She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (43 page)

She already had the great seal, which had been taken from Edward at Monmouth by the bishop of Hereford on 20 November. While her husband was a prisoner, of course, she and Mortimer could control his public pronouncements, and so it was declared that the king had sent the seal of his own free will ‘to his consort and son’, with orders that they should do ‘not only what was necessary for right and peace, but also what should please them’. This was the same freedom of action that Eleanor of Aquitaine had enjoyed when she ruled England for her son Richard – ‘the power of doing whatever she wished in the kingdom’. Then, it had been an expression of trust; now, a step on the road to depriving the king of his crown.

The language in which that extraordinary proposition might be couched had, after all, been spoken within months of Edward’s accession nearly twenty years earlier: ‘Homage and the oath of allegiance are more in respect of the crown than in respect of the king’s person,’ his lords had told him in 1308. And now, at a parliament called to meet at Westminster in January 1327, the ways in which the king had forfeited that allegiance were enumerated. Edward ‘had as good as lost the lands of Gascony and Scotland through bad counsel and bad custody’, reported one chronicler, ‘and likewise through bad counsel he had caused to be slain a great part of the noble blood of the land, to the dishonour and loss of himself, his realm and the whole people, and had done many other astonishing things’. In a carefully stage-managed piece of political theatre, the bishops, lords and selected representatives of the wider realm, with excitable crowds of Londoners gathered outside, declared that they would have Edward’s son wear the crown instead of a king whose failings and oppressions were manifest and incorrigible. The archbishop of Canterbury spoke on the proverbial saw ‘
vox
populi, vox Dei
’ (‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’) – a text that would normally be a contentious
proposition for a royal administration, now suddenly rendered a valuable political tool. And Prince Edward was ushered forward, a sombre-faced fourteen-year-old, to receive the acclamation of his newly acquired subjects.

Still this de facto deposition needed more legitimating ballast. A deputation from parliament led by the bullish bishop of Hereford rode to Kenilworth, another of Henry of Lancaster’s castles, to which the imprisoned king had now been moved. One later account describes Edward, dressed all in black, weeping and fainting when he realised they had come to demand the renunciation of his throne. But in truth we know very little of Edward’s emotional reaction to the straits in which he found himself. His responsibilities as king had never claimed his full attention; this was the monarch, after all, who had offered to agree to anything his lords asked of him if it would secure the presence of Piers Gaveston by his side. Now Gaveston was gone, along with Despenser, the man who had helped Edward to avenge his death. He had neither the resources nor the means to fight on; it may be that he also lacked the will. We cannot know, but we might guess that despair was his overwhelming response as he listened to the bishop’s blandishments and threats. At last, on 20 January, faced with the utter hopelessness of his cause, Edward was brought to agree that he would resign his crown to his son. Once he had done so, the deputation formally renounced their homage, and the steward of Edward’s royal household solemnly broke his staff of office in two. By the double logic of deposition and abdication, then, the transformation effected at Edward’s coronation was undone. And at Westminster on 1 February 1327 his son was anointed and crowned in his stead as King Edward III, a slight figure in rich red silk amid an abbey ablaze with gold.

From this moment on the decrees of government carried the authenticating mark ‘by the king’, rather than ‘by the queen’, ‘by the queen and the king’s firstborn son’, or (with nice elision) ‘by the queen and her firstborn son’, as they had done in the months since the invasion. But that did not mean the young king was
now ruling his kingdom for himself. Around him stood a formal council, made up of the great bishops and lords of the realm, with Henry of Lancaster restored to his brother’s lands and named as the ‘chief guardian of the king’. Behind the council, however, stood Isabella and Mortimer. Formally, their authority had been superseded by the coronation and the council; informally, they directed the entire administration. That was not necessarily and inescapably a problem, given the legitimacy attached to the queen’s role as mother of an underage king, and Mortimer’s leadership of the army that had ended the oppressions of the previous regime. But much would depend on what they did next.

