February 14, 2023 • 29 mins
Isabella of France was a pre-teen when she came to England to marry King Edward II. Though the two had plenty in common, a series of betrayals would ultimately drive Isabella to crossing the sea with an invading force.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grim and Mild from Aaron Maankie. Listener discretion advised.
In thirteen twenty six, the billowing sails of eight warships
rose over the sea on the English horizon. They were
(00:22):
flanked by one hundred and thirty two smaller vessels, all
ready for an invasion. The ships had come from France.
They had sailed from Flanders and were heading toward the
Thames Estuary that September, as summer turned to fall. They
were coming to depose the King of England. No invasion
(00:46):
of England by sea had succeeded since the Norman conquest
two hundred and sixty years earlier in ten sixty six.
But this was no ordinary invasion by some hostile foreign hour.
The man leading the charge had been condemned to death,
and he had been spared by the very king he
(01:08):
was now coming to depose. But far more shocking was
the woman standing next to him. She was the man's
lover in adulterous scandal. She was said to be among
the most beautiful women in the world. She had blonde
hair blowing against her forehead now in the sea wind,
(01:29):
she was dressed in widows weeds, the black clothes of mourning,
but her husband was alive for now. Her name was Isabella.
She had been born in France, but she wasn't some
foreign usurper. She was the wife of King Edward the
Second of England. She was the most treasonous queen in
(01:53):
all of English history. Born the daughter of the King
of France, adored and then despised by her subjects, mother
of the future sovereign, scorned and humiliated by an unpopular
husband more interested in having affairs with men than in
her She's known to history as a sinner, a Jezebel,
(02:15):
maybe even a murderer, known in the end as the
she Wolf of France. She was Isabella, Queen of England,
and she was sailing from the continent, with troops and
her lover by her side, and a steely glint in
her eye, ready to depose her king. I'm Dani Schwartz,
(02:39):
and this is noble blood. The little girl who would
someday overthrow the King of England was born Isabel, Princess
of France around the year twelve five. She was the
(03:01):
daughter of Philip the Fair, the handsome and fearsome King
of France. She was one of seven children, the only
daughter to survive to adulthood. Her father had keen political
designs for each of his children's marriages, which this podcast
actually covered in our episode on the Tordonell Affair. Suffice
(03:23):
to say that in thirteen o three, at only seven
years old, as a prized princess, Isabella was betrothed to
then Prince Edward of England, who was nineteen. At the
betrothal ceremony, Isabella made herself as tall as she could
in front of an archbishop who was Edward's proxy. She
(03:45):
put her little hand in the archbishop's big one and
hoped with her child's heart that her husband would be
good to her when they finally met, that he would
love her, that he would fulfill her father's hope for
a future king of England. And descended from both the
French and English lines. But she must have noticed that
(04:07):
her future husband never sent her any gifts across the
English Channel, nor any letters. Even as a child. She
may have wondered why not. Five years later she would
find out. On January twenty five, oh eight, twelve year
old Isabella formally married Edward, who was by then King
(04:30):
of England. Despite the mismatch in age, Edward was a
handsome groom. Isabella biographer Alice and Weir describes the six
foot tall Edward like a dang Disney prince for Isabella. Quote.
He was well proportioned and had curly, fair shoulder length
hair with a mustache and beard. He was also well spoken.
(04:52):
His mother tongue was Norman French and articulate, and he
dressed elegantly, even lavishly end quote. One limitation of histories
that old is we have very little insight into Isabella's
thoughts around this time. Even the biographies and articles about
her are frequently about her husband, which leaves a blank
(05:15):
space in our understanding. The fact is that Isabella was
twelve years old at her wedding to a man twice
her age. Both Isabella's mother and her new husband's mother
had been married by age eleven. Twelve was the youngest
age at which the Church permitted sex between husband and wife.
(05:36):
Historians generally believe that Isabella and Edward didn't consummate the
marriage on their wedding night. I can imagine a young
Isabella who was grateful for this reprieve. Maybe she felt
like a child thrown into a stranger's bed, albeit a
bed that she had been preparing for since youth. Maybe
she viewed her new husband's restraint as chivalrous or loving,
(06:01):
but that wasn't all it was. This podcast has covered
the story of Edward the Second and his affair with
the love of his life, his boyhood courtier Piers Gaveston.
The fact that he's the tragic hero of one episode
of this podcast and a side character in this one.
It's just more proof that history can be told from
(06:23):
many angles. Love for one person is heartache for another.
The difference between comedy and tragedy is often just a
matter of who your main character is. When Isabella arrived
in England after the wedding, her husband greeted Gaveston with
a degree of enthusiasm that shocked Isabella's relatives. Isabella had
(06:45):
to watch as Gaveston wore jewels that were part of
her dowry, and he wore purple to the coronation, the
color of royalty, as though he were the true spouse
of Edward being elevated to the throne. For Isabella, it
was embarrassing. She told her father that she was quote
(07:06):
the most wretched of wives. She received no money from
her husband. She was miserable. She wasn't the only one.
