A Great and Glorious Adventure Read online

  Despite the removal of Gaveston, by 1314, baronial opposition to Edward’s rule, or misrule, was growing. Having ignored his father’s dying wish that he should complete the conquest of Scotland, Edward II had abandoned that nation to civil war and returned south. Now, hoping to restore the political situation at home by a successful war in Scotland, Edward summoned the earls to report for military service. The earl of Lancaster and a number of his supporters refused, on the grounds that Parliament had not approved the finance for the expedition, which was therefore illegal. Edward went ahead anyway and the result was a disaster when, at Bannockburn in June 1314, his army of around 10,000 was decisively defeated by a much smaller Scottish army commanded by Robert Bruce. Edward fled the field (to be fair, he wanted to stand and fight but his minders would not have it) and his army collapsed with perhaps a third becoming casualties. Disaster though it undoubtedly was for Edward, the battle was the trigger for a root-and-branch reform of the English military system which, as we shall see, would contribute much to the superiority of English arms in the Hundred Years War.

  As the Scottish war dragged on without any prospect of a successful end, Edward’s position weakened further. Scottish raids into northern England were increasingly ambitious, Berwick-upon-Tweed was under siege yet again,17 and there was revolt in Wales. To make matters worse, new favourites began increasingly to engage Edward’s attention and to receive favours from him. The Despensers, father and son, both named Hugh, were rather better bred than Gaveston had been, but were actually more of a threat, being even more avaricious than the previous royal pet and, in the case of Hugh the Younger, possessing both political ambitions and the ability to pursue them. There is less evidence for a homosexual relationship between Edward and Hugh the Younger than for one with Gaveston, but there can be little doubt that the friendship was rather more than just the comradeship of men both in their thirties.

  As it was, the Despensers’ methods of increasing their holdings of land varied from blackmail and intimidation of the courts to the threat and sometimes use of force and outright theft. In this, they particularly upset the Marcher Lords, who found estates in Wales and on the border that should have gone to them being acquired by the Despensers, while early on Hugh the Younger upset the earl of Lancaster when he was granted a potentially lucrative wardship which Lancaster had attempted to obtain for himself. Antagonism towards the Despensers exploded in 1321 when the Marcher Lords, aided by Lancaster and including one Roger Mortimer, attacked Despenser lands and properties. In Parliament in London, the lords laid the usual charges: removal of competent officials by the Despensers and their replacement by corrupt ones; refusing access to the king unless one of them was present; misappropriating properties; and generally giving the king bad advice. Edward, backed into a corner and faced with the united opposition of so many, had little choice but to agree to Parliament’s demands and the Despensers were duly exiled.

  Now began Edward’s only successful military campaign of his entire reign. Lancaster, for all his titles and riches, was not a natural leader, a competent general or politically astute; he was indecisive and he too had his enemies. Once away from the London parliament, Edward recalled the Despensers, besieged and took Leeds Castle in Kent, executed the commander and his garrison, and marched north. Lancaster too moved north, possibly to seek sanctuary with the Scots, and on 16 March 1322 found his way barred by a royalist army at Boroughbridge, which held the only bridge over the River Ure. Unable to force the bridge, the earl of Hereford being killed in the attempt, and prevented by royalist archers from crossing at a nearby ford – lessons that would also be relevant to the great war that was to come – Lancaster’s army melted away and the earl himself surrendered the next day. Tried as a traitor at Pontefract, Lancaster could have expected to have been pardoned with a fine or exiled at worst in deference to his royal blood (he was a grandson of Henry III), but now it was payback time for Gaveston, and the only concession to Lancaster was that he was beheaded rather than hanged, drawn and quartered.18 Despite Lancaster’s unpleasant traits, such was the unpopularity of the king and the Despensers that a cult rapidly grew up and royal guards had to be posted over Lancaster’s tomb to prevent miracle-seekers approaching it. Now that he had dealt with Lancaster, Edward’s revenge on the other rebels was bloody: eleven barons and fifteen knights were indeed drawn, hanged and quartered, four Kentish knights were drawn and hanged but not quartered, in Canterbury, and another in London, while seventy-two knights were imprisoned. From now until 1326, the Despensers’ power, wealth and influence increased: their mistake, and the cause of their ultimate downfall, was in attracting the opposition of the queen.

