Isabella’s uncles, who had attended the coronation, returned to France in a frothy rage. Which was bad news, given that France and England were perpetually squabbling and barely maintaining an uneasy truce. England was already embroiled in a conflict with Scotland and didn’t need another front to open up. England’s powerful magnates—the lords and earls who really ruled the land—decided that Gaveston was too great a distraction for the king and needed to be removed. But attempts to exile the king’s favorite proved futile. Edward would send Gaveston away and then, a few months later, call him back.
Their frustration with Edward reached a boiling point in 1312; civil war was in the making. Edward and Gaveston traveled the countryside, trying to keep ahead of the lords baying for the latter’s blood, but they couldn’t run for long—England is only so big. On May 19, Gaveston surrendered to the king’s enemies at Scarborough Castle, where Edward had left him ensconced with a battalion. Just over a month later, Gaveston was executed, brutally and without a trial. The king swore he’d have his revenge.
Isabella, meanwhile, was biding her time. She’d become an adult while following Edward and Gaveston around the country; at the time of Gaveston’s execution, she was pregnant with her husband’s son and heir. On November 12, 1312, the 17-year-old queen gave birth to a healthy baby boy. She’d done her duty to crown and husband, and her position was secure. She had also accumulated enough political acumen to manage her useless husband and try to keep the nation from civil war. Edward and his warring lords patched things up long enough to sign a peace treaty, which got them through the first few months of 1313 without killing one another. With Isabella’s mediation, the lords swore fealty to Edward once again, but it was a tenuous peace. The Scots were hammering England’s defenses to the north, and Edward’s most powerful earl (and the man responsible in part for Gaveston’s murder), a man named Lancaster, refused to aid him. Worse, Lancaster was actively plotting against Edward while England was left rudderless, without a real leader.
Isabella remained at Edward’s side, his confidante and advisor. That is, until about 1318, when Edward again became infatuated with a young man in his company. Unlike the foppish Gaveston, Hugh Despenser was shrewd, cruel, and paranoid. He used the royal relationship to seize his rivals’ lands and treasuries. As Despenser hoarded more gold and more land, more and more lords began defecting to Lancaster’s side. Isabella worked to maintain peace between her husband, his magnates, and an irate France, but they all demanded that Despenser be exiled. In July 1321, Edward gave the order; ever the sly one, Despenser went only as far as the English Channel, where he and his father turned to pirating merchant ships while awaiting word from Edward. Meanwhile, the king’s struggles with Lancaster came to a head. Lancaster found himself on the losing side of the battle; he was arrested and executed as a traitor. Edward had his revenge.
TRUMPED
Edward may have won a battle, but he was about to lose the war. Triumphant after Lancaster’s death, he hastily called the Despensers back to England and made Hugh his chief advisor. Ever the opportunist, Hugh then started to make moves on Isabella’s property and that of her children. Bad decision.
Hell hath no fury like a woman whose children’s birthright is in danger. Now a seasoned political manipulator, Isabella waited for just the right moment to act, and in 1325 opportunity finally landed in her lap. By then, England’s relationship with France had frayed over land that both claimed to rule. It was decided that Isabella was ideally suited to work out a solution with her relatives back home. So the queen (who had likely planted the idea with Edward and Despenser) made her way back to France, where she spent several restorative months in the bosom of her family. Six months after landing in Calais, she was followed by her son, 12-year-old Prince Edward, on the pretext that relations between France and England would be softened if he were made duke of Aquitaine. And just like that, 27-year-old Isabella held the trump card: the heir to the English throne.
Within weeks, Isabella showed her hand. “I feel that marriage is a joining together of man and woman … and someone has come between my husband and myself trying to break this bond,” she said in a statement. “I protest that I will not return until this intruder is removed.” Edward was gobsmacked. “On her departure, she did not seem to anyone to be offended,” he supposedly remarked. Isabella’s plan was ingenious and subtle. Her husband was a useless king, but she couldn’t say so without looking like a traitor. So she cleverly shifted the blame to Despenser and cast herself as the dutiful wronged wife. Isabella also knew that Edward was unlikely to be a worthy leader even if Despenser were removed. Lucky, then, that she happened to have an alternative ready to roll and under her control: her son, the prince.
