Edward II: The Unconventional King (38 page)

At some point after Isabella’s refusal to return to England, Roger Mortimer came into her life. The first reliable evidence that they were allies or more comes from Edward II’s proclamation of 8 February 1326, when he said that Isabella ‘is adopting the counsel of the Mortimer, the king’s notorious enemy and rebel’.
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Edward also wrote to Charles IV and Edward of Windsor on 18 March to complain that his wife ‘draws to her and retains in her company of her counsel the Mortimer, the king’s traitor and mortal enemy’.
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Isabella first saw Roger Mortimer when she was twelve. He attended her wedding at Boulogne in January 1308, and was one of the four bearers of the royal robes at her and Edward’s coronation the following month. Whether they had had any personal contact before late 1325 is unknown, and Mortimer’s feelings for the queen are difficult to determine. Given the enormous benefits which accrued to him from becoming the queen’s favourite – he ruled England through Isabella and Edward III from early 1327 to October 1330, granted himself an earldom and became at least as wealthy as Despenser had been – it seems overly convenient that he just happened to fall in love with her, just as one would doubt that Hugh Despenser genuinely fell in love with Edward. Neither Mortimer nor Despenser was the kind of man to whom things just happened; both of them were ruthless and ambitious men who could wait years for their opportunity and then grab it with both hands. Without Isabella and her son, Mortimer had no chance of revenge against Edward and the Despensers or of seeing his home and family again.

Isabella and Mortimer, whose wife Joan was still incarcerated in 1326, may have had a sexual relationship:
Lanercost
reports a rumour that at the time of Mortimer’s downfall in 1330 ‘there was a liaison suspected between him and the lady queen-mother, as according to public report’, and Geoffrey le Baker’s scurrilous and unreliable
Vita et Mors Edwardi Secundi
of the 1350s says that Isabella was ‘in the illicit embraces’ of Mortimer.
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Adam Murimuth, a royal clerk, wrote that they had ‘an excessive familiarity’, a remark reminiscent of chroniclers’ statements about Edward and Piers Gaveston.
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Edward himself said in a letter of March 1326 that Isabella ‘keeps his [Mortimer’s] company within and without house’, usually assumed to be a euphemistic reference to adultery, though the phrase occurs in the context of Edward’s complaining about Isabella’s retention of Mortimer as a member of her council.
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One chronicle refers to Mortimer as Isabella’s
amasius
, ‘lover’, though three chroniclers use the same word to describe Gaveston’s relationship to Edward, and others describe Mortimer only as ‘chief of her council’ or even just as a member of Isabella’s faction.
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For a relationship inevitably said by modern writers to have been sexual, there is surprisingly little evidence that it certainly was. The reticence of the chroniclers and the fact that the many enemies Isabella and Mortimer made during their regency of 1327 to 1330 never used adultery or sexual impropriety as an accusation against them suggests that if they were indeed lovers, they were very discreet and no one was sure what was going on, contrary to the frequent statement in modern accounts that the two flaunted their affair or that Isabella openly took Mortimer as her lover. Their supposedly passionately sexual five-year affair produced no children; the unreliable Jean Froissart claimed a few decades later that Isabella was pregnant in the autumn of 1330, but no other source even hints at this.

It is very likely that, at least at the beginning, Isabella and Mortimer’s relationship was a political alliance between two people who loathed Hugh Despenser and who needed each other to bring him down. When they decided that Edward II should also be brought down, or even if they agreed that he should be, is impossible to say. No one had ever deposed a king before in English history; no one could have known for sure if it was even possible or how they might achieve it, for all the empty threats of deposition aimed at Edward throughout his reign. Events of 1325 to 1327 have been interpreted with decades or centuries of hindsight and knowledge of Edward II’s downfall, and it has always been assumed that Isabella and Mortimer must have plotted for months or years to destroy the king and planned it with the help of Charles IV and others. This is not necessarily the case, especially as Isabella’s presumed desire to overthrow her husband is predicated on an assumption that the royal couple detested each other, which they certainly did not.

