Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II (3 page)

The turn of the new century created fresh opportunities for Edward. Philip was drawn into a bitter struggle with Pope Boniface VIII over royal rights in the French Church. The Pope retaliated by opening a secret correspondence with Edward, gently encouraging him to reject both the 1298 settlement and the consequent treaty. Philip responded by sending armed men to assault the Pope in his own house.
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More importantly, Philip had grown tired of his lawyers’ advice. He may have brought England to heel but Flanders was still proving to be a thorn in his side. In 1302 the tension between the two countries erupted into war. Philip’s troops poured across the Flemish border. All of Europe expected Flanders to be crushed in one single campaign. Instead, at Coutrai, the Flemish burgesses, armed with spears and protected by rows of stakes, annihilated the mounted chivalry of France. Edward seized this opportunity to try and secretly repudiate the marriage of his son to Isabella. He opened clandestine negotiations with Flanders for the hand of another Flemish princess and, when this failed, considered a marriage alliance between his heir and the Castilian Infanta: Edward I’s first wife, Eleanor, came from Castile and an ally on France’s southern
border would be useful.
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Nevertheless, Philip still possessed Mauleon, the gateway to Gascony: his troops could occupy the entire duchy in weeks. Edward, involved in a full-scale war against Scotland, was astute enough to realize he could not fight a war on two fronts. Both countries were exhausted by conflict and eager for a settlement. In May 1303 a lasting peace was sealed and the Prince of Wales despatched envoys to negotiate his solemn betrothal to Isabella.

The nine-year-old Princess met these envoys on the 20 May 1303 and made her solemn commitment to marry Prince Edward in the presence of Gilles, Archbishop of Narbonne.
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Philip’s luck also changed. In November 1305, the pleasure-loving Frenchman, Bertrand de Got, was elected Pope Clement V. Clement, probably at Philip’s behest, tried to persuade Edward to send his heir to Lyons for the papal coronation: a fitting occasion, Clement maintained, for the marriage between his son and Isabella.
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Secretly, Edward was horrified. Time had passed: Isabella was now nine years old and the Pope was ready to grant a dispensation so that, despite her tender years, Isabella could marry the English heir. If Edward I objected to the marriage, Philip could then depict him as repudiating the treaty as well as offering grave insult to the papacy.

The diplomatic machinery of both French and papal courts ground on, despite English reservations. Clement V issued a dispensation for Isabella to marry as she had not reached the canonical age to do so.
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Clement and Philip also agreed to a solemn meeting of all parties at Lyons, a marvellous occasion and setting for the marriage between an English prince and his French bride.

Edward twisted and turned. He dared not object to the
marriage: his first line of defence was that he could not spare his heir for such a long journey, so the marriage would have to be by proxy. The Prince of Wales gave his father’s envoys to Lyons the authority to contract such a marriage on his behalf. Isabella appointed her own proxies.
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In the end the marriage did not take place. On the back of Clement’s dispensation for Isabella to marry, a clerk has scrawled, ‘
Dispensatio Matrimonii Reginae Angliae Non Valeat’.
In other words this dispensation was never implemented. However, it is interesting to note that, almost three years before the wedding actually took place and Isabella’s arrival in England, European courts already regarded her as ‘
Regina Angliae
’, ‘Queen of England’.

This marriage by proxy was deliberately frustrated by Edward. His envoys seized on the fact that Philip had not returned the castle of Mauleon so everything went back to square one.
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The papacy, however, now involved in Philip’s secret designs to seize the wealth of the Templar Order, refused to give up. A Spanish cardinal was sent to England, arriving in the spring of 1307. The cardinal gave solemn assurances that all of Edward’s territories in France were to be returned. He insisted that the Prince go to France to attend another meeting between the Pope and Philip during April and May 1307.
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Edward was forced to accept this and his heir dutifully travelled to Dover. The English king even agreed to release 100,000 Marks from the Exchequer but then, abruptly, the Prince was recalled north,
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and so no money was ever released. He was still playing for time, although this was beginning to run out.

