Until he took up with Rosamund, Henry had conducted his amorous intrigues with relative discretion. But this time, it was impossible for Eleanor to turn a blind eye to his infidelities because Henry openly consorted with Rosamund. His passion for her was so overt—and evidently reciprocated—that a contemporary scribe waggishly punned on her nickame, calling her “Rosa Immundi,” or “Rose of Unchastity.”
The royal marriage became greatly strained, and in 1167, Eleanor had most of her possessions loaded onto ships for Argentan on the European continent. After celebrating Christmas there with Henry, she appeared to have agreed to some form of official separation, because she soon embarked with her property to her birthplace of Poitiers.
But she didn’t lay low for long. Eleanor was imprisoned by Henry in 1173 for inciting their sons to rebel against him in France. The queen spent the next fifteen years of her life in captivity at various locations throughout England.
During the first three years of Eleanor’s imprisonment Rosamund enjoyed the warmth of the royal bed, while the queen was left to angrily pace the chilly floors of drafty castles.
In October 1175, the king was still flaunting his affair with Rosamund, perhaps in an effort to goad the queen into demanding an annulment. But Eleanor was far too canny to take the bait, knowing that if she allowed Henry to be rid of her, he could banish her to an abbey. If she were compelled to cast off her secular being and forfeit her worldly possessions, she would lose her title as well as the continental lands that were in her name (such as Aquitaine) to the English crown.
Eleanor was not one of those queens who meekly acquiesced to her husband. She was a political animal who played to win at all costs—in war, and in love. Given her reputation, rumors abounded that she was involved in the swift dispatch of her romantic rival in 1176.
Stories that gained popularity four hundred years later, during the Elizabethan era, held that the jealous Eleanor had Rosamund poisoned, but this conjecture has never been concretely established.
True, Eleanor most certainly saw Rosamund as a threat to her power, if not to her throne. But it’s doubtful for several reasons that Eleanor had a hand in her rival’s demise. For one thing, Eleanor had been imprisoned since 1173, so any personal involvement in Rosamund’s death would have been impossible, as Eleanor herself claimed. “In the matter of her death the Almighty knows me innocent. When I had power to send her dead, I did not; and when God wisely chose to take her from this world I was under constant watch by Henry’s spies.”
Nearly everything written about Rosamund is the stuff of folklore rather than of fact. Some accounts give her two sons by Henry, but their birth dates don’t seem to make sense in terms of Rosamund’s. Historians differ by thirteen years as to Rosamund’s own date of birth. I chose the later date of 1150, which seems most logical, particularly when one considers Henry’s predilection for nubile damsels. Even the extent of the footprint her royal affair left on the map of England is a matter of conjecture. One legend claims that Henry built his hunting lodge at Woodstock in her honor, and named the labyrinth there “Rosamund’s Bower.” Woodstock is now gone, but it stood near the current Blenheim Palace; and it certainly existed, although whether it was built specifically as a royal love nest, or as a gift for Henry’s mistress, is unlikely. What everyone seems to agree on, however, is that Rosamund de Clifford was the great love of Henry’s life and (with Queen Eleanor incarcerated for encouraging her sons to revolt against Henry) they lived together openly.
Though we know Rosamund died in 1176 because priory records confirm it, the reason she entered the nunnery at Godstow in the first place, like much of the rest of her life, remains a mystery. At her death, Rosamund was either all of twenty-six or she had managed to make it to the age of thirty-nine, depending on which source you read. The cause of her death remains unknown. But the legend of her life took root, and the fair Rosamund became more famous in death than she had been in life. Shortly after her demise, her tomb, which had been commissioned by Henry and placed before Godstow’s high altar, began to attract pilgrims, who turned the deceased royal favorite into something of a cult figure and the tomb itself into the ultimate expression of her royal lover’s undying devotion. Visitors laid their floral tributes and lit their candles about her sepulcher as though it were a monument to True Love.
