was his resentment at the still-undelivered homage that Edward owed for his French possessions, which suggested an obvious diplomatic solution: making homage. As should by now have been clear to every crowned head of Europe, however, the king of England’s personal talent for diplomacy was virtually nonexistent. Even Edward recognized his own shortcoming, which is why he deputized his most reliable proxy, the earl of Pembroke, to act in his place. However, when the earl died in Paris on June 23, 1324, the opportunity for a peaceful solution died with him. In August 1324, Charles invaded Gascony and Ponthieu.

  War loomed. Edward panicked. In September 1324, he ordered all French subjects in England arrested, including twenty-seven members of Isabella’s own household. Five months later, in February 1325, he tried diplomacy again, sending an embassy, consisting of two bishops plus the earl of Richmond, to Charles. They failed to move the needle on any of the outstanding issues: Edward’s refusal to pay homage (or fealty) to Charles; the French troops in Gascony; even a hoped-for marriage alliance between Edward’s thirteen-year-old son and a French princess.

  At that point, Pope John XXII intervened, as much out of a desire to remain politically relevant as to promote peace. He suggested that the best way to resolve the tension was to send a different envoy: Isabella, Charles’s sister and Edward’s queen.

  The brief for Edward’s obliviousness doesn’t have any stronger evidence than the fact that he agreed. Isabella’s feud with the Despensers had been simmering ever since 1324, when, at their urging, Edward seized her lands in Cornwall under the feeble excuse that they might be used as a base for a French invasion. It boiled over when three of her children—John, Eleanor, and Joan—were given into the care of Hugh the Younger’s wife, Eleanor de Clare.

  In 1325, Isabella was twenty-nine years old, and far more politically sophisticated than the girl who had been Piers Gaveston’s rival fifteen years before. She had learned that even a queen needed allies, and was clever enough to recognize that the Despensers’ heavy-handedness had produced hundreds of potential supporters of her cause. The Despensers were not only rapidly becoming the de facto rulers of England but were advertising their status by obnoxiously building castles and mausoleums that were direct copies of their royal equivalents.* Hugh the Younger had such a high opinion of himself—partly deserved; he really was a gifted administrator, ruling entire provinces on behalf of the Crown, including the flashpoint in Franco-English relations, Gascony—that he took to using the royal pronoun in personal correspondence: “It seems to our lord the king and to us.”

  If the Despensers had intended to help Isabella’s recruiting, they could hardly have done any better; lords both ecclesiastical and temporal flocked to Isabella’s cause: Adam Orleton, the bishop of Hereford (who had arranged Mortimer’s escape from the Tower of London); John Stratford, bishop of Winchester; William Airmyn, bishop of Norwich; and the earl of Kent, the earl of Richmond, and the earl of Leicester (brother to the late Lancaster). All agreed that the ultimate goal was the elimination, once and for all, of the Despensers, and that Isabella could best achieve this by distancing herself from their reach. In March 1325, she returned to her brother’s court, swearing, in the words of the author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi (who almost certainly died in early 1326—that is, with no knowledge of any subsequent events), “She will not return until Hugh le Despenser is wholly removed from the King’s side.”

  Isabella wasn’t the only one to have learned a new strategy for opposing her enemies. Thousands of men and women at the very opposite end of the feudal continuum had learned exactly the same lesson over the preceding years, and were ready to put that knowledge into action.

  The first great peasant revolt of the fourteenth century began in Flanders in 1323 and continued for five years. The Flemish uprising deserves to be remembered not as a peasant insurgency but as a revolt of the not-yet-named bourgeoisie—in the most urbanized region of northern Europe, collective action proved easier when thousands of potential recruits live within shouting distance of one another. In another way, though, it marked the beginning of peasant revolts as a regular feature of life in Europe—yet another collateral effect of the fault lines in feudal manorialism four centuries after its birth. The French king, his successors, and his rivals would face one uprising after another over the next two centuries, from the Jacquerie of 1358 to the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and dozens more.

