The Third Horseman by William Rosen

Author:William Rosen
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

“She-Wolf of France”

1313–1320

The twelve-year-old who had celebrated the nuptial mass in Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1308 had been a girl; a royal princess, to be sure, but still a girl. Five years as queen of England transformed Isabella. She improved her position with her husband after the murder of the despised Piers Gaveston, and did so without alienating any of the opposing sides in the Gaveston affair: the king, his earls, and even her father, the king of France, who had let it be known that he would support Gaveston’s enemies, even to the point of offering £40,000 to the earls trying to depose Gaveston. The young queen survived two failed expeditions to Scotland, not to mention near capture by Robert Bruce, and had even fulfilled her most important royal duty: giving birth to the future King Edward III in November 1312.

Yet she was still seen by her subjects as a luxury-loving spendthrift—and not unfairly. Even by the standards of medieval queens, few of whom could be called frugal, Isabella was remarkable. In addition to the royal wardrobe keeper, John Faleise, and the five dozen seamstresses required to drape the royal frame in the latest fashions, her household counted 180 servants, 70 of whom were of the “upper rank,” including a physician, two apothecaries, three cooks, a chaplain, a steward, a comptroller, a cofferer, and an almoner, whose only job was to dispense alms on feast days and holy days, using “the Queen’s great silver alms dish.”* Reporting to them were lower servants such as butlers, pantlers, a “clerke of spicerie,” a saucerer, ushers, marshals, chandlers, watchmen, eight knights, twenty-eight squires, bailiffs, castellans, a variety of senior and junior clerks, ladies-in-waiting, and a fool called Michael. To manage the household stable’s dozens of horses (plus eight greyhounds, and half a dozen falcons and hawks) required six carters, thirty-nine grooms, twenty-five palfreymen, and assorted (and uncounted) pages.

Such an extensive domestic staff made it easy for her enemies—and, as it happens, some of her modern biographers—to paint her as a profligate, even to the point of spreading gossip that Isabella’s October 1311 pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury was so lavish that it cost the treasury £140,000. The scandalmongers missed the far more important and valuable asset that the queen had become. On May 23, 1313, Edward and Isabella sailed for France, landing first in Gascony, and then traveling north to Paris. There Isabella was now old enough to be included, for the first time, in the negotiations between her father’s and her husband’s royal houses, and all three—Philip, Edward, and Isabella—formally accepted the cross of a crusader from Cardinal Nicholas, the papal legate, which technically obliged all three to enlist directly in the pan-European campaign to liberate the Holy Land.

In one of the more curious episodes in medieval European history, the bishop of Rome for whom Cardinal Nicholas was a representative wasn’t, at the moment, actually residing in Rome. In 1305, after a decade of vicious fighting between

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