A lot of what you think you know about Edward II and Isabella is wrong

A hotch-potch of a post which in some ways continues from my recent one about Edward II and Isabella of France's relationship, and an older one.

Apropos of nothing much in particular, things that break my irony meter:

Moaning that Isabella of France has been the victim of 'sexual prejudices' while castigating Edward II and talking about him in drippingly contemptuous terms because of his non-heterosexuality, to the point where you call him 'perverted' and 'unnatural' because of his sexuality.

Moaning that Isabella of France was a tragic neglected victim of her nasty cruel husband because of his outside love interests, while at the same time finding Isabella's relationship with the married Roger Mortimer wildly romantic, wonderful and amazingly speshul, and conveniently ignoring his wife.

Things often said to be fact which are not:

1) Edward II only had sex with his queen reluctantly.

To quote from two self-described Facebook 'historians' who in fact are nothing of the sort, but people who've maybe read a novel or two about Edward II and seen Braveheart and Helen Castor's She-Wolves programme (sorry to any fans of it, but I thought the part about Isabella was dire), and now fancy themselves as experts on Edward and Isabella:

"It was a fact and well documented than Edward the 2nd had many "favorites" who were males. It was also a well documented fact that he preferred boys and men over women and his own Queen. The only reason he succumbed to his duty to his wife was for the sanctity of the royal heir and in that alone is the only reason they had one child."

"Edward II was "a fastidiously gay guy who begat children on her [Isabella] - note not with her - as a painful duty...Edward was the very reverse of uxorious at a time when it was important to demonstrate respect for women. His own parents were very well-married so he didn't lack example..Regarding respect for women: one thing publicly noticed was the contrast between that which he had for his relatives and Eleanor [Despenser], and incidentally his other niece Margaret who was married to Gaveston, and the frosty and dismissive tone he used to his wife."

Wow, I've been studying Edward II and his life and reign for the best part of a decade now and I've never come across anything which tells us in which tone of voice he spoke to his wife.  I've certainly never seen anything which tells us that he didn't enjoy having sex with his queen.  Seriously, where on earth do people think something like this would be recorded in the early fourteenth century?  Did they travel back in time and set up a webcam in Edward and Isabella's bedchamber?  Do they think Isabella kept a diary in which she wrote stuff like "3 February, Edward with Piers, not me...so sad...will cry myself to sleep?  5 February, Edward came to my bed but only had sex with me reluctantly...he treats me like a brood mare!  Not fair!"

(Notice also the assumptions apparent in that second quote: that Edward II being a lover of men meant that he failed to 'demonstrate respect for women'; that men who love men should take the 'example' of their 'well married', opposite-sex heterosexual parents.  I have no words.)

Edward II did not like 'boys'.  Let's kick that particular myth in the teeth before it takes hold.  Piers Gaveston was some years his senior, Roger Damory probably about the same age as Edward or older, Hugh Despenser no more than five or so years younger and around thirty when he became the king's 'favourite' in 1318.  Point being, all the royal 'favourites' were grown men.  Stating that Edward II liked 'boys', as though he was some kind of perverted paedophile, is frankly unpleasant.  Also, I take issue with the notion that he 'preferred men over his own queen', as though Isabella was automatically in competition for Edward's affections with Piers and the others.  Isabella was royal, Edward's queen, the mother of his children.  He had to marry her for political reasons.  His relationship with her no doubt was very different from his relationship with Piers.  Not necessarily inferior, just different.  People nowadays act as though because Edward loved Piers, he can't have loved Isabella as well, or even felt anything at all for her beyond indifference and perhaps contempt.  It doesn't work like that.  Godefroy of Paris, who saw Edward and Isabella in France in 1313, states directly and without equivocation that Edward loved Isabella: cele amoit-il.  The c. 1327 poem 'The Lament of Edward II', written by a supporter of the deposed king, also states at various points throughout that the royal couple had once loved each other as courtly lovers.  I would say it's beyond doubt that Piers Gaveston, not Isabella, was the great love of Edward II's life, but it's a long way from that to concluding that Edward felt no positive, affectionate emotions for her at all ever.  That seems astonishingly unlikely.

This is the sum total of what we know about Edward II's sex life:

- He had intercourse with Queen Isabella on four occasions which resulted in the births of their four children.

- He had intercourse with an unknown woman which resulted in their illegitimate son Adam.

That is IT.  That is literally all we know, all we can know and all we ever will know.  Anything else is pure speculation.  We don't know how regularly or irregularly, how enthusiastically or unenthusiastically he had sex with Isabella.  We don't know (unfortunately) the true nature of his relationships with Piers Gaveston, Roger Damory and Hugh Despenser, and whether they were sexual or not.  We don't know whether he had sex with other women besides the one who gave birth to his son Adam.  It's fine to speculate, of course, but be clear that that's what you're doing.  Don't pretend that you have some way of knowing that Edward only slept with Isabella reluctantly as a 'painful duty'.  And I'm also sick of seeing it claimed that Edward only used Isabella as a 'brood mare'.  As opposed to all those other kings, I suppose, who didn't care at all if their wives bore children and especially sons.

2) Common modern misconception, as seen above: Edward II and Isabella of France only had one child together.

Nope, they had four:

- Edward III, king of England (13 November 1312 - 21 June 1377)
- John of Eltham, earl of Cornwall ( 15 August 1316 - 13 September 1336)
- Eleanor of Woodstock, duchess of Gueldres (18 June 1318 - 22 April 1355)
- Joan of the Tower, queen of Scotland (5 July 1321 - 7 September 1362).

Additionally, it's possible that Isabella had a miscarriage in or shortly before November 1313, when a purchase of pennyroyal for her is recorded.

3) Isabella told her father Philip IV in 1308 that her husband was 'an entire stranger to her bed' and that she was 'the most wretched of wives'.

This story appears, as far as I can tell (it's difficult to be entirely sure as real fourteenth-century historians never mention it and it only appears in the work of popular writers, who never source it properly), in the Historia Anglicana of Thomas Walsingham who died c. 1422, which was written between about 1377 and 1392 (and has continuations by another writer down to 1422).  It's hard to take a story about Edward II and Isabella seriously when it was first written by a man who died around the year their great-great-grandson Henry V died and their great-great-great-grandson Henry VI became king.  Walsingham had no possible access to the private letters sent by Isabella to her father, and his story has no reliable provenance whatsoever.  It's pure invention, something a man writing at least seventy or eighty years later thinks she might have told her father.  Shame that it's so often repeated as 'fact'.

Pearls of online wisdom; read them and weep:

"Isabella is married off to Edward II at the age of thirteen - and soon discovers that as far as her husband is concerned, she is simply a brood mare for his children. He'd rather spend his time with his lover, Piers Gaveston."

"I hate how people call Isabella of France homophobic for deposing her husband Edward II. Imagine being used as a broodmare by a gay dude."  There we go with the brood mare thing!  Woo-hoo!

"Following Isabella' s marriage to Edward II, a marriage that he had no intention of being a part of other than to produce heirs and either ignore Isabella or abuse her...".  Edward and Isabella were together far, far more often than not, as a comparison of their itineraries demonstrates.  He 'ignored' her?  Nah.

"You can [sic] help but feel for Isabella, married to a fop who is interested only in his favourites."  Hmmmm yes, Edward II, "one of the strongest men of his realm," "fair of body and great of strength," the man who loved digging ditches, rowing and outdoor exercise in general, was, of course, a 'fop'.  I'm sure his sexuality has nothing at all to do with that judgement.  Of course not.

"My father [name redacted] often told me that my ancestor Sir Roger Mortimer seduced the Queen of England. Now I know how it happened. I was pleased to learn that my father and I have inherited Sir Roger's sense of right and wrong."  *snort*

"The innocent little heroine wins our immediate sympathy when, at fourteen [sic], she is married to handsome, homosexual Edward the Second of England. We pity her more and more as she is shamed and neglected in favour of his male lovers."  Is it just me, or is the word 'male' the most important one here, in the writer's eyes?  Have you ever read anything bewailing Constanza of Castile's arrival in England in the early 1370s to marry John of Gaunt as 'she is shamed and neglected in favour of his female lover'?  Bet you haven't.  And I often see Isabella being called 'little'.  Yuck.  You condemn Edward for 'neglecting' her, but would you rather he'd fawned all over a 'little' girl?  Ah, the lack of joined-up thinking and cognitive dissonance.

21 September 1327: Death of Edward II?

As I expected and predicted, Twitter, Facebook and numerous other online sites are full of posts today marking the anniversary of the alleged death of Edward II on 21 September 1327, around 97%, at a rough estimate, repeating the red-hot poker story as though it's certain fact.  If you've found your way here searching for more information about Edward's death, welcome, and I've linked below to the numerous posts I've written on the subject.  Happy reading, and be aware that the red-hot poker story you've always heard repeated as 'fact' is 99.99% certain to be a myth.

Death?

Death part two

Edward was not tormented and abused at Berkeley Castle

Red-Hot Poker

Chronicle evidence

Survival?

