The Greatest Traitor

by Ian Mortimer

  Even this was not the limit of his luck. War now seemed likely between England and France. Tension had been high between the two countries for the past few years, owing to problems arising from Edward’s lordship of Gascony. For this Edward was required to do homage to the King of France in person, a humbling act he had hitherto avoided. Now King Charles had every legal right to confiscate the lordship. Furthermore, the duchy had seen several conflicts which Edward had failed to subdue, and in such circumstances it was incumbent upon the King of France to resolve matters, using a French army to suppress the rebellious Gascon lords, if necessary. This was a highly contentious issue, and one which threatened to flare up into war in the autumn of 1323. Arriving at precisely the right time, Roger was welcomed as an ally and treated with great honour by Charles IV. Edward was naturally infuriated by this, but there was little he could do, for in a final piece of amazing good fortune for Roger, in mid-October 1323 a French attempt to build a fortified town at Saint Sardos was met with resistance from a Gascon lord, Raymond Bernard. Bernard was felt to be acting with the connivance of the Seneschal of Gascony, Sir Ralph Basset, and Basset did not help matters by taking no action against Bernard, despite the murder of a French royal official. When Edward also refused to act to bring the offenders to justice, and refused again to do homage for Gascony (on the advice of Hugh Despenser), the French king confiscated the duchy and sent a royal army to take possession. Thus it is not surprising that Roger was welcomed by Charles: they had a common enemy in King Edward.

  With Roger in France, all Edward could do to control him was to keep his spies on the lookout. On 6 December the seneschal wrote to Edward to report that Roger and his companions were travelling towards Germany.3 A week later Edward’s envoys to Paris sent news that ‘the Mortimer’ (as Edward now referred to him) and the other rebels with him were being entertained by the Count of Boulogne, who was then on his way to Toulouse.4 It seems that Roger and his French friends were leading the English spies a merry dance. The panic felt at the English court did not diminish. News of the arrival of German ships in the Channel, or a Hainault invasion fleet, or Genoese armed ships, swept the country regularly. Fears of a foreign invasion led by Roger abounded and were widely believed.

  The only action left open to Edward was the persecution of anyone in England who supported Roger, such as John de Gisors and Ralph de Bocton, who were accused of helping Roger to escape. De Bocton lost his lands and possessions. So too did John le Mercer of London. So too did William de Boarhunt and his wife Alice, who lost their lands on the Isle of Wight. The English lands of the de Fiennes family were confiscated. Edward even accused King Charles of France of complicity in Roger’s plot.5 The Bishop of Hereford was again questioned, and found guilty of providing arms and horses to help Roger escape, in an irregular – and probably illegal – court, with a jury specially selected by the king for the purpose.6 The Bishop of Lincoln was also accused.7 Finally, and most importantly, the king and Despenser took steps against Queen Isabella. Whether she was suspected of complicity in Roger’s escape is not known, and with no evidence on which to work the king did not dare accuse her directly, but when she declared herself to be in favour of the accused bishops she incurred the full wrath of the king.

  In April 1324 Edward ordered Isabella to write to Charles to try to end the dispute over Saint Sardos. She was the obvious person to make peace: the wife of one king and the sister of the other. But Edward’s motive was not just to buy time. He ordered the queen to state in her letter that peace between England and France was the very reason for her marriage to Edward, as the marriage had originally been arranged by Edward I in order to settle a dispute between the two countries. It followed that if war broke out the marriage had failed. In the summer the Pope also suggested that she mediate, but in person, not by letter. Edward would not let her leave the country. He suspected she would meet Roger and form an alliance with him. His preference was to keep her under strict control. He ordered that his debts to her should not be repaid. At the same time, Isabella was aware that she was being spied upon by Hugh Despenser’s wife, who was even reading her letters. In September 1324, when Despenser heard rumours that Roger might invade from Hainault,8 Edward confiscated all her lands and property. It was said that Despenser had sent men to the Pope to request a divorce between Isabella and Edward. The following month the queen’s personal living expenses were reduced to a fraction of their former level, to be paid not by her but directly by the Exchequer. All Frenchmen in England were arrested. Twenty-seven of Isabella’s household retainers, including her clerks and her doctor, were imprisoned, and she was expressly forbidden to help them. Her income, including the money owed to her by the king, was appropriated for the king’s use. Lastly her children were removed from her and placed in the keeping of Hugh Despenser’s wife.9 The woman who had come to England as an innocent and beautiful twelve-year-old bride, who had put up with her husband’s affection for Gaveston, who had endured the petty squabbles with the Earl of Lancaster, who had dutifully given birth to four children, who had been abandoned to the Scots at Tynemouth, and who had steadfastly supported her husband despite everything, had now lost her husband’s love, her position, her status, her income, her friends, her companions in faith, and her children.

