The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March (28 page)

The bishop was wrong. Isabella did have a choice. Now that the matter of homage for Gascony had been resolved, and Prince Edward was with her, there was no longer any point in continuing the charade. Moreover, she felt humiliated by this public demand made on her by the bishop. ‘I feel that marriage is a joining together of man and woman, maintaining the undivided habit of life,’ she replied in a loud voice, ‘and that someone has come between my husband and myself trying to break this bond. I protest that I will not return until this intruder is removed, but, discarding my marriage garment, shall assume the robes of widowhood and mourning until I am avenged of this pharisee.’

Isabella’s words amazed and delighted the French court. The bishop had spoken in Charles’s presence in the belief that Isabella would not be able to defy him. Now she had made herself plain. De Stapeldon fully expected Charles to rebuke his rebellious sister for her treason. But Charles had played a very clever tactical game for the last two years, and he was not going to let an English bishop jeopardise his plans. ‘The queen came of her own free will, and may freely return if she so wishes. But if she prefers to remain in these parts, she is my sister, and I refuse to expel her.’

With the utterance of these words, Roger’s and Isabella’s lives changed for ever. Isabella had openly defied her husband, and the King of France had supported her. She had declared herself against Hugh Despenser and against her husband the king. She had effectively joined Roger’s rebellion.

Now it was the bishop’s turn to be alarmed. Isabella was not the only one to detest him. In his time as Treasurer he had made himself rich through extortion. He was universally loathed, and was one of four Englishmen (along with the two Despensers and Robert Baldock, the Chancellor), of whom it was said that, if they were ever found in France, they would be tortured.
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Within days, fearing for his life, he fled from Paris. Some said he fled disguised as a pilgrim. The men of his household hurried after him and returned with him to England, and went straight to the king to report the news. De Stapeldon told Edward that the men who had threatened his life were ‘certain of the king’s banished enemies’. From earlier intelligence reports sent back to England, the English exiles seem to have moved about the Continent with Roger as a body. This indicates that now, with the prince safely in the queen’s custody, Roger had returned to France.

Over the subsequent days, Isabella’s companions realised the implications of her stance. Most of them had been picked because of their loyalty to Edward and Despenser, and most of them refused to accept that they would not be returning home with the queen. The queen did indeed dress as a widow, and played the part of a woman in mourning.
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For those who remained loyal to Edward, the knowledge that the queen was in communication with Roger, and that he was in France despite his exile, was too much. Isabella gave them an ultimatum: if their loyalty lay with the king then they should return to England. If, however, they were loyal to her, they should stay. Rather than defy the king and Despenser, most returned.

This turning point did not come as a shock to Isabella. She had been preparing for it since the beginning of September, when the Bishop of Winchester had demanded that she return. Her reply on that occasion had been that she would not return ‘for danger and doubt of Hugh Despenser’. Edward referred to this earlier refusal when he wrote back to her again at the start of December. He stated that he did not believe that she disliked Despenser, and that:

The king knows for truth and she knows that Hugh has always procured her all the honour with the king that he could; and no evil or villainy was done to her after her marriage by any abatement and procurement, unless peradventure sometimes the king addressed to her in secret words of reproof, by her own fault, if she will remember, as was befitting …
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Isabella must have been infuriated by this reply. Why should she have to be grateful that Despenser was supposed to have helped advance her? She was the queen, and he a mere baron’s son! She should not need his approval. But the king’s complete lack of respect for his wife is discernible not in his pretence that Despenser had helped her, nor in his implication that Despenser was her superior, but in his refusal even to listen to her. Her will was something he sought to tame and control. Having sent this letter he made another crass attempt to control her through the bishops. Knowing she would accept the order to return more readily if it came from a clergyman, he ordered all the bishops in England to write to her, telling her that it was her duty to come home. As if that were not enough, he dictated to all of them exactly the text they should send, as if they were all her ‘fathers’ beseeching their ‘dear daughter’ to return.

