The Three Edwards (38 page)

The marriage of the young princess, who became known in Scotland as Joan Makepeace, was proceeded with at once. The English court moved north to Berwick in great splendor for the event. Isabella was accompanied by her son, Prince John, her other daughter, Eleanor, and a great train of the nobility. Mortimer stole the show with a train which included one hundred and eighty knights in glittering armor and with gold spurs on their heels. People asked if any of the indemnity money had gone into the rich apparel of the knights, and a rhyme was repeated by the Scottish spectators which ran as follows:

This confirmed the people of England in their newly aroused contempt for the queen and her paramour. Isabella was said to be a heartless
mother for sending her little daughter into exile in the barbarous and uncouth land of the Scots.

There was another flaw. The King of England and his bride were not present when the marriage took place between the two infants. Edward had taken Philippa to the royal castle of Woodstock and refused to return for the ceremony. Under the bright gold of his hair the young king had a long head. He was keeping himself clear of any blame for the unpopular peace treaty. The country seems to have been willing to absolve him, believing that the fault lay with Isabella and Mortimer.

A
T this stage in English history a complete lack of evidence is encountered on a point of the first importance, the relationship between the boy king and his mother. Isabella was running things with an imperious hand and Edward was standing to one side and neither doing nor saying anything to indicate his state of mind. He appeared on the surface to have acquiesced in everything she did until the very last moment, when he stepped in and put an abrupt end to it. It is even suggested in some histories that he did not learn of his mother’s adulterous conduct with Mortimer until he went to France after his marriage to swear fealty to the French king. This is nothing short of absurd. Only a cretin could have been unaware of it in Edward’s place. And this young king, who was to become the most ambitious and one of the ablest of English kings, was a boy of strong character and rare gifts.

It is not hard to understand the course taken by Isabella which was to result in her ultimate downfall. She was unable to submerge Isabella the woman in Isabella the queen, and the faults of the woman undid the queen. In the telling of the story there seems to be a tendency to underestimate the position she won for herself in England after the fall of Edward II, or at least no desire to measure the full extent of her rise. A country thoroughly weary of the rule of an oafish king and bitterly antagonistic to his greedy favorites suddenly saw his estranged queen, the beautiful, captivating, and diverting consort he had treated so badly, emerge with a small army of volunteers and make a successful landing on the eastern coast. The nobility flocked to her, the common people rallied to her banner, the cities were a unit in lending her support. Whether acting on her own judgment or accepting sound advice from those about her, she handled her campaign so well that Edward was captured without striking a blow and the Despensers were taken and executed. A tendency
to believe that the country was shocked by her summary treatment of the two favorites is another absurdity. This was a cruel age and the Despensers were so universally hated that anything short of the elder swinging on the gallows in his armor and the younger dying slowly under the knives of the executioners would not have satisfied. That the queen seized the power of a regent from the council of indecisive and unready men selected by Parliament did not seem to disturb the public; no one had much faith in any of the members of that inept and spineless board. The abdication of Edward was the next step, and to the people it was completely logical and acceptable.

At this point Isabella was in a position to turn the whole tide of history in her favor. Blanche of Castile had never enjoyed the personal popularity that Isabella had won. She, Blanche, was made regent in her husband’s will and her skillful administration during her son’s minority was not of the showy variety. But now the fair Isabella who had done everything spectacularly well began to do everything spectacularly wrong.

If she had been completely her father’s daughter she would have succeeded in submerging the woman in the queen. Philip the Fair, that silent and incredible despot, never allowed personal feelings (it is sometimes doubted that he had any) to sway him one inch from his course. Isabella seems to have been willing enough to do anything the Horn-owl of France would have done under the same circumstances, but she lacked the will and the desire to subordinate the woman in her.

The point where she allowed herself to go completely astray was, of course, in the murder of her husband. She undoubtedly was consulted in the decision and did nothing to protect the unfortunate Edward from his fate. It may have been, as history has unhesitatingly believed, that she and Mortimer hatched the plot against him. Aside from the fact that Mortimer did not hesitate to assume the direction of the foul deed, there is nothing to prove how the decision was reached. It must be borne in mind, moreover, that a rule of statecraft had persisted down the ages which taught that deposed kings were always a menace to the peace of the realm. It would continue to be recognized in later ages; and on several occasions, in the cases of Richard II, Henry VI, and the two princes in the Tower, the hand of assassins would be employed to rid the state of the threat they posed. The point is raised to indicate that Isabella and Mortimer were undoubtedly not the only ones in posts of authority who favored the elimination of Edward.

The queen acted throughout with an indifference which is hard to believe. If she had governed herself according to an obvious machiavellian rule she would have been careful to disassociate herself completely from the murder of her husband and then she would have cried aloud for the punishment of the perpetrators. From what is known of her character,
she would have done this if her hands had not been tied. Mortimer, that blind and willful upstart, had plotted the death with a carelessness which seems to indicate that he considered himself beyond reach of reprisal or even criticism. He openly planted his confederates about the unhappy ex-king—Maltravers, Gurney, and the man Ogle, the latter an unknown but obviously a killer, perhaps from the dregs of London. There was never any doubt in the minds of the people of England that he had conceived and executed the crime. How did this affect the queen?

If she had been completely her father’s daughter in this crisis, she would not have hesitated about throwing Mortimer to the wolves, to use a modern phrase. There could be no doubt whatever of his guilt. The countercharges and recriminations he might have indulged in would not have penetrated beyond the walls of his cell. If his ultimate visit to the Elms of Tyburn had been anticipated by three years, Isabella could have succeeded in washing her hands of any stain. The public, suspicious at first, could have been led in time to condone the favors she had showered on the greedy Marcher baron and to accept him as the sole villain of the piece.