Oddities in the narrative of Edward's death

Events from September to December 1327

Regicides part one

Regicides part two

Regicides part three

The earl of Kent's plot to free Edward in 1330

(My article about the plot in the English Historical Review)

The archbishop of York says in 1330 that Edward is alive

Edward's custodian of 1327 says in 1330 he didn't know about the former king's death

Isabella of France And Her Relationship With Edward II

This is a post which I originally wrote a few months ago as a guest post on my lovely friend Sarah's history blog, which is now sadly defunct, though she writes one about Edward II's grandfather Henry III instead, yay.

Isabella of France, queen consort of England, lady of Ireland, duchess of Aquitaine, countess of Chester and Ponthieu, had a remarkably illustrious lineage: she was the daughter of Philip IV, king of France and of Joan, queen of Navarre and countess of Brie, Bigorre and Champagne in her own right. Isabella was the sixth of Philip and Joan's seven children. Her three older brothers all reigned as kings of France, Louis X, Philip V and Charles IV, her younger brother Robert died in 1308 aged about eleven, and she also had two older sisters, Marguerite and Blanche, who both died in early childhood in or shortly after 1294. Her paternal grandmother Isabel, queen of Philip III of France, after whom she was presumably named, was the daughter of King Jaime I 'el Conquistador' of Aragon and the granddaughter of King Andras II of Hungary; via the Hungarian line, Isabella of France was the seven greats granddaughter of Harold Godwinson, the king of England killed at Hastings in 1066.  She and her husband Edward II were related: her great-grandmother Marguerite of Provence, queen of France was the older sister of Edward's paternal grandmother Eleanor of Provence, queen of England.  They were also related rather more distantly via the Castilian royal family, Edward's great-grandmother Berenguela, queen of Castile and Leon, being the sister of Isabella's great-great-grandmother Blanche of Castile, queen of France.

Isabella's date of birth is uncertain but is usually assumed to have taken place in the second half of 1295 or at the beginning of 1296. She was thus only three or four years old when in the Treaty of Montreuil of June 1299 her future marriage was arranged to fifteen-year-old Edward of Caernarfon, son and heir of Edward I of England, as a means of ending the latter's war with her father Philip IV over the English king's territories in the south-west of France. The pair were formally betrothed in May 1303. Otherwise, very little is known of Isabella's childhood. Her mother Queen Joan died when she was probably nine, in April 1305; Isabella's eldest brother Louis, then fifteen, succeeded her in Navarre. Isabella cannot have remembered a time when she didn't know that it was her destiny to marry the future King Edward II of England, and at the French court, after the death of Edward I but before her marriage, she was addressed as ma dame Yzabel royne Dangleterre, my lady Isabella, queen of England.

Isabella married Edward II in Boulogne on 25 January 1308, six and a half months after he acceded to the throne. She was, almost certainly, only twelve, he twenty-three. (Contrary to the depiction of her in the film Braveheart, she was never princess of Wales and never met her father-in-law Edward I, never mind William Wallace, who was executed in August 1305 when she was nine or ten.) The wedding ceremony, attended by much of the royalty and nobility of western Europe, was splendid. Isabella wore a red mantle lined with yellow sindon, over a gown and tunic in blue and gold; fifty years later, she would be buried with the mantle, at her own request. Edward wore a satin surcoat and cloak embroidered with jewels, and both wore crowns glittering with precious stones. With these sumptuous clothes and the good looks ascribed to both of them by contemporaries, they surely looked magnificent.

Much is made nowadays of Isabella's supposed 'neglect' by her husband in the first months and years of her marriage and life in England, usually by people who conveniently ignore that she was little more than a child married to a man almost twice her age who was, admittedly, involved in an intense relationship with Piers Gaveston, earl of Cornwall. She and Edward were crowned king and queen of England at Westminster Abbey on 25 February 1308, exactly a month after their wedding. Shortly afterwards, Edward granted Isabella a generous income out of the revenues of the county of Ponthieu in northern France, his inheritance from his half-Spanish, half-French mother Eleanor of Castile - Ponthieu was not Isabella's dowry, as is often stated - and a large household of close to 200 people. The king also paid all his wife's expenses. In February or March 1312 when Isabella was sixteen, she and Edward conceived their first child, the future Edward III, who was born on 13 November 1312. Contrary to popular belief, based on nothing more than a modern assumption that because Edward II was a lover of men he must have been incapable of intercourse with women, there is no doubt whatsoever that Edward was the boy's father. Three more children were to follow: John of Eltham, earl of Cornwall, born 15 August 1316; Eleanor of Woodstock, duchess of Guelders, born 18 June 1318; Joan of the Tower, queen of Scotland, born 5 July 1321.

There is no reason to suppose that until about 1322 at the earliest, Edward and Isabella's marriage was an unhappy or tragic or even a particularly unusual one; for many years there is ample evidence of mutual support and affection between the couple, with modern assumptions that it must have been a disaster from start to finish, and that Isabella must have always loathed her husband, based solely on hindsight knowledge of how it ended. How Isabella felt about her husband's 'favourite' Piers Gaveston is unknown and unknowable, but there is no evidence for the assertion that she must have loathed him and wished him ill. Here are some examples of the couple's apparent closeness: in 1313 Edward and Isabella spent a few weeks in France at her father Philip IV's court. One morning, Edward arrived late for a meeting with Philip because he and Isabella had overslept, and on another occasion, he saved her life when a fire broke out in their bedchamber one night and he scooped her up and rushed outside with her, although they were both naked or in their bedclothes. It certainly seems to me that their intimate marital relations were entirely normal, even close. They conceived Edward III during Lent in 1312, a time when intercourse was forbidden, which hardly implies that Edward slept with his wife unwillingly; Lent gave him a perfect excuse to avoid it if he wanted to. In 1316 when Isabella was pregnant with their second son John, Edward paid for cushions for her carriage so that she could travel in greater comfort, and bought new horses to carry her litter. In his letters to her (few of which survive, sadly), Edward called his wife 'dear heart' while in her own letters she called him 'my very sweet heart' (mon tresdoutz coer). Even in 1326 when she refused to return to him and remained in France with their son, and later led an invasion of England against him, Isabella still referred to her husband as "our very dear and very sweet lord and friend" (nostre trescher and tresdouz seigneur et amy), which is a most unconventional form of address and hints that, despite her anger and humiliation at his confiscating her lands, reducing her income and his permitting his 'favourite' Hugh Despenser to treat her with disrespect, she neither hated Edward nor felt "profound revulsion" for him, as a modern writer has claimed. On the contrary, this unconventional way of referring to her husband as 'sweet' and her 'friend' implies that, despite her rebellion against him as a king, she still felt affection for him as her husband. When Edward was detained in custody in 1327 after his forced abdication in favour of his and Isabella's son Edward III, Isabella continued to send him gifts and letters - something she had absolutely no reason to do unless she genuinely wanted to, which again implies that despite everything, Isabella still felt affection for the difficult, unpredictable, erratic, fiercely emotional man who had been her husband for nearly twenty years and whose existence had been a constant in her life since she was a toddler. Edward II and Isabella's relationship was, in my opinion, far more complex and interesting than the tediously basic 'nasty cruel Edward / suffering neglected little Isabella' way it is most often depicted nowadays. It seems to me, however, that this is something some people don't want to hear; I've been told here and on my Facebook page about Edward that I'm wrong to think that maybe, just maybe, Edward and Isabella's relationship was slightly more complex and one-dimensional than the usual 'he ignored her, she hated him' way it's mostly written these days.  That I'm wrong to think that a marriage which lasted nearly twenty years might change and develop, that each partner's feelings might likewise have evolved and changed and might not have been relentlessly negative all the damn time.  It's not as though either of them had foreknowledge of what would happen in 1325/27; as far as both Edward and Isabella were concerned, they would be married for life, and it was in both their interests to make their relationship work as well as they could.