But Hugh, the Bishop of Lincoln, who visited Godstow in 1191, two years after Henry’s death, was not so smitten with the fairy tale. He saw Rosamund as a harlot and ordered her tomb to be moved, relegating her remains to an area beyond the church walls as a warning to other would-be fallen women. Rosamund’s new resting place was a cemetery plot by the nuns’ chapter house until the reign of Henry VIII, when it was destroyed during the execution of the Dissolution of Monasteries Act. The Godstow Priory itself is now only a shell of a ruin.
HENRY II and Alys (or Alais), Countess of the Vexin 1160-1220
Henry’s second-most famous mistress, Alys (or Alais), was the daughter of King Louis VII of France by his second wife, Constance of Castile, who died giving birth to her. Louis’s first wife was Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was now married to the hotheaded Henry II.
Alys was the poster child for the princess-political pawn of the Middle Ages. According to a treaty arranged between France and England in 1169, when Alys was only nine years old, she was sent to Britain to become the eventual bride of Henry’s son Richard (known as Richard the Lionheart). Alys pretty much grew up in Henry’s court, and after Henry lost his beloved Rosamund to death in 1176, his eye alit on his pretty, sixteen-year -old French ward. With complete disregard for his 1169 treaty with Louis of France, and any feelings or opinions Richard might have had on the subject, Henry “stole” Alys, making her his own mistress.
In the long run—although it was beside the point—Alys probably wouldn’t have been happy with Richard anyway. True, the prince was young and strong, well built and handsome, a magnificent horseman and an even greater warrior—but more than likely he didn’t play for her team.
The match between Alys and Richard had been Eleanor’s idea. Richard was her favorite son and Eleanor was always on the lookout for ways to enrich him and strengthen his political and military position in western Europe. Alys was the countess of a continental territory known as the Vexin, which was strategically important to both England and France.
But the lands that might have eventually become Henry’s through Alys’s dynastic marriage with Richard paled in comparison to the landscape of her body—young, firm, and evidently willing. Henry’s libido recovered from Rosamund’s untimely demise with relative alacrity. By 1177, only one year after her death, the royal affair with Alys was an international scandal and rumors abounded that Henry was considering divorcing Eleanor so that he could be free to marry his new paramour. Alys’s reputation was roundly trashed. It was popularly bandied about that she had borne Henry a son (who died before 1190), in addition to gossip that she had always been a promiscuous girl.
King Louis was livid that his daughter, by sleeping with her fiancé’s father, had become England’s royal whore, instead of marrying the son to become its future queen. Then, the issue of religion was added to the scandalous cocktail of sex and politics. Pope Alexander III’s emissary, Cardinal Peter of St. Chrysogonus, threatened to place England’s continental possessions under an interdict (which would have effectively excommunicated all of Henry’s subjects who abided there), if Henry didn’t proceed with the marriage between Richard and Alys in accordance with the treaty.
Finally, when Louis demanded his daughter’s return if no marriage was to take place, Henry begrudgingly agreed to permit the French princess to marry Richard, but neglected to mention a date, let alone a timetable, for this happy event.
In 1189, an ailing Henry promised Alys’s brother Philip, now King of France, that he would give up his twenty-nine-year -old mistress and see that she was put under the guardian-ship of any one of five men (to be named by Richard), and thence married to Richard upon his
return from the Holy War in Jerusalem.
But after Henry died that year, his (possibly gay) crusader son, now King Richard I, made use of the popular (and convenient) story that Alys had given birth to his father’s child as an excuse to terminate their marriage treaty. Alys, who had lived in limbo for six years while Richard was a political prisoner of King Leopold of Austria, was sent home to France in 1195, shortly after Richard’s return to England. Later that year her brother arranged for her marriage to William III Talvas, Count of Ponthieu, who was eighteen years her junior, hoping the union would be childless so that Philip could assume control of the strategically located Ponthieu. Alys thwarted her brother’s aspirations, however, bearing the count three daughters, one of whom, Marie, inherited the county upon her father’s demise in 1221.