Isabella had spent the last six months getting all her ducks in a row. Not only did she have France on her side, she had also won the loyalty of a faction of disaffected Englishmen to legitimize her rebellion. They were led by Roger Mortimer, one of the nobles who had led the revolt against Edward. Two years earlier, Mortimer had made a daring escape from the Tower of London and turned up in the French court. He and Isabella met up in Paris; he became not only her captain, but her lover as well.
To get her son on the throne, Isabella needed military might, so she and Mortimer engineered a marriage between young Edward and the daughter of a French count. In late September 1326, Isabella and Mortimer set sail for England with her daughter-in-law’s dowry—700 soldiers—along with a pack of mercenaries paid for by Isabella’s brother, the king of France. Isabella was, without a doubt, at the head of this operation; one fourteenth-century image shows her leading the troops while clad in shiny armor. Popular support for her as a romantic, righteous figurehead had been growing since word of her rebellion spread; that support, and her ranks, continued to swell after she returned to English soil. Edward had fallen out of favor not only with his lords and magnates but also among his people, who had suffered famine and war while he was occupied with avenging his lover’s death.
The end came swiftly. On November 16, the king and his companion were caught trying to make it across open country in Wales. Hugh Despenser was brought before the queen and her lords and sentenced to death. He was dragged through the streets, stripped naked, and hauled 50 feet in the air by his neck. He was then disemboweled while alive and castrated—punishment, it was rumored, for his intimate relationship with the king. As if all that wasn’t enough, he was beheaded, too.
The king was confined to Monmouth Castle as a prisoner of Henry of Lancaster, brother of the rebellious earl whom Edward had executed four years before. But Isabella and Mortimer still had one problem: with Despenser gone, the dynamic duo no longer had reason to challenge Edward’s fitness to rule. So, clever Isabella argued that, by fleeing to Wales, Edward had abandoned England and his right to rule it. Prince Edward was, therefore, the rightful king. The relieved bishops and lords of England agreed. Now all that remained was to convince Edward to resign the throne in favor of his son. Faced with overwhelming opposition, he agreed, and Prince Edward, just 14 years old, became King Edward III on February 1, 1327. Isabella, as the mother of the underage ruler, and Mortimer, as leader of the deposing army, now held authority in England.
MURDER, SHE WROTE
The situation was unprecedented—it was the first time the country had ever had a living ex-king. And there was also the issue of Isabella’s marriage: Edward may have been an ex-king, but he was not her ex-husband. With Despenser gone, she had no legitimate reason not to return to him. Moreover, Edward’s very existence posed a threat to the new regime, especially since it appeared he wasn’t completely without supporters. Indeed, by September 1327, three plots to free him had been foiled. So the queen and her captain hit upon a more traditional means of ridding themselves of this troublesome ex-king: murder.
The story is probably apocryphal, but later chroniclers morbidly insist that Edward II was murdered by the violent application of a red-hot poker up his backside. However death occured, o
n the night of September 21, 1327, the 43-year-old relatively robust former king conveniently died. He was buried with all the ceremony accorded to a dead monarch, his wife and son weeping and kneeling before his gilded hearse.
But young King Edward III, it seems, had learned a trick or two at his mother’s knee. Though Isabella and Mortimer were content to run things in England indefinitely, Edward wasn’t about to sit idly by and watch them do it. In late 1330, just three years after Isabella and Mortimer seized power, the 18-year-old king outflanked them. Mortimer was arrested as a traitor by a group of nobles loyal to the crown; he was hung on November 29, 1330. Isabella had but one choice: accept the death of her lover and an enforced retirement, surrendering her vast estates to her son. Ever the realist, she did so within a week of Mortimer’s execution. Isabella lived the rest of her life in quiet obedience to her son, dying in 1358. The “She-Wolf of France,” as she came to be called, was buried as she requested: with a silver vase containing the heart of her husband, the man she’d kicked off the throne and probably murdered.