It can hardly be denied, however, that when their marriage did go wrong, it went spectacularly wrong. Although often-repeated stories such as, for instance, Edward cruelly 'removing' Isabella's children from her and giving her jewels to Piers Gaveston, are modern inventions, he did confiscate her lands in September 1324 and reduce her income when he was at war with her brother Charles IV, to Isabella's understandable fury. It was almost certainly this, and her hatred and fear of her husband's chamberlain and 'favourite' Hugh Despenser the Younger and his father the elder Hugh Despenser, which led Isabella to take a momentous step, and lead a rebellion against her own husband. Sent to Paris by her husband in March 1325 to negotiate a peace treaty with her brother, and reunited with her son the future Edward III there six months later, the queen refused to return to England and to her husband unless he removed Hugh Despenser from his side, which he refused to do. She began a relationship with Sir Roger Mortimer, lord of Wigmore, a Contrariant (baronial rebel) who had been imprisoned in February 1322 and escaped from the Tower of London in August 1323, and fled to the continent. Whatever is claimed nowadays, the true nature of Isabella and Roger's relationship is uncertain; usually assumed with very little evidence to have been passionately sexual and a great love affair, it may merely have been, at least at the start, a political alliance between two people who hated the Despensers and their influence over the king, and wanted their lands back. Perhaps I'm just cynical, but it seems highly unlikely to me that Roger Mortimer fell deeply and sincerely in love with Isabella in late 1325, given the benefits he was to derive from the relationship, ultimately becoming the richest and most powerful man in England. (In the same way, I certainly don't believe that Hugh Despenser the Younger just happened to fall madly and genuinely in love with Edward II in 1318.) The first people to suggest that Isabella had some kind of relationship with Roger Mortimer before late 1325 were the dramatists Christopher Marlowe and Michael Drayton in the 1590s, and although some fourteenth-century chroniclers say that the pair were rumoured to have had a 'liaison' or a 'familiarity', others state merely that Mortimer was Isabella's 'chief counsellor' or even just 'of her faction', and don't hint at any kind of romantic or sexual relationship. It was nowhere near as 'notorious' or 'flaunted' as it's usually said to be nowadays. Many modern writers assume that Isabella had something to do with Mortimer's escape from the Tower in 1323, or at the very least smoothed his path to her brother's court afterwards, but this is also based solely on centuries of hindsight and cannot be corroborated.

I'm afraid that I simply cannot see the romance that many others see in Isabella and Mortimer's actions of 1326 to 1330. Assuming that their relationship was indeed sexual, it was doubly adulterous, yet the same modern commentators who complain about how tragic and awful it is that Isabella was 'neglected' by her husband for other people never express the same compassion for Mortimer's loyal wife Joan Geneville, who had borne him a dozen children and was held in close confinement for years because of his treason against his king. The people who applaud Isabella's cleverness, courage, strength and amazing empowerment in acting against her husband and invading England never seem to consider what it involved: keeping her thirteen-year-old son little more than a prisoner in a foreign country; forcing him to act as a weapon against his own father; leading an illegal invasion with mercenaries; destroying her husband's relationship with his children. When Isabella and Mortimer were in power from late 1326 to late 1330, they proved no more competent and more greedy even than Edward II and the Despensers; in four years, Isabella bankrupted her son's kingdom by enriching herself and her favourite almost beyond measure (they reduced the treasury from almost £80,000 in November 1326 to a mere £41 four years later), kept for herself the £20,000 given to England by Robert Bruce in exchange for peace, kept her son, again, little more than a prisoner while she and Mortimer ruled in his name (which they had no right to do as they had never been appointed to the regency council), kept him and his queen Philippa of Hainault humiliatingly short of money, and put spies in his household. The Brut chronicle says that by the late 1320s 'the community of England began to hate Isabel the queen', other chroniclers point out how she and Mortimer destroyed the kingdom, and their downfall in October 1330 when Mortimer was arrested, tried and hanged by the teenage king was greeted with universal joy and relief. Isabella was kept under house arrest for a while, but otherwise treated with respect by her son for the rest of her life, which was an entirely conventional one. She was not sent to a nunnery, or imprisoned, and did not go mad. She died at Hertford Castle on 22 August 1358 at the age of sixty-two or sixty-three and was buried at the Greyfriars church in London, not next to Roger Mortimer, as is still often claimed today - he was buried in Coventry - but with her husband Edward II's heart (not Mortimer's, as is also sometimes stated these days) and the mantle she had worn to their wedding. Some modern writers assume that Isabella continued to love Roger Mortimer for the rest of her life, and barely gave her husband a second thought. I have no idea one way or the other, but little in the evidence we have bears this out. I do think that Isabella was a woman with a strong sense of her royalty and high position, and her marriage to Edward had made her a queen. And as I've pointed out elsewhere in this post, although Isabella didn't meet Edward until she was twelve, she had known of his existence as her future husband for her entire life. To suggest that she never gave her husband, the father of her children, the man who had put a crown on her head, another thought after 1327 seems utterly ridiculous to me.

In the past, Isabella was unfairly condemned by many writers as a 'She-Wolf' (a nickname first given to her in a 1757 poem, and still, annoyingly, sometimes used even today) and condemned as wicked and unnatural by writers incensed that a woman could commit adultery and rebel against her lawfully wedded spouse. In recent decades her reputation has been re-examined, however, and in the many novels and non-fictional works about her she is more often portrayed as a long-suffering, put-upon victim of her cruel neglectful husband who is miraculously transformed into an empowered feminist icon, striking a courageous blow for women everywhere by fighting back against marital oppression and finding an opportunity for self-fulfilment by taking a 'strong, manly, virile, unequivocally heterosexual' lover. The 'She-Wolf' nonsense is ridiculous, but perhaps the pendulum has been swinging too far in the other direction lately. Depictions of Isabella reflect the way society currently views women who step outside the bounds of conventional behaviour rather than the real woman, who was neither a modern feminist and believer in sexual equality transplanted to the Middle Ages, nor an evil unfeminine caricature. Like her husband, Isabella was a complex character with qualities both admirable and not. Avaricious and extravagant to a degree extraordinary even by the standards of the time, she nevertheless had many fine qualities, including compassion, loyalty, generosity, piety and courage. The contemporary chronicler Godefroy of Paris claimed that she was "very wise", and although for sure Isabella was an intelligent person, most of her actions during her regency of 1327 to 1330, the only period in her life when she had much of a chance to act independently, hardly seem to demonstrate wisdom.

There is a tendency in modern writing to excuse, minimise and justify (or preferably ignore altogether) Isabella's less pleasant actions by blaming them on the convenient scapegoat Roger Mortimer and her infatuation with him, which I find patronising and paternalistic. Edward II's many errors and flaws are not excused on the grounds of his infatuation with Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser; Roger Mortimer's own errors and flaws are not excused on the grounds of infatuation with Isabella. If Isabella is to be praised for her courage and intelligence and assumed to have been acting under her own agency when doing things modern writers approve of, she must be held equally responsible for the actions they don't like, in the same way as men generally are. Isabella was, in many ways, a remarkable person, who would probably not recognise herself in the frequently mawkish, inaccurate tales invented and related about her in modern times, such as having her children 'removed' from her, being 'abandoned' by her husband when pregnant in 1312 and having to see her husband's lover parade around in front of her wearing her own jewels. I truly hope that one day we see a more accurate, scholarly re-telling of her life which puts these tiresome myths to rest rather than perpetuating them, and examines Isabella and her life and actions fairly without whitewashing or blackwashing either her or Edward II. Re-writing Isabella's life to cast her as either a helpless victim of nasty men or as an evil manipulative bitch is simplistic, inaccurate and unhelpful. Isabella and Edward were both complex, fascinating people and their marriage was equally complex, and too much modern writing about them reduces them both to the level of one-dimensional, tedious caricatures.

What Lord Berkeley Said To Parliament In November 1330, And Its Over-Elaborate Modern Interpretations

On 3 April 1327, custody of Sir Edward of Caernarfon, formerly King Edward II, was transferred from his cousin Henry, earl of Lancaster to Thomas, Lord Berkeley and Sir John Maltravers.  Berkeley (born c. 1293/97) was Roger Mortimer's son-in-law, and Maltravers, a knight of Dorset, was married to Berkeley's sister (see here for more info about the two men).  Contrary to popular belief, there is really no reason to imagine that Edward was tormented and abused while under Lord Berkeley's supervision at Berkeley Castle, and John Maltravers was never at any point in his long life accused of any complicity in the death of Edward of Caernarfon or of mistreating him.  Lord Berkeley wrote to Edward III informing him of his father's death at Berkeley Castle on 21 September 1327, sending Sir Thomas Gurney as his messenger.  The fourteen-year-old king, then at parliament in Lincoln, told his cousin the earl of Hereford on 24 September 1327 that he had heard the news during the night of 23 September, presumably meaning 23-24 September, the night before he sent the letter.  News of the former king's death was disseminated at parliament and from there, around the country.  Edward II's funeral took place in Gloucester on 20 December.  (See here for a narrative of events between September and December 1327.)

Edward III overthrew his mother Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer at Nottingham Castle on 19 October 1330, and to general relief and jubilation, took over the governance of his own kingdom.  On 23 October Edward summoned a parliament to be held at Westminster beginning on 26 November, during which Roger Mortimer was sentenced to death; the sentence was carried out on 29 November.  Mortimer's son-in-law Thomas, Lord Berkeley, who had been given legal responsibility for the welfare of the king's father in 1327, was called to account during the parliament.  In response to the question "how can he excuse himself, but that he should be answerable for the death of the king," Berkeley said something very strange, recorded in Latin in the rolls of parliament (he had presumably been asked, and had answered, the question in French):

- qualiter se velit de morte ipsius regis acquietare, dicit quod ipse nunquam fuit consentiens, auxilians, seu procurans, ad mortem suam, nec unquam scivit de morte sua usque in presenti Parliamento isto: he wishes to acquit himself of the death of the same king, and says that he was never an accomplice, a helper or a procurer in his death, nor did he ever know of his death until this present parliament.  (Text and translation from The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England.)