Alys is believed to have died in 1220 at the age of sixty, still Countess of Ponthieu. The circumstances surrounding her death are unknown.
THE PLANTAGENETS 1216–1399
EDWARD II
1284-1327 RULED 1307-1327
EDWARD II WAS THE YOUNGEST OF FOURTEEN (POSSIBLY sixteen) children born to the powerful, canny, and ruthless Edward I and his queen, Eleanor of Castile, but by the time he acceded to the throne in 1307, he was the only surviving son. So, perhaps the scion of the man considered the greatest Plantagenet king, even in his lifetime, was bound to be inadequate, if not a downright disaster, by comparison.
The great-grandson of Henry II, Edward I had been a conqueror, a crusader, and a lawmaker. He was also a huge bully who asserted the rights of the crown over private powers, such as those wielded by his nobles, whenever possible, but always within the confines of the law. He might not have been liked, but he was most certainly feared and respected with the deference due to one’s monarch. His son, Edward II, was just a huge bully, the Plantagenet with the worst reputation as a ruler, and deservedly so. He allowed the decisions taken by the head inside his tights to prevail over the one between his shoulders, and the result was bloody and disastrous for England.
On the surface of it, Edward looked every inch a king—tall and handsome, with a head of golden curls and a full mustache and beard. But from his youth, his behavior was decidedly unroyal, eschewing the usual manly martial pursuits, including jousting, for the fascination of gardening and farming, and learning the skills of manual laborers and the crafts of the artisans.
In 1308, the twenty-three-year-old king wed the barely adolescent Isabella of France in a match that was entirely political; it was clear from the outset that Edward was not remotely willing to abandon his passionate attachment to his boyhood pal, the Gascon-born popinjay Piers Gaveston.
But the monarch managed to do his conjugal duty with yeomanlike obligation, producing two more children than the requisite heir and spare. Isabella’s life at court careened precipitously from trusted consort to pariah, depending on which of her husband’s male favorites was pulling his strings or was blissfully making havoc elsewhere.
At length, Edward’s involvement with the powerful Despenser family proved his undoing. Their rapaciousness sent the kingdom into revolt, culminating in Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer raising an army against her own husband and his paramour, Hugh Despenser the Younger. Isabella’s forces handily defeated them in 1326.
Consequently, Edward was brought before Parliament and tried for his crimes against the realm. On January 24, 1327, given the chance to abdicate in favor of his son, the crown prince, he accepted it, a broken man—the first King of England to be formally deposed. The following day, the fourteen-year-old prince began his rule as Edward III. He was crowned at Westminster Abbey on February 1.
In April, the forty-three-year-old Edward II was transferred from Kenilworth to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, where he remained imprisoned at least until September 1327. Two attempts to rescue him proved unsuccessful. What happened to him after that has been in dispute for centuries.
The circumstances surrounding the death of Edward II are murky. Although there are no contemporary accounts of his demise, sometime during the latter half of 1327, he was believed to have been snuffed out—literally. Stories surfaced later (which were fancifully embellished over the next few centuries) that he was suffocated as he lay prone upon a table, while a hot poker was shoved up his rear in what his murderers (who may have been directly hired by Roger Mortimer) deemed a fitting end to an acknowledged sodomite.
Or not. There’s an odd twist to the story, which will be discussed in the following entry.
Edward III finally grabbed the reins of power from his mother and her despotic lover in October 1330, shortly before his eighteenth birthday. Free of their manipulative influence he became a strong and respected monarch.
EDWARD II and Piers Gaveston 1284-1312 and Hugh Despenser the Younger 1286-1326 ISABELLA OF FRANCE (QUEEN TO EDWARD II) 1295-1358 and Roger Mortimer 1287-1330
The lives of these five figures are so intertwined that their royal affairs must form a single entry. This is a cautionary tale of passion and politics that began because of preferences in the royal bed and led to civil unrest, international tensions, gruesome executions, and, for the first time in English history, the abdication of a king.