  Philip IV of France, known as ‘the Fair’ for his good looks, had three sons out of his wife Joan of Champagne before she gave birth to a daughter, Isabella, in 1295. As part of Edward I’s search for a solution to the vexed question of Aquitaine, he married the French king’s sister, Margaret, in 1299, his first wife having died in 1290, and had his eldest surviving son, the future Edward II, betrothed to Isabella. Their wedding took place in Boulogne in 1308, the year after Edward II became king, when he was twenty-four and his bride not yet thirteen. The earliest age permitted by the church for a girl to have sex in marriage was twelve, but practicalities ruled that she must have passed puberty. We do not know whether Isabella had passed that point at the time of their marriage – and if she had not, then there might be a charitable explanation for the non-consummation of the marriage – but contemporary chronicles all describe her as being beautiful, so, if she was not yet physically capable of sexual intercourse, we may assume that she was within the next year or so. In any event, she did not conceive until 1312, when she was rising seventeen, which would indicate that Edward visited her bed but rarely. He did fulfil his dynastic duty, however, perhaps without much enthusiasm, and Isabella gave birth to the future Edward III in 1312, a second son, John, in 1316, and daughters Eleanor in 1318 and Joan in 1321.

  Isabella must have felt humiliated and embarrassed by her husband’s obvious preference for Gaveston over herself, particularly when she found Gaveston wearing the jewels given to Edward by her father, the French king, as wedding presents, and, worse, some of her own jewellery that had come over to England as part of her train. In spite of this, she seems to have done her best to support and help the king, albeit complaining to her father that she was kept short of money and that Gaveston was preferred over her.

  Since the eighteenth century, Queen Isabella has been described as the ‘she-wolf of France’. Reviled as a notorious adulteress, a rebel against her husband and an accomplice in his murder, only recently has she been reassessed, at least by some, as a tragic queen. Isabella certainly had much to contend with, and for most of her marriage to Edward II she was a loyal and supportive wife. She accompanied her husband on military campaigns (campaigns which almost always had disastrous results), and on several occasions she was entrusted with the Great Seal of England; she was literate and, with maturity, certainly capable of understanding the political nuances, both domestic and international, of her time. As the daughter of the king of France, and after the death of Philip in 1314, the sister of his successor Louis X, she was well aware of her status and determined to maintain it in the face of her husband’s frequent neglect and casual cruelty.

  Isabella’s discovery of adulterous relationships involving the wives of two of her brothers with the connivance of the wife of a third and her eventual reporting of it to her father, Philip, in full knowledge of what the result might be, have been cited as evidence of a hard-heartedness in her character, but it is far more likely that she knew what the punishment for her might be if she concealed such knowledge. Margarite of Burgundy was the wife of Louis, later Louis X, and Blanche of Hungary was married to Charles, later Charles IV. Both young ladies, aided and abetted by Jeanne of Burgundy, wife of Philip, later Philip V, were carrying on with two knights of the French court, the brothers Philip and Gautier d’Aulnay. All five we
re arrested and the brothers tortured until they admitted adultery – a particularly serious offence as it could call the whole royal succession into question. The wretched knights were publicly castrated with their organs thrown to the hounds, then flayed until almost dead, and finally decapitated. Margarite and Blanche were sentenced to life imprisonment in Château Gaillard, while Jeanne was put under house arrest.