This peculiar statement 'he did not know of his death' or 'he never knew about his [Edward II's] death' - peculiar because it was Lord Berkeley himself via his messenger Sir Thomas Gurney who had informed Edward III of his father's demise in September 1327 - has been translated over-elaborately by some modern commentators so that the words mean what they think they should mean.  Take for example Professor Roy Martin Haines in his 2002 book Death of a King, p. 78:

"Now this can hardly be taken to mean, as some have thought, that the baron did not know that the king was dead.  For one thing such a thing would have been tantamount to treason, and had been so interpreted during the regime of Isabelle and Mortimer*; for another, it would be quite inconceivable in the light of all the circumstances already painstakingly reviewed [in Haines' book].  What Berkeley meant to say, and he ought to have expressed himself more clearly, unless the recording clerk is to blame, was that he knew nothing about the circumstances of Edward's death.  As we now know, the idea of murder was first openly mooted in the parliament and there accepted as the cause of death."  Although Professor Haines is beyond doubt a superb historian with a remarkable decades-long track record of publications about Edward II and his reign, is it reasonable for him to assume that he knows what was going on in Thomas Berkeley's mind in late 1330 and to explain to readers 'what Berkeley meant to say' with such utter certainty?  This is a classic example of how Berkeley's strange remark is interpreted by someone sure that Edward II had been dead for more than three years at the time, to make it fit into this notion, to make the words say what the modern commentator wants them to say.

(* A reference, presumably, to the execution of Edward II's half-brother the earl of Kent in March 1330 for attempting to free the supposedly dead Edward from captivity.)

Here's another modern-day declaration by someone else convinced that he knew what Thomas Berkeley was 'really' saying in November 1330: David J.H. Smith, the Berkeley Castle archivist, wrote several years ago in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement (now behind a paywall, so I can't link to it) that "what Thomas actually said was that this was the first time he had heard any suspicion of foul play in the King's death...".  No.  That is not what Thomas actually said.  What Thomas actually said, as recorded in the rolls of parliament by a clerk who was there and heard him speak, was nec unquam scivit de morte sua usque in presenti Parliamento isto.  Nec unquam, never; scivit, he knew; de morte sua, of or about his death; usque in presenti Parliamento isto, until this present parliament, i.e. the one sitting at Westminster in November 1330, over three years after the alleged death of the former Edward II at Berkeley Castle.  What in those six words says anything at all about 'suspicion of foul play'?  Thomas Berkeley's words can only be made to mean 'he hadn't previously heard any suspicion of foul play' or 'he knew nothing about the circumstances of Edward II's death' by people looking at his words with the assumption that Edward died at Berkeley Castle while under Lord Berkeley's care in 1327 and trying to change the meaning of the words so that they make logical sense to them in this context.

Edward II's biographer Professor Seymour Phillips, Professor Chris Given-Wilson and the other editors of the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England 1275-1504 (PROME) translate nec unquam scivit de morte sua as 'nor did he know of the death...' in their text of the proceedings of the November 1330 parliament without any additions, although their Introduction to this parliament says that Lord Berkeley claimed he "had not known that the former king had died of other than natural causes."  Professor Phillips goes into this point in more detail in his 2010 work Edward II, pp. 579-80.  Footnote 18 acknowledges his translation of nec unquam scivit... as 'nor did he know of his death' in PROME, and adds that "my intention was to avoid over-interpretation of the text, since I was aware that it was open to different meanings."  To quote Professor Phillips in his narrative (he is himself quoting Ian Mortimer's article 'Death of Edward II in Berkeley Castle'*): "Is 'the most obvious meaning' that Berkeley was claiming 'that he had not at any time heard of the death', or does it mean that he did not know the circumstances of the death until 1330?  The latter meaning is more consistent with the language employed, especially when taken in conjunction with the immediately preceding statement that 'he was never an accomplice, a helper or a procurer in his death' ('ipse nuncquam fuit consentiens, auxilians, seu procurans, ad mortem suam'): this can only mean that Berkeley knew that the death had occurred but that he claimed he had no part in it."

(* Ian Mortimer, 'The Death of Edward II in Berkeley Castle', English Historical Review, cxx (2005), pp. 1175-1214; reproduced in his Medieval Intrigue: Decoding Royal Conspiracies (2010), pp. 61-108.)

To summarise, nec unquam scivit de morte sua has been variously stated to mean certainly or almost certainly that what Thomas Berkeley really intended to say was that a) he knew nothing of the circumstances of Edward II's death; b) he hadn't previously heard any suspicion of foul play relating to the death; c) he hadn't known that the king's death was due to anything other than natural causes; d) he knew nothing of the circumstances of the death although he knew it had taken place, but had nothing to do with the death.  We are also informed that one of these interpretations 'is more consistent with the language employed' than translating nec unquam scivit de morte sua literally as 'he never knew about the death'.  Hmmm, this is a lot of meaning being read into those six simple words, isn't it?

Although I already knew what Berkeley's statement dicit quod ipse nunquam fuit consentiens, auxilians, seu procurans, ad mortem suam, nec unquam scivit de morte sua usque in presenti Parliamento isto meant, I decided to send it to Quintus the Latin Translator as I was very interested in how an independent Latin expert would translate it, and he kindly sent this back to me:

"He said he was never in agreement to his death, either by lending help or by direct involvement, and he never knew about his death until this present parliament."

According to his website, Quintus was educated in Latin to doctoral level at Cambridge, taught Latin Prose and Verse Composition at the university, and then moved on to head the Classics department at a prestigious boarding school.  Here we see how a Latin expert, without knowing the background to Berkeley's statement and without a vested interest in altering the translation so that it fits into his preconceived notions of what the statement 'should' mean, translates nec unquam scivit de morte sua usque in presenti Parliamento isto: he never knew about his death until this present parliament.  Not 'he didn't know about the circumstances of his death' or 'he didn't know until the present parliament that it was murder' or 'he hadn't previously heard any suspicion of foul play', or any other ways in which these words been interpreted in recent years.  Simply, 'he never knew about his [i.e. Edward II's] death'.  I certainly wouldn't call myself an expert in the European languages derived from Latin, but if someone said in French, for example, Il n'a jamais su de sa mort, I'd assume they meant 'He never knew about his death' and not that they were trying to tell me they didn't know the person was murdered, which I assume would be Il n'a jamais su qu'il a été assassiné/tué, or didn't know anything about the circumstances of the death, which I'd translate as something like Il n'a jamais su comment il est mort/il a été tué.

As Professor Haines says, perhaps Lord Berkeley 'should have expressed himself more clearly' to parliament.  Or perhaps the clerk who recorded his statement was in fact to blame as the professor suggests, and Berkeley said something else and it was written down wrongly or less fully than the baron had meant.  Or perhaps we should work with the evidence that we actually have, rather than trying to read Lord Berkeley's mind and ascertain what we think he 'really' meant or what the clerk 'should' have recorded and thus try our hardest to make his words fit into the scenario that Edward II certainly, definitely, absolutely died in his castle in September 1327.

It is true that the November 1330 parliament was the first time that the cause of Edward II's death was officially and openly stated to have been murder.  The killers, in addition to the executed Roger Mortimer, were named as Sir Thomas Gurney (who had carried Lord Berkeley's letter to Edward III) and the man-at-arms William Ockley or Ogle (see here for more about them), and a price was put on their heads.  It is also undoubtedly true that the young Edward III was keen to emphasise that his father really was dead, to a point where - to me, at least - it almost seems absurd.  The response to the petitions of the earl of Kent's widow Margaret Wake and their young son Edmund repeats over and over that Edward II was dead and had been dead when the earl of Kent had tried to free him from captivity a few months earlier, "which release was impossible to secure all that time seeing as he was already dead, as is said above," and Kent "had knowingly wished the said release to the prejudice of the king our present lord, which was completely impossible as is said above," and was "willing to purchase the easement and the release of his same brother, which release was impossible to secure all that time seeing as he was already dead," and evil men had tried to convince Kent and "encourage him to purchase the release of his said brother, as if it had been possible to do this" and had caused him "to understand that our lord the king the father of our present lord the king was alive when he was dead, and for that reason it had been impossible to have secured or purchased his release."  So, have we got that yet, folks?  Just in case you missed the message being hammered home again and again, Edward of Caernarfon is DEAD.  And cannot possibly be free somewhere, and the earl of Kent and his many adherents cannot in any way have really been on the verge of releasing him because that's impossible.  Really, really impossible.