  The roots of the 1323 rebellion date to the succession of Louis de Nevers, grandson of Count Robert III of Flanders, as the province’s feudal overlord in 1322. Two years earlier, in 1320, he had married Isabella’s niece, Margaret, and allied himself with the French court. What was good news for France was very bad news indeed for Louis’s subjects. The Flemings had a long suspicion of French alliances, and didn’t have to wait long to be reminded why, as Louis increased their taxes, acting as the factor for the French king. After the disastrous famine years of 1315–16 and another lost harvest in 1321, with nearly constant threat of war in between, the Flemings were in a notably ungenerous mood, and ready for revolution.

  Leading the revolt was a prosperous farmer named Nicolaas Zannekin, who took a rural uprising into the towns of Flanders in the fall of 1323, capturing half a dozen of them, including Nieuwport and Kortrijk. In 1325, shortly after Isabella’s arrival in Paris, he captured Louis himself. For three more years, until Zannekin was defeated by a French army in support of their puppet ruler, the wealthiest province in Europe was in revolt not just against its feudal lord but the entire Catholic Church, which placed all of Flanders under interdict.

  The proximate causes of the Flemish “peasant” revolt were local and immediate; its roots, the reason it could occur in the first place, were four centuries in creation. As Europe’s population increased threefold between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, the Continent’s demographic pyramid changed its shape. The base grew larger relative to its peak, and more distant: the gap between nobility and peasantry got bigger and bigger. Families that were noble by birth became more and more “noble” in behavior: dressing more opulently, entertaining more lavishly, and housing themselves more extravagantly, while the rural peasantry lived more or less the same as their many times great-grandparents. While Europe’s villages housed families of six in two rooms, one of them shared with sheep and cattle, its manors and castles featured two-story aisles of stone pillars, fitted out with colorful paint, floral ornamentation, double-curved arches, mullioned windows, upholstered window seats; even that most expensive of luxuries, glass. Wall hangings were made of silk, wool, damask, or velvet; floors were laid with tile and strewn with herb-scented rush mats. The highest nobles of England and France came back from crusading with carpets from Turkey and farther east. Isabella’s pillows were stuffed with down and feathers, and covered with the sheer silk known as dimity. From the twelfth century on, medieval custom accelerated the process separating Europe’s highest classes from everyone else—“courtesie” in French, “courtesy” in English, revealingly the “courtly” manners expected at court.

  Meanwhile, as the desire of nobles to cover feather pillows with silk dimity increased, their ability to do so was deteriorating. The income of the manorial system depended on rents that were fixed by tradition, which made them vulnerable to price inflation; even though inflation in the thirteenth century averaged only around 0.5 percent annually, a hundred years at that level turned an annual rent of £10 into a little more than £6. The only way to spend more while collecting less was to raise rents, impose abusive policies such as requiring farmers to pay more for milling their own grain, and engage in other practices unlikely to endear them to their tenants. The same practices that provoked Scottish peasants to take up arms against English kings, or Swiss burghers against the Holy Roman Emperors, made Flemish townsmen a recurring problem for the French Crown.

  Which is why, when Isabella returned to her brother’s court, Charles ha
d more on his plate than his ongoing conflicts with the king of England, or maintaining his hold on the Avignon popes. Even so, by the summer of 1325, Isabella had persuaded her brother to restore Gascony and Ponthieu to English rule, subject to Edward finally offering formal homage and fealty. It was a notable diplomatic achievement, but one greeted in England not with acclaim but suspicion. Spies in the employ of Hugh the Younger had reported that if Edward declined the offer, Charles would attack Gascony and mount an invasion of England from Normandy. Worse, he would do so in alliance with Robert Bruce, who had never forgotten that Scotland was strongest whenever England was warring with France, and would simultaneously invade from the north. Edward could either give homage for Gascony, in the hope that Charles would then return it, or prepare for battle. Faced with the choice of swallowing his pride or risking a two-front war, Edward agreed to swear the oath to Charles in August 1325.