Edward wrote to Isabella on 1 December 1325, the last letter he would ever send his wife, defending Hugh Despenser and saying that the favourite had ‘always procured her all the honour with the king that he could’. Given Despenser’s efforts since 1322 to reduce Isabella’s influence with her husband and even her ability to see him, and her statement that Edward and Despenser’s behaviour made her feel like a widow, this was either a blatant untruth or proof of an astonishing capacity for self-deception on Edward’s part. Edward reminded Isabella that her duty was to be in his company and to obey his commands, and ordered her to come to him with all speed, bringing their son, as ‘the king has a great desire to see and talk with him’. Edward resisted for as long as possible the notion that Isabella would not return, renewing letters of protection for her retinue as late as 26 January 1326.
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This was not in fact a vain hope. In a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury of 5 February 1326, the queen declared that no one must think she had left her husband ‘without very great and justifiable cause’, writing that Hugh Despenser wished to ‘dishonour us by all his power’ and that she had hidden her hatred of him to escape danger, as he was in full control of the king and realm. Isabella wrote, ‘We desire, above all else, after God and the salvation of our soul, to be in the company of our said lord [Edward] and to live and die there.’ The queen referred to Edward in her letter as her ‘very dear and very sweet lord and friend’, which is very unconventional (conventional would be simply ‘very dear lord’) and indicates her strong feelings for him. Isabella certainly did not feel ‘profound revulsion’ for her husband as a modern writer has claimed; her letter and much of her behaviour in the 1320s imply genuine hurt and bafflement at Edward allowing Despenser to come between them and ruin a marriage in which she had been happy.
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Later in 1326, the queen wavered and talked of returning to Edward. For her to rebel not only against her husband and lord but an anointed king, must have been enormously difficult for her, and it would be astonishing if she didn’t have second thoughts on occasion.