  Isabella was just one of the many who were suffering. Bishop Orleton was sent for trial. Assize courts were held in many counties, so that anyone who had helped Roger escape, or who was suspected of having dealings with him in the recent past, or who had sided with the Mortimers and the rest of the Marchers in the rebellion against Despenser in 1321 was to be tried. No matter how great or small, all were judged, and many were imprisoned or hanged. Even Henry of Lancaster was accused. Roger’s relatives fared particularly badly. His sons in England were imprisoned. In April 1324 his wife was removed from her lodging in Hampshire, where she was under house arrest, and imprisoned in the royal castle of Skipton-in-Craven in Yorkshire. The men of her household were removed, although she was still allowed a damsel, an esquire, a laundress, a groom and a page; but she was permitted only one mark per day to keep and feed herself and them. Her daughters fared worse. Margaret, married to Thomas de Berkeley, was shut up in Shouldham Priory, with 15d weekly for her expenses – a smaller allowance than the criminals in the Tower were allowed. Her younger sisters fared even worse. Joan, who was twelve or thirteen, was sent to Sempringham Priory by herself, and received only 12d a week to feed her and one mark a year for her clothes. Her young sister, Isabella, suffered a similar fate, being incarcerated at Chicksands Priory.

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  There is little evidence as to where Roger was and what he was doing while on the Continent. Traditionally this has been seen as a period in which he was wholly opportunistic: that he was waiting, with no distinct plan in mind, until Isabella traded her son’s marriage for an army. This ignores the fact that Isabella, while known for her intelligence, was not a military leader; her attempts to use force in the past had ended in failure, and it is unlikely she sought military help without first establishing military leadership. It also presumes that, because Isabella maintained the higher profile throughout the later campaign, Roger was dependent on her for direction. It is far more likely that when Roger arrived in France, and was welcomed with ‘great honour’ by Charles, the seeds of a future attack on England were then sown. This is not to say that Charles and Roger planned the following two years’ events at the end of 1323; but it is unrealistic to suggest two men at war with the King of England idled away their time together in jousting and falconry. They almost certainly discussed the possibilities open to them, and probably established a framework for future action. This limited the need for direct communication, and what need there was could be satisfied by Charles’s personal messengers. The fact that such a framework was possible was due to one factor which Edward did not understand: Gascony.

  Charles and Roger knew that, sooner or later, Edward would have to do homage for Gascony. Edward would have to leave Eng
land, and, when he did so, he would have to leave Hugh Despenser behind. As Charles implied in a firm statement about exiles in a letter of 29 December 1323, Despenser was no more welcome in France than Roger was in England.10 Edward would of course have ignored Charles’s request that Despenser be ousted from England in return for Roger being asked to leave France, but there was little doubt that, if Edward came to France, he would be cut off from Despenser in the same way that he had been cut off from Gaveston in 1312. On that earlier occasion Thomas of Lancaster had astutely moved between the two parties and taken Gaveston prisoner. Roger hoped that, with Edward held in France under the watchful eye of the French king, an English lord, perhaps Henry of Lancaster, could move against Despenser. Henry was no friend of the Despensers and very wary of Edward. He had received none of his brother’s vast estates, which had all been confiscated by the king on the execution of Earl Thomas. Moreover, when he had supported the Bishop of Hereford, Edward had prosecuted him, and only his extremely able defence in court had saved his life. He was also of royal blood, so he was the obvious candidate for leading the disaffected English lords against the favourite. As it happened, this course of events did not occur, but the clear potential for Despenser to be isolated by a known and predictable event allowed Roger and Charles to discuss possible strategies.