  Isabella’s importance in British history lies not in whether or not her eventual conduct was justified, but in who she was and her place as a catalyst of the Hundred Years War. Gaveston’s relations with the king, while shaming to the queen, did not seriously affect her property or her safety, while those of the Despensers certainly did. Until the rise of the Despensers, Isabella had supported her husband against his barons and in disagreements with her own father and brothers, kings of France. When the Despensers began to move against her, however, suspecting that she was in contact with their enemies, as she probably was, and when they persuaded the king to take back her property on the grounds that they should not, as an independent source of funds, be left in her hands as Anglo-French relations worsened, Isabella’s attitudes began to change. She did retain the confidence of the king in political matters, for when war over Aquitaine broke out again in 1324, it was Isabella, with the approval of the overconfident Despensers, who was sent to France to mediate with her brother, Charles IV. Charles had succeeded his brother Philip V in 1322, when the latter had died of dysentery without a legitimate male offspring, and, while he was undoubtedly supportive of Isabella as his sister, he also saw her as a possible pawn that could be manipulated to discommode the English king.

  The queen was well aware of the enmity of the Despensers but was clever enough to bid an ostensibly amiable farewell to Hugh the Younger on leaving Dover for France and to send him friendly letters from Paris. In her discussions with her brother Charles, Isabella seems genuinely to have wanted a solution to the issues between England and France that would benefit her adopted country and her husband, its king, while still being acceptable to the French. Inevitably, much centred around the homage that would have to be paid for any continental lands where the French would agree to English rule, and whether that would be simple homage, which acknowledged that the lands were held from the king of France; or liege homage, which carried with it a feudal obligation of service to that king – something that could never be acceptable to any English monarch. At one stage, Edward was prepared to come and pay simple homage in person, but then the Despensers, fearful for their own position if the king was out of the country, persuaded him not to go, and it was agreed, probably at Isabella’s instigation, that Edward would grant his eldest son all his titles and lands in France and that the son, rather than the father, would go to France to pay homage. Whether this was a genuine attempt by Isabella to resolve the conflict, or whether it was a ploy to obtain control of the heir to the throne, is still the subject of debate – it was probably a bit of both. But in any event Edward, Prince of Wales, who was not quite thirteen, set sail from Dover with his entourage, including two bishops and a number of knights, on 12 September 1325 and paid homage to his uncle Charles at Vincennes on 24 September.

  With a truce brokered and the English lands safe in the hands of the heir, there was now no need for Isabella and her son to remain in France and the king expected their return. At first, this took the form of enquiries as to their travel arrangements, with the queen giving various reasons why she should stay a little longer, but, as the king’s enquiries became demands that she and his son should return, she made it clear that she would not set foot in England until the Despensers were exiled, as she feared for her safety if she returned. In the meantime, she began to become a focus for various disenchanted Englishmen and exiled nobles in France – something that was duly reported back to the king by emissaries sent to escort her back and by members of her own household whom she returned to England when the king stopped her allowance. The king of France, her brother, was initially happy to pay Isabella’s bills, but then she became embroiled in scandal.

  Roger Mortimer was born in 1287, into a family that was already enormously rich with lands in the Welsh Marches and mid Wales, southern England, the Midlands and Ireland, but, when his father died in 1304, his wardship was given by Edward II to Piers Gaveston. A wardship was immensely lucrative as all the income from the ward’s estates was controlled by the guardian (and could be diverted to the latter’s own purposes) until the ward reached his majority. The guardian also controlled his ward’s marriage, and in 1306 Roger paid Gaveston 2,500 marks to claim his estates and income for the rest of his minority. As his minority had only two years to run, the payment of £140,000 in today’s money (by the silver standard) indicates how valuable the estates were.

  At first, Roger’s life was like that of any other sprig of the nobility: knighted by Edward I in the same year as he reclaimed his estates and in the same batch as the Prince of Wales, later Edward II, he played an official role in the latter’s coronation, served in Aquitaine, took part in the suppression of revolt in Wales, and served two terms as Justiciar of Ireland, where he was as successful as any English peacemaker could be in that lawless land. From 1320, towards the end of his second tour in Ireland, he became increasingly part of the opposition to the Despensers as they extended their holdings in Wales to what he and his fellow Marcher Lords saw as their detriment. In any case, it was said that Hugh Despenser the Younger was determined, in the manner of a Pathan blood feud, to wreak vengeance on Mortimer for the death of his, Hugh’s, grandfather at the hands of Roger’s at the Battle of Evesham in 1265. As we have seen, the success of the baronial opposition to the Despensers in 1321 was short-lived. The Battle of Boroughbridge on 16 March 1322 ended the civil war, but before that, on 23 January, Roger Mortimer and his uncle, Roger Mortimer of Chirk, had already surrendered to the king at Shrewsbury. They were sentenced to death but spared the terrible fate of so many of their fellow rebels when the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in the Tower of London.