The English barons all wanted the king's favorite, Gaveston gone,
and they got their way. In th eight, six months
after Isabella arrived in England, Gaveston was banished from the country.
(07:30):
With Gaveston gone, Isabella's husband warmed to her. He started
giving her lands and money. Wherever he traveled, she went
with him. She may have felt like any girl who
has a crush on a guy who has a crush
on someone else. It hurts, yes, but maybe his affections
can be turned. But then Edward brought Gaveston back. Everybody
(07:57):
likes a catfight sensation. Aalized history would have us believed
that Isabella hated Gaveston to the end. Isabella was probably
pained to see the return of her competition, but she
was quite a bit older now with some relationship of
her own with the king, and she reached some equilibrium
(08:17):
with Gaveston. It's worth noting that everyone in this saga,
from Gaveston to the lovers of both king and Queen
that I'll mention later in this episode was married to
a member of the opposite sex and had children of
their own. Once Gaveston came back, Isabella was kind to
his pregnant wife. She spent time with Gaveston. She may
(08:40):
have even found him kind of amusing. But if Isabella
mellowed somewhat towards Galveston, the English courts as a whole
did not. They wanted him gone for good, violently if
need be, as violence mounted around them. In thirteen eleven
and twelve of Isabella told her husband that she was pregnant,
(09:04):
probably hoping that with that news, Edward would prioritize her protection.
He didn't. He left her at Newcastle while he protected
Gaveston instead. Some piece of her must have learned, no
matter how good her relationship with Edward seemed, she would
never really come first. Gaveston would be brutally executed on
(09:29):
June twelve. The details of that brutality belonged to edwards story,
covered in another episode. This is Isabella's story, and here
it's more interesting to imagine her reunion with her grieving
husband in the aftermath. I wonder if she felt a
victor's gladness at being the only remaining competitor for her
(09:53):
husband's heart, or a wife's sorrow for her husband's grief,
or maybe she felt the empathy of the fellow unlucky
in love. Either way, five months later, at age seventeen,
Isabella gave birth to the heir to the throne, another Edward.
She went on to have three more children with the king,
(10:17):
and whether there was any love in the act of
conception or purely dynastic duty was a secret that died
with their history. What certain is that once Gaveston was
out of the picture for good, there was at least
mutual respect between Isabella and her husband. Isabella was smart
(10:37):
and savvy, versed in both English and French territorial and
political interests. She was also impressively involved in negotiations and diplomacy. Edward,
never one of the greats when it came to statecraft,
seemed to like having his queen involved. They simply liked
each other. They wrote letters to each other any time
(10:59):
they were apart. They played gambling games together as a team.
It would have been hard to imagine that this beautiful
woman laughingly playing games of chance beside her husband would
some day gather the flotilla that would overthrow him. But
maybe there were hints. At one point, giggling playing a game,
(11:21):
Isabella's ladies fake captured the king and wouldn't let him
go until the fake ransom had been paid. Some games
seemed more ominous in retrospect. Isabella spent years developing mutual
respect with her husband, maybe even genuine affection, so she
(11:43):
must have been devastated when she learned that his dalliances
did not die with Gaveston. Not yet a decade after
Gaveston's death, Edward took a new lover, Hewla Dispenser, Royal Chamberlain.
This dispense her was nothing like Isabella's earlier arrival, Galveston,
(12:04):
who honestly seemed kind of meek, almost cute by comparison,
Dispenser was a cruel and violent man, especially depraved toward women.
He had one widow tortured until all four limbs were
broken and she was said to have lost her mind.
Isabella hated him. Dispenser began to turn her husband against her.
(12:29):
It's possible that Dispenser actually sexually harmed Isabella in some way,
although the details aren't quite clear. As relations between France
and England worsened, Dispenser whispered in the King's ear and
Isabella lost everything King Edward asked the Pope to annul
(12:49):
their marriage, though the Pope declined. Isabella's lands were taken
from her. French servants, who had come to England with
her when she was twelve years old, were taken from
her household. Finally, her three younger children were taken from her,
on suspicion that she would incite them to treason because
she's a French woman. Well, you tell someone what they
(13:12):
are enough, they might believe you. She didn't deserve this treatment.
Isabella was the Queen of England, the daughter of King
Philip of France. She had spent years giving Edward children,
doing his diplomacy, playing games with him, delighting side by
side at the animals in their menagerie. No, she deserved
(13:34):
a husband like her father had been, who never remarried
after the death of his wife. Isabella's mother loyal to
the end. Isabella's father was harsh as a king, but
as a father, he was in touch with his daughter constantly.
