Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  With the king engaged in a very public display of quayside affection with Gaveston, the humiliated and embarrassed girl was compelled to pick her own way along the planks of the gangway. Isabella’s mortification intensified when to her dismay Edward gave her wedding gifts, including her jewelry, to Gaveston!

  Matters worsened at the coronation. Instead of dressing in the traditional earls’ cloth of gold, Gaveston appeared in a pearl-encrusted royal purple ensemble, a color that was the purview of the monarchy. During the procession, he carried the crown of Edward the Confessor, England’s most sacred relic, an honor that was customarily reserved for the highest-ranking nobleman in the land. At the coronation, Gaveston’s arms, and not Isabella’s, were displayed next to the king’s. Most offensively to the assembled dinner guests, it was very clear who Edward considered the real queen. He spent the entire meal making out with Gaveston.

  It had also been Gaveston’s job to plan the event, including the coronation feast, and any bride who has had a less-than-perfect wedding reception can relate to the disasters that ensued. People were crushed into the cathedral, the food wasn’t ready when it was time for supper, and when it finally arrived, it was inedible—badly cooked and unprofessionally served.

  Only nine months after Edward became king, and less than two months after his marriage to Isabella, the enraged barons banded together to demand Gaveston’s exile. Piers was banished twice in as many years, but the proverbial bad penny kept returning. And when Gaveston reappeared for the third time alongside the king during the Christmas celebrations of 1311, the barons were not in a holiday mood. Faced with rebellion, the lovers ran for the border—the Scottish border—where Edward pleaded with Robert the Bruce, King of the Scots, to offer Gaveston a safe haven.

  “If the King of England will not keep faith with his own people, how then will he keep faith with me?” Bruce replied, refusing sanctuary.

  The barons caught up with the lovers, and Gaveston was taken in honorable captivity until he could present his case to Parliament. But the Earl of Warwick had his own agenda. After forcing Gaveston to run a gauntlet through a mob of angry peasants, he tossed him into the dungeon at Warwick Castle to await the arrival of the Earl of Lancaster, the rebellious barons’ ringleader.

  “While he lives there will be no safe place in the realm of England,” Lancaster insisted, setting the wheels in motion for Gaveston’s execution. At three a.m. on June 19, 1312, the prisoner was taken to Blacklow Hill on Lancaster’s estate, where two Welsh executioners ran him through with a sword and then beheaded him.

  Dominican friars eventually brought Gaveston’s body to their priory, stitched his head back on, and dressed the corpse in cloth of gold, before realizing that because Gaveston died an excommunicate he could not receive a Christian burial. The friars held on to the corpse until they could figure out what to do with it.

  Edward’s surprisingly unsentimental reaction to the news of his beloved’s death was “By God’s soul, he acted like a fool!” But from that moment, the king swore vengeance against Gaveston’s murderers.

  Despite his extramarital passion for Piers, Edward had successfully executed his royal duty in the conjugal bed. The pregnant queen welcomed her grieving husband home. Isabella was probably relieved in the extreme that Gaveston was forever out of their lives, and for a resumption of her husband’s attention in the boudoir. Five months later, on November 13, 1312, she gave birth to their first son, the future Edward III.

  Through Edward’s diplomatic mediation, the new Pope, John XXII, overturned Gaveston’s excommunication in 1315 and the king finally buried his late lamented lover with all due pomp. He also paid for masses to be said all over England for Gaveston’s soul, to be repeated twice every year—on Gaveston’s birthday and on the anniversary of his death—until the king’s own demise.

  For the next nine years Isabella counted herself surprisingly happy. She blossomed as a woman, setting new fashions with daring low-cut gowns. And she felt secure in her husband’s affections, even while other pretty courtiers came and went from his bed. Isabella did enjoy the king’s favors often enough to give birth to three more children between 1316 and 1321 (with at least one miscarriage during those years). Edward trusted her with affairs of state, leaving her to govern England when he was engaged in military campaigns on the Scottish border. She had grown from an innocent girl into a stunning queen, proud, strong-willed, and ambitious.

