She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (36 page)

One more player remained in the wings, watching and waiting, while she enacted a private drama of her own. On Sunday 12 November, in her brilliantly painted chamber at Windsor Castle – golden stars dancing on green as the Wise and Foolish Virgins played out their parable in the finest pigments – Isabella went into labour. Shortly before six the next morning, she gave birth to a boy. The seventeen-year-old queen had kept her own counsel since the bitter complaints her uncles had relayed to her father in the first unhappy months of her marriage. She had maintained a cool dignity throughout the months and years of following Edward as he followed Gaveston in the fruitless search for sanctuary in his own kingdom. But, in her silence, she had learned a great deal: that her husband had much passion and little judgement; that his understanding of politics was sometimes wilfully obtuse, sometimes hopelessly naïve; and that his nobles were men to be reckoned with. Isabella was still young, but she had a shrewd intellect and a forceful will of her own. And now, with her son in her arms, she held the key that would transform her power as queen.

 

‘Our King Edward has now reigned six full years’, the author of the
Vita
wrote in 1313, ‘and has till now achieved nothing praiseworthy or memorable, except that by a royal marriage he has raised up for himself a handsome son and heir to the throne.’ Amid the wreckage of England’s hopes, then, Isabella and her baby son embodied Edward’s sole accomplishment as king.

The arrival of the new prince – who was named Edward after his English father and grandfather, despite the efforts of a French delegation headed by Isabella’s eldest brother Louis to suggest Philippe as an alternative – was greeted with wild enthusiasm in the capital. Londoners caroused in the streets, inebriated not only by the free wine flowing from barrels set up at the roadsides but by sheer relief that riotous celebration was overtaking their city, rather than the riotous violence that had threatened to erupt during previous weeks. Then, tense negotiations had been taking place in a desperate attempt to avert all-out war between the king and the earls responsible for Gaveston’s death, whose fear for their own safety had taken steel-clad form when they arrived in London at the beginning of September at the head of a formidable army.

Now, at last, God had shown that he was willing to smile again on England and its unhappy monarch. The baby’s birth, in providing for the future of the royal line, served to strengthen Edward’s hand; he was as yet in no position to impose the vengeance he craved, but a ‘treaty of peace’ was finally patched together on 20 December 1312, under the auspices of envoys from the pope and the French court. The earls of Warwick and Lancaster were to submit to the king’s grace, and restore to him the jewels and horses Lancaster had seized when Edward and Gaveston fled from
Newcastle. In return, the agreement stipulated, Edward would lay aside all rancour arising from Gaveston’s death.

The depths of hostility and suspicion that lay behind these ostensibly simple provisions were laid bare by the protracted manoeuvring over their enactment that occupied the uneasy months after the treaty was drawn up. It was hardly surprising that Warwick and Lancaster were reluctant to accept the settlement: Edward had proved many times before that his word was not to be trusted where Gaveston was concerned, and there was ample reason to believe that his offer of forgiveness was entirely disingenuous. Moreover, the treaty as it stood neither mentioned the ordinances, on the authority of which the earls claimed to have acted, nor identified Gaveston as a traitor – and, as such, it gave Warwick and Lancaster no protection in law beyond the offer of the king’s grace, fleetingly insubstantial as it was likely to be. Meanwhile, silence on the matter of the ordinances was, for Edward, merely a first step: he sought their revocation, and his own absolution from his oath to maintain them.

By the end of February 1313 Lancaster had finally agreed to return the king’s jewels, a dazzling hoard with a value to Edward that went beyond the financial, including as it did not only a golden cup that had been a gift from his mother, but four great rubies, an emerald and a huge diamond in an enamelled silver box that Gaveston had been carrying when he was captured. But still argument and counter-argument continued, while all the time the Scots continued to press home the advantage presented to them by the implosion of English politics. Bruce’s violent raids had already exacted thousands of pounds in tribute from the people of Northumberland and Westmorland, and his troops were now plundering the countryside as far south as Yorkshire.

Edward – whose inability to focus on the issues that most exercised his earls had not disappeared with Gaveston’s death – chose this moment to announce his departure for Paris. Isabella’s father, King Philippe, had invited his daughter and her royal husband to attend the French court for the knighting of his three sons, Isabella’s
brothers Louis, Philippe and Charles. This lavish state visit – undertaken in casual defiance of the ordinances’ prescription that the king should not leave the country without the consent of his lords – presented Edward with a characteristically welcome opportunity to absent himself from the scene of conflict at home.

But it also marked the emergence of his wife as a political player in her own right. Newly a mother to the heir to the English throne, seventeen-year-old Isabella was returning to her homeland as a queen taking her rightful place beside her husband almost for the first time. Without Gaveston’s disturbing presence, Edward and Isabella once again looked every inch the golden couple they had appeared at their wedding five years earlier – and it now seemed possible to hope that, this time, appearances might be matched by reality.

The royal entourage sailed from Dover at dawn on 23 May, and made a ceremonial entry into Paris on 2 June, before dining with the French king at an elaborately staged banquet that evening. The next day, on the feast of Pentecost, the solemn ritual of knighthood was enacted at the great Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame (the foundations of which had been laid under the aegis of Louis VII a century and a half earlier, a few years after his divorce from Eleanor of Aquitaine). There Philippe and Edward bestowed the belt and spurs of a knight on Louis, the heir to the French throne – a prince who was already a king, since he had inherited the crown of Navarre from his mother Jeanne on her death in 1305. These three kings then made knights of the other young men before them, almost two hundred in all, including Louis’s younger brothers, Philippe and Charles, and their cousins Philippe of Valois and Robert of Artois.