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  It was particularly foolish of Edward to allow Despenser to counsel him to antagonise the French over Gascony. All his experiences in Scotland had proved that he was an incompetent military leader and a poor judge of military commanders. For Gascony he chose to send his young and inexperienced brother, the Earl of Kent. This was equally foolish; not long after arriving Kent greatly angered the people of Agen by trying to extract large sums of money from them and abducting a young girl from the town.11 Nor were his military engagements any more successful. When Charles de Valois, uncle of King Charles, moved against him in August 1324 his defences crumpled. After losing several key towns, he fell back to the castle of La Réole and was forced to sue for peace. King Charles readily agreed to a six-month truce, but he kept possession of the lands his uncle had conquered.

  The truce gave Edward a chance to relieve the army in Gascony, and also a good excuse not to leave England, thus threatening Roger’s hopes of separating the king from Despenser. But fortunately for Roger, Edward adopted Despenser’s inappropriate bullying tactics. A contemporary account of his attempt to lift the siege of La Réole is to be found in the pages of the Vita Edwardi Secundi:

  Then the king ordered all the infantry to board their ships and stand out at sea, until the time should come for crossing to Gascony; and he put in command the Earl Warenne, John de St John, and other great men of the land, who likewise went on board not daring to resist. The king also sent letters to every county commanding and ordering that all who had returned from the army to their homes without leave should be arrested and hanged forthwith without trials. The harshness of the king has today increased so much that no one however great and wise dares to cross his will. Thus parliaments, colloquies, and councils decide nothing these days. For the nobles of the realm, terrified by threats and the penalties inflicted on others, let the king’s will have free play.12

  With this sort of motivation and poor organisation there was no chance of La Réole being relieved. Hugh Despenser’s policy of gathering as much money as he could in his treasury and spending as little as possible meant that the fleet did not carry enough cash to pay the footsoldiers. There was insufficient food even to feed the men who did go. The army rioted. Part of the fleet did not set out at all, as Hugh Despenser was panicked into commandeering the eastern fleet to defend the coast against Roger. At the beginning of October 1324 Despenser wrote to John de Sturmy, the admiral of the eastern ships, that a great fleet was being amassed in Holland which was expected to arrive shortly in East Anglia with a great number of armed men under the command of Roger Mortimer and other banished men.13 It seemed Roger only had to remain outside England in order to strike terror into the hearts of Edward and Despenser.

  Charles now gave Edward four options. All except one involved the loss of Agen and other lands in Gascony. The one exception was that Edward would receive all his lands back as long as Isabella and her son, the prince and heir to the throne, were both sent to France to negotiate. This, clearly, was a trap.14 The twelve-year-old prince was a suitable alternative figurehead to Edward II, and, in his mother’s company, was an eligible candidate for a diplomatic marriage. To remove him from Despenser’s control was equally desirable, as Isabella would not be able wholly to take action against her husband while her son was a potential hostage. No doubt Charles also wanted to see Isabella rescued from her English ordeal, if only out of fraternal compassion. But what was so clever about this trap was that, despite the obvious dangers, this option was the most attractive to Edward. At a stroke he could end the war and regain all he had lost at little or no cost. Cautious of the dangers, he reworked Charles’s offer, suggesting he would send the queen first, with the promise that his son would follow, as further concessions were made. He also proposed that Isabella should be returned to England if she did not gain a peace settlement satisfactory to Edward by a certain date. An interesting stipulation was that ‘the Mortimer’ and the other English rebels with him had to leave France in advance of the queen’s visit, ‘on account of the perils and dishonours’ which might befall her.15 The Pope too was in favour of Isabella acting as a negotiator, and his envoys told Edward that Isabella’s presence in France would guarantee the return of Gascony in its entirety. This ‘guarantee’ convinced Edward: he decided to send Isabella to France in the spring.