THE SORCERESS PRINCESSES
Being close to the English throne was a dangerous place for a woman, even if you weren’t trying to maneuver the monarchy away from your husband. Not only can bad behavior bring your fairy-tale life crashing down around you, just the accusation could cost you your freedom … or your head.
The charge of witchcraft was a popular one. Most people in medieval England believed in witches, sorcery, and the Devil as much as they believed in Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit. They believed, without question, that there were perverted individuals who made pacts with Satan, sacrificed babies, and copulated with demonic beasts at Black Masses, had animal familiars, and flew on broomsticks. The pointy hat? Well, that was optional.
Witchcraft was heresy, a crime that, given the power of the church, endangered one’s mortal body as well as one’s immortal soul: often, the punishment was execution. That made the accusation of witchcraft, which could be difficult to disprove, a handy way to neutralize a woman who’d grown inconvenient or too big for her britches. Between the kings Henry IV and Henry VIII, roughly 150 years of civil instability, no fewer than four royal women were brought down by charges of dabbling in the dark arts. Here are their stories.
JOAN OF NAVARRE
The French second wife of Henry IV, Joan of Navarre was among the first European princesses to be accused of sorcery. Joan married Henry in 1403, several years after he’d deposed Richard II to take the throne; both she and Henry had children from their previous marriages, and at first this medieval Brady Bunch seemed to get along just fine.
But in 1419, six years after Henry IV’s death, Joan was accused of using witchcraft to try to poison her stepson, the young Henry V. No matter that, by most accounts, Joan had a pretty good relationship with young Henry and little reason to want him dead. Nevertheless, her confessor, the duplicitous Friar Randolph, claimed that Joan had told him she imagined “the king’s death in the most horrible manner that could be devised,” and she was supposedly using a wax figure of him to bring it about. She was put under house arrest at Pevensey Castle and denied access to revenue from her dowry; she was released in 1422 (the year that Henry V died of dysentery, not sorcery).
In reality, the charges were likely punishment for Joan supposedly trying to help her French son from her first marriage to escape prison after his capture by her adopted country’s forces at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Confused? So were everyone’s loyalties. England was in a fog of civil unrest, frequent coups, increasing church power, and unrelenting superstition. In that climate, it was easy to use a charge like witchcraft for political ends.
ELEANOR COBHAM, DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER
Twenty years later, another royal Englishwoman was charged with sorcery. Eleanor Cobham was the second wife of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, who was the brother of the late Henry V and uncle of the young Henry VI. The only thing that stood between Eleanor and the throne was a damp disappointment of a monarch no one really liked—if Henry VI were out of the picture, then the duke would become king and Eleanor queen. In 1441, rumors flew that people near the 20-year-old King Henry were practitioners of the “Black Art” and had been conspiring to kill him with “incantations and witchcraft.” Even worse, the Devil had appeared in a church in Essex not long before. Clearly, something evil was afoot.
What happened may have been wicked, but it had more to do with politics than sorcery. Roger Bolingbroke, an Oxford priest, physician, and astrologer, and Thomas Southwell, a canon of St. Stephen’s, Westminster, were arrested and accused of plotting to kill the king by means of necromancy. In Bolingbroke’s possession was found a wax figure of the monarch, which authorities claimed was being slowly melted to bring about the deterioration of the king’s health. Both men were tossed in the Tower of London in July 1441. Bolingbroke, under “examination” (read: torture), revealed that he had been instructed by the duchess of Gloucester, who he claimed wanted to use magic to murder the king. Eleanor soon found herself facing charges of witchcraft, a burning offense, and treason, a hanging one. She tried to flee but was caught and brought before the religious authorities, most of whom were her enemies.
