She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (44 page)

But here the limitations of Isabella’s world view, and of her political understanding, were revealed for the first time. She was an intelligent woman, and a political animal through and through, whose acute tactical sense had enabled her to play her hand with masterful skill in the critical moment of 1326. But now it emerged that her overwhelming sense of entitlement – which had driven her resistance to her husband from the moment he had allowed Despenser to displace her from her hard-won position at his side – also prevented her from understanding that constraints on her freedom of action remained, despite the power she had achieved. Of course a royal daughter of France and a queen of England would expect to command the reverence and enjoy the luxury appropriate to her exalted rank, but the acquisitive arrogance that Isabella now displayed blunted her vision as a ruler in a manner that was alarmingly reminiscent of her feckless husband.

It was indisputable that the queen should retrieve the valuable dower lands, worth
£
4,500 a year, that had been stripped from her by the rapacious regime she had overthrown. But the award made to Isabella on the day of her son’s coronation tripled that already generous endowment. With her new estates worth an astonishing annual sum of twenty thousand marks – or
£
13,333 – she enjoyed an income greater even than that of Thomas of Lancaster in his pomp. Among the many properties of which she now took possession were her dead husband’s favourite manor of Langley, where Gavestonlay beneath a gilded tomb; Leeds Castle, from the gates of which she had been turned away with such bloody results; Bristol Castle, where the older Despenser had died; and the earl of Lancaster’s fortress at Pontefract, which the younger Despenser had seized after his execution, and Isabella now appropriated for herself despite the prior claims of the earl’s brother Henry. Meanwhile, with a series of cash grants – needed to pay her army of mercenaries as well as to establish her glittering supremacy at her son’s new court – she drained the gold that Despenser had stockpiled in the royal treasury.

And she was not alone in her acquisitions. Mortimer’s ambition
had been no less apparent than Isabella’s at the young king’s coronation, when his three sons had knelt to receive the order of knighthood dressed in the cloth of gold and furs appropriate to the heirs of an earl. It was no surprise, therefore, to find that title soon among the rewards Mortimer amassed. In the winter of 1326 and during 1327 he accumulated in his possession the great lordships that Despenser had previously held in Wales and the Welsh marches, together with the estates of his uncle, Roger Mortimer of Chirk (disinheriting his cousin, the heir to Chirk, in the process), as well as the royal office of justiciar of the principality of Wales, to give him power there on a scale of which even Despenser would have been envious. These grants were mirrored by more in Ireland, and in the autumn of 1328 Mortimer was named earl of March, a new title created especially in his honour, to reflect his extraordinary dominance in the western territories of the young king’s realm.

Liberation from the oppressions of Edward II, it was becoming unnervingly clear, had delivered England into the hands of a queen mother determined to enrich herself beyond reason or precedent, and a domineering nobleman who aspired to the status of an uncrowned king, scarcely letting young Edward out of his sight and taking for granted his own right to speak on his behalf. The council, for Isabella and Mortimer, was no more than window-dressing, an irrelevance to the reality of their political control. But they, no less than the dead king and his favourite before them, failed to understand that the process by which they sought to consolidate their own power was also the process by which, piece by piece, they began to forfeit the legitimacy of the authority they claimed.

With alarming speed, cracks began to appear in the fragile facade of unity that still remained as the legacy of their invasion. Doubts were raised about Isabella and Mortimer’s capacity to govern not only by the rewards they lavished upon themselves, but also by their handling of the weightiest matters of policy. It had never been likely that the Scots would stand by and watch such violent upheavals in English politics from a gentlemanly distance, and in the summer of 1327 Scottish raids forced the muster
of an English army and an advance against them into the northeast. But the English forces were caught ponderously flat-footed by typically agile and elusive Scots manoeuvres, and the teenage king – who had accompanied Mortimer, Lancaster and his uncles of Kent and Norfolk north on his first military campaign – was almost captured in one daring raid on the English camp. As the exhausted, dispirited soldiers and their bitterly frustrated king made their way disconsolately south, Isabella and Mortimer made the decision to pursue peace in the north, rather than war; and in the spring of 1328 a treaty was agreed, to bring a lasting settlement between England and Scotland.