By 1302 Robert the Bruce had emerged as the new Scottish leader and was intent on a relentless campaign
against the English occupying army.
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Five years later, Edward I, sixty-eight years of age and racked with illness, was determined on one last, all-out invasion to remove this threat. He was on the brink of this campaign when, stricken by sudden illness, he died on the 7 July 1307, leaving the marriage of his son unresolved. In a sense this was a triumph for Edward I: for almost nine years he had endeavoured to extricate his son from a marriage he never intended to let happen. It was now up to this same son to decide what future course these negotiations would take.

At the time of Edward I’s death, Isabella was eleven years old. In medieval eyes, she was on the brink of womanhood and had been raised in a tradition, immortalized by the tales of King Arthur and his knights, where princesses were regarded as objects to be worshipped, ladies in the tower, over whose favours gallant knights fought. Isabella would have been aware of these stories as well as the court ritual and code of chivalry surrounding them, and up to her final days, she remained a fervent admirer of the Arthurian legend: she not only collected books on Arthurian tales but lent them to others.
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This medieval code of Arthurian chivalry is very clearly reflected in Chaucer’s
The Knight’s Tale
where the brothers, Arcite and Palemon, fight over their beloved. Taken to extremes, these chivalrous rules reduced women to objects: prizes to be fought over, according to the rules of the tournament, or married in order to secure access to an inheritance. Such attitudes encouraged a broad stream of medieval consciousness to regard women as either objects of desire in themselves or as possessions to be used as bargaining counters for other more mundane reasons, land or inheritance. The tales of La Tour Landry, a string of
moralizing stories, emphasize the subservience of women and the necessity for their complete obedience to their husbands. A far-fetched example is La Tour Landry’s
The Book of the Knight,
where three merchants wager that each of their wives will do whatever they ask, be it leaping into a basin or dancing on a table.
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Another work,
The Menagier of Paris,
laid down how the young wife of a Paris merchant existed to please her husband and satisfy his every whim: ‘Take pains to cherish the person of your husband and I beg of you to keep him in clean linen . . . I advise you to prepare such comforts for your husband and remember the country folks’ proverb how three things drive a good man out of his home: a leaking roof, a smoking chimney and a scolding wife.’
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If women broke out of this mould they could expect not only human, but divine retribution. The English chronicler Knighton, a canon of Leicester, described how, in 1348, a group of high-born women began to ape the men in organizing their own tournaments, but finished the story on a high moralizing note, describing how God put ‘their frivolity to rout by heavy thunder-storms and diverse extraordinary tempests’.
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True, these works were written in the second half of the fourteenth century but they captured a popular trend and public attitude. The subservience of the wife to the husband was seen as part of a divinely ordained plan, a theme which, no doubt, was constantly stressed in Isabella’s early education.

Yet there was also another prevalent strain of thought, best represented by Chaucer’s brilliant sketch of the Wife of Bath and her tale. The Wife of Bath owned her own business; she went on ‘package tours’ to the sacred
shrines of Canterbury, Compostella and Cologne; she saw a number of husbands through the church door for marriage and out again to the graveyard. She is pugnacious, assertive, and not afraid to speak her mind.
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This is not a caricature or exaggeration. In the towns and cities of both France and England, women often played an important civic role, particularly in trade and industry; even in medicine, until 1520, a number of physicians in England were women.
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The Wife of Bath’s tale goes further, emphasizing the superiority of women and the need for wives to exercise mastery over their husbands.
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Isabella would have been aware of such conflicting attitudes. Her mother had been a queen and ruler in her own right, and Queens of England had also held their own. Eleanor of Aquitaine led her husband, Henry II (1154–89), a merry dance, both in their private as well as their public lives. The Empress Mathilda, for nineteen years, waged a bitter civil war against her cousin Stephen for the English crown whilst, according to rumour, King John’s wife took lovers so indiscreetly, her husband retaliated by hanging them from her bedposts.

Isabella progressed through a series of roles: first the princess in the shadows, then the honourable queen, then the dutiful wife. She was only twelve when she married Prince Edward and it took sixteen years of intense provocation, before she emerged as the ‘She-Wolf’, the ‘new Jezebel’. This progression, from the passive to the active, is the most fascinating aspect of Isabella’s life and career, not only for her actions but for the true reasons behind those actions.