  He did so reluctantly. Partly, this was due to the indecisiveness that had been such a prominent theme of his entire reign, but partly the fear that once in France, he would be completely at the mercy of Charles, even to the point of being taken hostage. It’s also worth recalling that England’s king decided a lot of matters of state on more emotional grounds than reasoned ones. Edward was loath to put himself in a position of inferiority to another king not out of some rational calculus of interest but simply because he saw it as a humiliation. When the king is “the state,” it’s hard to see much daylight between the national interest and personal self-regard.

  If Edward was fearful of leaving England for France, Hugh the Younger was positively terrified. If he accompanied the king to France, he would be in far greater danger than the king; if he stayed behind without his patron, he’d be vulnerable to the ever-growing regiments of his enemies at home. The Despensers insisted that the king stay in England, and at the last minute Edward acquired a diplomatically convenient illness that precluded his departure.

  Isabella then delivered her masterstroke: She proposed that her elder son do homage on his father’s behalf. What this would require, though, would be his installation as duke of Aquitaine, and count of Ponthieu and Gascony. Edward was boxed in. In September, the heir to the English throne arrived in France, and on the twenty-fourth, Charles accepted his homage; he then announced that he intended to keep the Agenais, the Gascon county lying between the Dordogne and the Garonne.

  When the news reached England, Edward exploded. He immediately declared that he was to be the administrator of his son’s estates, at which point Charles announced that this meant that the English territories were, again, forfeit.

  As diplomatic mess-making goes, Edward was nothing if not consistent. In the same declaration that allowed Charles to call his bluff, the English king also demanded the return of his wife and son. He had no leverage that would force Charles to send his sister and nephew home, but he weakened an already enfeebled hand by transmitting his demand via Walter Stapledon, the bishop of Exeter—an envoy who was so detested in France that he was apparently threatened with imprisonment and torture if he ever showed his face there.

  Despite Edward’s ham-handedness, Isabella could almost certainly have persuaded her brother to send her home. Instead, she supposedly replied—in public—“I felt that marriage is a union of a man and a woman, holding fast to the practice of a life together, and that someone has come between my husband and myself and is trying to break that bond; I declare that I will not return until that intruder is removed, but, discarding my marriage garment, shall put on the robes of widowhood and mourning until I am avenged of this Pharisee.”

  Even Edward recognized an ultimatum when he heard one. Isabella had demanded the Despensers’ heads. His response was a speech given to Parliament on November 18, 1325:

  The Queen crossed to France to make peace . . . on her departure, she did not seem to anyone to be offended; but now someone has changed her attitude. Someone has primed her with inventions [and] she says that Hugh Despenser is her adversary and hostile to her . . . I firmly believe that the Queen has been led into this error at the suggestion of someone, and he is in truth wicked and hostile.

  Edward was correct. By the time of the king’s speech to Parliament, and probably before, Isabella was engaged in adulterous relationship with Roger Mortimer, which had become scandalously known by the end of 1325. Mortimer was irresistible to the queen: Whatever his physical charms—and they seem to have been considerable—the queen and the Marcher Lord had a classic attraction based on mutual interests: both loved Arthurian legends, luxurious living, and the destruction of the Despensers. Edward may have learned of the liaison from Bishop Stapledon upon his return from France; certainly, he knew of it by February 1326, when Isabella’s servants returned carrying word of the affair, and the king accused his wife of being with Mortimer “within and without house.”

  Knowledge of his cuckolding didn’t prevent Edward from continuing to plead, via letter and envoy, for the return of his wife and son. Isabella replied with contrived despair—longing to return, but fearing for her life should she do so—but her real attention was elsewhere. The queen of England had opened secret negotiations with Robert Bruce.