Edward also wrote on 1 December to Charles IV and others, asking them to do all in their power to return Isabella and his son to him, as ‘the king is very uneasy because he has such loss of her company’ and greatly wished to see his son, also showing himself excessively anxious to defend Hugh Despenser against Isabella’s hostility.
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Edward, although highly emotional himself, was not good at reading other people’s emotions, or capable of much insight. Because he loved Despenser, he could see no faults in him, and the tone of his letters implies that he was genuinely astonished that Isabella didn’t think Despenser was as marvellous as he did. The king wrote a short letter to his son on 2 December, reminding him that he must remember what Edward had enjoined on him at Dover – not to marry – and to travel back to England, with his mother if possible but alone if she refused.
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Edward was desperate to have his son back in England, well aware of the dangers of his heir slipping out of his control. That night, he travelled down the Thames from Westminster to Sheen to pay a quick visit to Eleanor Despenser, gave his niece a remarkably generous gift of a hundred marks, and went back to Westminster the same night. He took eight of his chamber valets to attend him during the visit, including Syme Lawe, Wat Cowherd and Jack Edriche, all of whom received four shillings in the boat ‘in the king’s presence’ to buy themselves boots for the water. Eleanor Despenser must have been heavily pregnant at the time or had just given birth, as Edward made an offering of thirty shillings on 14 December to the Virgin Mary, in gratitude that God had granted Eleanor a ‘prompt delivery of her child’. Edward also ordered his almoner John Denton to give sixpence each in alms to forty ‘poor pregnant women’.
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The king spent a quiet Christmas, his last as a free man, at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, and gave a pound to the messenger who brought him letters from Eleanor Despenser.
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Edward saw her in 1326 at Haughley near Stowmarket, and received a palfrey horse with saddle and all other necessary equipment from Eleanor as her New Year gift to him. He visited his half-brother Thomas of Brotherton, earl of Norfolk, for a few days in early January with a large retinue.
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Norfolk, as annoyed with the king and Hugh Despenser as their brother the earl of Kent was, was probably in touch with Kent in France, and hastened to join Isabella and Mortimer on their arrival later in the year. Not only had Edward allowed Despenser to buy Norfolk’s lordship of Chepstow for a ridiculously small amount, he also temporarily confiscated Norfolk’s hereditary office of Earl Marshal, actions seemingly designed to alienate his brother from him, although Edward did try to make amends by giving Norfolk a gift of £200, making him commissioner of array in seven counties and putting his sister-in-law Joan Jermy in charge of the household of his daughters Eleanor and Joan in February.
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Edward spent a week at South Elmham in Suffolk, giving Hugh Despenser’s Carmelite confessor Richard Bliton two pounds ‘for what he did in the park of South Elmham when the king ate’, and arrived at Norwich on 18 January, where he paid thirty shillings for fourteen ells of Coggeshall cloth to make tunics (
cotes
) for the wives of five of his chamber valets. The cloth, however, was found to be too stiff for the purpose, and the king bought instead eighteen ells of ‘bright blue English cloth’ to make
cotes hardies
(close-fitting, sleeved coats or gowns) with hoods for the women, at twenty pence an ell.
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While Edward was at Norwich, he heard the shocking news that Roger Belers, chief baron of the Exchequer, had been stabbed to death on 19 January at Rearsby in Leicestershire, by the la Zouche brothers, the Folville brothers and others. Roger Belers was pardoned for adherence to Thomas of Lancaster in 1318, though had switched sides to the Despensers by 1321, and Hugh Despenser appointed him as his attorney in July 1322.
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Belers’ murder can therefore perhaps be interpreted as hostility towards Despenser, though at the time of his death he was on his way to dine with Thomas of Lancaster’s brother Henry, no friend of Despenser although the men were brothers-in-law.
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Edward appointed several men, including the earl of Arundel, Donald of Mar, his steward Thomas le Blount, his former steward Richard Damory, and Henry of Lancaster himself to investigate the murder.
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The Folville brothers fled abroad but returned with Roger Mortimer’s invasion in the autumn, and subsequently became the most notorious of the criminal gangs who roamed England during Edward III’s reign.
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Edward co-founded Oriel College at Oxford with his almoner Adam Brome on 21 January 1326, and the foundation charter says that love of the Blessed Virgin and a desire to increase her ‘divine cult’ motivated him to establish the college. The king declared his zeal for sound learning and religious knowledge, granted Brome, the first college provost, and the scholars permission to acquire sixty pounds’ worth of lands and property, and specifically requested that five or six of the first ten scholars be students of canon law.
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The foundation was originally named the Hall of the Blessed Mary; the name ‘Oriel’ comes from a house called La Oriole granted to the college after Edward’s deposition. Walter Reynolds, archbishop of Canterbury, informed Edward at this time that a joint invasion by France and Hainault could be expected shortly, though Henry Eastry, prior of Canterbury, doubted the story and believed that Charles IV had no real intention of invading England. Edward himself evidently believed that Charles would indeed invade England on his sister Isabella’s behalf, though whatever he may have thought, this was highly unlikely; the French king may well have wanted, out of fraternal affection, to protect Isabella, but this did not extend to invading a sovereign country on her behalf.
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Edward told Count William of Hainault on 22 January that he was willing to satisfy all reasonable demands of the count’s subjects who had been robbed and slain by Englishmen, a proposal that offered too little, and came too late.
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William was committed to the thought of his daughter being queen of England. Edward was equally committed to a Castilian alliance, and again informed the king and queen of Portugal that his son was marrying the king of Castile’s sister.
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Edward appointed Hugh Despenser’s eldest sister Aline Burnell as constable of Conwy Castle in North Wales, presumably at Despenser’s request, on 30 January.
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It was a rare honour for a woman to be put in charge of such an important stronghold. The king dined with his sister-in-law Alice, countess of Norfolk, on the same day, at Burgh in Suffolk, and gave a pound each to the minstrels – Henry Newsom, harper, and Richardyn, citoler – who performed for them. He gave her sister Joan Jermy a silver cup worth seventy-five shillings, and remained in touch with Alice, paying her messenger a hundred shillings on 5 June for bringing him her letters.
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Edward spent the first few days of February 1326 at Walsingham, and presumably visited the shrine of Our Lady there. He bought two pounds’ worth of ‘masts, cables and other equipment for ships’ from a merchant of Lynn, which his clerk carefully recorded as being ‘for the king’s use’, and several weeks later invited a group of shipwrights from London to visit him at Kenilworth.
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