In all fairness, her prospective husband, Edward of Caernarvon, was, for the greater part of his youth and early
manhood, a similar pawn on the diplomatic chessboard. Like Isabella, he was brought up well away from the machinations of the court, only emerging onto the political scene when his aged father decided to use him for his own political purposes. Indeed, Edward of Caernarvon proved to be as big a contradiction as his future wife. In the main, historians have been unanimous in their condemnation of a king who lost his crown, his wife and his life. Edward II spent most of his reign fighting his barons, not on matters of high principle, but to protect favourites such as Gaveston and de Spencer. The most scathing judgement on Edward of Caernarvon is that of T. F. Tout who dismissed him as ‘a coward and a trifler’.
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The Articles of Deposition which brought Edward II’s reign to an end, begin with the contemptuous remark that the King ‘was not competent to govern for, in all his time, he had been led and ruled by others who have advised him badly to his own dishonour to the destruction of the Church and all his people.’
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The key to his character surely lies in his early years. His father was forty-five years of age when Edward was born at Caernarvon on 25 April 1284. His mother, Eleanor of Castile, whom Edward I loved to distraction, died when the Prince was only six. For most of his early life Edward was dismissed by his father to the royal manor of Langley in Hertfordshire with his nurse, Alice Leygrave, his doctor Robert de Cysterne and his tutor and guardian Sir Guy Ferre, a former soldier and courtier and one of his father’s henchmen.
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Left to his own devices, bereft of a father and a mother-figure, the young Edward naturally looked for friendship from others, whether they were ditchers, rowers, sailors
or boatmen. From them he learnt how to gamble at games such as Pitch and Toss. Free of any strictures, young Edward went to bed when he wanted and soon won the reputation of a late sleeper, so much so that, when he decided to reform his ways, the elderly Bishop of Worcester loudly proclaimed the Prince had renounced his bad habits because he was now getting up early in the morning.
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Prince Edward appears to have had a lively intellect and to have been interested in hunting, horses and music. A member of his household wrote the first earliest known English treatise on hunting. Another, the minstrel Richard Rhymer, was sent to Gloucester to learn how to play a favourite instrument.
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The Prince kept a camel at Langley and even took a lion with him on his progresses through the kingdom.
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He was well educated, although his French proved better than his Latin. He took his coronation oath in the French language, whilst the Pope had to thank the Archbishop of Canterbury for translating his letters for the new King from Latin into French.
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Edward of Caernarvon was a gossip, a constant letter-writer, communicating with his sisters and foreign princes. These letters depict an easygoing, good-natured young man with a well-developed sense of humour. No wonder he later paid his painter, James of St Albans, the huge sum of fifty shillings ‘for dancing on the table before him and causing him to laugh uproariously’.
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In many ways Edward would have made an excellent country squire; it was his terrible tragedy to be king.

By 1298, the year of the papal arbitration, Edward of Caernarvon was fourteen, being slowly drawn into the politics of the court. He attended council meetings, joined
his father at certain festive occasions while being trained for his role as a fighting king.

Nowhere does the young Edward betray any interest in Isabella or his planned marriage. He attended the wedding of Isabella’s aunt, the Princess Margaret, to his own father at Canterbury Cathedral in 1299, and soon established cordial relationships with his young step-mother as well as with Isabella’s uncle, Louis, Count of Evreux, to whom he despatched affectionate, pleading letters.
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It was in 1297 that the young Prince of Wales met the real love of his life. In the autumn of 1297 Edward I returned from Flanders: in his retinue was the young Gascon ‘Perrot Gaveston’, who was paid for military service in the English forces between August and November 1297 – the first mention of this fateful name in English records. According to the chroniclers, ‘As soon as the King’s son saw him [Gaveston] he fell so much in love that he entered upon an enduring compact with him.’
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The young Prince had found his soulmate and, over the next two years, this friendship ripened. His father, busy in Scotland, allowed his heir to continue his happy-go-lucky existence, which he spent boating along the Thames with his barge-master Absalom of Greenwich, dicing and gambling or taking the pilgrims’ routes to Canterbury to pray before the ‘blissful bones’ of Thomas à Becket.
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