She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (42 page)

Too late, Edward could see with horrifying clarity the nature of the threat that confronted him. In panic, he despatched letter after letter across the Channel, to his son (‘we are not pleased with you, and neither for your mother nor for any other ought you to displease us …’), to Isabella’s brother King Charles (‘if you wished her well, dearest brother, you would chastise her for this misconduct and make her demean herself as she ought, for the honour of all those to whom she belongs’), and to the pope, who obligingly responded – after a doomed effort to make peace – by weighing in on his behalf, threatening Charles with excommunication if the French court continued to shelter the adulterous queen and her lover.

This was spiritual instruction with which Charles was happy to comply, in public at least. Isabella and her son were honoured guests at the coronation of Charles’s new wife in the jewel-like Sainte Chapelle within the Île de la Cité’s royal palace in May 1326, with Mortimer in close attendance upon them, but just two months later the English queen and prince left her brother’s court, riding north to her county of Ponthieu. This ‘expulsion’, however, was timed perfectly to enable Charles to defer diplomatically to papal authority while Isabella put the next stage of their plan into action. From Ponthieu she rode eastward to join Mortimer in Hainaut, where he was already working with Count Guillaume to muster and provision a fleet. By 21 September everything was
ready. The queen had signed a treaty with Hainaut, promising that her son would marry the count’s daughter Philippa, and the bride’s dowry had already been assembled, in the form of seven hundred soldiers under the command of the count’s brother Jean. With them, filling the hundred or so leased ships that had gathered in Dordrecht harbour, were mercenaries from the Low Countries and Germany, their wages paid out of the revenues of Ponthieu with financial guarantees provided by the king of France. Isabella was on board, with her ladies, her son and the English exiles who had rallied to her cause, Roger Mortimer at their head. And on the morning of 22 September, with a fair wind swelling the sails, they set their course for England.

It was an extraordinary journey. This adrenaline-fuelled moment marked the final unravelling of a marriage, just as Eleanor of Aquitaine’s revolt against Henry II had done a century and a half earlier. Eleanor had been imprisoned for fifteen years for her pains, and denounced as a threat to the order of all creation. Isabella was – as Eleanor had not been – an adulteress as well as a disloyal wife. And yet, remarkably, her overwhelming defiance of the paradigms of female virtue was not met with the same outrage and vilification. This was a battle over the very nature of legitimate authority, and the greater and preceding sins of her husband meant that Isabella’s self-presentation as a wronged queen and a royal mother took precedence over her infidelity, and vindicated her rebellion.

That much was clear after two days struggling against the hostile waters of the North Sea when the rebel fleet reached the Suffolk coast on 24 September. One of Edward’s half-brothers, the earl of Kent, was already with Isabella, having joined her in Paris. The other, the earl of Norfolk, had been entrusted with the defence of East Anglia in the name of the king – and he too immediately defected to the queen’s side. The small force of invaders had not known what to expect when they made landfall, scarcely knowing where they were after the disorientation of a difficult crossing. But as they made cautious progress inland, they discovered, wonderingly, that there was no one to resist them.

The tyrannical regime that Edward and his favourite had imposed on his frightened people was suddenly and silently disintegrating, undermined from within by the reign of terror with which Despenser had sought to make the king’s power impregnable. Edward had turned a blind eye to Despenser’s bullying and extortion. Worse, much worse, he had allowed his own royal authority to become an instrument of that abuse. And in doing so he had failed to understand that the strength of his crown – the essence of the oath he had sworn at his coronation – lay in protecting his people from unchecked disorder and injustice. For as long as there was no alternative, it was hard to see how an anointed king who had made himself a force for division and oppression could in practice be resisted. But as soon as Isabella appeared – a royal champion acting in the name of the realm and of her son’s role as its heir – support for Edward simply melted away.

At news of his wife’s arrival, the king had issued urgent orders for his people to muster in defence of his kingdom against an invasion which, unsurprisingly, his proclamations characterised entirely differently: ‘Roger Mortimer and other traitors and enemies of the king and his realm have entered the realm in force’, he declared, ‘and have brought with them alien strangers for the purpose of taking the royal power from the king …’ But the bankruptcy of his cause was everywhere apparent. The musters fizzled out, the sheriffs muttering excuses, sitting on their hands, or leading the men they recruited to join the rebels. The royal treasury was filled with thousands of extorted pounds in drifting heaps of gold, but it was slowly dawning on Edward and Despenser that gold could not save them if its cost had been counted in forfeited loyalty.

To Isabella, meanwhile, gates were opened, gifts brought and service pledged. She rode first to Ipswich, where the citizens proffered a welcome and a loan to support her troops, and then to Bury St Edmund’s Abbey where she took possession of more treasure. Twenty-five miles further west at Cambridge, the support of the wider Church took concrete form with the arrival of the bishops
of Hereford, Lincoln, Ely and Durham. At each staging-post, she publicly insisted that fair prices be paid for the supplies her forces needed; they had come, after all, to rescue Edward’s people, not to pillage them. And all the while Mortimer, in public discreetly maintaining an appropriate distance from the queen, was marshalling under his disciplined command the growing army of men who rallied to her side.

When news of this triumphal progress reached London, unrest in the city began to accelerate out of control, and behind the walls of the Tower Edward and Despenser were gripped by panic. From the start they had been bound together by obsessional mistrust, the conviction that they were surrounded by enemies intent on their destruction. Now paranoia had created its own reality. With gold packed heavily into saddlebags, they fled westward on 2 October, seeking the safety of Despenser’s strongholds in south Wales, hoping still that the force of a royal command might bring soldiers to their side. They had reached Gloucester on 10 October when news came that the earl of Lancaster’s brother Henry – who had stood aloof from his brother’s revolt four years earlier, and had been allowed to inherit a portion of his estates as reward for his loyalty – had ridden with his men to offer his sword in Isabella’s service. This was grim certainty that the ranks of the army for which the king was waiting would be filled only with phantoms. In fear and despair, Edward and Despenser and their handful of guards turned their horses west once again.

