Isabella II: The She-Wolf of France

In 1320, Edward took another lover, Hugh Dispenser the younger, on whom he lavished gifts and titles. Outraged, the Baron’s once again took up arms and forced Edward to banish the Dispenser’s, both father and son. But Edward soon summoned their return and this time he was determined to assert his authority once and for all. In 1322 he issued a statute revoking all ordinances that in any way limited his power.

Having reasserted his power, Edward now made a fatal mistake. He had refused to pay homage to the French King for the territory of Gascony. War seemed imminent. Having only recently restored stability in his own Kingdom, and unable to depend upon the loyalty of his own nobility, Edward wished to avoid conflict at all costs. So he decided to send Isabella to negotiate a settlement (no doubt grateful to be rid of her). She by now detested her husband, his toadies the Dispensers, and his coterie of pretty-boy friends. So she negotiated a settlement that favoured the French King, Charles IV, who also just happened to be her brother. Humiliated, Edward still refused to pay homage and so sent his son to do so instead. This played right into Isabella’s hands. Safe in the Court of her brother and with her son, the heir to the throne, in her possession, she openly declared her liaison with the leading English Baron Roger Mortimer, condemned her husband’s homosexuality, and declared her intention to invade England with a French army. Edward immediately demanded that the French King send her home. This Charles refused to do stating that “the Queen has come of her own will and may freely return if she wishes But if she prefers to remain, she is my sister and I refuse to expel her”. Edward’s authority began to unravel. His son refused to return to England deciding instead to side with his mother. Edward’s brother now married Mortimer’s cousin securing a family connection and the Earls began to desert their King and declare for Isabella. When the army he had ordered to gather failed to materialise it became evident that Edward II’s days were numbered.

The invasion when it came was unopposed. Isabella’s army though small took London. The Dispenser’s were captured and brutally executed, suffering live disembowelment and castration before being decapitated; The older Dispenser being executed in Isabella’s presence. It is said she looked on with some satisfaction.

Edward II was imprisoned and forced to abdicate in favour of his son. But this did not answer the question of what was to be done with him. On 3 April, 1327, Edward was moved from Kenilworth to the more isolated Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. According to Sir Thomas More what happened next was brutal and unequivocal:

“On the night of 11 October, while lying on a bed (the King) was suddenly seized, and while a great mattress held him down and suffocated him, a plumbers iron, heated intensely hot, was introduced through a tube into his private parts so it burned the inner parts of his intestines.”

A hot rod pushed up his rectum would have represented a clean death. The insertion of a tube ensuring there would be no marks. For a Queen who had long thirsted for vengeance and so detested her husbands sin against nature, it was a deserved and appropriate death. One, it is said, she personally devised.

In 1330, just three years later, when Edward III came of age, he ended the short-lived regency of Isabella and Mortimer. Almost immediately he had Mortimer executed. His mother he forced into retirement and internal exile. Though he awarded her a generous allowance and she was a frequent visitor to Court she was never again allowed to involve herself in politics or affairs of State. When she died on 22 August, 1358, she was buried, perhaps with some irony, in her wedding dress.