It was not, in itself, a foolish or myopic plan, but it came at a heavy price. England now for the first time formally recognised Scotland as an independent kingdom, and Robert Bruce as its rightful sovereign. The dream that the Scots might be brought under English rule – pursued so ferociously by the first Edward, and never relinquished by the second, no matter how hapless his interventions there – was now abandoned in the name of the third. Not, however, with his consent. When Isabella’s seven-year-old daughter Joan travelled north to Berwick with her mother in July 1328 to marry Bruce’s son and heir, four-year-old David, in fulfilment of the treaty, Edward was not with them. Appalled and angry at the humiliation of the campaign and the subsequent jettisoning of what he saw as his rights over Scotland, the fifteen-year-old king refused to attend the wedding and obstructed his mother’s attempt to deliver the Stone of Scone – the sacred sandstone on which kings of Scots were traditionally crowned, which had been captured by Edward I thirty years earlier – back into Scottish hands.

Angry though he might be, the king was still too young to free himself from the enveloping arms of the government which Isabella and Mortimer had created around him. But this breach between mother and son brought widespread condemnation for the first time upon the head of the queen mother and her unofficial consort. The king, it was clear, rejected this policy made in his
name. So did his subjects, who called it a
turpis pax
, a ‘shameful peace’. Meanwhile, the
£
20,000 which the Scots agreed to pay in reparation for their raids did little to soothe such discontent, given how rapidly it disappeared into the bottomless pit of Isabella’s coffers. And most immediately disquieting for Isabella and Mortimer was the fact that this growing resistance found public voice in the imposing person of Henry of Lancaster.

The wheel, it seemed, was turning full circle. This was not, after all, the first time that humiliation in Scotland had precipitated an earl of Lancaster into opposition. When parliament met at Salisbury in October 1328 – the same tame assembly that ratified Mortimer’s elevation to the earldom of March – Lancaster refused to attend, complaining of the failure to prosecute the king’s rights in Scotland, the sidelining of the regency council which he himself had been appointed to lead, and the plundering of the royal treasury to the private benefit of Isabella and Mortimer. If this was the reign of the king’s father revisited, it was abundantly clear who, this time, might be accused of usurping royal power.

In a process that had become horrifyingly, wearyingly familiar over the previous two decades, division spiralled quickly into armed confrontation. By winter troops were once again being mustered by England’s great nobles, who circled one another warily, trying to find a means to peace while preparing for war. In December Lancaster marched into London at the head of an army, where he was joined by the king’s uncles of Kent and Norfolk, who shared his anger at Isabella and Mortimer’s appropriation of their nephew’s government. But while Lancaster and his allies gathered in the capital, Mortimer’s army, accompanied by Isabella and Edward, outflanked them by moving north into the midlands and onto the attack. By 6 January, Lancaster’s manors in Warwickshire and Leicestershire had been sacked and burned, and his city of Leicester seized by Mortimer in the name of the young king.

In the face of this devastating reprisal, and confronted yet again with the imminent threat of civil war, the earls of Norfolk and
Kent decided that discretion was the better part of principled resistance, and abandoned Lancaster to rejoin the court. Realising now that he could not hope to prevail – and also, at almost fifty, finding himself progressively disabled by his failing eyesight – Lancaster surrendered to his king, kneeling in the mud of a January morning to ask his young cousin’s forgiveness. His submission saved his life and his lands, albeit at the cost of crippling financial penalties. Thereafter, hobbled by these monetary bonds and by his increasing infirmity, Lancaster was in no further position to resist.

Opposition had reared its head, and it had been crushed. Like Edward II and Despenser before them, Isabella and Mortimer could have chosen to learn lessons from the resistance they faced. Instead, like Edward and Despenser before them, they clung tighter to the power they had achieved. Her son’s anger at the Scottish peace might have given Isabella pause for thought; she was an astute woman, after all, and her authority fundamentally depended on his – a fact which made his approach toward adulthood a challengingly complex political phenomenon. Perhaps she had a blind faith that her influence over her son could not be shaken; perhaps she was simply unable to see the ramifications of long-term strategy when confronted with the pressing imperatives of short-term gain. Perhaps – and unknowably – the dynamics of her relationship with Mortimer obscured any other consideration, political or personal, although it has to be said that Isabella had never before knowingly set her own interests aside. What is certain, however, is that she and Mortimer now sought to tighten their stranglehold on power with a narcissism and paranoia to rival that of the regime they had destroyed.

