She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (41 page)

Isabella had played her part with aplomb. It was hardly a diplomatic breakthrough, but her presence had undoubtedly oiled the wheels of a process from which Edward could not realistically have hoped for more tangible gains. With careful formality, she made a public entry into Paris at the beginning of April, and remained there for the ratification of the treaty in May and her brother’s lavish wedding to their cousin, the daughter of Louis of Evreux, in July. But then, as the weeks went by and Isabella drifted between the royal palaces and hunting lodges to the west and north of the French capital, making offerings at local shrines and entertaining the great and good of the French court to dinner, it gradually became clear that she was making no move to return home.

If Edward was discomfited by his wife’s prolonged absence, his anxiety was offset both by her circumspect demeanour and by the obvious limitations to her freedom of action. As his consort, she could represent his wishes to her brother of France; but, as his consort, the only power she could exercise was an extension of his own. Whether he knew it or not, the legitimacy of his own rule
was leaching away as he allowed Despenser to misuse the power of his crown, but that fact did not mean that legitimate authority would automatically accrue to his wife instead.

It is also entirely likely that the attention the king paid to Isabella’s movements was limited by his preoccupation with much more obviously pressing concerns. The moment for the performance of his homage for Aquitaine was at hand, and on that ceremony depended the safety of the remaining English possessions in Gascony; but even as preparations were in train for Edward’s departure for France, Despenser and his father frantically sought to dissuade him from leaving England – for, as the
Vita
sagely remarked, ‘in the absence of the king they would not know where to live safely’. True to form, Edward succumbed to his favourite’s influence, announcing at Dover on the eve of his embarkation that he found himself indisposed and unable to travel.

But the circle still had to be squared and Gascony secured by the homage that Charles demanded. It was a seemingly intractable dilemma, and a perilous one – until a messenger arrived, fresh from crossing the Channel, with a proposal for an elegant solution. The French king, it appeared, would happily receive the homage of Edward’s eldest son if he were invested with the duchy of Aquitaine in his father’s stead. Twelve-year-old Prince Edward was already, conveniently, at Dover with his father; on 10 September he was created duke of Aquitaine in anticipation of the oath of allegiance he would offer to his French uncle, and two days later he set sail for France with an imposing entourage of bishops and lords. And, along with their young son, the king sent orders to his wife that she should return immediately to England, since her presence at her brother’s court was no longer required by English policy.

It was a double move that made impeccable sense from within the bunker that Edward’s gilded palaces had now become: to bring a princely pawn into play while retrieving the queen from her position in the front line, all the while allowing Despenser to remain sheltered at the king’s side. But, in their haste and their paranoia, Edward and Despenser made two mistakes of monu
mental proportions. They took for granted Isabella’s compliance; and they failed to see the sequence of moves that opened up to her for the first time as a result of their gambit.

When Prince Edward stepped onto the quay at Wissant on 14 September to be enfolded in his mother’s embrace, Isabella’s position was transformed at a stroke. With her son at her side, she was no longer merely an adjunct to her husband’s power, a consort who could be silenced and isolated if she failed to co-operate. Instead, she stood apart as the mother of the heir to the throne, an anointed queen who could speak and act for her young son and his people in the face of the tyranny that her husband’s rule had become. The king had been so focused on his own need to remain in England, on averting the loss of another favourite and another internal assault on his own power, that he had failed to recognise the impossibility of compelling the return of his wife and son once they were beyond his borders. Isabella, however, had been waiting for her chance, and now she took it.

When Edward’s envoy relayed his command that she should return to England, he did so in the presence of the French king and his court, perhaps in the belief that the English queen would not openly defy her husband. But a public platform suited Isabella’s purposes perfectly. ‘I feel that marriage is a joining together of man and woman …’ the
Vita
has her declare, ‘and someone has come between my husband and myself trying to break this bond. I protest that I will not return until this intruder is removed, but, discarding my marriage garment, shall assume the robes of widowhood and mourning until I am avenged of this Pharisee.’

For Edward, her defiance came as a palpable shock. He could not believe that this call for the removal of Despenser – the man who had become his right hand, restoring his power and securing his revenge for the death of Gaveston – had come from his loyal wife. His incredulity as he struggled to comprehend the reality of Isabella’s deception is manifest in the
Vita
’s account of his address to his assembled lords in parliament at Westminster that November: ‘…on her departure she did not seem to anyone to be
offended’, the king remarked, with a lack of percipience entirely characteristic of his political career.

Shock, however, was not the reaction of those whom Edward now suspected of involvement in his wife’s insubordination. Totally inadequate though his assessment of Isabella’s independence of mind might have been, he was not wrong to suppose that she would find allies around her in France. There is no incontrovertible evidence to prove that Isabella and her brother King Charles had worked together behind the scenes to secure her son’s presence in France and simultaneously prevent her own return to England, but it is by far the most likely conclusion in the light of their wholly compatible interests and the immediate support Charles gave her once she had made her feelings known. (‘The queen has come of her own will, and may freely return if she so wishes. But if she prefers to remain in these parts, she is my sister, and I refuse to expel her.’)

Meanwhile Isabella’s self-assertion also made her a figurehead for English as well as French hostility to Edward. And there was plenty of it. There were those even among the hand-picked delegation that had accompanied Prince Edward to Paris who preferred, it now transpired, to stay with the queen rather than return to the king – including not only the bishops of Winchester and Norwich but also Edward’s own half-brother, the earl of Kent, whose military failure in Gascony had compounded his own disenchantment with Despenser’s role in his brother’s regime.

