The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Mortimer’s escape was a vital element in a political and diplomatic crisis that escalated steadily between 1323 and 1326. Driven by individual ambition and wider geopolitics, the crisis unfurled in a region that had caused little trouble to Edward since his accession: Gascony.

  When Mortimer fled to France, he was welcomed to the country by a new king. Charles IV had succeeded his brother Philip V in January 1322. Like all new French kings he was eager to show the kings of England that he regarded their claims to the duchy of Gascony with a suspicion that bordered on hostility. When a violent dispute broke out over a French bastide (fortified town) built on English territory at St-Sardos in the Agenais, Charles used the ensuing quarrel as a pretext for an invasion of Gascony. The earls of Kent and Pembroke were sent to protest, and dismissed haughtily. Charles wanted to discomfit the English as much as possible. In August 1324 he moved thousands of troops to the borders of the duchy and began to besiege its major towns. Almost in a blink, England and France were once again at war.

  Back in England the outbreak of war put Edward in a painful bind that exposed precisely why his aggressive, divisive approach to kingship could only lead to ruin. He could not trust his own subjects to obey his rule, for other than a small band of handsomely rewarded favourites, he had never given them reason to do so. He could – and did – arrest all Frenchmen in England and confiscate all lands held by French citizens, including the queen. But when he began to make plans to lead an army to Gascony in person, he faced a dilemma. Were he to leave England with an invasion force he would have to take with him most of the officials and magnates who were still loyal to him, and trust in the regency of his eleven-year-old son and heir Edward, earl of Chester. That would leave England highly vulnerable to plots, rebellions and invasion. If he left the Despensers behind him to keep order he risked losing them the way he had lost Gaveston. Furthermore, he feared rumours of Roger Mortimer’s plotting on the Continent, and imagined that either he or the Despensers could be kidnapped if they happened across Mortimer’s agents overseas.

  Rather than cross the Channel, Edward sent more envoys to negotiate for peace. In the first instance he sent an embassy led by the bishops of Winchester and Norwich, the earl of Richmond and Henry de Beaumont. But in March 1325, a diplomat of altogether higher status was sent: Queen Isabella.

  Both of Isabella’s two eldest brothers had been crowned king of France: Charles IV was the third and last. She had long enjoyed close links with her Capetian family, despite her involvement in the Tour de Nesle scandal of 1314, in which Charles’s wife Blanche had been imprisoned for adultery and her lover beaten to death in public. If anyone could appeal to Charles to end his aggression, reasoned Edward and the Despensers, it was Isabella.

  It would prove to be a fatal decision. Although she had been staunchly loyal to her husband during the convulsions of his reign, the queen had been rewarded, in the end, with little more than the same humiliation that she had suffered as a teenager, when she was sidelined by Gaveston at her own coronation. She suffered roundly at Edward and Despenser’s hands when war broke out: her lands had been confiscated, her servants exiled or imprisoned, and her maintenance payments from the king were both reduced and diverted via the younger Despenser. (She had written furiously to her brother Charles, complaining that she was treated like a maidservant.) On top of that, Despenser’s wife Eleanor de Clare was detailed to spy on Isabella’s correspondence. The queen had borne all this with public dignity, but she was clearly simmering with rage. Yet now the king and his ally decided that she was to be of some use to them after all, exploiting her relationship with the French king to try and dig her husband out of a situation in which he risked losing the last of the Plantagenet lands on the Continent.

  Isabella was, unsurprisingly, very pleased to leave England. ‘The queen departed very joyfully,’ wrote the author of The Life of Edward II. She was ‘pleased in fact to visit her native land and her relatives, pleased to leave the company of some whom she did not like’. This was something of an understatement. Isabella could not leave the Despensers and her weak, unpleasant husband quickly enough.

  A joyful reunion between the English queen and her brother took place at the end of March, and Isabella made her ceremonial entry into Paris on 1 April, dressed in striking fashion: a black riding habit, chequered black boots and a golden headdress. Her negotiating skills proved no more sovereign than any other English diplomat’s, but she did her duty and extended the fragile truce that held in Gascony.