The web was drawn ever closer around a king who had shown such unsettling signs of independent thought. Not only had Edward been paraded as the figurehead of military action against Lancaster’s revolt, but his household was filled with placemen loyal to his mother and Mortimer. He could trust only a few of the servants around him, notably his secretary Richard Bury and his close friend William Montagu, through whom he smuggled a message
to tell Pope John XXII that only letters bearing the words
pater
sancte
(‘holy father’) in Edward’s own handwriting could be read as genuine communication from the king rather than dictation by those who controlled his government – clearly, now, against his will.

And Edward was right to be wary. In early 1330, a year after the failure of Lancaster’s rebellion, Isabella and Mortimer resolved to flush out any last traces of disloyalty. The king’s uncle of Kent had recovered enough of his position after his flirtation with Lancaster to be entrusted in February 1330 with the task of escorting Edward’s Queen Philippa – a small, pregnant figure decked out in the finest gold tissue – to her coronation in Westminster Abbey. But a month later Kent was arrested on suspicion of treason. Hedging and vacillation were by this stage second nature to Kent; while in Paris with Isabella before the invasion of 1326, the earl had covered his back by sending covert, panic-tinged messages to England to reassure the king that, despite all appearances to the contrary, he had done nothing that might damage his royal brother’s interests. He might now have felt that he had been lucky to escape his entanglement with Lancaster with his head and his estates intact, and yet he chafed at his loss of influence at court, and the dominance of the vauntingly arrogant Mortimer.

So when secret information reached him that the wild rumours were true – that the dead king Edward was still alive, and a prisoner in the Dorset castle of Corfe – he had responded with alacrity, setting in train plans for his brother’s rescue and a counterrevolution to restore him to the throne. But the messages came from agents of Mortimer and Isabella, sent to entrap him; and, having enthusiastically demonstrated his willingness to plot their downfall, Kent was brought before parliament at Winchester in March 1330 to be condemned by letters written in his own hand. On 19 March, this son, brother and uncle of kings, a foolish, vain man brought down by political ambition unmatched by political judgement, was led, shivering in his shirt, out of the gate of Winchester Castle to a scaffold erected beyond its walls. There he stood for long, agonising hours, until the daylight began to fade.
Disillusion with the regime that had condemned him was now so widespread and so profound that no one could be found who was willing to spill such royal blood. At last a felon held in the castle’s jail agreed to wield the axe in return for a stay on his own execution; and when Kent’s severed head was raised, the crowd stood silent and stony-faced.

The circle was almost complete. It seemed, now, that Isabella and Mortimer were unassailable, their limitless power brutally demonstrated in the killing of the king’s uncle. But, as Edward II and Despenser had found after the execution of another royal earl, power based on fear, suspicion and ruthless self-enrichment might prove ephemeral when confronted with a challenge that could call on deep wells of legitimacy and loyalty. Edward II had been overwhelmed by the force of his wife’s betrayal; now it was Isabella’s turn to experience the sudden shock of rejection by the son in whose name she had deposed his father.

By the autumn of 1330, the earl of Kent’s lands had been parcelled out to supporters of the regime – many of them, with damning predictability, to Mortimer’s son and heir. Watches were set on the ports in case of invasion by those allies of the earl who had fled abroad, and everywhere Mortimer’s spies multiplied. By the time a parliament was called to meet at Nottingham in October the fog of rumour and suspicion curled so densely about the court that, when Mortimer and Isabella took up residence in the castle there, perched on a sandstone outcrop above the city, they did so with guards redoubled around them. The seventeen-year-old king, as always, was in their company, but that was no reason to be anything less than watchful. On 18 October Mortimer summoned a number of Edward’s household knights, the young king’s friend William Montagu first among them, to be interrogated on information that they were plotting against the regime. Mortimer’s spies had served him well, in all but one crucial respect: Montagu and his friends were not plotting against the king, but with him.