I still think "I never knew about his death until the present parliament" is an extraordinary thing for Lord Berkeley to have said.  If he was feigning ignorance of the circumstances of the death, why not say "I didn't know until I heard it at this parliament how Edward died, I don't know anything about how it happened, I wasn't there"?  On further questioning by parliament on the issue, Berkeley's alibi, as discussed below, was that he had been away from Berkeley Castle at the time and was seriously ill.  So why didn't he just say that the first time?  If Berkeley meant to say that this was the first time he had heard that Edward II's death was now being treated as murder, why not state that, rather than "I never knew about his death"?  Edward II's death was openly being stated as murder, and two men named as his murderers in addition to Roger Mortimer; Berkeley had nothing to gain by being coy and refusing to refer to the death as murder when the young king himself had stated this to be the case.  Berkeley went on to claim that he had been absent from Berkeley Castle at the time, "detained with such and so great an illness outside the aforesaid castle at Bradley that he remembers nothing of this."  This convenient illness and amnesia did not prevent Berkeley from writing to Edward III informing him of his father's death, and obviously was a lie (which Edward III presumably realised, having received Berkeley's letter on 23-24 September 1327 and acted on it in good faith, by disseminating the news of his father's death).

Thomas, Lord Berkeley lied to Edward III.  Either he lied to him in September 1327 by telling him that Edward II was dead when he wasn't (or at least, Berkeley didn't know for sure if he was dead or not), or he lied to him in November 1330 by telling the king that a) he had never known about the death of Edward II until he came to the current parliament and/or b) that he wasn't at Berkeley Castle on the night Edward II was supposedly killed there.  As Ian Mortimer points out in his article 'The Death of Edward II in Berkeley Castle' (cited above), Berkeley's letter to Edward III informing him that his father was dead is of fundamental importance, because it was this information which caused the young king to begin disseminating the news of his father's death to parliament, from where it spread around the entire country.  At no point, as far as is known, did Edward III send anyone to Berkeley Castle to confirm the veracity of Lord Berkeley's information (although the chronicler Adam Murimuth, who was ninety miles away in Exeter at the time, tells us that a group of knights, abbots and burgesses were invited to Berkeley Castle to view Edward II's body but only did so superficialiter).  Everything flowed from that letter of Lord Berkeley, the spreading of information that Edward II was dead, the funeral arrangements made for the former king, the certainty of fourteenth-century chroniclers that Edward II died at Berkeley Castle on or around 21 September 1327.  And yet thirty-eight months after that letter, here we have Lord Berkeley stating before parliament that "he never knew about [Edward II's] death until the present parliament."  To say that this is curious is an under-statement.  For more info, please do read Ian Mortimer's 'The Death of Berkeley Castle', his 'Twelve Angry Scholars' article in Medieval Intrigue (pp. 109-51), and his new essay An Inconvenient Fact, which go into Lord Berkeley's statement, interpretations of it and the likely meaning in great detail.

Edward II's Death and Afterlife Revisited (3): Survival

This is the third instalment in my Edward II's Death and Afterlife Revisited series.  Please take a look at part one and part two if you haven't already, and see also Ian Mortimer's new article on his website (PDF) for the arguments in favour of Edward II's survival past 1327 and the scholarly response to them.  If you're new to the blog and are interested in the debate surrounding Edward II's fate in 1327 and afterwards, I've also written these posts:

Freeing Edward from Berkeley
Edward was not tortured at Berkeley
Events from September to December 1327
Oddities in the narrative of Edward's death
The earl of Kent's plot of 1330
Archbishop Melton's Letter of 1330
John Trevisa and the red-hot poker
And plenty of others; see under 'Aftermath of Edward II's Reign' in the sidebar on the right for links.

Every fourteenth-century chronicle who dealt with the topic says that Edward of Caernarfon died at Berkeley Castle on or about 21 September 1327, though stated causes of death vary considerably (as I pointed out in part two of this series, the red-hot poker story is far from unanimous, not that you'd know it from most modern writing on the subject).  No chronicle says that Edward survived past 1327.  In addition to chronicle evidence, we have the former king's funeral taking place at Gloucester Abbey on 20 December 1327 and all the preparations made for that by the English government, and a statement by the fourteen-year-old Edward III himself, in a letter to his cousin the earl of Hereford of 24 September 1327, that n're t'sch' seign' et piere est a dieu comaundez, "our very dear lord and father has been called to God".  The parliament of November 1330, the first one held after the young Edward III took over the governance of his own kingdom, also repeated - very often - that Edward II was dead.

Edward III's letter of 24 September 1327. His announcement of the death of his father is at the start of the third line.

On the other hand, we also have a considerable body of evidence that Edward II did not die in September 1327:

- Two letters, one written in 1330 by an English archbishop and one written a few years later by an Italian papal notary who subsequently became a bishop, both of which make clear and entirely unambiguous statements that Edward II was alive past 1327.  The first letter asks the recipient, the mayor of London, to buy numerous provisions for the former king, who is said to be in 'good bodily health' at the time (January 1330, over two years after his funeral); the second provides a detailed account of how Edward of Caernarfon escaped from captivity at Berkeley Castle and made his way to the continent.  (See the top of this post for a link to the first letter, by Archbishop William Melton.)

- The execution of Edward II's twenty-eight-year-old half-brother Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent, on 19 March 1330 for the 'crime' of trying to free the supposedly dead former king from captivity at Corfe Castle.

- The support and aid given to Kent in this endeavour by many dozens of other men, including the archbishop of York, the bishop and mayor of London, the earls of Mar and Buchan, former and future sheriffs of Kent and many former members of Edward II's household.

- The promise made by Edward II's Scottish friend and ally Donald, earl of Mar, to the archbishop of York in the autumn of 1329 that he would bring an army of 40,000 men to England to secure Edward's release.

- Statements in various contemporary chronicles that many people in England believed Edward II to still be alive in the late 1320s, and proclamations of the same time period declaring that anyone who claimed that Edward was still alive would be arrested.

-The statement to the November 1330 parliament by Thomas, Lord Berkeley, custodian of Edward of Caernarfon from 3 April 1327 until Edward's supposed death at Berkeley's home on 21 September that year, that he hadn't heard about Edward's death until he attended the present parliament over three years later.  This despite his writing in September 1327 to inform Edward III of his father's demise (which information prompted the young king's letter to the earl of Hereford, cited above).

- The entry in Edward III's Wardrobe account of 1338 which refers to a man called William le Galeys or William the Welshman, "who says he is the father of the present king."  Not only was William not executed, as royal pretenders almost inevitably were, he was actually brought to Edward III in Koblenz and met him.

- One might also add the persistent legends in Italy of a king of England who died there, and the mysterious squire of the king of Navarre described as the 'son of the king of England' and 'the bastard of England'.

I'm going to look at all of these points in detail over several blog posts, starting soon!

Anniversaries in the second half of August

On 15 August 1316, Isabella of France gave birth to her and Edward's second son John of Eltham, later earl of Cornwall.  I suspect that John was named in honour of the new pope, John XXII, who was elected by the cardinals at Avignon on 5 August.  News of his election reached England about the time of little John's birth; Edward II gave a pound to Lawrence de Hibernia, the messenger who brought him the news in Yorkshire, on 17 August 1316, and Queen Isabella 250 miles further south in Kent had presumably heard the news a few days earlier.

On 16 August 1284, Isabella's parents the future Philip IV of France and Joan, queen of Navarre, and countess of Champagne and Brie, got married.  Philip was fifteen or sixteen, Joan eleven or twelve.  Their eldest child, or at least their eldest son, was born on 4 October 1289: Louis X of France.

On 19 August 1284, Edward II's elder brother Alfonso of Bayonne died suddenly at the age of ten (he was born in Bayonne in November 1273 and named after his uncle and godfather Alfonso X of Castile).  This made the four-month-old Edward of Caernarfon heir to the throne.  Alfonso himself had become heir to the throne at the age of eleven months in October 1273 on the death of their six-year-old brother Henry, the second son of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile.  Alfonso's death seems to have come as a great shock to his parents, as Edward I was arranging a marriage for him with a daughter of the count of Holland.  Eleanor of Castile was buried with his heart after her death in November 1290.

Also on 19 August, in 1315, Edward's twenty-five-year-old brother-in-law Louis X of France married his second queen Clemence of Hungary, five days after the death (or the murder?) of his adulterous first wife Marguerite of Burgundy at Château Gaillard. Clemence was crowned queen of France at Rheims on 24 August.  One of Edward II's scribes made an embarrassing mistake a few months later, and addressed her in a letter as 'Queen Elizabeth'.  Oooops.  Louis died suddenly on 5 June 1316, and on 15 November Clemence gave birth to his posthumous son King John I, who sadly lived for only five days.

On 24 August 1325, Edward wrote to his last remaining brother-in-law Charles IV telling him that he was ill and thus would not be able to travel to France to pay homage to Charles for his French possessions of Gascony and Ponthieu, as he was meant to do on 29 August.  This is unlikely to have been a genuine illness, but rather a diplomatic one as Edward stalled for time.  After weeks of prevaricating, on 12 September he sent his son to France in his place, which would with hindsight have been the worst thing he could have done.  At the time, however, he really had little other option.

On 27 August 1320, Edward wrote to the king of Cyprus and titular king of Jerusalem, Henri de Lusignan, asking him to protect three Dominican friars going to preach to the Saracens.  Henri was Edward's third cousin twice removed via common descent from Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henri being descended from Eleanor's eldest child Marie of France; he was also the great-great-grandson of the famous Balian Ibelin.