In his youth, Edward had developed a mutually reciprocated passion for Piers Gaveston. The Gascon-born Gaveston had grown up in the service of the court. His father was one of Edward I’s retainers, and though he was a commoner, the young Piers, who was the same age as the future Edward II, displayed excellent manners and breeding. In 1300, when both boys were sixteen, the king made Piers a companion of the prince.
It ended up being a deadly move. A contemporary historian wrote of Gaveston that “as soon as the king’s son saw him, he fell so much in love that he entered upon an enduring compact with him.” Clearly there was nothing secret about the nature of their relationship. And it’s remarkable that they got away with it, because homosexuality was regarded as a heinous crime and a sin against nature. In the fourteenth century, punishment for sodomy ranged from excommunication (which was taken very seriously) to a rather gruesome execution.
Young Edward became determined to share all of his possessions with Piers. For a prince to cede such power to a commoner was unthinkable; and the king (correctly) feared that his son would inevitably share the entire English government with his favorite, if allowed to do so.
After Prince Edward dispatched the Royal Treasurer to inform the king that he intended to grant the county of Ponthieu to Gaveston, Edward I became so enraged by his son’s preposterous idea that he summoned his heir. When the prince appeared, the king grabbed him by the hair, threw him to the floor, and literally kicked the crap out of him.
Edward’s present-day biographer, Ian Mortimer, credits the king with the following outburst: “You baseborn whoreson! Would you give away lands, you, who never gained any? As the Lord lives, were it not for fear of breaking up the kingdom, you shall never enjoy your inheritance!”
The sovereign made his son promise never to see his lover again, and then, before the assembled lords of Parliament, declared Gaveston banished.
But as soon as Edward I died in July 1307, the new king’s first Royal Act was to recall his lover to court. Gaveston was made Duke of Cornwall—a title that Edward I had intended for his second son, and one that was traditionally conferred on a nobleman. Edward II then married off his lover to Margaret de Clare, a niece who was one of the heiresses to the vast and lucrative Gloucester estates. This, too, was another preference reserved for a high-ranking noble, because the wife in question was so near a relation to the king. The plethora of favors and titles Edward II bestowed upon his paramour angered the British barons; and the fact that Gaveston was a foreigner, and baseborn to boot, made matters even uglier.
Confident of the king’s love, the arrogant Gaveston made matters worse by flaunting his newly acquired wealth and position. Understandably, the barons couldn’t wait for an opportunity to get rid of him.
This was the dynamic discovered by th
e young Queen Isabella on the day she arrived in England.
Future historians would call her “the she-wolf of France,” but Isabella the Fair, a daughter of King Philip IV, was all of twelve years old when on January 25, 1308, she was married to the twenty-three-year-old King Edward II of England. The union was designed to resolve the countries’ dispute over the English possession of Gascony and England’s claims to other continental duchies (Anjou, Aquitaine, and Normandy—which are also now part of present-day France), in the hope of averting any potential war between the two countries.
The preteen Isabella had probably been shielded from any murmurs at the French court regarding her betrothed’s “unnatural” relationship with Piers Gaveston, but it could not have been a secret to her father. For the sake of a political alliance Philip condemned young Isabella to a miserable marriage, sacrificing her to a known sodomite—one of the crimes for which he was expelling the Knights Templar from France.
The wedding between Isabella and Edward took place in France. The child-bride was described by Geoffrey of Paris, a contemporary chronicler, as “the beauty of all beauties . . . in the kingdom if not in all Europe,” which likely meant, given the preferences of the era, that she was blond and slightly plump.
Unfortunately, she learned all too quickly that she was not to be the primary beneficiary of her tall, blond, and handsome husband’s masculine magnificence; for no sooner did Edward’s ship reach English shores than His Majesty bounded down the gangplank into the waiting arms of his lover, Piers Gaveston, “giving him kisses and repeated embraces.” Gaveston had been named Keeper of the Realm in the king’s absence, an act that infuriated the English barons, who had hoped that Edward’s understudy would be (a) a nobleman, and (b) experienced in matters of governance.
Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy Page 2