She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (38 page)

It was therefore adding insult to self-inflicted injury when, in the summer of 1318, Edward was publicly accused of being not only a failure as king, but an impostor. That June, a man named John of Powderham walked into the King’s Hall in Oxford and announced that he was the rightful king of England. His real
father, he said, was not the Exeter tanner who had brought him up but the great warrior Edward I. As a baby he had been substituted for a changeling in his royal cradle by a terrified nurse after suffering an injury in her care; and now he had come to reclaim his inheritance. Edward’s first response was to laugh. He welcomed the pretender, the chronicle of Lanercost records, with a derisive cry of ‘Welcome, my brother!’ But for the queen, struggling to maintain her husband’s dignity (and, with it, her own), and acutely conscious of the threatening consequences of Edward’s manifest failings, jokes did not come so easily. Proud Isabella was ‘unspeakably annoyed’, the
Vita
notes; and this challenge to a king whose resemblance to his mighty father had never been less apparent ended with Powderham’s rotting corpse swinging slowly from a gibbet.

The fact that Isabella was heavily pregnant when Powderham’s claim exposed her husband to public ridicule and scurrilous rumour – her daughter Eleanor was born at Woodstock, eight miles from Oxford, in July 1318 – cannot have helped her equilibrium. But it did add to the gravitas of any intervention she might make in the discussions between the king and his magnates – and, when the treaty of Leake was agreed on 9 August 1318, the queen was first among those credited by the
Vita
with the success of the negotiations.

This settlement was so successful, indeed, that when Edward launched another military assault against the advancing Scots in 1319 his army presented a more united front than at any previous time since his father’s death. The English position in the borders had deteriorated so disastrously in the wake of the slaughter at Bannockburn that even the great walled city and castle of Berwick, the spearhead and safeguard of north-eastern England, had fallen into Scottish hands in April 1318. The magnates of England who rallied to its defence when Edward mustered his army at Newcastle in June 1319 included an improbable gathering of earls, including both Lancaster and Surrey (who had finally settled their private war at the punishing cost to Surrey of handing
over valuable lands to his enemy), together with Pembroke, Hereford and Arundel, as well as Hugh Despenser, Roger Damory and Hugh Audley, the three household men who had now shared the earldom of Gloucester between them. This was unity indeed, and Isabella settled herself at a manor house just outside York to wait for good news.

It did not come. Instead, the archbishop of York came galloping to her gate at the head of a host of armed men quickly gathered from the city, breathless with alarm and carrying a warning that Sir James Douglas – one of the most brilliant and brutal soldiers in Scotland, known as ‘the Black Douglas’ for the fear he inspired as well as for his dark colouring – was close at hand and planning to seize the English queen as a hostage. Isabella was bundled onto a horse and escorted at speed to York, from where she fled downriver to safety behind the massive walls of Nottingham Castle.

Meanwhile, Edward’s forces at the siege of Berwick – round whom Douglas and his men had skirted on their raid into Yorkshire – were faring little better. Lancaster’s participation was turning out to be so half-hearted that rumours were flying that he was in league with the Scots. Though sober assessment suggested that was unlikely, it was hardly surprising if the earl remained unconvinced that Bruce’s men were his only or even his most dangerous enemy. As the
Vita
reported, it was painfully obvious that Edward’s reconciliation with his cousin was skin-deep at best. ‘Peace between great men is to be regarded with suspicion when the eminent princes have arrived at it not through love but by force,’ the
Vita
’s author wrote, with an evidently heavy heart. 

By the beginning of October Lancaster had withdrawn from the siege and the English army had broken up in disarray: for Edward, it was yet another opportunity squandered. While Lancaster retreated again to the fastness of his castle at Pontefract, the king was forced to agree a two-year truce with the Scots. It was an ignominious retreat (‘What best to do, indeed he did not know,’ remarked one unimpressed northern chronicler) – but it did at least allow him a breathing space in which to embark once again for France. His presence was required there to offer his homage for Gascony to the new king, Philippe V, and for Isabella the expedition offered a chance to be reunited with her family after years of absence and multiple bereavement.