  As was so frequently the case during the first decades of the fourteenth century, the communication channel ran through the one location where every sovereign in Europe maintained some diplomatic presence: the papal court at Avignon. That was where, for more than a year, Thomas Randolph, the earl of Moray, had been pleading the Scottish case to Pope John XXII. At the same time, Edward had his own envoys representing England’s interests, one of which was freeing the country from the threat of interdict and excommunication. The preceding year, Edward had even invited Edward Balliol, son of the once-and-forgotten King John, to come from Picardy to England, which Randolph—and Bruce—could only have read as a provocation: an attempt to restore a more docile king to Scotland. It also, unintentionally, gave the earl of Moray and Isabella (who had evidently forgiven the earl’s attempts to kidnap her years before) interests in common. Through Randolph, she promised King Robert that, if he agreed to foreswear invading England, she would recognize an independent Scotland upon her return. It was the first hard evidence that she was planning not just the fall of the Despensers, but of the king himself.

  By then, however, even the pope had learned of Isabella’s affair with Mortimer, and let his displeasure be known to, among others, the king of France, whose brotherly affection had already been strained by the scandal. Isabella was notified that her continued presence at the French court was no longer desired, and, in the summer of 1326, she decamped to the court of William II, the count of Hainaut, Holland, and Zeeland.

  Isabella’s goal was not sanctuary but victory. While she commanded no troops, and her lands remained in the control of her estranged husband, she did have one very large strategic asset: her son Edward, the duke of Aquitaine and heir to the English throne. Isabella offered to marry young Edward to the count of Hainaut’s daughter Philippa in return for his support. Marrying his daughter to the future king of England seemed attractive enough that William agreed, as an advance against his daughter’s dowry, to pay for an army and to provide a general to lead them: his brother, John of Hainaut, who would share command with Mortimer. By August 27, they had a deal, and on September 23, 1326, Isabella’s army—a small one, probably no more than fifteen hundred, largely mercenaries from Hainaut and some German-speaking principalities of the Holy Roman Empire—sailed from Dordrecht, landing on the east coast of Suffolk the following day.

  Even after nineteen years of failed wars against the Scots, a decade of rebellion by his own earls, and seven years of famine, Edward II might still have mustered a respectable defense of his own kingdom. Against the wife who had cuckolded him, allied with the most unpopular nobleman in England, he hadn’t a chance. The fleet Edward and the Despensers summoned to meet Isabella’s invading force was so mutinous that it never even left harbor. Of the two thousand so
ldiers sent to contest the landing in Suffolk, only fifty-five showed up. (Meanwhile, adding incompetent strategy to inept leadership, King Edward and Hugh the Younger led their own force, some sixteen hundred soldiers, on a raid—of Normandy, because of the king’s continued fears of a nonexistent French invasion.)

  With her husband on the wrong side of the English Channel, Isabella spent the night of September 24 in the castle of her ally, the earl of Norfolk. The following day, she made a pilgrimage to Bury St. Edmunds, where her supporters—or, more likely, opponents of the Despensers—appeared, first in the hundreds, then by the thousands. A year earlier, she had sworn “to put on the robes of widowhood and mourning” until she was avenged against the Despensers, and that’s how she traveled, further evidence of her acquired gift for political theater. Even better (or more theatrically) her confederates spread the story that she had discovered nearly £500 while en route, and that, instead of keeping it for her own household, she was distributing it to the farmers of England as payment for the cattle and food her still-small army was in process of requisitioning. Similar stories transformed the march into a queenly triumph. Popular opinion, already hostile to the Despensers, shifted dramatically in her direction. The invaders proceeded in an arc from Ipswich through Cambridge to the west of London, growing in numbers each day. The king commanded the city burghers of Oxford to deny her entrance; on October 2, they greeted her with open arms and presented her with a silver cup.

  Isabella then marched the sixty miles east to London, her pace leisurely enough that the entire city had time to declare for the queen. On the same day that Isabella was receiving the keys to the city of Oxford, Edward correctly decided that London was indefensible and departed his capital for Wales, where he hoped to raise an army to defend his throne. His retinue included the Despensers, father and son; the earls of Arundel and Surrey; several hundred men-at-arms; and the chancellor, Robert Baldock, who carried some £29,000 in gold and the Great Seal of England.