  Around 1318, however, Edward’s attention became focused on a new favorite, who would wreak more havoc on the kingdom than Piers Gaveston had ever done. Hugh Despenser the Elder was one of Edward’s closest and most influential advisers. His son, Hugh Despenser the Younger, supplanted all the fey young men who vied for the king’s favor to become not only Edward’s paramour but one of the most powerful men in England. The grasping, corrupt, and ambitious Despensers soon controlled the malleable monarch, convincing Edward to decrease Isabella’s hard-won influence and authority and to shift the balance of power to them.

  Edward appointed his new lover Royal Chamberlain, which gave Despenser complete control of who gained access to the king. By 1320, young Despenser’s greed had run amok. He extorted vast sums of money and estates and arbitrarily seized lands belonging to others, adding them to his own list of properties by bullying, manipulating, kidnapping, and torturing anyone, including women, who gave him the slightest resistance. Edward countenanced his new lover’s rampant brutality, and in concert they terrorized the kingdom into submission. The younger Hugh Despenser’s tyranny was unprecedented. Noblewomen and children were dispossessed and incarcerated for their lords’ alleged crimes; Despenser seized and appropriated their lands for himself.

  Pregnant with their fourth child, Isabella begged Edward to get rid of her rival. But it was England’s barons who forced the king to banish the Despensers in 1321, only to see them return to court the following year.

  In 1322, during one of the Scottish skirmishes, Despenser the Younger had persuaded the king to take flight rather than look to the queen’s welfare. Consequently, Isabella nearly fell into the hands of his worst enemy, Robert the Bruce, who was plotting to kidnap her. The brave and gutsy queen somehow managed to elude her would-be captors (though two of her ladies-in-waiting perished during the attempt) in a boat bound for England. The captain of the vessel risked his life in bringing Isabella home, braving the coastal water routes, which were controlled by allies of the Scots.

  By this time, Isabella had understandably suffered enough of her husband’s abuse. As the Despensers gained more and more control of the kingdom, her own star sank lower and lower. In September 1324, fearing that she would ally herself with one of his former generals, Sir Roger Mortimer, the king confiscated all of Isabella’s property. The queen’s servants were arrested and replaced with spies handpicked by Edward to keep an eye on her. Her children were taken from her and given into the custody of Eleanor de Clare, the wife of Hugh Despenser the Younger, whose job it was to “chaperone” the queen everywhere she went.

  It was then that Isabella began to consider active rebellion against Edward. She was given the opportunity to gain allies in a circuitous way. Her brother Charles, now King of France, had seized possession of Edward’s lands there. Isabella departed for Paris in March 1325, to negotiate a peace treaty.

  The next time she set foot on English soil would be at the side of Roger Mortimer, the man who had become her lover—and who happened to be commanding her invading army.

  Because Mortimer’s father, the 2nd Baron Wigmore, had died in battle when his son was still in his minority, Roger grew up at Edward I’s court, ironically under the guardianship of Piers Gaveston. Married in 1301, Mortimer was knighted by Edward I in 1306, at which time he was also made the 3rd Baron Wigmore. He did yeoman service to the crown, successfully invading Ireland, where Edward II made him his viceroy, appointing him Lord Lieutenant on November 23, 1316.

  But two years later, Mortimer threw his support to the growing rebel fact
ion seeking to oust the influential and greedy Despensers. Unfortunately, the king’s army outnumbered the rebels, and in 1322 Mortimer surrendered at Shrewsbury and was imprisoned in the Tower of London, his lands forfeit to the crown. Mortimer’s wife, Joan de Genville, was imprisoned elsewhere, as punishment for her husband’s perceived treachery.

  The following year, on August 1, 1323, Mortimer effected a daring escape from the Tower, fleeing in a waiting vessel to the Continent. Isabella encountered him in France in 1325 and soon took him as her lover. Her own fate, as well as England’s, was set in motion. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned in bed, and Isabella was determined to have her revenge. Their relationship blossomed from friendship to fervor with all due speed. Motive and opportunity, as well as intense sexual frustration on Isabella’s part, fueled their mutual passion. The queen was doubtless overjoyed to have a man make love to her who knew his way around a woman’s anatomy.