  With her work done she ought to have returned to England, but Isabella had no such intention. Rather, she spent the summer of 1325 in France, touring her brother’s properties and waiting for her husband to make his long-awaited journey to France to pay homage to the French king at Beauvais.

  She waited and waited. But Edward would not and could not be tempted from England. Nothing had changed. He could neither leave his kingdom, nor be separated from the Despensers. And the prospect, in any case, of a demeaning ceremony at which Edward had to humble himself before the younger French king was hardly appealing on its own terms. Instead, the two sides compromised. It was agreed that the young Edward should be sent in his father’s place. He would be granted Ponthieu and Aquitaine in his own right, then travel to France to do homage to the king in person.

  This was a solution that looked very good to Edward II. But it looked even better to Isabella. Her son, now twelve years old, arrived in mid-September 1325, having been appointed duke of Aquitaine by his father, and did homage for his new lands in a ceremony at Vincennes.

  Here, finally, was a solution to the Gascon problem. With the crisis satisfactorily ended, Isabella and her son were expected to make a prompt return to England. Instead of coming home, however, Isabella and Edward adamantly refused to return to the troubled kingdom. In late November Isabella wrote to her husband explaining with venom the hatred and contempt in which she held the Despensers, and stating in bald terms her refusal to return. The author of The Life of Edward II reported the contents of her letter.

  ‘I feel that marriage is a joining of a man and woman holding fast to the practice of a life together,’ wrote Isabella. ‘[But] someone has come between my husband and myself and is trying to break the bond; I declare that I will not return until this intruder is removed, but discarding my marriage garment, shall put on the robes of widowhood and mourning until I am avenged of this Pharisee.’

  And so she did. The queen stayed in France, with her brother’s satisfied support, taunting the king of England who had so abused her and drawing around her a coalition of disaffected English nobles and prelates. True to her word, she symbolized her disgust with and alienation from her husband by wearing the black robes of mourning and a veil over her face. It was a powerful political statement of the injustice she had suffered and the rotten condition of the country from which she had exiled herself.

  In England, Edward raged. He wrote furious letters to his wife, and instructed all of the leading bishops of England to do the same, telling Isabella that her absence roused fears of a French invasion of England, and accusing her of wishing ‘to destroy a people so devoted to you for the hatred of one man’. But Isabella’s heart was unmoved. She held the heir to the Plantagenet realm, and she was protected by her brother, the king of France. And she was about to make her extraordinary position even more distressing to her husband. As 1325 drew to a close, Isabella committed what to Edward was the ultimate sacrilege. She delivered the sum of all the English king’s fears, and allied herself with the fugitive Roger Mortimer of Wigmore.

  Endgame

  The crossing from the Low Countries to England was rough. Storms blew up around the fleet of ninety-five ships, and they were tossed by powerful winds and violent waves as they made the journey towards the Essex coastline. For two days the fleet was scattered, but around midday on 24 September 1326 it was in sight of shore. The fleet dropped anchor in the mouth of the Orwell, on the Suffolk coast, and unloaded its cargo in haste.
As each vessel emptied of its men, horses and supplies it put swiftly back to sea and returned to the Continent.

  The army that landed in the small East Anglian port was small. At its centre were 700 Dutch and German mercenaries. With them came a party of English exiles who included noble veterans of the battle of Boroughbridge, refugees from the harsh royal revenge that followed, and a number of prominent magnates who had left England during the tyranny of the Despensers and never returned. They included the King’s half-brother Edmund earl of Kent, and John of Brittany, earl of Richmond – two men who had been almost unwaveringly loyal throughout Edward’s reign but who now, at last, had joined the opposition.

  The leaders of the invasion were Queen Isabella of England, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, and the heir to the English throne: Edward, earl of Chester and duke of Aquitaine. The exiles had finally returned to England. But they did not come in sorrow and humble apology. They came to rid the country of the king and his favourites for ever.

  Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer made an odd and scandalous couple. They met around Christmas 1325, and within weeks Isabella had taken Mortimer as her lover. Shortly afterwards the couple began to live together quite openly, and by May 1326 they had appeared in public as a couple, when Mortimer carried Prince Edward’s robes at the coronation of Charles IV’s third wife, Jeanne d’Evreux. Edward II had heard about his wife’s betrayal by February 1326, when he stated angrily: ‘the queen will not come to the King, nor permit his son to return, and the king understands that she is adopting the counsel of the Mortimer, the king’s notorious enemy and rebel.’ Edward put pressure on Pope John XXII to censure the French king for harbouring an adulterous couple, and Charles, under threat of excommunication, was obliged to order Isabella and Mortimer to leave France. Mortimer, however, had spent his time on the Continent establishing a network of allies, and the couple found a safe haven in the county of Hainault, where the count was sweetened by the betrothal of the young Edward to his daughter Philippa.

  The support of the Hainaults enabled Isabella and Mortimer to raise their invasion force. The paranoia of Edward II and the Despensers had allowed them to land in safety. England was on a defensive footing, but it was marshalled against the wrong invasion. Edward was convinced that Charles IV was going to invade the south coast from Normandy. He was wrong: Charles had no such intention.

  When news reached London that Isabella and Mortimer had landed on the east coast, Edward was dining in the Tower of London with the younger Despenser. He was dismayed. The size of the force reported in Suffolk – probably no more than 1,500 men in total – was tiny. But the king rightly concluded that this meant the bulk of his enemies were already inside England. ‘Alas, alas!’ the Brut chronicle has him exclaim. ‘We be all betrayed, for certain with so little power she had never come to land but folk of this country have consented.’ Like King John before him, Edward’s violent paranoia had bred real treachery.

  As news of Isabella and Mortimer’s arrival spread throughout England, supporters flocked to her side. The Anonimalle chronicler preserved an open letter written in French to the citizens of London, which proclaimed that the queen came ‘with good intent for the honour and profit of the Holy Church and of our very dear lord the King and to uphold and safeguard all the realm’. She offered a reward to any citizen who could help her ‘destroy sir Hugh Despenser, our enemy and all the realm’s, as well you know’. Copies of the letter were fixed to windows and the sealed original was pinned on the Eleanor Cross at Cheapside – a highly symbolic location for a queen’s propaganda. Isabella was claiming the inheritance of the old king and his beloved queen, and she found a willing audience.

  The Londoners rose in revolt on 15 October. They dragged John Marshal, a close ally of the younger Despenser, from his house and beheaded him on Cheapside, the great thoroughfare through London. The bishop of Exeter, a former royal treasurer, was discovered seeking sanctuary in the porch of St Paul’s. Although he rode in full armour, he was dragged from his horse as he neared the north gate of the cathedral, and taken to Cheapside, where the mutilated and bloody body of Marshal lay prone on the ground. The bishop’s armour was wrenched from his body and his head was cut off with a bread-knife. Two of his attendants were also murdered.

  Anarchy reigned. Every supporter of the realm – whether bishop, earl, judge or lowly servant – began to flee for his life. Members of Edward’s favourite monastic order, the Dominicans, disappeared into hiding. Offices connected with the Despenser regime and those who served it were plundered, burned and smashed. The plaque erected by Thomas earl of Lancaster to commemorate the 1311 Ordinances was erected again in St Paul’s for the first time since the earl’s death.

  Meanwhile, Isabella was moving west. Edward and the Despensers had fled the Tower of London almost as soon as they learned of her arrival, and headed for their power base in Wales, which had stood firm for them during the civil war of 1321–2. They sent word ahead to their old allies Rhys ap Gruffudd and Gruffudd Llwyd to raise troops for the cause. With almost £30,000 to his name, the king was certainly rich enough to pay a large army to defend him.

  By late October, Edward and the younger Despenser were in Chepstow, while the earl of Winchester was barricaded in Bristol castle. The queen and Mortimer gave steady pursuit and were at Gloucester by the time the bishop of Exeter’s head arrived for Isabella’s inspection. As they moved through England, magnates gathered to their sides. The king’s other half-brother, Thomas of Brotherton, earl of Norfolk, joined their company, as did Henry of Lancaster, earl of Leicester, the younger brother of the late Earl Thomas.