He mentioned Isabella's name in every written record of French
(13:54):
concessions to England. Knowing that she loved books, he made
sure she got the gift of an ornately illustrated apocalypse
when she burned her hand, he sent doctors to attend
to her. In England, Isabella's husband didn't show loyalty anywhere
nearly that much. But Isabella's husband had never been loyal
(14:15):
to her, so why she thought should she be loyal
to him? Isabella started smiling. It hurt far more to
have lost her husband's respect as a thirty year old
adult than it had been as a child to have
never had it. But she played nice, so nice that
(14:37):
Edward himself allowed his beautiful, smiling wife to go alone
to France, ostensibly as a peacemaker between the nations. A
nightmare dressed like a day dream. When Isabella arrived in France,
she kissed her brother, King Charles the Fourth, who looked
(14:57):
so much like their departed father. She breathed in the
sweet scent of home, and soon enough she encountered a
man named Roger Mortimer. He had once been a friend
and ally of King Edward, until, under Dispenser's cruel regime,
he turned against the English king. They had this in common.
(15:20):
Mortimer and Isabella. Mortimer had once been sentenced to death
for treason against the king, but Edward had commuted the
sentence he could not have known at the time that
he was sparing the life of the man who would
become his wife's lover. Yes, Isabella started an affair with Mortimer,
(15:41):
fueled by the aphrodisiac of shared hatred for her husband.
There's something almost tragic that Isabella and Edward had so
much in common. Both were trapped in a marriage when
their real devotions were elsewhere. Both turned to an adulterous affair.
(16:01):
We can imagine in a different life, in a different
time in history, with a different understanding of sexuality, the
wife and husband might have divorced, might have even remained married,
but understood their desires for people that their spouses could
never be. They had respected each other once upon a time,
(16:22):
but that time was now long past. By thirty five,
Isabella and Mortimer were playing it very smart, while at
the exact same moment Edward played it very dumb. Edwards
sent his firstborn son to visit Isabella in France, which
(16:43):
put all the power in her hand. She now had
the heir. The king pretty soon realized his mistake. He
started sending letter after letter to Isabella, to Charles, to
anyone he could think of. He asked Isabella to come
home to England with their son. She sent back de
mural letters with feeble excuses. Oh, I couldn't possibly leave France,
(17:07):
my brother wants us to say. Edward started to get
very nervous. He was right to. Isabella was hanging out
in France with English exiles who hated Edward. She was
wearing the black garb of a widow, major alarm bells.
It was probably seen as a symbol of her displeasure
(17:31):
with her husband's infidelity, but it was also a threat.
If she wasn't a widow yet, she would be one soon.
She would make sure of it. Edward kept asking Isabella
to return with their son, and Isabella kept defying him.
It became like a game of keepaway. Finally she made
(17:54):
it plain she would not return to England except upon
quote the destruct action of Hugh. At this point Edward
really and rightly freaked out. On December one, five, his
bishops wrote to Isabella, quote, the whole country is disturbed
(18:14):
by the answers which you have lately sent to our
Lord King, and because you delay your return out of
hatred for Hugh la dispenser, we warn you as a
daughter to return to our Lord King. Your husband. It's
striking that Edwards Bishops wrote from the perspective of a
father figure to this woman whose father had actually helped
(18:38):
her in her life. Isabella knew whose daughter she really was,
so she and Mortimer drew up plans they would invade
England by sea. At the time, it had been two
hundred years since the last successful sea invasion, far but
not so far outside in history that it couldn't be
(19:02):
done again. They gathered their eight warships and one hundred
and thirty two support vessels together they set sail. They
landed in England two days later, September twenty four, twenty six.
As far as invasions go, it was a shockingly easy
(19:23):
and bloodless one, As had happened with Gaveston. Isabella's hatred
of Dispenser matched the public sentiment. Under Dispenser's influence, Edward
had become a tyrant. The people were on her side.
Isabella and Mortimer captured Cambridge, than Oxford militias that were
(19:43):
called in defense of the king instead defected to the
side of the invaders. When Isabella found out what her
husband did next, perhaps she felt only a superior, justified
kind of vengeance. Perhaps she felt a twinge of sorrow
at how predictable her husband was, how well she knew
(20:04):
his heart, how much she had changed while he had not.
As his reign collapsed around him, Edward left with Dispenser,
just as he had with Gaveston years before, when she
had been left alone and pregnant with their son. Isabella's
husband had never been a great tactician. His actions gave
(20:27):
her the chance to claim that he had abandoned his people,
given up his throne. No one was willing to fight
for him. The will of the nation was with Isabella.
Dispenser was captured and brutally executed. He was hanged, castrated,
and burned Edward the Second it was kept under guard
in Berkeley Castle. On January seven, Edward the Third was
(20:54):
proclaimed King of England. As he was only fourteen, not
yet of age, some one else would have to rule
as regent in his stead. Well, one woman was up
to the task. Queen Isabella had invaded with popular support.
She had deposed her husband. She essentially took the crown.
(21:22):
Queen Mother Isabella came to rule on behalf of her
son on a wave of public popularity. But the public
is fickle. On September twenty first, thirteen twenty seven, former
King Edward the Second was murdered in his captivity. It
was said that he was suffocated by a pillow to
(21:42):
the mouth and a heavy table to the stomach, and
then killed, my apologies, by a hot iron up the rectum.