On 28 August 1311, Edward II paid £113 "for the expenses and preparations made for the burial of the body of the Lady Eleanor, the king's sister" at Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire.  Eleanor was his half-sister and only five years old (born 4 May 1306) at her death, the youngest child of Edward I and Marguerite of France.  Edward I was almost sixty-seven at the time of Eleanor's birth, and she was at least forty-five or so years younger than his eldest child.  Edward I's eldest great-grandchild, Hugh, Lord Despenser (child of Eleanor de Clare and Hugh Despenser the Younger) was born in 1308 or 1309: only two or three years' age difference between a child and a great-grandchild.

29 August, the feast of the Beheading of St John the Baptist, in 1321 was the deadline for the two Hugh Despensers to leave England into perpetual exile, at the demand of their baronial enemies whom Edward II took to calling the Contrariants.  Hugh the Younger appears to have left a few days after the deadline, apparently accompanied by the king, and became a pirate in the English Channel.

Two Weddings Of 1326

Here's some information about two weddings which took place in 1326, from Edward II's chamber account of that year, which is now held in the library of the Society of Antiquaries in London (SAL MS 122).  The couples are Sir Richard Talbot and Elizabeth Comyn, and Sir Robert Wateville or Waterville and Margaret Hastings.

On 9 July 1326, Edward II gave ten marks to Sir Richard Talbot, "who had secretly married the lady Comyn at Pirbright..." (q' avoit espouses p'uement la dame de Comyn a Pirbright).  Sir Richard Talbot was a former Lancastrian knight who switched sides after defeat at the battle of Boroughbridge on 16 March 1322, where Richard and his father Gilbert were captured.  The arrest of Richard and Gilbert had been ordered on 15 January 1322, along with the earl of Hereford, Roger Mortimer, John Maltravers, Roger Damory, Henry Tyes and a few other well-known Contrariants, for their sacking of the town of Bridgnorth and Hugh Despenser the Younger's castles of Hanley and Elmley.  [Close Rolls 1318-23, pp. 511-513]

Despite these attacks on Hugh's castles, Richard joined Hugh's retinue after March 1322 and is called "knight of the said Sir Hugh" (chivaler le dit mons' Hugh) in Edward's chamber account of 1325/26 - perhaps because he and Hugh were fairly closely related, second cousins or thereabouts, via Richard's paternal grandmother Sarah Beauchamp (Hugh's mother was Isabel Beauchamp, the earl of Warwick's daughter).  The new allegiance of Richard and other Lancastrian knights generally was only skin-deep, however, as Edward and the Despensers discovered to their cost in the autumn of 1326.  Richard Talbot's date of birth is estimated as around 1302 or 1305, so he was still only in his early twenties in 1326.  His new wife Elizabeth Comyn was somewhat older than he, born on 1 November 1299.  She was the youngest of the three children of John the Red Comyn, lord of Badenoch, who was killed by Robert Bruce in February 1306, and the niece of Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke.  Elizabeth and her elder sister Joan were close to the Scottish throne, as their father the Red Comyn had been the nephew of John Balliol, the king of Scotland deposed in 1296.  It's interesting to note that Edward II didn't fine the couple for marrying without his permission, and instead seems to have been happy about it, if his generous gift to Richard is any guide.  A guilty conscience for letting Hugh Despenser the Younger imprison Elizabeth and bully her out of some of her lands, perhaps?  The date of Richard and Elizabeth's wedding is unfortunately not given in the king's chamber account, but presumably had taken place shortly before.

On 19 May 1326, at Marlborough, Edward II and presumably Hugh Despenser the Younger as well attended the wedding of Hugh's household knight Sir Robert Wateville and Margaret Hastings, Hugh's niece (her mother Isabel, Lady Hastings was Hugh's sister).  It was on this occasion that Edward II gave a massive twenty shillings to Lady Hastings' servant Will Muleward, "who was for some time with the king and made him laugh greatly."  Edward also gave twenty or forty shillings each to four other members of Lady Hastings' household, for their hard work in ensuring that the ceremony went ahead.

The family was interconnected: Isabel Hastings' third husband, who had died the previous year, was Ralph de Monthermer, whose first wife had been Edward II's sister Joan of Acre.  Isabel's first husband had been Gilbert de Clare, lord of Thomond, who was the first cousin of Edward II's niece Eleanor (née de Clare) Despenser, and her second, the father of all her children, was John, Lord Hastings.  I assume, though don't know for sure, that Hugh Despenser the Younger had arranged the marriage between his knight Robert Wateville - he was, like Richard Talbot, specified as being Hugh's 'bachelor' in Edward II's chamber account - and his niece, who can't have been much past her mid-teens at the time but was already a widow.  Sir Robert Wateville was high in Edward II's favour, as several other entries in the king's chamber account of 1326 demonstrate, and was one of the men with whom Edward played an unspecified ball game in the park of Saltwood Castle a couple of weeks after his wedding (he also won money from the king at cross and pile).  The Marlborough wedding sounds like it was a lot of fun, and presumably Edward II also got to spend some time with his daughters Eleanor and Joan, who were living at Marlborough Castle in Lady Hastings' care.

The De Clare Sisters

I saw someone on Facebook recently mixing up Edward II's nieces Eleanor and Margaret de Clare, and also seemingly unaware of their younger sister Elizabeth.  Here's a quick post about them.

Gilbert 'the Red' de Clare, earl of Gloucester and Hertford, was born on 2 September 1243, son of Earl Richard and Maud de Lacy, great-grandson of the famous William Marshal, earl of Pembroke.  Gilbert was first married to Alice de Lusignan, half-niece of Henry III, with whom he had two daughters, Isabel, Lady Berkeley (1262 - c. 1333/38) and Joan, countess of Fife (c. 1264/67 - after 1322).  This marriage was annulled in 1285, which made Isabel and Joan illegitimate.  On 30 April 1290, aged forty-six, Gilbert married Edward I and Eleanor of Castile's second-eldest surviving daughter Joan of Acre, who was born in the Holy Land in the spring of 1272 and thus was eighteen or almost at the time of her wedding to the irascible Gilbert.

Gilbert and Joan's eldest child Gilbert, earl of Gloucester, was born on or around 10 May 1291, just over a year after their wedding, and was killed at the battle of Bannockburn on 24 June 1314.  The younger Gilbert had no surviving children with his wife Maud de Burgh (but see here for her claims to be pregnant twenty months after his death), and left his vast lands and fortune to be divided equally among his three younger sisters and their husbands.  His sisters were:

- Eleanor, born in October or November 1292, died June 1337
- Margaret, date of birth unknown, probably in the spring or summer of 1294, assuming a regular spacing between the four siblings; died April 1342
- Elizabeth, born on 16 September 1295, just a few weeks before the death of their father Gilbert 'the Red' on 7 December 1295, aged fifty-two; died November 1360.

For the 45332896th time, Edward II did ***NOT*** arrange the marriage of Eleanor de Clare and Hugh Despenser the Younger.  Eleanor and Hugh married on 26 May 1306 at Westminster, in the presence of her grandfather Edward I, who had arranged the match.  There is ample evidence for this wedding date - for which, please see my post on the subject - and I'm sick to death of the laziness of writers who can't be bothered to research properly and instead repeat the usual rubbish about Edward II arranging it after Hugh had become his favourite, a dozen or more years after Hugh and Eleanor actually married.  Edward II did arrange the marriages of Margaret and Elizabeth de Clare, however, to his 'favourites' Piers Gaveston, earl of Cornwall in 1307 and Sir Hugh Audley in 1317, in Margaret's case, and to Sir Roger Damory in 1317 in Elizabeth's.  Elizabeth had previously been married to the earl of Ulster's eldest son and heir John de Burgh (d. 1313) and Theobald, Lord Verdon (d. 1316).

All the de Clare sisters were married two or three times and all left children.  Eleanor had at least nine or ten children with Hugh Despenser the Younger and at least one with her second husband William la Zouche, lord of Ashby, whom she married in 1329.  Her heir on her death in June 1337 was her eldest son Sir Hugh Despenser (1308/09 - 1349).  Eleanor's third of the de Clare inheritance passed from the Despensers to the Beauchamps and the Nevilles in the fifteenth century, as Eleanor and Hugh the Younger's great-great-granddaughter Isabel Despenser married Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick.  Margaret's daughter Joan Gaveston died young; her sole heir on her death in 1342 was her younger daughter Margaret Audley, abducted and forcibly married by Sir Ralph Stafford in 1336.  Elizabeth's heir when she died in 1360 was her granddaughter Elizabeth de Burgh (1332-1363), daughter of Elizabeth's only son William de Burgh; the younger Elizabeth married Edward III's son Lionel, duke of Clarence.  Elizabeth's share of the de Clare lands passed from the de Burghs to the Mortimers, thanks to Philippa of Clarence's marriage to Edmund Mortimer.  Elizabeth de Clare also left two daughters, Isabella Verdon and Elizabeth Damory.