And whatever they chose to do would be done under uniquely intractable pressure. Never before had England had to contend with the existence of an ex-king, alive and well in captivity, while a new king attempted to establish his rule. Isabella’s failure to discharge her matrimonial responsibilities by returning to Edward’s side now that the ‘intruder’ Despenser had been removed had been explained away by the bishop of Hereford, chief propagandist of the coup, who expatiated at length on the violence with which Edward had threatened his wife should he see her again. (He carried a knife with which to kill her, the bishop declared, and, if that failed, had announced his intention to despatch her with his teeth.) But what could not be so easily remedied was the threat to the nascent regime posed by the pre-existing claim of the old king as a means of justifying opposition to the new. Unity had been easy to establish in the heady days of September 1326, when Edward was inseparable from the hated Despenser, but much harder to maintain with Despenser dead and Edward deposed through a process of political improvisation and outright invention.

One plot to free Edward had already been foiled by April 1327, when he was moved from Kenilworth sixty miles south-west to Berkeley Castle, a stronghold a couple of miles inland from the Severn estuary that was, in its marshy remoteness, much less easily accessible than Lancaster’s midland fortress. It was held by Thomas
Berkeley, son of the Lord Berkeley who had rebelled against Edward in 1322, and husband of one of Mortimer’s daughters – a much more reassuring custodian, from the point of view of the queen and her lover, than the increasingly powerful and independent-minded Lancaster. There Edward’s captivity became closer, to prevent further attempts at rescue, and perhaps less comfortable, in the hope that his robust health might take a convenient turn for the worse in the cold and damp of a less than royally furnished cell.

By the end of the summer, however, it was clear that neither expectation had been fulfilled. Edward remained unhelpfully alive; not only that, but in July a second conspiracy to liberate him had been thwarted, this time by a much narrower margin. Like the first plot, it was the brainchild of a Dominican friar, an order to which Edward had always shown particular favour and devotion – an attachment reciprocated by the friars years earlier in the tending and reverent burial of Gaveston’s broken body, and now in these demonstrations of diehard loyalism to a discredited king. This time it seems the conspirators succeeded in releasing Edward from his cell before the breakout was contained and the former king was returned to his prison quarters. But when a third plot was discovered in mid-September, it was obvious just how little hope there was that his continued existence might fade from public consciousness into political irrelevance.

And so, with impeccable and implacable political logic, covert arrangements were put in train that resulted, during the night of 21 September 1327, in the death of the man already known to his former subjects as ‘Edward, the late king’. By its very nature, his end was a grim business that took place in shadows and secrecy. Officially, it was simply reported that he had died – whether by unfortunate accident or a sudden extremity of illness was left disconcertingly unspecified – but the suggestion that natural causes had claimed his life at forty-three in so abrupt a manner, and with such extraordinarily opportune timing, convinced no one. This impulsive and misguided man, who had understood so little about the power he had once wielded, died in an obscurity quite at odds
with the royal spotlight in which he had lived – and the vacuum of information about his fate was rapidly filled with swirling dust-clouds of rumour, innuendo and conjecture.

Some of the myth-making about this political murder took the form of unsubtle allusion to the intimate relationships with his favourites that had proved so destructive. Edward was killed, later chroniclers would confidently assert, by a red-hot iron thrust violently into his anus, burning his intestines from the inside without a mark left on his body. Other whispers denied that the killing had taken place at all, and told instead of another corpse buried in his place, while the king himself escaped into exile under an assumed identity. Though these rumours acquired a little traction in the years (and even centuries) that followed, the truth was that such stories formed a familiar accompaniment to politically charged deaths that took place before their time or in mysterious circumstances. Tales already long in circulation included that of the Emperor Heinrich V, Matilda’s first husband, who had – so the legend went – faked his own death, substituted another body for his own at his magnificent funeral, and made his way to England to live in penitential poverty as a hermit in Chester. (Nor was he the only royal refugee to do so, according to inventive local tradition; near to his cell, it was said, lived a one-eyed anchorite named Harold who had made his home there after escaping from a battlefield near Hastings.) English folklore had found room for a German emperor: now the German Empire played host to a lost king of England. Edward’s tale, as it developed, was Heinrich’s in geographical reverse, with the king dodging a counterfeit funeral to arrive in Cologne in the guise of a wandering hermit, before ending his days in religious contemplation near Pavia in Lombardy.