Rumors swirled that Isabella and Mortimer had secretly ordered the
king's death. After all, a living former king who had
been deposed by his French wife and her lover would
(22:04):
always be a threat to their rule. The public is fickle,
after all, this was the Middle Ages. What if opinion
had turned. What if over time Edward came to be
seen as the wronged party and he gathered support. God
knew if he were reinstated, it would be Isabella's had
that rolled. But whoever was responsible for the loss of
(22:27):
Isabella's husband, he was gone. Isabella was making royal decisions,
and six months later, in thirty eight, she supported the
Treaty of Edinburgh Northampton, which recognized Scotland's independence and promised
her daughter to the son of the Scottish king. The
(22:48):
English public felt betrayed, their support for Isabella fell apart.
In an ironic twist, Isabella did what her husband had done.
In the face of public disapproval, she unjustly elevated the
status of her lover to the consternation of the public
and the pain of her family. Amidst calls for Mortimer's banishment,
(23:12):
Isabella defiantly gave him an earldom that she invented for him,
pretty much exactly in the mold of edwards defiant elevation
of Gaveston and then Dispenser. Isabella and her husband really
did have a lot in common, and just as Isabella
had done to her husband, her son did to her
(23:37):
in thirteen thirty he took Isabella's favorite away. Mortimer was
convicted of treason and hanged naked in London, where his
body was left dangling for two days. And as for Isabella,
for a woman regarded by history as evil, she got
(23:57):
off pretty lightly. In life, Queens of England have been
beheaded and imprisoned for far less than deposing a king
alongside an adulterous lover, But Edward the third made sure
that his mother was barely even mentioned in Mortimer's trial.
Isabella was briefly placed under house arrest, but she lived
(24:18):
out the majority of her next twenty eight years in freedom.
Isabella died on August twenty second, fifty eight, at sixty
three years old. Her body was embalmed and, per her
own instructions, wrapped in her wedding cloak. It was an
odd move for a woman who had been so betrayed
(24:39):
by her husband. In the end, she wanted to dress
as his bride. History was not kind to Isabella, The
beautiful daughter of the fair King, was called ugly a
sinner at Jezebel until two thousand and six. She had
no published biography, but her influence lasted juries. When her brother,
(25:02):
Charles the Fourth died, she insisted that her son had
the rightful claim to the French crown, which eventually set
off the Hundred Years War between England and France. She
instigated the first parliamentary deposition of a king, which set
a precedence that would depose five more kings over the
(25:23):
next three hundred years. Today we might call her a
femme fatale. They're sort of a hashtag feminist kind of
basic reading of Isabella, which her story lends itself to.
She was a slighted woman, overthrowing her tyrannical husband and
removing his lover, who was a brutal torturer of vulnerable
(25:46):
women and widows. But the Middle Ages don't really lend
themselves to girl bosses. Mortimer had at one point threatened
to kill her if she didn't follow through with their
designs against the King. However areous or not he was,
Isabella had needed Mortimer to do what she did. The
role of women was constricted in the fourteenth century, and
(26:09):
while Isabella acted fiercely, audaciously, bravely, she still had to
rely on a man in order to do it. In
fifteen ninety one, Shakespeare would coin the term she wolf
of France to describe Henry the Fourth's wife, Margaret of Anjou.
Centuries later, in seventeen fifty seven, the English poet Thomas
(26:33):
Gray applied the term to Isabella, quote she Wolf of
France with unrelenting fangs that tearced the bowels of thy
mangled mate. The name stuck. Isabella became known to history
as the she wolf of France. The imagery is striking
(26:54):
a feigned creature waiting in the woods, the suggestion of
sexual predation and indiscretion. There's also the suggestion in the phrase,
though Gray didn't mean it, of a pack of other
she wolves to come after. That's the story of Queen
(27:21):
Isabella deposing her husband the King, but stick around after
a brief sponsor break to find out whether she really
was responsible for Edward the seconds murder. While many sources,
including this very podcast, have speculated that Isabella and her
(27:46):
lover Mortimer were behind the murder of the deposed King
Edward the Second, not all historians agree. Another story goes
that Isabella had nothing to do with the death of
her husband. According to that story, Edward escaped his captors
in thirty six and a doppelganger was buried in his place. Eventually,
(28:08):
he even reunited with his son, Edward the Third in
disguise as a humble, unsuspecting Welshman William the Welshman. It
sounds like a merry children's book character, but it has
an outside chance of being true. In this version of events,
Isabella knew or had reason to suspect that her husband
(28:29):
was alive, gave her peace to know she was not
his murderer enough piece that she felt comfortable wrapping herself
in their wedding cloak after her death. Her conscience Free
(28:56):
Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mile from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted
by me Danishwartz. Additional writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston,
hannah's Wick, Miura Hayward, Courtney Sunder, and Laurie Goodman. The
show is produced by rema Il Kayali, with supervising producer
(29:16):
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Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grim and Mild from Aaron Maankie. Listener discretion advised.