All the de Clare sisters suffered imprisonment during or after Edward II's turbulent reign: Eleanor in the Tower of London in and after 1326, as she was the wife of an executed traitor (one Flemish chronicle claimed that she had had an affair with her uncle Edward II and was imprisoned in case she was pregnant by him); Margaret at Sempringham Priory in May 1322 after she successfully pleaded for the life of her husband Hugh Audley, once a royal favourite then a rebel, for the rest of Edward's reign; and Elizabeth at Barking Abbey, also in March 1322 for the same reason as her sister, but only for a few months.  [For Margaret and Elizabeth, see: Close Rolls 1318-1323, pp. 428, 440, 651; Livere de Reis de Britanie e le Livere de Reis de Engletere, ed. John Glover, p. 345]

And finally, just for the record, these are Edward II's nieces, the ones who lived to adulthood:

Eleanor de Clare, Lady Despenser (1292-1337)
Margaret de Clare, countess of Cornwall and Gloucester (1293/94-1342)
Elizabeth de Clare, Lady Burgh (1295-1360)
Mary de Monthermer, countess of Fife (1297 - after 1371)
Joan de Monthermer, a nun (1299-?) [all the above, daughters of his sister Joan of Acre]
Joan of Bar, countess of Surrey (1295/96-1361) [daughter of his sister Eleanor]
Eleanor de Bohun, countess of Ormond (1304-1263)
Margaret de Bohun, countess of Devon (1311-1391) [daughters of his sister Elizabeth]
Margaret of Norfolk, duchess of Norfolk (c. 1322-1399)
Alice of Norfolk (c. 1324 - early 1350s) [daughters of his half-brother Thomas]
Joan of Kent, countess of Kent and mother of Richard II (1328-1385) [daughter of his half-brother Edmund]

Marriage Negotiations in January 1324

Recently I was looking through the correspondence relating to the 1324/25 War of Saint-Sardos between Edward II and his brother-in-law Charles IV of France, and came across a letter of c. 23 January 1324 written to Edward by Sir Ralph Basset (see Lady D’s excellent post on him), who was the king's steward of Gascony.  [1]  The letter is long and informative and contains some information about marriage negotiations between England and France which I don't remember ever hearing about before. They concern Edward II and Isabella of France's daughters Eleanor, then aged five (born June 1318) and Joan, then aged two (born July 1321), and also, most interestingly to me, the king's half-brother Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent, then twenty-two (born August 1301). I'd never known before that any marriages were discussed for Edmund before he married Margaret Wake in late 1325, though of course it makes complete sense that they would have been. In August 1320 Edward II discussed a possible marriage for his other half-brother Thomas of Brotherton, earl of Norfolk (born June 1300) with King Jaime II of Aragon: Thomas would marry Jaime's daughter Maria, widow of Pedro of Castile, who was the son of Sancho IV and thus Edward II’s first cousin once removed. In August 1321, however, Jaime reported to Edward that Maria had decided to take the veil and that he did not think he would be able to change her mind.  [2]  Thomas of Brotherton ended up making a remarkably obscure marriage to Alice Hales, daughter of the coroner of Norfolk, probably later in 1321.

The potential marriages for Edward II's daughters mentioned in Ralph Basset's letter were with the offspring of the powerful Charles de Valois, count of Valois, Alençon, Perche, Anjou and Maine. Valois (12 March 1270 - 16 December 1325) was the son of Philip III of France and Isabel of Aragon and the brother of Philip IV, and the uncle of Louis X, Philip V, Charles IV and Edward II's queen Isabella. His children and Edward II's therefore were first cousins once removed. His eldest son Philip, born in 1293, succeeded his cousin Charles IV in 1328 as the first of the Valois kings of France, as Charles and his two elder brothers had no surviving sons and therefore were the last of the Capetian kings. Valois was married three times and had about fourteen children, including Jeanne, mother of Edward III's queen Philippa of Hainault; Isabelle, who married the heir of the duke of Brittany; Catherine, titular empress of Constantinople and princess of Taranto; another Isabelle, duchess of Bourbon; Blanche, Holy Roman Empress and queen of Germany; yet another Isabelle, abbess of Fontevrault. Valois was, in the usual tangled manner of royal relationships, also the uncle of Edward II's half-brothers the earls of Norfolk and Kent, being the elder half-brother of their mother Queen Marguerite.

Basset’s letter states that Valois had asked his nephew Charles IV for permission to send Amaury de Craon to England to meet Edward II, "to discuss and negotiate the marriages of my ladies your two daughters, that is, one for the son of the said Sir Charles who is of the issue of his last wife, and the other for one of the sons of his son from his first marriage" (...pur parler et treter de mariages de mes dames vos deus files ceo est asavoir la une pur le fitz du dit monsire Charles qui est del issue de sa dreine femme et lautre pur un des fitz de son fitz qui est des primeres esposailes).

Valois’s third and last wife was Mahaut or Matilda of St Pol, also known as Mahaut de Châtillon (d. 1358), sister of Marie de St Pol, countess of Pembroke.  With her he had only one son, who must be the boy mentioned here: Charles, count of Chartres, born probably in 1318.  Valois had two sons with his first wife Marguerite of Naples and Anjou, who died in 1299: the aforementioned Philip, who succeeded as Philip VI of France in 1328, and Charles, count of Alençon, born in 1297, who was killed at the battle of Crécy in 1346.  Charles of Alençon had been married to Joan de Joigny since 1314, but the couple had no children (Alençon’s children all came from his 1336 second marriage to Fernando de la Cerda the younger's daughter Maria).  Philip of Valois had married Joan ‘the Lame’, Jeanne la Boiteuse*, of Burgundy in 1313; she was the younger sister of Marguerite, first wife of Louis X, who was imprisoned for adultery in 1314.  As far as I can tell, the only son of Philip of Valois and Joan of Burgundy alive in 1324 was John, or Jean in French, the future King John II of France, who was born in April 1319 (they had had an older son, Philip, but he died young).  It must be John who was being put forward as a husband for one of Edward II's daughters in January 1324.  [* Later known in France as la male royne boiteuse, 'the evil lame queen']

Louis of Chartres died on 2 November 1328, probably aged only ten or thereabouts.  John of Valois married Bonne (born Jutta) of Bohemia, daughter of John the Blind, king of Bohemia, in 1332 and succeeded his father as King John II in 1350.  He is known to history as Jean le Bon, John the Good, and was succeeded by his son Charles V and then his grandson Charles VI, and so on.  No-one could have known at the time of Charles de Valois's marriage proposals in January 1324 that Charles IV would die without a son in February 1328, and that if this proposal had been realised it would ultimately have made one of Edward II's daughters queen of France.  Given that Edward's son Edward III claimed the French throne from his kinsman Philip VI (who was also the uncle of Edward's queen, Philippa), that's a fascinating what-if.

The marriage of the future Edward III to one of Charles of Valois's daughters had also been proposed, incidentally, in about May 1323; Edward II told Valois and Charles IV on 6 June that he would put the suggestion to his next parliament, which didn't take place until February 1324, by which time the alternative marriage proposal had been suggested.  [3]  The daughter is not named, but presumably meant one of Valois's daughters with Mahaut of St Pol, who were all about the right age to marry Edward of Windsor: Marie (b. c. 1309), Isabelle (b. 1313) or Blanche (b. 1317).  In March 1324, Edward II sent envoys to Jaime II of Aragon to discuss a marriage between Edward of Windsor and Jaime's daughter Violante, and in February 1325 sent envoys to Castile to arrange a marriage for the boy with Alfonso XI's sister Leonor.  [4]

Unfortunately, nothing came of these proposed marriages for Edward II's daughters and Charles de Valois's son and grandson, and I'm not sure whether Valois's envoy Amaury de Craon did indeed visit England and Edward to discuss them.  I've found a reference to Craon in July 1325 as an envoy of the duke of Brittany and a clerk of his being granted protection in England earlier that same year, but that's it.  Amaury had twice served as Edward II's steward of Gascony, Ralph Basset's predecessor, and was always acknowledged as 'cousin' or 'kinsman' by Edward; if I've worked it out correctly, Amaury's grandmother was one of Henry III's Lusignan half-siblings.  Over the next year or two Edward II betrothed his daughters instead to Alfonso XI of Castile and the future Pedro IV of Aragon, Jaime II's grandson, and after his deposition they married David II of Scotland and Duke Reynald II of Gueldres.  

The impetus for the Valois marriages came from Charles de Valois himself.  The next proposed marriage, however, was one which Ralph Basset had been trying to negotiate on Edward II's behalf. The prospective bridegroom was Edward's half-brother Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent, and the prospective bride was Régine de Got, daughter and heir of Bertrand de Got, viscount of Lomagne, a small town north-west of Toulouse (Basset wrote: jeo avoi comence parlaunce et trettement od le viscounte de Leomaine pur avoir euz le mariage de sa file et mon seignur vostre frere le counte de Kente, "I had begun discussions and negotiations with the viscount of Lomagne to have had the marriage of his daughter and my lord your brother the earl of Kent").