Isabella and Mortimer were not far behind. From Oxford, where they were greeted with a gift of a precious silver cup, they rode to the queen’s castle at Wallingford. There they issued a proclamation in the name of the queen and prince which trod the most delicate of political lines: still covering their backs by protesting public loyalty to the king, they called his subjects to arms against Despenser, whom they denounced as ‘a clear tyrant and enemy of God and the Holy Church, and of our very dear said lord the king and the whole kingdom’. Still they had not shed a drop of blood, and as their army grew, the order they brought was thrown into
sharp relief by the chaos that was overwhelming London.

Once the king had fled, the capital had declared for his queen, but in her absence the vacuum of power was filled with violent anger at the falling regime, and on 15 October the rioters in the city claimed a significant scalp. The bishop of Exeter, who as treasurer of England had been one of Despenser’s chief allies in turning Edward’s government into a mechanism of financial extortion, rode into the city that day, thinking that he could save his beautiful house, his jewels and his books from the mob. By the time he realised his mistake it was too late to turn back. He rode desperately for St Paul’s, hoping to find sanctuary there, but the jeering crowd closed in. He was pulled from his horse, stripped of his armour and dragged down Ludgate Hill to the great cross in Cheapside, where his head was crudely hacked from his shoulders with a baker’s knife.

The bishop’s severed head was sent westward to Isabella – a macabre trophy, and an unwelcome reminder of the anarchy that could too easily result from her challenge to her husband’s authority. But there was no time to turn back to quieten the capital. Edward and Despenser had reached Wales, and found a ship at Chepstow to take them to Ireland. But after six days at sea, battling impotently against headwinds that penned them in the Bristol Channel, they were forced to admit defeat and land again at Cardiff. Despenser’s father, meanwhile, had been left at Bristol to hold the castle there against the queen’s implacable advance. Eight days into a siege by Mortimer’s troops, and with no hope of rescue, the garrison capitulated. The elder Despenser was hauled in chains before a tribunal including Mortimer himself, Henry of Lancaster and the king’s half-brothers of Kent and Norfolk. Like the earl of Lancaster before him, the accused was not permitted to speak in his own defence; unlike Lancaster, he was spared none of the ugly penalties for treason, but was drawn on a hurdle through the streets, hanged from the city gallows and cut down for decapitation, his head sent on a spear to Winchester where he had once been earl, and his body fed to the dogs.

By then, the king and the younger Despenser were seven miles north of Cardiff at Caerphilly, seeking shelter in a fortress on which the favourite had lavished part of the extraordinary fortune he had amassed. But now they knew that walls would not save them. At the beginning of November they pressed on twenty-five miles westward to Neath, but, like trapped animals, they had nowhere left to run. They had turned back east when they were caught at last on 16 November, bedraggled figures riding in driving rain across open country near Llantrisant, by Henry of Lancaster and his men. Despenser was taken at once to Isabella and Mortimer at Hereford, tied roughly onto a shambling nag to run the gauntlet of the howling, taunting crowds that lined his route.

His fate was clear. He refused all food and drink, trying to starve himself into oblivion before a more terrible death could find him. He succeeded only in bringing it closer. In Hereford’s market-place on 24 November he was half-carried, almost fainting, before the queen and her lords, who had brought forward his trial for fear he should die on the road to London. They heard a lengthy denunciation of his crimes – to which Despenser was allowed no reply – and watched as he was pulled through the city streets to the walls of the castle for execution. Amid a baying mob, he was stripped of his clothes and hoisted, choking and kicking, by a noose fifty feet into the air. Then the rope was lowered and loosened so that he could see the approach of the executioner’s knife that would disembowel and – in a torture added specifically for this intimate companion of the king – castrate him. Beheading, when it came, was a mercy. And, as the crowd sated itself on this bloody spectacle, Isabella and Mortimer knew that the simple part of their task was over.

 

Edward, to whom his wife and her lover had professed such loyalty, was now a prisoner in the keeping of Henry of Lancaster at Monmouth Castle. In his person the gulf between the rhetoric and the reality of their invasion was made dangerously real. The practical fact of the matter was that he could not be allowed to regain his liberty, let alone the power of his crown. At the same time, they had rallied the country against Despenser as an enemy of both the kingdom and its king – and the king had now been liberated from his destructive influence.

But seeds had already, carefully, been sown for a process by which Edward’s loss of legitimacy could be made explicit. The fruitless days he and Despenser had spent at sea between Chepstow and Cardiff had allowed Isabella and Mortimer to proclaim that Edward had abandoned his realm, and that the young Prince Edward had, ‘with the assent of the whole community of the realm’, been appointed keeper of the kingdom in his father’s place. Meanwhile, the bishop of Hereford had preached a sermon before the queen at Wallingford, taking as his text a phrase from the Book of Kings – ‘my head aches’ – from which he extrapolated an argument for removing the head of a kingdom altogether if it were found to be diseased.

Now, however, the time had come for action, not argument. And there was no precedent for what had to be done. Never before had a king been unmade. The fact of Stephen’s kingship – his consecration and anointing – had stood baldly in the way of Matilda’s efforts to assert her own right to the throne, and, though Stephen’s heir had been pushed aside to make way for the succession of Matilda’s son, Stephen’s kingship had been ended only by
death. Now Isabella sought to achieve the opposite: to uphold the direct line of succession, but to do so prematurely; to set aside an old king to make way for a new while the former still lived.