In thirteen twenty six, the billowing sails of eight warships
rose over the sea on the English horizon. They were
(00:22):
flanked by one hundred and thirty two smaller vessels, all
ready for an invasion. The ships had come from France.
They had sailed from Flanders and were heading toward the
Thames Estuary that September, as summer turned to fall. They
were coming to depose the King of England. No invasion
(00:46):
of England by sea had succeeded since the Norman conquest
two hundred and sixty years earlier in ten sixty six.
But this was no ordinary invasion by some hostile foreign hour.
The man leading the charge had been condemned to death,
and he had been spared by the very king he
(01:08):
was now coming to depose. But far more shocking was
the woman standing next to him. She was the man's
lover in adulterous scandal. She was said to be among
the most beautiful women in the world. She had blonde
hair blowing against her forehead now in the sea wind,
(01:29):
she was dressed in widows weeds, the black clothes of mourning,
but her husband was alive for now. Her name was Isabella.
She had been born in France, but she wasn't some
foreign usurper. She was the wife of King Edward the
Second of England. She was the most treasonous queen in
(01:53):
all of English history. Born the daughter of the King
of France, adored and then despised by her subjects, mother
of the future sovereign, scorned and humiliated by an unpopular
husband more interested in having affairs with men than in
her She's known to history as a sinner, a Jezebel,
(02:15):
maybe even a murderer, known in the end as the
she Wolf of France. She was Isabella, Queen of England,
and she was sailing from the continent, with troops and
her lover by her side, and a steely glint in
her eye, ready to depose her king. I'm Dani Schwartz,
(02:39):
and this is noble blood. The little girl who would
someday overthrow the King of England was born Isabel, Princess
of France around the year twelve five. She was the
(03:01):
daughter of Philip the Fair, the handsome and fearsome King
of France. She was one of seven children, the only
daughter to survive to adulthood. Her father had keen political
designs for each of his children's marriages, which this podcast
actually covered in our episode on the Tordonell Affair. Suffice
(03:23):
to say that in thirteen o three, at only seven
years old, as a prized princess, Isabella was betrothed to
then Prince Edward of England, who was nineteen. At the
betrothal ceremony, Isabella made herself as tall as she could
in front of an archbishop who was Edward's proxy. She
(03:45):
put her little hand in the archbishop's big one and
hoped with her child's heart that her husband would be
good to her when they finally met, that he would
love her, that he would fulfill her father's hope for
a future king of England. And descended from both the
French and English lines. But she must have noticed that
(04:07):
her future husband never sent her any gifts across the
English Channel, nor any letters. Even as a child. She
may have wondered why not. Five years later she would
find out. On January twenty five, oh eight, twelve year
old Isabella formally married Edward, who was by then King
(04:30):
of England. Despite the mismatch in age, Edward was a
handsome groom. Isabella biographer Alice and Weir describes the six
foot tall Edward like a dang Disney prince for Isabella. Quote.
He was well proportioned and had curly, fair shoulder length
hair with a mustache and beard. He was also well spoken.
(04:52):
His mother tongue was Norman French and articulate, and he
dressed elegantly, even lavishly end quote. One limitation of histories
that old is we have very little insight into Isabella's
thoughts around this time. Even the biographies and articles about
her are frequently about her husband, which leaves a blank
(05:15):
space in our understanding. The fact is that Isabella was
twelve years old at her wedding to a man twice
her age. Both Isabella's mother and her new husband's mother
had been married by age eleven. Twelve was the youngest
age at which the Church permitted sex between husband and wife.
(05:36):
Historians generally believe that Isabella and Edward didn't consummate the
marriage on their wedding night. I can imagine a young
Isabella who was grateful for this reprieve. Maybe she felt
like a child thrown into a stranger's bed, albeit a
bed that she had been preparing for since youth. Maybe
she viewed her new husband's restraint as chivalrous or loving,
(06:01):
but that wasn't all it was. This podcast has covered
the story of Edward the Second and his affair with
the love of his life, his boyhood courtier Piers Gaveston.
The fact that he's the tragic hero of one episode
of this podcast and a side character in this one.
It's just more proof that history can be told from
(06:23):
many angles. Love for one person is heartache for another.
The difference between comedy and tragedy is often just a
matter of who your main character is. When Isabella arrived
in England after the wedding, her husband greeted Gaveston with
a degree of enthusiasm that shocked Isabella's relatives. Isabella had
(06:45):
to watch as Gaveston wore jewels that were part of
her dowry, and he wore purple to the coronation, the
color of royalty, as though he were the true spouse
of Edward being elevated to the throne. For Isabella, it
was embarrassing. She told her father that she was quote
(07:06):
the most wretched of wives. She received no money from
her husband. She was miserable. She wasn't the only one.
