Isabella of France: The Rebel Queen by Kathryn Warner

Author:Kathryn Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
Published: 2016-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

8

War with France 1323–1325

Isabella dined with her elder son and the heir to the throne, Edward of Windsor, at the Tower of London in early February 1323. Now ten, the boy was surely growing aware of his father’s incompetence and tyranny and his reliance on Hugh Despenser. The king himself was still in Yorkshire with Despenser and remained there until the middle of March. In the 1320s, Edward II seems to have been going out of his way to make as many enemies as possible: as well as failing to reconcile the many Contrariants languishing in prison or released, none too happily, having been forced to acknowledge huge debts to the king, Edward began a series of extraordinarily vindictive vendettas against several of the English bishops. Most notably, these were Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford, whom he accused of supporting the Contrariants and especially the Mortimers against himself in 1321/22; Henry Burghersh, bishop of Lincoln, for no other reason than he was the nephew of the executed but still loathed Bartholomew, Lord Badlesmere; and in 1323, the king took great offence at the pope’s appointment of John Stratford as bishop of Winchester. Edward pettishly declared himself ‘exceedingly incensed’ with Stratford and called him ‘faithless and ungrateful’; he had been hoping for Hugh Despenser’s close ally Robert Baldock, archdeacon of Middlesex, to be appointed to the bishopric.1 Edward ordered Stratford in November 1323 not to leave the country, forced him to acknowledge a debt of £10,000 to him, and even began proceedings against him before the King’s Bench. He also allowed Hugh Despenser to extort £1,000 from the unfortunate bishop, which Despenser deposited with his Italian bankers the Peruzzi.2 Edward would conduct pointless vendettas against other bishops as well, and also remained on cold terms with Thomas of Lancaster’s younger brother and heir Henry of Lancaster, his first cousin and Isabella’s uncle, even though Henry had played no role whatsoever in the Contrariant rebellion and had not had a close relationship with his brother (and even though Henry’s late wife, Maud Chaworth, who died in 1321 or early 1322, was Despenser the Younger’s half-sister). Edward’s talent for antagonising men he should have been making every effort to keep on his side was to have tragic consequences for himself, and these men would form the core of Isabella’s support when she later moved into a position of opposition to her husband.

On 17 February 1323, Isabella was again (or still) staying at the Tower of London with her niece-in-law Eleanor de Clare, with whom she had an apparently amicable and affectionate friendship for many years. The two women wrote almost identical letters on that day to the treasurer of England, asking that Roger Mortimer’s wife, Joan Geneville, their ‘dear and beloved cousin’ who had been held under house arrest with eight servants since February 1322, received promptly the money allocated for her sustenance.3 This has sometimes been seen as evidence of the queen’s collusion with Joan’s husband, Roger, with whom the queen began a relationship in about late 1325.

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