Isabella did not care that members of her household were leaving her. As far as she was concerned, the more disloyal men and women who left her service the better. She had no use for spies. Especially not when, in
December, Roger came openly to court. There is no evidence that she had seen him since she left him in the Tower, nearly four years earlier,
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and we cannot be certain what her feelings had been for him over those years. But now she made no secret of her love, and neither did he. Roger was with her: not the defeated, humiliated and half-starved lord he had been in the Tower but the champion of free England, and the man she loved more passionately than any other in her life.

The relationship between Roger and Isabella is one of the great romances of the Middle Ages. To see them as they were in December 1325, openly defying Edward, is to see two people bound to each other against all the law and authority in the secular and spiritual world. Yet their affection for each other is rarely commented on by historians. In essence it was a relationship formed in adversity. Adultery, especially on the part of a woman, was a terrible sin in the fourteenth century, and doubly so for a queen, for whom it also carried the stain of treason. Isabella’s religious fervour made her feel this intensely: breaking solemn vows of fidelity was not something lightly done. Nor was it easy for Roger. Joan, his wife of twenty-five years’ standing, was suffering. He was betraying her in her darkest hour, while she was in her cell in Skipton Castle. But their attraction to each other was irresistible, and their affection for each other unshakeable.

For Isabella’s part, the rush into Roger’s arms seems to have been a reaction against years of self-control and self-denial. All her suffering had resulted in nothing but a husband and who was trying to manipulate her and shame her. She was threatened. She needed someone she could trust, someone, moreover, who would share the risks she was taking. She needed a steadfast and mature adviser on whom she could rely. At thirty-eight, Roger fitted the bill perfectly.

Roger’s new companion was one of the most beautiful and intelligent women of the age. She was, furthermore, ten years younger than his wife, whom he had not seen for five years. Her status as the wife of the man who had sentenced him to death, and the chance publicly to cuckold him, added a certain piquancy. If their relationship ended with their executions at the command of the King of England, then so be it. They would go down fighting together.

For a few weeks they tried to keep their closeness a secret. Edward was probably not fully aware of the depth of their relationship until 23 December, when the members of Isabella’s household loyal to Edward returned to England. From that day on there was no further pretence. It was a sober Christmas at the English court. For Isabella and Roger, however, it was a Christmas like no other. Not only were they together,
and free, they were able to plan the invasion of England. While they had to be careful, aware that Despenser had agents everywhere, and aware too of the dangers of the murderer in the night, or the poisoner in the kitchen, they were relatively safe in the palace of King Charles.

The events of 1323–6 must have been profoundly shocking to the misogynist King Edward. Never before had such an important prisoner escaped from the Tower, and never before had that prisoner been so favoured by heads of state and nobles on the Continent. But worse, far worse for Edward, was this new eclipse of his authority. He, the King of England, had been cuckolded by his enemy. The humiliation was extreme. It was made even worse by the threatened invasion, which Edward was now convinced would come from France. He could do nothing but wait, set up watch beacons, hide his treasure, order the ports watched, and threaten any potential rebels within the kingdom. Such was the personal slight to Edward that he decided he would seek revenge on members of Roger’s family. He sent soldiers to old Lady Mortimer, Roger’s mother, to accuse her of hosting seditious meetings. They were to take her, immediately, to Elstow Priory, where she was to remain at her own cost, for the rest of her life.
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When she could not be found, Edward sent more men to seek her out at Radnor and Worcester. A further order to the same effect in April 1326 indicates that she had, like her son, outwitted her would-be captors.

On 8 February 1326 Edward publicly admitted that the queen had turned against him. He sent letters to all the sheriffs in the country ordering them to proclaim that all men should be ready to take arms and protect England against the queen, because, he claimed, ‘the queen will not come to the king nor permit his son to return, and he understands that the queen is adopting the counsel of the Mortimer, the king’s notorious enemy and rebel’. Four days later an array for the purpose of defending the southeast was ordered. Letters similar to those to the sheriffs were sent to the admirals patrolling the coasts. Edward renewed his orders for searches for messages to be conducted at the ports. Despenser hid his treasure in Caerphilly Castle. All exports of gold were stopped out of fear that aggrieved English lords would help fund the invasion, and all letters leaving the realm were to be inspected for treasonable contents.