The English barons all wanted the king's favorite, Gaveston gone,
and they got their way. In th eight, six months
after Isabella arrived in England, Gaveston was banished from the country.
(07:30):
With Gaveston gone, Isabella's husband warmed to her. He started
giving her lands and money. Wherever he traveled, she went
with him. She may have felt like any girl who
has a crush on a guy who has a crush
on someone else. It hurts, yes, but maybe his affections
can be turned. But then Edward brought Gaveston back. Everybody
(07:57):
likes a catfight sensation. Aalized history would have us believed
that Isabella hated Gaveston to the end. Isabella was probably
pained to see the return of her competition, but she
was quite a bit older now with some relationship of
her own with the king, and she reached some equilibrium
(08:17):
with Gaveston. It's worth noting that everyone in this saga,
from Gaveston to the lovers of both king and Queen
that I'll mention later in this episode was married to
a member of the opposite sex and had children of
their own. Once Gaveston came back, Isabella was kind to
his pregnant wife. She spent time with Gaveston. She may
(08:40):
have even found him kind of amusing. But if Isabella
mellowed somewhat towards Galveston, the English courts as a whole
did not. They wanted him gone for good, violently if
need be, as violence mounted around them. In thirteen eleven
and twelve of Isabella told her husband that she was pregnant,
(09:04):
probably hoping that with that news, Edward would prioritize her protection.
He didn't. He left her at Newcastle while he protected
Gaveston instead. Some piece of her must have learned, no
matter how good her relationship with Edward seemed, she would
never really come first. Gaveston would be brutally executed on
(09:29):
June twelve. The details of that brutality belonged to edwards story,
covered in another episode. This is Isabella's story, and here
it's more interesting to imagine her reunion with her grieving
husband in the aftermath. I wonder if she felt a
victor's gladness at being the only remaining competitor for her
(09:53):
husband's heart, or a wife's sorrow for her husband's grief,
or maybe she felt the empathy of the fellow unlucky
in love. Either way, five months later, at age seventeen,
Isabella gave birth to the heir to the throne, another Edward.
She went on to have three more children with the king,
(10:17):
and whether there was any love in the act of
conception or purely dynastic duty was a secret that died
with their history. What certain is that once Gaveston was
out of the picture for good, there was at least
mutual respect between Isabella and her husband. Isabella was smart
(10:37):
and savvy, versed in both English and French territorial and
political interests. She was also impressively involved in negotiations and diplomacy. Edward,
never one of the greats when it came to statecraft,
seemed to like having his queen involved. They simply liked
each other. They wrote letters to each other any time
(10:59):
they were apart. They played gambling games together as a team.
It would have been hard to imagine that this beautiful
woman laughingly playing games of chance beside her husband would
some day gather the flotilla that would overthrow him. But
maybe there were hints. At one point, giggling playing a game,
(11:21):
Isabella's ladies fake captured the king and wouldn't let him
go until the fake ransom had been paid. Some games
seemed more ominous in retrospect. Isabella spent years developing mutual
respect with her husband, maybe even genuine affection, so she
(11:43):
must have been devastated when she learned that his dalliances
did not die with Gaveston. Not yet a decade after
Gaveston's death, Edward took a new lover, Hewla Dispenser, Royal Chamberlain.
This dispense her was nothing like Isabella's earlier arrival, Galveston,
(12:04):
who honestly seemed kind of meek, almost cute by comparison,
Dispenser was a cruel and violent man, especially depraved toward women.
He had one widow tortured until all four limbs were
broken and she was said to have lost her mind.
Isabella hated him. Dispenser began to turn her husband against her.
(12:29):
It's possible that Dispenser actually sexually harmed Isabella in some way,
although the details aren't quite clear. As relations between France
and England worsened, Dispenser whispered in the King's ear and
Isabella lost everything King Edward asked the Pope to annul
(12:49):
their marriage, though the Pope declined. Isabella's lands were taken
from her. French servants, who had come to England with
her when she was twelve years old, were taken from
her household. Finally, her three younger children were taken from her,
on suspicion that she would incite them to treason because
she's a French woman. Well, you tell someone what they
(13:12):
are enough, they might believe you. She didn't deserve this treatment.
Isabella was the Queen of England, the daughter of King
Philip of France. She had spent years giving Edward children,
doing his diplomacy, playing games with him, delighting side by
side at the animals in their menagerie. No, she deserved
(13:34):
a husband like her father had been, who never remarried
after the death of his wife. Isabella's mother loyal to
the end. Isabella's father was harsh as a king, but
as a father, he was in touch with his daughter constantly.