They now joined forced with the exiles who had fled England after the failure of the earl of Lancaster’s rebellion, principal among them Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, the lord who had made such a dramatic escape from the Tower two years earlier.
Mortimer was thirty-eight years old, a soldier and politician of hard-won experience gained first as Edward’s justiciar in Ireland and later as Despenser’s enemy in the marches of Wales. Isabella had encountered him at her husband’s court many times, and in the wake of his incarceration had petitioned Edward to treat Mortimer’s imprisoned wife with greater compassion. But he had not been in Paris to greet the queen on her arrival in France, since Edward had made it a condition of Isabella’s embassy that his enemies should be expelled from Charles’s kingdom before her arrival, and Mortimer had therefore made his way to the county of Hainaut, France’s neighbour in the Low Countries to the north.

In December 1325, however, Hainaut’s countess Jeanne – a French princess by birth, and first cousin to Isabella and her brother – travelled to Paris for the funeral of her father, Charles of Valois. With her came Roger Mortimer. There is every reason to suppose that Mortimer, just as much as King Charles, had been covertly apprised of Isabella’s plans before her public breach with her husband. He was an obvious ally, a man with everything to gain and nothing to lose by supporting the queen’s revolt against Despenser’s power. Within weeks of their meeting, however, word reached England that, when they were united at last in Paris, Isabella and Mortimer had begun not only a political partnership but a passionate affair.

There is tantalisingly little evidence to document the private dynamics of this charged liaison, but its emotional logic is instantly recognisable. Physical attraction there clearly was: they were almost of an age, Isabella at thirty still a famous beauty, and Mortimer, though his looks are unknown, an athletic and compelling figure. Add to that a combustible combination of forceful temperaments, the aphrodisiac qualities of the power play in which they were caught up, and the depth and breadth of their shared political interests, and it is clear that this was no idle dalliance but an all-consuming personal bond.

That conclusion can only be reinforced by the dangers of the course to which they had now committed themselves. Adultery,
for a queen, was sin and treason combined, and Isabella had seen at close hand its grievous effects on her young sisters-in-law and their lovers. Beyond the personal risks were the political ones. By compromising the ground on which she stood as Edward’s betrayed wife, she might put in jeopardy the legitimacy of her position as a mother who could speak for the rights of her son. She now chose to wear the becomingly sombre gowns of a widow, in ostentatious expression of her claim that Despenser had destroyed her marriage, but in pursuing a relationship with Mortimer she risked the accusation that she had revealed herself as a scarlet woman.

On the other hand, Mortimer’s total identification with her cause also brought her significant practical resources. She could serve as a figurehead and a rallying point for opposition to her husband, but he was a soldier, and could lead an army into battle should confrontation develop into military conflict (as it surely would, for what other choice remained?). He could call on significant lands and loyalties at home. And if their liaison brought opprobrium upon her, it also emphasised the ‘unnaturalness’, to contemporary eyes, of the closeness between Edward and Despenser that had driven her from the marital bed.

Certainly the affair revealed that – greater tactician than her myopic husband though she undoubtedly was – she was also capable of impulsive behaviour that gave precedence to her immediate inclinations over cautious and far-sighted policy. But her sense of duty had always been inextricably entangled with a profound sense of entitlement, and both were unmistakably in play as she sought to seize her moment amid the political flood-tide that she herself had unleashed – fully aware, whatever else she thought she knew, that there were no safe options any more.

The question was what move the queen would make, with her knight at her side and the most valuable pawn of all, her son, under her control. Here for the first time we miss the perceptive commentary of the most acute of contemporary observers, the author of the
Vita Edwardi Secundi
. The single surviving transcript of
his narrative stops abruptly at the end of 1325 with the news that ‘mother and son refused to return to England’. This sudden silence, and the absence from the text of any sign of foreknowledge of what was to come, suggests that this wise and humane observer died early in 1326. We are left in the company of other chroniclers – variously interesting and well informed, but few as discerning – to contemplate the choices with which Isabella was now faced.

Her stand so far had been taken against Despenser, his intervention in her marriage and his improper influence with Edward. On those grounds, it was already clear, she would find widespread support in England, as well as among the exiled lords in France. But if she aimed merely at the destruction of Despenser, it had to be said that the precedents of the last twenty years were not good. Edward had shown time and again that he would say whatever his enemies wished to hear, and go back on his word the moment he was able to do so. It was this desperate knowledge that had pushed the earl of Lancaster to the killing of Gaveston, but that had done no more than condemn the kingdom to a decade of pathological political conflict until the king secured his revenge. The logic of the position that Isabella had adopted since her son’s arrival in France, meanwhile, dictated that her challenge was in practice aimed as much at her husband as at his favourite. By styling herself a widow, she had thrown off Edward’s authority in personal as well as political terms; and if her husband was now dead to her, her duty lay with her son, for whose rights and responsibilities she could claim to speak. To make that challenge real on English soil, however, she would need an army. Her brother Charles had furnished political and financial support, and Isabella could also draw on the resources of her dower lands in Ponthieu and Montreuil. But the prospect of military backing became concrete for the first time in the early months of 1326 thanks to Isabella’s cousin Jeanne of Valois and her husband, Count Guillaume of Hainaut.

A marriage alliance between Hainaut and England, in the youthful shape of the count’s eldest daughter and Isabella’s son Edward, had first been proposed six years earlier. Since then, the
ebb and flow of European diplomacy had swept the scheme aside, and, back in England, King Edward was embroiled in negotiations to secure an Aragonese princess for his heir. But the enormity of the king’s error in allowing the young prince to escape his grasp meant that Edward was no longer in a position to dictate his son’s future. Now Isabella and Mortimer revived the plan that young Edward should marry one of Count Guillaume’s daughters – this time one of his younger girls, Philippa – in an alliance that would bring the queen not only a daughter-in-law but troops with which her son might claim his birthright sooner than his father had anticipated.