Edward had finally realised his blunder. While he might have dismissed his wife as a French irritation, he knew his son to be every bit as royal as himself. Edward took his own royalty very seriously indeed, and recognised that many Englishmen would willingly fight for their future king. When his son refused to obey his order to leave the queen, claiming that out of duty he should stay with her in her great unease of mind and
unhappiness, he wrote back to him in the strongest terms, saying of the queen:

… if she had conducted herself towards the king as she ought to have done towards her lord, the king would be much harassed to learn of her grief or unhappiness, but as she feigns a reason to withdraw from the king by reason of his dear and faithful nephew Hugh Despenser, who has always served the king well and faithfully, Edward can see and everybody can see that she openly, notoriously, and knowingly contrary to her duty and the estate of the king’s crown, which she is bound to love and maintain, draws to her and retains in her company of her council the Mortimer, the king’s traitor and mortal enemy, approved, attainted and adjudged in full Parliament, and keeps his company within and without house, in despite of the king and of his crown and of the rights of his realm, which Mortimer the King of France had banished from his power as the king’s enemy at the king’s request at another time, and now she does worse, if possible, when she has delivered Edward to the company of the king’s said enemy, and makes him Edward’s councillor, and causes Edward to adhere to him openly and notoriously in the sight of everybody, to the great dishonour and villainy of the king and of Edward …
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At the same time he summoned back from France John de Cromwell and the Earl of Richmond, both of whom had stayed with the queen and Roger. The Earl of Kent, the king’s own half-brother, had also decided to stay, having married Roger’s cousin, Margaret Wake.
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Despairing that he was losing his authority, Edward further ordered his son not to enter any marriage contracts with anyone in his absence from England. As the king must have known, however, these matters were not in the prince’s hands. They were now entirely in the hands of Roger and Isabella.

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We have only one fact illustrating the nature of Roger and Isabella’s relationship at this time, and it can hardly be described as representative. At some point before June 1326 there was an emotional outburst between them in which Isabella, probably confused and frightened, suggested that she might return to her husband. Although the young prince and others were present, Roger angrily replied that, rather than let her go back to Edward, he would himself ‘kill her with his knife or some other way’.
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The prince was profoundly shocked by Roger’s threat, as were all those present, including Despenser’ spy. But it offers a tantalising glimpse into the
relationship. On the strength of it one might say that, after the initial rush of passion, it seems Isabella had doubts about their joint course of action, and considered going back to Edward seriously enough to say so. Roger, on the other hand, did not have this option, and refused to countenance her idea. But that he did this in a way which was sufficiently public for the discussion to become more widely known suggests that his emotions got the better of him, and that his feelings for Isabella were stronger than his self-control. This is the only evidence we have of him being anything other than circumspect in his personal affairs. One last point we can make about this outburst: Isabella’s doubts proved only temporary. With Roger’s support thereafter she was resolute.

Isabella’s wavering might possibly explain why Roger’s attack from Hainault, planned initially for February 1326, was delayed. Intervention by the Pope, however, is a more likely explanation.
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In view of the international situation, Roger and Isabella – particularly Isabella – had to be seen to have exhausted all other options for resolving the dispute with Edward before invading. In February the Pope wrote to Hugh Despenser ordering him to prevent civil war by leaving court, as Isabella had requested. Despenser, lacking the vision to manipulate this intervention to his advantage, told the Pope’s legates that the queen had no right to demand his withdrawal. The real reason why she had not returned to England, he claimed, was that Roger was threatening to kill her if she did. Edward himself wrote to the Pope at this time admitting that his wife was sharing her living accommodation with Roger, with the obvious implication that she was also sharing her bed. Only then did the Pope realise that the hatred the English felt for Hugh Despenser, and the hatred Despenser and Edward felt for Roger and the queen, would not be dissipated except by force of arms.