At the trial, Eleanor’s two supposed accomplices were joined by a third, Margery Jourdemayne, dramatically called the “Witch of Eye,” from whom it was alleged that Eleanor begged love potions to ensnare the affections of the duke of Gloucester. Faced with the evidence against her, Eleanor admitted to dabbling in sorcery; she claimed the drugs she obtained from the Witch of Eye were to help her conceive a child but denied plotting against the king.
All four were found guilty. The Witch of Eye was burned alive at a market in London; Bolingbroke was hanged, beheaded, and quartered; and lucky Southwell died in prison, probably by his own hand. Eleanor was spared death after the king interceded. Stripped of her title, she was forced to walk through London barefoot, bearing a heavy candle, to the altar of St. Paul’s Cathedral and then to two more London churches to do the same penance. It was winter; the filthy ground cut her feet, and crowds along the way jeered at her. She was then made a prisoner in a castle in Wales, where she stayed until her death 18 years later. Her husband abandoned her to her fate, knowing he could do nothing to save her. There can be no doubt that Gloucester’s political enemies had a part in engineering her downfall. Eleanor hadn’t made many friends in her climb to the top of the social ladder, and Gloucester had lost some of his own because of both his marriage to her and his efforts to increase his wealth by diminishing that of others. Losing his wife in such a spectacularly public fashion meant the loss of Gloucester’s influence in the affairs of the king; he was fully discredited by her shame and would never again play a major role in England’s politics.
Meanwhile, Eleanor would go down in history as an ambitious sorceress. In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, Gloucester pleads with his wife to “banish the canker of ambitious thoughts,” but haughty Eleanor cannot. When she and her accomplices raise a spirit to tell them the future, they are caught by Gloucester’s political rivals and arrested. Gloucester, who hears about her crimes from her accusers, banishes her from his “bed and company/And give her as prey to law and shame/That hath dishonour’d Gloucester’s honest name.”
JACQUETTA OF LUXEMBOURG AND ELIZABETH WOODVILLE
Twenty years after Eleanor was forced to take those penitential steps, more accusations of witchcraft popped up on the other side of the family tree. In 1432, 17-year-old Jacquetta of Luxembourg married John, duke of Bedford, a 43-year-old widower who was also younger brother of Henry V and the duke of Gloucester. Three years later Bedford died, leaving Jacquetta a young and wealthy widow; she remarried within two years, to Sir Richard Woodville, a minor knight.
Despite her new marriage, Jacquetta was still the dowager duchess Bedford, and she remained tangentially involved in court intrigues. She certainly would have witnessed the downfall of the only other living duchess, Eleanor. So Jacquetta would have at least b
een wary of anything that looked like sorcery, knowing as she did how quickly fortunes in the court of England could change. And wow, did they.
In 1461, Edward IV deposed the mentally ill Henry VI, with the help of the earl of Warwick. Three years later, Jacquetta’s daughter, the beautiful Elizabeth Woodville, was secretly married to Edward IV, and the Woodville fortunes seemed to be cemented. But in 1469, civil war threatened to throw everything into turmoil.
Edward was facing insurrection from his former ally, Warwick. Fearing the increasing influence of the Woodville clan, Warwick executed Jacquetta’s husband and son and charged her with witchcraft. Witnesses came forward claiming that Jacquetta had made tiny lead effigies of the king and queen. Gossips claimed that she and her kin could have achieved so much only through witchcraft, and that the little figures were part of Jacquetta’s black magic to pull off the match.
Jacquetta was ultimately cleared of all charges, but the taint of sorcery remained on her and her daughter and grandchildren. After Edward died in 1483, his youngest brother, Richard III, declared that Edward’s children with Elizabeth had no right to the throne. His justification was that not only was Edward contracted to marry another woman before Elizabeth, making Edward a bigamist and their children bastards, but also that the union between Elizabeth and Edward was brought about by magic. Elizabeth’s two sons, the 12-year-old heir to the throne and his 9-year-old brother, were locked in the Tower of London and never seen again.
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