by Lisa Hilton
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 century18 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’.19 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’.20 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 reelected 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 a
gainst 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:
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 …21
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, 22 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’23 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’.24 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.’25 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.26
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’.27
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nbsp; 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.