  Edward was not sufficiently imaginative to see the more subtle and dangerous aspects of the trap. Reassured that Isabella would not disobey his orders in France and relying heavily on Despenser’s control of the barons at home, he saw only the diplomatic aspects of the issues confronting him, not their strategic implications. In not sending his son to France he had avoided the most dangerous move he could have made, but he could not see how international diplomacy was so different from domestic political control. At home it was possible for him, or rather Despenser, to terrorise the lords and people into submission, and to keep them there through threats and fines, through the hierarchy of the law. No such control was possible on an international scale; the resources and independence of France, Spain and the Low Countries ensured that a measure of compromise was necessary for an English king trying to keep his foreign possessions. Thus his policy in Gascony should have been one of collaboration with France, not the bellicose stance forced on him by Hugh Despenser.

  Unfortunately the one man who would have been able to guide Edward through the process of international compromise, the Earl of Pembroke, had died six months earlier. At the end of June 1324, on his way to Paris, he collapsed after dinner at one of his houses near Boulogne. He died almost instantly, probably suffering from an apoplectic fit, but possibly poisoned. His passing was much lamented by all factions in England. He had personally taken a part in defusing every major crisis of Edward’s reign. From now on there were no more arbiters of peace to settle Edward’s disputes with his barons.

  In March 1325 Isabella set out for her homeland with a company of retainers selected for her by her husband and Despenser. Everyone who went with her was, in effect, a spy or a chaperone. Her ladies were women whose husbands were loyal to Edward, and her male retainers, none of whom was French, were all ardent royalists. Nevertheless she was delighted to leave England. ‘The queen departed very joyfully’, wrote the author of Vita Edwardi Secundi at the time of her leaving, adding that she was ‘happy with a two-fold joy; pleased to visit her native land and her relatives, and delighted to leave the company of some whom she did not like’.16 Had he known of the intrigue which was to unfold, the chronicler could have called it a three-fold pleasure, adding the prospect of plotting revenge.

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  For Isabella, returning to France was an immense relief. She tou
red the country in no particular hurry, happy just to be away from England. While Edward was worried that she would form a political intrigue with Roger – and indeed a number of French and English chroniclers who wrote about the events in retrospect presumed that her sole purpose in leaving England was to see Roger – this was not overtly the case. Roger was in Hainault, supposedly ‘banished’ by the French king, in accordance with Edward’s instructions. The queen also behaved in total compliance with her husband’s directions. After landing she proceeded to Paris via Boulogne and Beauvois with her entourage, dining with the Queen of France at Pontoise before meeting her brother at Poissy. She did not meet Roger, nor did they directly contact one another. For the moment, whatever their secret desires, their relationship was merely a political understanding channelled through Charles IV.

  Isabella was under no illusions about what would happen if she thoughtlessly squandered the freedom she had gained from Edward. In the spring of 1314, at the age of eighteen, she had visited Paris and met her father, Philip the Fair. She had unburdened herself of the terrible knowledge that all three of her brothers’ wives were having adulterous affairs with two knights in the Tour de Nesles. Philip had the two men watched, and apprehended them. They died cruel deaths: broken on the wheel at Montfaucon. More importantly for Isabella, the women too were severely punished: divorced from their husbands and imprisoned for life.17

  Gascony also served to keep Isabella on the straight and narrow. The negotiations with her brother were not easy. Although she had had some experience of diplomacy in 1313, when she had been sent to France as an English ambassadress, the principal French negotiator had been her doting father, to whom she had simply presented a petition and waited as he granted almost all her wishes.18 Now she was negotiating with her clever and careful brother, Charles IV. His principal aim was to extract as much as he could from the situation in Gascony without actually provoking a larger war. He argued forcefully, and, in view of the events leading to the war, he held the upper hand throughout the negotiations. After the initial stages had gone badly for Isabella, she wrote to Edward saying that she had considered returning to England. This was probably a rhetorical device, to encourage his confidence in her, for she also offered to remain in France to see the negotiations through, if he agreed. Edward clearly accepted her letter at face value, as he sent her some money shortly afterwards.19