  Having heard the rumors that his wife and Mortimer were raising an army against him, Edward summoned Isabella home, but the queen stood her ground and refused to return to England. Rather than name the king as the cause of her misery, Isabella targeted the myriad abuses of Despenser, stating publicly before the French court, “I feel that marriage is a joining together of man and woman, maintaining the undivided habit of life, and that someone has come between my husband and myself 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.”

  Aside from the fact that the third party referred to by the queen happened to be a guy, Isabella’s statement sounds an awful lot like a fourteenth-century version of Princess Diana’s famous line, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”

  Charles IV stuck by his sister’s resolve to remain in France, telling Edward, “The queen has come of her own will and may freely return if she wishes. But if she prefers to remain here, she is my sister and I refuse to expel her.”

  Isabella had already convinced her husband to send their eldest son to her, on the promise that if their heir paid homage to Charles, he would return Edward’s French lands to him. With the future King of England safely by her side, Isabella’s strategy began to take shape.

  By March 1326, the affair between Isabella and Mortimer was common knowledge in both France and England, and their plans were well afoot to invade Britain and depose Edward. But Isabella must have had second thoughts about their decision, leading to an embarrassing public argument with Mortimer. When she considered returning to her husband after all, Mortimer grew violently angry, replying that he would sooner kill her than see her go back to Edward.

  That summer, the Pope spoke out against Isabella. Her brother abandoned her, perhaps in fear of his own excommunication, or in an attempt to avoid war with England. So the queen and her paramour visited Holland, to request military aid from William of Hainault, who was married to Isabella’s cousin. William gave Isabella and Mortimer eight warships in exchange for a marriage contract between his daughter Philippa and Isabella’s son Edward, the crown prince.

  On September 24, 1326, the queen, her son, and her lover landed in Suffolk with an army of mercenaries ready to fight King Edward for his crown.

  Edward endeavored to rally his supporters, but one by one they withdrew their backing or threw their muscle behind the queen. She gained additional support and sympathy when from his pulpit one of England’s most powerful bishops spread the word “that the king had carried a knife in his hose to kill Queen Isabella, and he had said that if he had no other weapon, he could crush her with his own teeth.” Isabella herself declared that if the barons were to repel her forces, it was tantamount to fighting her son, their future ruler. Presented that way, the barons’ choice was a no-brainer.

  Hugh the Younger grabbed as much as he could liberate from the Royal Treasury and fled London with his father and the king, but Isabella’s men caught up with them in Bristol. Hugh the Elder was executed there, and on November 16, 1326, Hugh the Younger and the king were captured in the open country near Neath. Edward was separated from his favorite and taken to Kenilworth Castle.

  Unsure whether to brand Edward’s lover as a thief or a traitor, a sodomite or a heretic, the rebels adjudged Hugh the Younger as all of the above, and he received the death sentence accorded to each of those offenses. On November 24, Hugh, whose flesh had first been crudely tattooed with scripture verses, was dragged by two teams of horses to the place of public execution and hanged like a thief on a gallows fifty feet high, while a bonfire was torched beneath him. But before the flames could asphyxiate him, Hugh was removed from the gallows and tied to a ladder, whereupon his genitals were sliced off and burned before his eyes. Hugh was then disemboweled and his entrails and vital organs consigned to the flames as well. Finally, his limbs were hacked off, followed by his head, which was spitted upon a pike atop the gates of London.

  Apart from this orgy of retribution and a half dozen more minor executions of traitors, Isabella had successfully staged a bloodless coup.

  It fell to Parliament to decide Edward’s fate. A number of options were available, which met with varying degrees of concern from the royal family. Isabella didn’t want the lords to depose him because it trampled on the notion of the divine right of kings. The crown prince most certainly objected to the execution of his father. Even Mortimer, whose life had been spared by the sovereign several years earlier, appeared uncomfortable with a parliamentary decision to kill a king.