But Isabella the woman was infatuated with her gentle Mortimer. She did not raise her voice after the assassination, either in grief or condemnation. Her questioning of the woman who embalmed the body of Edward may not have been prompted by a desire to get at the truth so much as by a morbid interest in the grisly details. She kept Mortimer at her right hand and took only the most elementary precautions to hide the fact that he was not a stranger to her bed. It was Isabella the woman who held the reins from that time on.

As has been stated earlier, Edward, the son, could not have been unaware of what was happening about him, but he kept himself carefully aloof in every way. He did not even adopt the pose of a Hamlet whose hands were tied. This need not be accepted as a criticism of the young king. His hands
were
tied and he was in no position at first to oppose the imperious will of his mother. He could not have protected his father from physical harm without being completely in control of the administration of justice. That he did not come forward to demand justice for the murderers of his father, no matter where the chips of guilt might fall, was so entirely contrary to the firm character he displayed later as king that only one explanation can be accepted. He stayed his hand to protect his mother, fearing that complicity on her part would be revealed by a searching investigation. He was in a position of unenviable difficulty.

But it goes deeper than that. Young Edward had need of his mother to achieve what had become even at that early stage the great and compelling ambition of his life. They were working together toward an aim which would have made Edward the greatest king of the Middle Ages and would at the same time have placed Isabella higher in historical perspective
than the woman she strove to emulate, Blanche of Castile. The throne of France was the prize they hoped to win.

The claim that Edward would soon thereafter make to the throne of France was based on the fact that all three sons of Philip the Fair had succeeded each other as king and had died without legal issue. Isabella was the sole surviving child of Philip, and it seemed to both mother and son that his case had a validity above all other claimants.

Young Edward knew that there would be a great reluctance on the part of the French people to accepting an Englishman as their king, particularly as it would mean the union of the two crowns. That reluctance would be heightened if Isabella’s reputation became tarnished in the meantime. They would hesitate to accept the son of a loose woman, even though she had been a daughter of France, the mistress of the man who had connived with her in the murder of her husband. Edward needed the glamorous Isabella of the past, the ill-treated daughter of Philip who was still remembered as beautiful, captivating, and brave. Edward’s skill in diplomacy would be one of his strongest assets during his long years as king, and it can be taken for granted that even at this early age he took a realistic view of his position as a claimant to the French throne.

While the French dynasty, known as the house of Capet, withered and died on the vine, the whole world began to ask a question: Had the curse pronounced by the Templar Grand Master as he perished in the flames been directed at the family as a whole? Certainly some malignant fate seemed to be pursuing them.

Philip the Fair left four children: Louis, born 1289; Isabella, born 1292; Philip, born 1294; and Charles, born 1294. A healthy and handsome family.

He was succeeded by his oldest son, Louis, called Le Hutin, or the Quarreler. He came to the throne a healthy man of twenty-five and died in two years. His second wife, Clemence (he had quarreled with his first and put her in prison), was with child when the spectral arm of the old Templar beckoned to him. A son was born named John and died in four days. It was believed by many that the second brother, Philip, who was acting as regent, had substituted a dead baby for the real one. Many years later a pretender turned up who claimed to be the real John but did not convince anyone.

Philip V, called the Tall, was a poet and surrounded himself by minstrels and students. He dodged his fate for six years and then died without issue, aged twenty-eight.

Charles IV, called the Fair, reigned another six years and managed to
get himself married three times in that period. By leaving daughters only, he became the last of the Capetian line.

Was it any wonder that Isabella and her son watched with mounting interest as the royal brothers died in such rapid succession? When Charles the Fair gave up the struggle against fate, the path seemed to have been cleared. Who had a better right to the throne than Isabella or, if the French persisted in their refusal to allow women on the throne, her son Edward? There was, of course, a document of doubtful application (according to English jurists, at least) called the Salic Law which had been invoked on several occasions to exclude women from the succession. It was a survival from the laws of the Salian Franks and was, in reality, a penal code. Its value consisted of one chapter dealing with private property, in which it was declared that daughters could not inherit land.

Edward was prepared to claim that, even if daughters were excluded from reigning because of this ban on owning property, the prohibition could not be extended to their sons when all other claimants were farther removed in consanguinity. His first step in presenting his claim was to write vigorously to Pope John XXII. He acknowledged that his mother had no right to the throne as “the kingdom of France was too great for a woman to hold by reason of the imbecility of her sex.” But he claimed that he was the nearest male in blood to the deceased king, being related in the second degree of consanguinity. Philip of Valois, a nephew of Philip the Fair, who was his only serious rival, was related in the third degree. Pope John, who had been so helpful in the matter of Edward’s marriage, does not seem to have done anything about this claim. The issue was laid before the Twelve Barons of France, who decided in favor of Philip of Valois.

The new king promptly sent instructions to Edward to appear before him and swear fealty for the duchy of Guienne and his other holdings in France. No attention was paid to this, and a year later, 1330, a more peremptory summons was sent. Edward was following a rule, even at this early stage, of submitting his problems to Parliament. Accordingly he sought the advice of the next Parliament to meet and was advised to obey the summons. A secret admonition was added that his method of doing homage should not prejudice his claim to the French throne; a proof that the idea of combining the two crowns found general favor in England. On May 26 of that year the young king sailed from Dover, leaving his brother John of Eltham as guardian of the kingdom.