Days and nights of celebration followed. The city was a riot of colour, the houses decked in hangings of red, blue, white, black, yellow and green; there was eating, drinking and dancing in the streets, with wine flowing from a great fountain around which coiled ornamental mermaids, civet-cats, lions, leopards and other fabulous creatures; and the citizens presented intricate tableaux of
popular tales and biblical scenes. On one stage a hundred costumed devils enthusiastically tormented anguished sinners as pitch-black smoke poured from the pit of hell, while, on another, angels sang as souls trooped cheerfully into brightly painted paradise.

Amid this revelry, kings, queens and nobles faced a punishingly continuous schedule of feasts and functions. On Tuesday 5 June, it was Edward and Isabella’s turn to entertain their hosts at a banquet laid out in richly hung tents beside their lodgings at the abbey of St-Germain-des-Prés, with torches blazing ostentatiously in the midday sun while guests were served, in another showy conceit, by attendants on horseback. The following day, Edward returned to Notre-Dame, walking with Philippe and the flower of the French aristocracy on a forty-foot-wide pontoon bridge across the Seine to pledge themselves as crusaders to the future rescue of the Holy Land from the infidel. The day after that, Isabella missed her turn to take the crusaders’ cross with the rest of the royal ladies when, after yet another feast, she and Edward overslept – a faux pas which an eyewitness Parisian chronicler treated with amused indulgence, on the grounds that the king could hardly be blamed for tarrying in the bed of such a beautiful wife. (Isabella’s failure to wake her notoriously tardy husband may, in fact, have been the result of circumspection rather than the previous night’s excesses. When she did finally take the cross two days later, she proved a sceptical crusader-in-prospect, qualifying her commitment by securing a cardinal’s promise that she need only set out for the Holy Land if and when her husband did so, and – a crucial proviso, this, for a young woman who luxuriated in her lavish lifestyle – that she would be required to contribute only such sums of money as her own devotion suggested were necessary.)

On 10 June the English king and his queen followed her father to Pontoise, seventeen miles north-west of Paris, where the serious business of diplomacy would take place. There were the usual tensions over Gascony to be tackled, but Philippe was generous in the privileges he granted and the loans he proffered to his son-in-law. The French king’s munificence was far from selfless: the
weeks of ceremony and celebration had confirmed his own position as the most powerful monarch in western Europe and the champion of Christendom in defence of the Holy Land. But for Edward, too, the visit had been a welcome interruption to the challenges and confrontations he had faced in England, demonstrating the grandeur of his sovereignty and his place among the royal leaders of Europe. And central to that reaffirmation of his authority was Isabella.

Thanks to Isabella, Edward could stand at the heart of the dynastic rituals of the French crown. Thanks to Isabella, he had a son to represent the future of his own dynasty. And, thanks to Isabella, the support he was offered in Paris was unquestioning. No word of criticism, no hint of past scandal or present conflict, attaches itself to ‘
Odouart, roy des Anglois
’ in the account of the eyewitness chronicler, a Parisian clerk with connections to the royal chancery. Instead, praise is heaped upon Isabella, ‘the wise and noble lady Isabeau’, ‘the beautiful Isabelot’, ‘the fairest of the fair, even as the sun surpasses the stars’.

For Isabella herself, the visit had been a heartening opportunity to see her father, her family and her childhood home for the first time in five years. The omens of their stay had not all been auspicious: at Pontoise, a fire broke out in the English royal pavilion during the night, destroying many of their possessions and leaving Isabella with a burn to the arm that was to trouble her for many months. But she returned to England ready to play the part for which she had been anointed and crowned: to intercede with her husband in the interests of peace and justice, and to support him in his duty to his people.

Not that his people were overly impressed, it had to be said, with the length of time that Edward had chosen to devote to his Parisian progress. The lords had assembled in London in the second week of July in anticipation of a parliament to be held on the king’s promised return, but when Edward failed to appear, or even to send word, they dispersed, ‘weary’, the
Vita
says, ‘of the trouble and expense to which they had been put’. It was through gritted
teeth that they agreed to reassemble in September. By then, the search for a lasting settlement had become desperate. More than a year had passed since Gaveston’s death, and exhaustion had set in among a political community worn down by the accidental strategy of attrition that had been forged out of Edward’s stubbornness and his talent for procrastination.

Now, Isabella and her family helped make a final push for peace. Just as the threat of French intervention had secured Gaveston’s exile in 1308, so now the queen’s uncle Louis of Evreux drove forward the negotiations to resolve the consequences of his death. And Isabella herself (together with the young earl of Gloucester, Gaveston’s brother-in-law, who had stayed close to Edward and served as keeper of the realm during his absence in France) stepped forward to mediate between her husband and his nobles. The public intervention of the young queen made it possible for both sides to enter with dignity into a formal ritual of reconciliation, and on 14 October the great lords of England at last knelt before their king in Westminster Hall to submit themselves to his grace and receive his pardon for their part in Gaveston’s death. The next day, Edward dined with his cousin Thomas of Lancaster as evidence of their new-found harmony.

But there could be no mistaking that this peace was brittle and tenuous, its limitations exposed by what Edward did not say as much as by what he did. There was still no royal acknowledgement that Gaveston had been a traitor, nor of the force in law of the ordinances by which, the earls claimed, his death had been prescribed. The immediate danger of political conflagration had been averted, but the safety of England’s greatest men was left hanging by the slender thread of the king’s questionable integrity. And the mistrust behind the public smiles was made manifest all too soon, when Edward began to prepare for a major military campaign against the Scots – a mere six years too late to halt the consolidation of Bruce’s power in its tracks.