Her father, Philippe the Fair, had died in November 1314 at the age of just forty-six, a few weeks after suffering a seizure while hunting. Her brother Louis, already king of Navarre, succeeded him as Louis X of France. The new king’s disgraced wife Marguerite still languished in Château Gaillard, and when she died in August 1315 (an end so convenient and obscure that rumour immediately began to cry murder) Louis remained a widower for a grand total of four days before marrying Clémence, granddaughter of the king of Naples. By the summer of 1316 his new wife was pregnant, and all seemed well in the French royal household at the beginning of June as the young king threw himself into his favourite pastime, a furiously exhausting game of
jeu de paume
(‘real’ tennis, played on an enclosed court). After the match, sweating and dehydrated, he drained cup after cup of cooled wine – an unwise choice of refreshment which either precipitated a dangerous chill or (as those of a more suspicious nature soon whispered) had been tainted with poison. The result, at least, was incontrovertible: on 5 June the twenty-six-year-old king died, leaving his kingdom in the grip of a sudden succession crisis.

The government of France was temporarily committed into the hands of Louis’s brother Philippe while the kingdom waited for the birth of the baby the widowed queen Clémence was carrying. It was a boy, born on 15 November 1316 and christened
Jean (‘the Posthumous’, his subjects called him). But the reign of this king who acquired his crown with his first breath lasted only five days. When the baby died on 20 November, the surviving contenders for his throne were his half-sister Jeanne, Louis’s daughter by his tragic first wife – a little girl who was just four years old, and damaged goods because of her mother’s publicly confessed adultery – or his uncle Philippe, the adult prince in whose hands power already lay. Realpolitik dictated that there could be no contest between these competing claims, and so, in the absence of any support for little Jeanne’s cause, the coronation of Philippe V excluded female heirs from the French succession with an absolute clarity that had eluded Stephen on his similarly pragmatic accession to the English throne nearly two hundred years earlier.

Now Philippe was demanding that his English brother-in-law perform homage for the French territories he ruled, and Isabella was there in June 1320 to watch her husband kneel before her brother in front of the high altar of Amiens Cathedral, a Gothic marvel of riotously painted stonemasonry that lay halfway between Boulogne and Paris. The stalwart earl of Pembroke had been left as keeper of England when the royal couple took ship at Dover, while Lancaster remained in stubborn isolation behind the massive walls of his fortress at Pontefract. An unsteady peace was holding. Edward’s people were still starving, their suffering now compounded by the effects of epidemic disease among their flocks and herds; but at least there were grounds for hope that the king was applying himself to the business of government with a little more purpose. The bishop of Worcester, writing to the pope during the parliament held at Westminster on Edward and Isabella’s return from France, was moved to remark that the king ‘bore himself splendidly, with prudence and discretion’, and that, ‘contrary to his former habit’, he was now ‘rising early, and presenting a nobler and pleasant countenance to his prelates and lords’. ‘On that account’, the bishop added in another optimistic letter to a cardinal at the papal curia, ‘…there is considerable hope of an
improvement in his behaviour and a greater possibility of unity and harmony.’

But in Edward’s train on his visit to France, and by his side when he returned to England, was a man who was about to precipitate the most destructive conflict Edward’s fractured rule had yet visited on his kingdom. The younger Hugh Despenser had been appointed chamberlain of the king’s household in 1318 – an office that had once been held by Piers Gaveston, and which allowed Despenser to spend increasing amounts of his time in Edward’s company. There is less suggestion in the surviving sources that Despenser was the object of the king’s private passion than there is of Despenser’s ravening hunger for all the public power that access to Edward could provide. But that meant merely that he represented a different sort of threat to Edward’s subjects – a menacing predator, as opposed to Gaveston’s distracting peacock.