Bertrand de Got, viscount of Lomagne, was one of the many nephews of the Gascon Pope Clement V, who died on 20 April 1314 and whose real name was also Bertrand de Got.  On 16 June 1308, Edward II had granted Bertrand the nephew the castle and town of Blanquefort and appointed him his proctor at the papal court.  This was just before Piers Gaveston was forced to leave England for his second exile, and Edward candidly admitted that he hoped the grant to the pope's nephew would encourage Clement to support him in the Gaveston matter and to lift the conditional sentence of excommunication imposed on him by the archbishop of Canterbury.  [5]  In November 1317, Bertrand de Got, his kinsman Peter de Via, another nephew of Clement V, and other men were accused of "proceeding by witchcraft" against Pope John XXII.  A letter in the Gascon Rolls states "However, it is not possible to credit accusations against such important and noble persons...The pope has hitherto acted so  affectionately towards them, for it not to be reasonable that they should be suspected of such horrendously criminal behaviour."  [6]

Ralph Basset informed Edward in his letter that unfortunately his negotiations with Bertrand had been unsuccessful and he had heard that Régine de Got was shortly to marry the count of Armagnac instead (a ceo qe jeo ay entendu ele serra mariee au counte de Armeniak en moult bref temps). The count of Armagnac in 1324 was Jean I, who was still underage at the time and lived until 1373.  Countess Régine sadly did not live long: John Travers, constable of Bordeaux, told Edward II on 1 September 1325 that "the countess of Armagnac, who was the daughter of the viscount of Lomagne, is dead without an heir of her body," and on the 23rd Edward wrote to inform his half-brother the earl of Kent, the spurned bridegroom and the king's lieutenant in Gascony.  [7]  Betrand de Got, viscount of Lomagne, died in 1324, within months of Basset's letter.  Ralph Basset was afraid of an alliance between the viscount of Lomagne, the Armagnacs and Amanieu, lord of Albret against Edward II, which he had been hoping to avert with the marriage of Kent and Régine. Armagnac and Albret supported Charles IV against Edward II in the War of Saint-Sardos, although Albret's son Bérard was a staunch ally of Edward.  Malcolm Vale's 1990 book The Origins of the Hundred Years War: The Angevin Legacy 1250-1340 mentions Kent and Régine's proposed marriage (p. 94 footnote 87), but otherwise I don't believe it's ever been discussed, except here.

Sources

1) Pierre Chaplais, ed., The War of Saint-Sardos (1323-1325): Gascon Correspondence and Diplomatic Documents (1954), pp. 15-17.
2) Pierre Chaplais, English Medieval Diplomatic Practice (1982), part 1, vol. 1, pp. 64-66.
3) Foedera 1307-1327, p. 523; Close Rolls 1318-1323, pp. 713-714.
4) Foedera 1307-1327, pp. 548-549; Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 171; Patent Rolls 1324-1327, pp. 103-104; Chaplais, War of Saint-Sardos, pp. 214-216.
5) Patent Rolls 1307-1313, p. 83; Foedera 1307-1327, p. 51.
6) Gascon Rolls C 61/32, mem. 17.
7) Chaplais, War of Saint-Sardos, p. 240; Foedera 1307-1327, pp. 609-610.

Roger Mortimer Escapes From The Tower, 1323

Yes, this post is somewhat late for the anniversary of Roger Mortimer's escape from the Tower on 1 August 1323, but it's been a hectic (and very hot and humid!) week, and I had no time to write it before.  :-)  Then after I did write it, I accidentally pressed some key and the entire post disappeared, Blogger auto-saved a split-second later, and it was gone forever.  I felt like weeping.  So here it is again, considerably shorter than it was originally because I'll discuss the notion that Queen Isabella was involved in the escape in a second post soon.  I simply can't face writing it all again at the moment!

Roger Mortimer and his uncle Roger Mortimer of Chirk were imprisoned in the Tower of London in February 1322 after taking part in the unsuccessful Contrariant rebellion against Edward II and the Despensers.  The two men surrendered to Edward at Shrewsbury in January 1322, supposedly, according to some chroniclers, after the earl of Pembroke and other earls loyal to the king lied to them and promised them that the king would grant them a pardon if they did so.  Well, maybe, but they would have had to have been pretty gullible and naive to think that they'd be offered a pardon after committing so many crimes: armed rebellion against the king, destroying lands and homes all over England and Wales in May 1321, forcing Edward to banish the two Hugh Despensers, destroying much of Gloucestershire when the king advanced on them in early 1322, and taking part in other Contrariant crimes such as homicide, assault, theft, false imprisonment and extortion.  I'm pretty sure Roger Mortimer wasn't that naive, and given that forces led by Edward II's ally Sir Gruffydd Llwyd had captured their castles and that the rebellion was collapsing around them, I don't really see what other choice they had but to surrender.

On 14 July 1322, five men – the mayor of London, three justices of the court of Common Pleas and the chief baron of the exchequer – were ordered to try the two Roger Mortimers, and on 2 August condemned them to be drawn for their treason and hanged for their arson, robberies, homicides and felonies.  Edward II had on 22 July, however, already commuted their sentence to life imprisonment, which would prove to be one of the worst mistakes he ever made and seems to defy explanation, unless he was remembering the Mortimer family's long service to himself and his family.  [1]  I looked recently at the possibility that Edward II, despite his decision of the previous year to spare the younger Mortimer's life, was planning to execute him in 1323, and that this is the reason why Mortimer escaped.  It's possible, but is a story which appears in some chronicles but not others and is not corroborated by any evidence in the chancery rolls or other government sources.  Roger Mortimer of Chirk died still imprisoned in the Tower of London on 3 August 1326, aged about seventy.  Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, future self-appointed earl of March and favourite of the queen, escaped from the Tower on 1 August 1323, and here's what we know about the event.

Mortimer escaped by feeding his guards sedatives in their wine, and made his way to the continent.  Gerard Alspaye, deputy constable of the Tower and a Mortimer sympathiser, fled with him, letting Mortimer out of his cell while the guards were incapacitated, taking him through the kitchens and over the wall with a rope ladder to the river, where more men were waiting with a boat.  They were the prominent Londoners John de Gisors, Richard de Bethune and Ralph de Bocton.  Five days after the escape, Stephen Segrave, constable of the Tower, was still seriously ill from the sedatives.  [2]  Edward II, at Kirkham in Yorkshire, heard the news on 6 August, and ordered all the sheriffs and keepers of the peace in England and the bailiffs of fifteen ports to pursue Mortimer with hue and cry and take him dead or alive.  [2]  For a long time, he had no idea where Mortimer had gone, and assuming that he had fled to Wales, ordered the loyal Welshmen Rhys ap Gruffudd and Gruffudd Llwyd to search for him there.  Hugh Despenser the Elder was also ordered "to capture the said Roger and his adherents; with power to punish all persons not aiding him by incarcerating them and seizing their lands and goods."  [3]  On 26 August, Edward told his brother the earl of Kent that he thought Mortimer was in Ireland, and was still ordering numerous bailiffs to search for Mortimer on 20 September.  By 1 October, had finally learned where Mortimer was: in Picardy, with his kinsmen the Fiennes brothers.  [4]  As early as mid-November 1323, Mortimer was allegedly inciting "aliens to enter the kingdom and to murder the king’s counsellors," which certainly meant the Despensers, and perhaps Mortimer’s detested cousin the earl of Arundel and the younger Despenser's protégé Robert Baldock, whom Edward had appointed as chancellor of England in August 1323. [5]

With Roger Mortimer on the continent beyond his reach, Edward II lashed out vindictively at his family. This was no doubt inspired at least in part by his frustration at being unable to re-capture his enemy, though as Mortimer had sent assassins to kill Edward's friends, it is hardly surprising that the king would retaliate, and Mortimer chose to flee the country in the full knowledge that he was leaving his family to Edward's not-so-tender mercies. I n March and April 1324, his wife Joan and her servants were moved from Southampton to Skipton-in-Craven, and three of their eight daughters – Margaret Berkeley, Joan and Isabella – were sent to separate convents and granted the pitifully small amounts of fifteen pence (Margaret) or twelve pence (Joan and Isabella) per week for their sustenance.  [6]  As far as I know, three of Mortimer's four sons also remained under guard, though Geoffrey was reunited with his father on the continent, about which much more in the second part of this post, soon.

Sources

1) Calendar of Patent Rolls 1321-1324, p. 249; Ibid. 1327-1330, pp. 141-143.  The judgement on the Mortimers is printed, in the original French, in James Conway Davies, The Baronial Opposition to Edward II (1918), p. 565 (...pur les Tresons soiez treynez et pur les arsons roberies homicides et felonies soiez penduz).
2) Calendar of Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 132.
2) Ibid., p. 132.
3) Patent Rolls 1321-1324, p. 335.
4) Close Rolls 1323-1327, pp. 133, 137-138, 140-141.
5) Patent Rolls 1321-1324, p. 349.
6) Close Rolls 1323-1327, pp. 87-88, 106.