  On 1 August 1323, in a Buchanesque adventure involving conniving jailers and drugged sentries, Roger Mortimer escaped from the Tower, obtained a boat in which he rowed across the Thames, stole or was given a horse, rode to Dover, found a ship to cross the Channel to France, and was welcomed at the court of Charles IV, then at loggerheads with Edward II over the usual vexed question of Aquitaine. Mortimer now joined the band of expatriates who were also in opposition to Edward II’s England and clustered around the French court or that of the count of Hainault, whose territory bordered on Flanders and is now part of modern Belgium. His uncle, however, remained in the Tower, his lands forfeited, and died there aged seventy in 1326.

  Roger Mortimer did not stay long in Paris and spent the next year or so in Hainault trying to raise troops and money to mount an invasion of England; in this, he was encouraged by the count and by disaffected elements in England who vowed they would rise if an invasion to remove the Despensers were to happen. Isabella probably first met Mortimer at the funeral of the old count of Valois, when he came to Paris in the entourage of the countess of Hainault. As both he and Isabella were united in hatred and fear of the Despensers, it was natural that they should meet and that Roger should confer with the English opposition now coalescing around the queen.

  Remarkably quickly, their relationship became more than a political alliance, and by at least early 1326 it was generally assumed that they were sleeping together. While it was considered normal for married men to have mistresses (and Mortimer had been separated from his own wife for three years), for a lady to have extra-marital affairs was regarded as a heinous crime and for a queen to do so was treason of the worst sort. One can only assume that Isabella knew this perfectly well but that she was motivated by years of sexual frustration and resentment of her husband’s actions towards her and his predilection for unsavoury favourites. She was a mature beauty of thirty-one and the thirty-nine-year-old Mortimer was, after all, everything King Edward
was not: he was heterosexual, decisive, outgoing and audacious, and he shared her interest in culture and the arts. We might not blame either of them today, but at the time both were playing a dangerous game. Once news of their relationship reached England – and it did so remarkably quickly – Edward redoubled his efforts to force his son to return to his allegiance, even if the boy’s mother would not. Letters were sent to the king of France, to the pope, to his son and to anyone who might listen, but to no avail.

  Rumours of invasion were rife, and throughout the summer Edward issued commissions of array calling up troops, sequestered ships to watch the maritime approaches, ordered coastal defences to be put in order, seized Isabella’s remaining lands and confiscated her funds lodged in the Tower, attempted to arrest Mortimer’s mother (she was tipped off and went into hiding), and locked up anyone else he could lay hands on who might be sympathetic to the queen or who might oppose the Despensers. Eventually, having failed to persuade Charles IV to cooperate, Edward declared war on France in July 1326. At last, Edward’s appeals to the pope in Avignon bore fruit: John XXII had hoped to keep the peace between England and France and had sent nuncios to try to mediate between Isabella and her husband, but he could not condone adultery and wrote to Charles IV to tell him so. Charles, no doubt mindful of what had happened to his ex-wife Blanche and her illicit lover, agreed to expel Isabella and her lover, but it would seem to have been done in a gentlemanly way, with the couple given plenty of notice and Isabella allowed to take with her all her possessions and the funds provided by Charles. It seems that she now accepted, if she had not done so before, that it was not just the Despensers that were her enemies, but her husband, the king of England, as well. Since his escape from the Tower, Mortimer had always hoped to overthrow Edward II, and Isabella became part of the plan too, for it was she who possessed the strongest card – the king’s son, Edward, Prince of Wales. After a diversion to Isabella’s county of Ponthieu to raise further funds, she and Mortimer were welcomed in Hainault in August.