He mentioned Isabella's name in every written record of French
(13:54):
concessions to England. Knowing that she loved books, he made
sure she got the gift of an ornately illustrated apocalypse
when she burned her hand, he sent doctors to attend
to her. In England, Isabella's husband didn't show loyalty anywhere
nearly that much. But Isabella's husband had never been loyal
(14:15):
to her, so why she thought should she be loyal
to him? Isabella started smiling. It hurt far more to
have lost her husband's respect as a thirty year old
adult than it had been as a child to have
never had it. But she played nice, so nice that
(14:37):
Edward himself allowed his beautiful, smiling wife to go alone
to France, ostensibly as a peacemaker between the nations. A
nightmare dressed like a day dream. When Isabella arrived in France,
she kissed her brother, King Charles the Fourth, who looked
(14:57):
so much like their departed father. She breathed in the
sweet scent of home, and soon enough she encountered a
man named Roger Mortimer. He had once been a friend
and ally of King Edward, until, under Dispenser's cruel regime,
he turned against the English king. They had this in common.
(15:20):
Mortimer and Isabella. Mortimer had once been sentenced to death
for treason against the king, but Edward had commuted the
sentence he could not have known at the time that
he was sparing the life of the man who would
become his wife's lover. Yes, Isabella started an affair with Mortimer,
(15:41):
fueled by the aphrodisiac of shared hatred for her husband.
There's something almost tragic that Isabella and Edward had so
much in common. Both were trapped in a marriage when
their real devotions were elsewhere. Both turned to an adulterous affair.
(16:01):
We can imagine in a different life, in a different
time in history, with a different understanding of sexuality, the
wife and husband might have divorced, might have even remained married,
but understood their desires for people that their spouses could
never be. They had respected each other once upon a time,
(16:22):
but that time was now long past. By thirty five,
Isabella and Mortimer were playing it very smart, while at
the exact same moment Edward played it very dumb. Edwards
sent his firstborn son to visit Isabella in France, which
(16:43):
put all the power in her hand. She now had
the heir. The king pretty soon realized his mistake. He
started sending letter after letter to Isabella, to Charles, to
anyone he could think of. He asked Isabella to come
home to England with their son. She sent back de
mural letters with feeble excuses. Oh, I couldn't possibly leave France,
(17:07):
my brother wants us to say. Edward started to get
very nervous. He was right to. Isabella was hanging out
in France with English exiles who hated Edward. She was
wearing the black garb of a widow, major alarm bells.
It was probably seen as a symbol of her displeasure
(17:31):
with her husband's infidelity, but it was also a threat.
If she wasn't a widow yet, she would be one soon.
She would make sure of it. Edward kept asking Isabella
to return with their son, and Isabella kept defying him.
It became like a game of keepaway. Finally she made
(17:54):
it plain she would not return to England except upon
quote the destruct action of Hugh. At this point Edward
really and rightly freaked out. On December one, five, his
bishops wrote to Isabella, quote, the whole country is disturbed
(18:14):
by the answers which you have lately sent to our
Lord King, and because you delay your return out of
hatred for Hugh la dispenser, we warn you as a
daughter to return to our Lord King. Your husband. It's
striking that Edwards Bishops wrote from the perspective of a
father figure to this woman whose father had actually helped
(18:38):
her in her life. Isabella knew whose daughter she really was,
so she and Mortimer drew up plans they would invade
England by sea. At the time, it had been two
hundred years since the last successful sea invasion, far but
not so far outside in history that it couldn't be
(19:02):
done again. They gathered their eight warships and one hundred
and thirty two support vessels together they set sail. They
landed in England two days later, September twenty four, twenty six.
As far as invasions go, it was a shockingly easy
(19:23):
and bloodless one, As had happened with Gaveston. Isabella's hatred
of Dispenser matched the public sentiment. Under Dispenser's influence, Edward
had become a tyrant. The people were on her side.
Isabella and Mortimer captured Cambridge, than Oxford militias that were
(19:43):
called in defense of the king instead defected to the
side of the invaders. When Isabella found out what her
husband did next, perhaps she felt only a superior, justified
kind of vengeance. Perhaps she felt a twinge of sorrow
at how predictable her husband was, how well she knew
(20:04):
his heart, how much she had changed while he had not.
As his reign collapsed around him, Edward left with Dispenser,
just as he had with Gaveston years before, when she
had been left alone and pregnant with their son. Isabella's
husband had never been a great tactician. His actions gave
(20:27):
her the chance to claim that he had abandoned his people,
given up his throne. No one was willing to fight
for him. The will of the nation was with Isabella.
Dispenser was captured and brutally executed. He was hanged, castrated,
and burned Edward the Second it was kept under guard
in Berkeley Castle. On January seven, Edward the Third was
(20:54):
proclaimed King of England. As he was only fourteen, not
yet of age, some one else would have to rule
as regent in his stead. Well, one woman was up
to the task. Queen Isabella had invaded with popular support.
She had deposed her husband. She essentially took the crown.
(21:22):
Queen Mother Isabella came to rule on behalf of her
son on a wave of public popularity. But the public
is fickle. On September twenty first, thirteen twenty seven, former
King Edward the Second was murdered in his captivity. It
was said that he was suffocated by a pillow to
(21:42):
the mouth and a heavy table to the stomach, and
then killed, my apologies, by a hot iron up the rectum.