  On 18 October Bristol castle was besieged by Lancastrian forces. The earl of Winchester tried frantically to bargain for his life, but neither Mortimer nor Henry of Lancaster was in any mood to spare a Despenser. After eight days of siege their army stormed Bristol castle and Winchester was brought out in chains.

  While Bristol castle lay under siege, Edward and the younger Despenser decided that their best chance of survival lay in flight to Ireland. With a small party of men-at-arms, they boarded a ship at Chepstow. But the wind was against them. Desperate prayers from a friar brought no succour, and after five days spent battling the angry sea, the royal party was forced to put ashore at Cardiff and flee for the grandly rebuilt and supposedly impregnable Despenser castle at Caerphilly.

  As they were doing so, Isabella and Mortimer developed another piece in the diplomatic war. They issued a statement at Bristol arguing that, since the king had left the realm, his son Edward, duke of Aquitaine, should take control of government. The statement, preserved on the Close Rolls, cited the assent of prelates and barons including the archbishop of Dublin, the bishops of Winchester, Ely, Lincoln, Hereford and Norwich, the king’s two half-brothers Thomas earl of Norfolk and Edmund earl of Kent, Henry of Lancaster, ‘and other barons and knights then at Bristol’.

  According to the statement, Duke Edward was chosen to lead the country ‘with the assent of the whole community of the realm there present … that the said duke and keeper should rule and govern the realm in the name and right of the king his father’. The king was stripped of his authority and it was given – albeit temporarily – to a fourteen-year-old boy entirely under the sway of the queen and her lover. He assumed his responsibilities on 26 October.

  The following day the elder Despenser was brought before a court headed by Sir William Trussel and deliberately styled on that which had convicted Thomas earl of Lancaster. He was charged with robbery, treason and crimes against the Church, and told that since in convicting Lancaster he had constituted a court that did not recognize a defendant’s right to reply, he would be treated in the same way. The cycle of quasi-judicial violence continued: Despenser was hanged, drawn, quartered and beheaded on the public scaffold at Bristol. His head was sent to Winchester to be displayed in public.

  To all around Edward it was clear that the game was up. Despenser’s tenants in his Welsh lands bore him no love and refused to turn
out to defend him. On 31 October Edward’s household deserted, leaving Edward and Despenser with a bare few retainers to protect them.

  The king’s actions grew increasingly panicked and desperate. He might have remained in Caerphilly a long time, for the castle was stoutly defended and well stocked; he also had vast reserves of cash and jewels, as well as the great seal, privy seal and other appurtenances of government. But in early November, Edward and Despenser left for the Cistercian abbeys at Margam and Neath. At Neath they discovered that a manhunt was under way, led by Henry of Lancaster, and a group of barons seeking personal revenge for wrongs they or their families had suffered during or since the civil war. The king, Despenser and the royal chancellor Robert Baldock attempted to flee, probably along a high mountain path, towards the Despenser castle at Llantrisant. On the road they encountered the search party, who eventually captured the king and his remaining adherents as they cowered in a wood.

  Abdication

  On 24 November the whole population of the town of Hereford assembled in the market square. Before them sat a now familiar form of court, headed by Sir William Trussel, the man who had sent the elder Despenser, earl of Winchester, to the gallows less than a month previously.

  Before the court stood Hugh Despenser the younger, a dishevelled and sorry shadow of the man who had ruled England through the king. He had been brought to the town earlier in the day to the sound of drums and trumpets. A large crowd had gathered to see the fallen favourite arrive, and they bayed and cheered as the captive Despenser approached on horseback, a crown of nettles on his head to symbolize his crime of accroaching royal power, and his arms reversed on his tunic to proclaim his treachery. The front of his tunic bore a Latin verse from the New Testament: ‘Quid gloriaris in malicia qui potens est in iniquitate?’ (‘Why do you glory in malice, you who are mighty in iniquity?’) For almost a week before his transfer to Hereford the captive had been attempting to starve himself to death. But he was allowed no such easy fate. The crowd dragged him to the ground, stripped off his clothes and scrawled biblical slogans on his skin. Then he was hauled before the court.