The alchemical quality of Edward’s necessarily shadowy death was evident not only in this elaborate afterlife but in the transmutation of his reputation. Even the unlikely figure of Thomas of Lancaster had been transfigured by the shock of his violent end into a candidate for popular sainthood: within weeks of the earl’s execution miracles had been breathlessly reported at his tomb at
Pontefract, where his hat and belt were reverently kept as healing relics. Now Edward too had his chance to become a political martyr. By the time the chronicler Geoffrey le Baker wrote his venomously partisan account of events some thirty years later, the former king had become a Christ-like figure – the description of the lamenting, swooning Edward at Kenilworth is Baker’s – whose noble spirit was betrayed and destroyed by those who owed him their loyalty.

Chief among these Judases, of course, was Edward’s wife. For Baker, Isabella was Jezebel – a tyrannical and sexually corrupt queen manipulating her husband and son to impose evil on the kingdom – and a
ferrea virago
, a woman who aped a man, abandoning her feminine virtues, to become as cruel and unyielding as iron. But this vilification of a queen who had been welcomed with open arms in the autumn of 1326 – a mother to England’s people as well as to its heir, come to rescue the realm from tyranny – was neither instant nor inevitable in the immediate aftermath of Edward’s death.

Given the clandestine circumstances in which he died, almost nothing could be known for certain about what exactly had happened or where responsibility lay. Nor has the passage of time made answers any easier to find. Was Isabella the instigator of her husband’s murder, or did Mortimer decide that he must be removed? Did one initiate and the other resist, or were they partners in this, as in so much else? In public, the proprieties were carefully observed. The king’s corpse was embalmed, and his heart sent in a silver vase to his royal widow. The body lay in state, first at Berkeley, then in the abbey of St Peter at Gloucester, the coffin draped in cloth of gold embroidered with the arms of England. On 20 December, Edward was laid to rest in a ceremony full of elaborate ritual. Isabella and her son knelt before an exquisitely carved and gilded hearse bearing not only the coffin but a fine wooden effigy of the king dressed in royal robes and a copper-gilt crown. Mortimer too, clad respectfully in black, took his place among the mourners. Then, the following day, the court left Gloucester to
spend Christmas at Worcester and to prepare for the young king’s marriage to Philippa of Hainaut. Newly arrived in England, she was welcomed into London on Christmas Eve with lavish civic festivities, before travelling north to York for a wedding joyfully celebrated amid a snowstorm in the half-built minster.

Whatever view we take of Isabella’s role in her husband’s murder, therefore, it has to be noted that his death did not cause a moment’s disruption to the part she played in the regime she and Mortimer had created, or to her conduct as a queen and a mother. She had always evinced a conventionally observant piety – but faith, however genuine, might also be as flexible and accommodatingly complex as the person who professed it. Isabella’s religious belief had so far proved able to encompass personal and political rebellion against her husband and king, to the point of adultery and deposition; and by September 1327 it was already two years since she had begun to style herself a widow. It is hardly unimaginable, therefore, that Isabella might have brought herself to contemplate the irresistible political imperative of her husband’s death, particularly given the depths to which Edward’s rule had sunk and the degree of political legitimacy that Isabella’s resistance to his oppressions, and her possession of the unquestioned heir to his throne, had conferred on her claim to power. God, after all, had smiled on her actions and vindicated her every move by granting her overwhelming victory.

Much would depend, then, on whether the queen could maintain that legitimacy now that Edward had been removed from the political stage. Whatever happened, the regime over which she and Mortimer presided could not last indefinitely. The young king had just turned fifteen, and, though he had so far been no more than a pawn in the political process, it could not be expected that he would be content to remain forever in the shadow of his mother and her lover. The power that Isabella and Mortimer now enjoyed therefore depended on their continuing claim to be conscientious guardians of the realm until her son was old enough to rule for himself.