Rumors swirled that Isabella and Mortimer had secretly ordered the
king's death. After all, a living former king who had
been deposed by his French wife and her lover would
(22:04):
always be a threat to their rule. The public is fickle,
after all, this was the Middle Ages. What if opinion
had turned. What if over time Edward came to be
seen as the wronged party and he gathered support. God
knew if he were reinstated, it would be Isabella's had
that rolled. But whoever was responsible for the loss of
(22:27):
Isabella's husband, he was gone. Isabella was making royal decisions,
and six months later, in thirty eight, she supported the
Treaty of Edinburgh Northampton, which recognized Scotland's independence and promised
her daughter to the son of the Scottish king. The
(22:48):
English public felt betrayed, their support for Isabella fell apart.
In an ironic twist, Isabella did what her husband had done.
In the face of public disapproval, she unjustly elevated the
status of her lover to the consternation of the public
and the pain of her family. Amidst calls for Mortimer's banishment,
(23:12):
Isabella defiantly gave him an earldom that she invented for him,
pretty much exactly in the mold of edwards defiant elevation
of Gaveston and then Dispenser. Isabella and her husband really
did have a lot in common, and just as Isabella
had done to her husband, her son did to her
(23:37):
in thirteen thirty he took Isabella's favorite away. Mortimer was
convicted of treason and hanged naked in London, where his
body was left dangling for two days. And as for Isabella,
for a woman regarded by history as evil, she got
(23:57):
off pretty lightly. In life, Queens of England have been
beheaded and imprisoned for far less than deposing a king
alongside an adulterous lover, But Edward the third made sure
that his mother was barely even mentioned in Mortimer's trial.
Isabella was briefly placed under house arrest, but she lived
(24:18):
out the majority of her next twenty eight years in freedom.
Isabella died on August twenty second, fifty eight, at sixty
three years old. Her body was embalmed and, per her
own instructions, wrapped in her wedding cloak. It was an
odd move for a woman who had been so betrayed
(24:39):
by her husband. In the end, she wanted to dress
as his bride. History was not kind to Isabella, The
beautiful daughter of the fair King, was called ugly a
sinner at Jezebel until two thousand and six. She had
no published biography, but her influence lasted juries. When her brother,
(25:02):
Charles the Fourth died, she insisted that her son had
the rightful claim to the French crown, which eventually set
off the Hundred Years War between England and France. She
instigated the first parliamentary deposition of a king, which set
a precedence that would depose five more kings over the
(25:23):
next three hundred years. Today we might call her a
femme fatale. They're sort of a hashtag feminist kind of
basic reading of Isabella, which her story lends itself to.
She was a slighted woman, overthrowing her tyrannical husband and
removing his lover, who was a brutal torturer of vulnerable
(25:46):
women and widows. But the Middle Ages don't really lend
themselves to girl bosses. Mortimer had at one point threatened
to kill her if she didn't follow through with their
designs against the King. However areous or not he was,
Isabella had needed Mortimer to do what she did. The
role of women was constricted in the fourteenth century, and
(26:09):
while Isabella acted fiercely, audaciously, bravely, she still had to
rely on a man in order to do it. In
fifteen ninety one, Shakespeare would coin the term she wolf
of France to describe Henry the Fourth's wife, Margaret of Anjou.
Centuries later, in seventeen fifty seven, the English poet Thomas
(26:33):
Gray applied the term to Isabella, quote she Wolf of
France with unrelenting fangs that tearced the bowels of thy
mangled mate. The name stuck. Isabella became known to history
as the she wolf of France. The imagery is striking
(26:54):
a feigned creature waiting in the woods, the suggestion of
sexual predation and indiscretion. There's also the suggestion in the phrase,
though Gray didn't mean it, of a pack of other
she wolves to come after. That's the story of Queen
(27:21):
Isabella deposing her husband the King, but stick around after
a brief sponsor break to find out whether she really
was responsible for Edward the seconds murder. While many sources,
including this very podcast, have speculated that Isabella and her
(27:46):
lover Mortimer were behind the murder of the deposed King
Edward the Second, not all historians agree. Another story goes
that Isabella had nothing to do with the death of
her husband. According to that story, Edward escaped his captors
in thirty six and a doppelganger was buried in his place. Eventually,
(28:08):
he even reunited with his son, Edward the Third in
disguise as a humble, unsuspecting Welshman William the Welshman. It
sounds like a merry children's book character, but it has
an outside chance of being true. In this version of events,
Isabella knew or had reason to suspect that her husband
(28:29):
was alive, gave her peace to know she was not
his murderer enough piece that she felt comfortable wrapping herself
in their wedding cloak after her death. Her conscience Free
(28:56):
Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mile from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted
by me Danishwartz. Additional writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston,
hannah's Wick, Miura Hayward, Courtney Sunder, and Laurie Goodman. The
show is produced by rema Il Kayali, with supervising producer
(29:16):
Josh Thaine and executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and
Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Dana Schwartz
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