And the first prey on which his talons fastened was one of his own brothers-in-law, his co-heirs to the earldom of Gloucester. The settlement of the Gloucester estates made in November 1317 had given Despenser vast tracts of land in south Wales, including the lordship of Glamorgan. But it had also served to spur, rather than satisfy, his ambition, and within weeks he had seized more of the dead earl’s Welsh properties from Hugh Audley, the husband of his wife’s sister, Gaveston’s widow Margaret. Despite Audley’s vociferous protests, Edward allowed Despenser to impose a territorial exchange which left Audley holding less valuable lands in the south-east of England and Despenser in unchallenged command of southernmost Wales and the Bristol Channel.

Soon, he set his sights further afield, on the lordship of Gower adjoining Glamorgan to the west, which belonged to a cash-strapped baron named William de Braose. By the time de Braose died in 1320 without a son to succeed him, several of the most powerful landowners in the region were already circling acquisitively in the hope of snapping Gower up at a bargain price, while his daughter’s husband, John Mowbray, who was determined to take over the lordship as his father-in-law’s heir, immediately took
possession of the estates to ward off these challengers. Despenser, however, had other ideas, and in November 1320 he persuaded Edward that Gower should be seized into royal hands.

This was an unambiguous demonstration of Despenser’s influence over the king. It was also a mistake. The customary law of the Welsh marches – the frontier lands between England and the principality of Wales – did not, by long tradition, permit this kind of intrusive royal intervention. And this threat to the legal basis of marcher landholding, together with the manifest certainty that Despenser was now the power behind Edward’s throne, was enough to bind together an extraordinary consortium of lords who were prepared to resort to arms to defend themselves against the king and his favourite. John Mowbray, the prospective heir to Gower, was joined by his local rivals for that lordship: the earl of Hereford, whose loyalty to Edward had been so painstakingly reconstructed after the killing at Blacklow Hill, and a namesake uncle and nephew, Roger Mortimer of Chirk and Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, the latter a major landowner in Ireland as well as in Wales. Also standing alongside them to confront Despenser were his former associates in royal favour, now his deadly rivals, Hugh Audley and Roger Damory. And behind them all loomed a marcher lord with more reason than any to mistrust Edward’s intentions: Thomas of Lancaster, whose huge estates made him a neighbour of Despenser in Wales as well as the keeper of the north.

The mortal enmity between Lancaster and the king had been the fault-line in English politics for the last ten years. Edward had been unable to take decisive action against his cousin because of the power of Lancaster’s earldoms and their function as a bulwark against the Scots. Equally, Lancaster’s isolation, both politically and temperamentally, had allowed him to make little headway in consolidating formal checks on the king’s authority. Now, however, Edward’s increasing indulgence of Despenser’s aggression had created a new constituency for Lancaster – one where the competing interests of the marcher lords coalesced into a collective
determination to restore the rule of law and free the king from the pernicious influence of Despenser, who was now, the Lanercost chronicler acidly remarked, ‘as the king’s right eye’. While Lancaster sought to rally support in the north, his allies began an assault on Despenser’s lands in Wales and England, leaving in their wake panic and devastation.

By the end of July, the forces of Hereford, Damory, Audley and the younger Mortimer – their troops arrayed in liveries of green with the right sleeve yellow – had all converged on London. Once again it was left to the earl of Pembroke to serve as the voice of loyal reason, pointing out to Edward that he would condemn his kingdom to the horror of civil war if he did not listen to the demands of his lords and send Despenser into exile. And once again, Edward’s queen took centre stage in her role as intercessor in the cause of peace. Isabella had given birth for the fourth time only a month earlier, to a daughter, Joan, known as Joan of the Tower because, with armies advancing on the capital, the queen had retreated for her confinement behind the protective walls of London’s great fortress. Now, Isabella went down on her knees before her husband, playing out the public ritual of queenly intervention so that he could accede to her entreaties in the name of his people without compromising his majesty as king. Her involvement had the desired effect, but it was with a markedly ill grace that Edward capitulated to the appeal of his queen and the advice of his lords and expelled Despenser and his father from England.