  So the lords Parliamentary decided to imprison Edward II for life, and on January 20, 1327, they read him their verdict: the king had been found guilty of (among a lengthy list of charges) gross incompetence, not listening to good advice, having lost Scotland as well as lands in Ireland and in Gascony due to poor decisions and worse governance, fleeing in the company of an enemy of the realm, losing the faith and trust of his subjects, and conduct unbecoming a monarch.

  The king wept as he heard the charges, and then chose the lesser of two evils offered to him—he could relinquish the throne to an experienced governor of common blood, or abdicate in favor of his son. Sensing that the first option referred to his wife’s lover, Roger Mortimer, Edward II decided to abdicate as of January 24, 1327, the tragic price and ultimate consequence of his own carnality.

  The following day, his eldest son began his rule as Edward III. Just fourteen years old, he was crowned at Westminster Abbey on February 1.

  That spring, the disgraced former monarch was transferred from Kenilworth to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, where he remained at least until September, despite two failed rescue attempts. The true fate of Edward II may never be known.

  There is no fourteenth-century account of his death. Stories surfaced much later that, according to one medieval chronicler, Edward II had been “slain with a hot spit put through the secret place posterial.” Even the eminent Sir Thomas More, writing his historical biographies in the sixteenth century, gave credit to a “plumber’s iron, heated intensely hot . . . introduced through a tube into his secret parts so that it burned the inner portions beyond the intestines.”

  Or not.

  Credence has been given to a contemporary letter from a papal notary that alleges that the king escaped Berkeley Castle and fled to the Continent, hiding in an Italian castle, and surviving at least as late as 1330. Under close scrutiny of the letter’s text, the case collapses for this denouement. But it was enough to make Edward III consider the possibility that his father might be somewhere out there after all, and that the body buried with pomp at Gloucester Cathedral was that of an impostor, a consideration that contemporary historians have not entirely dismissed out of hand. In any case, Edward III chose not to pursue the matter. If he had issued a new statement declaring that Edward II still lived, it would have jeopardized his own reign, and might have sparked a civil war between supporters of each of the two Edwards.

&nbs
p; Isabella admitted her great distress at the news of her husband’s death, but it was politically expedient for him to remain deceased, regardless of the truth. After all, Isabella had never enjoyed so much power. The queen and her lover coruled England as regents until Edward III attained his majority in 1330. In fact, Roger Mortimer holds a unique position in English history: he essentially ruled the country for three years with absolutely no legal right to do so. He was not a legitimate regent. He was neither the father nor the guardian of Edward III, nor was he married to the queen.

  During the de facto regency, Mortimer lived large and lavishly, illegally appropriating at least as many estates as Hugh Despenser had done. He also gave himself as many titles as Edward had bestowed upon his paramours. And in March of 1330, he ordered the execution of Edward II’s half brother Edmund, Earl of Kent, for plotting to return Edward II to the throne—although it was supposedly common knowledge that Edward had been gruesomely murdered three years earlier.

  Edward III now feared, and not without reason, that he might be next on Mortimer’s hit list. It was time to act. In the words of Edward’s trusted knight Sir William de Montagu, “Eat the dog lest the dog eat us.”

  In October 1330, the month before Edward III’s eighteenth birthday, a special session of Parliament was convened in Nottingham. Edward and a few of his trusted friends staged a mini-coup and seized his mother and her lover, imprisoning them.

  “Fair son, have pity on the kind Mortimer,” Isabella pleaded. But as she was probably the only person Mortimer had ever been kind to, Edward III was deaf to her entreaties and had Mortimer conveyed to the Tower of London to await execution.

  On November 29, 1330, Roger Mortimer was condemned without trial for assuming royal power and other treasonous offenses. He was hanged at Tyburn and his estates became forfeit to the crown. Mortimer’s hapless widow, Joan, received a royal pardon in 1336 and lived for another twenty years.