Titans of History

ISABELLA & ROGER MORTIMER

1295–1358 & 1287–1330

The tongue devises mischiefs, like a sharp razor, working deceitfully. You love evil more than good, and lies more than honesty.

Psalm 52, read to Roger Mortimer by his executioner

They were the couple—an adulterous French queen and her English baronial lover—who invaded England, overthrew her husband the king, and ruled the country for three tumultuous years. Mortimer was the first son of Edmund Mortimer, 2nd Baron Wigmore, and his wife, Margaret de Fiennes, second cousin to Eleanor of Castile, the wife of Edward I. His grandfather had been a close ally and friend of King Edward I, and in return for their service to the crown the family had enjoyed royal patronage ever since. Roger married Joan de Geneville, the daughter of a neighboring lord, in 1301, when he was just fourteen, her eventual inheritance, coupled with his own, helping to swell the already vast family estates in the so-called marcher lands on the border of England and Wales.

In 1307, King Edward I died and his son became Edward II. Cowed by his terrifying father as a boy, young Edward, though outwardly imposing, was timid and easily led—a weakness that others eagerly exploited. First to do so was Piers Gaveston, a onetime companion to the prince who may have been his lover and was certainly his best friend. The king showered him with privileges. In 1308, Edward traveled to France to marry Isabella, sister of the king of France. Isabella was a stunning creature, described by one contemporary as “the beauty of beauties.” But her life was fraught with humiliations and triumphs, and in the end Edward’s neglect led her to betray him.

Isabella was the only surviving daughter of Philip IV of France. When she was no more than an infant, Philip proposed her as the future wife of the heir to the English throne, with the aim of easing tensions between the two countries. The marriage duly took place in Boulogne in 1308. Isabella was only twelve years old; the lackluster Edward II was twice her age.

Edward II was tall, fair-haired, handsome—and almost certainly homosexual, favoring as he did a succession of young, good-looking male courtiers. Before he even returned to England after his marriage he had passed on Philip’s wedding gifts to Piers Gaveston. Although Isabella bore him four children, Edward rarely showed her any affection, leading her to describe herself as “the most wretched of wives.” Furious and resentful, the country’s barons eventually rebelled in 1312, and Gaveston was executed by order of the earl of Lancaster. To their dismay, a voraciously greedy, ambitious and ruthless new favorite took his place—his name Hugh Despenser. In 1306, Hugh had married Eleanor de Clare, a granddaughter of Edward I, and through the king’s patronage he secured ever more wealth, land and influence, becoming royal chamberlain in 1318 and one of the richest nobles in the kingdom. Isabella feared and loathed the thuggish Despenser.

The Despensers’ lands bordered the Mortimers’, and the families hated each other. When Hugh tried to expand his territories into south Wales, threatening Mortimer’s own interests in the region, loathing for the Despensers finally outweighed his loyalty to the king and he joined the earls of Hereford, Lancaster and Pembroke—equally disenchanted with the king’s behavior—in open rebellion. In August 1321, the Contrariants, as they were known, marched to London, where they forced Edward to banish their hated rivals. The king, however, swiftly mobilized support and a royal army, Hugh Despenser and his father among them, marched west to confront the rebels. In January 1322, abandoned by his allies, Roger surrendered in Shrewsbury.

Mortimer was imprisoned for the next two years in the Tower of London, but after drugging his jailers, he escaped from his cell, climbed out of the Tower through a chimney, crossed the Thames in a waiting boat, and rode to Dover, from where he crossed to France. He was warmly welcomed in Paris by Edward’s enemy and Queen Isabella’s brother the French king, Charles IV. The following year, in a dispute over Edward’s French territories, Edward sent Queen Isabella, accompanied by their son, the heir to the kingdom, Prince Edward, to negotiate a settlement. Isabella despised Hugh Despenser as much as Roger did: Mortimer and Isabella soon became lovers.

In 1326, having moved to Flanders, Isabella and Mortimer gathered an army of 700 men and invaded England, intent on revenge. The Despensers, caught by surprise, were routed, and, within the month, King Edward, deserted by his nobles, was captured by Mortimer’s forces in south Wales. Brutal reprisals followed. Hugh’s father was hanged and beheaded in Bristol in October 1326. The following month, at Hereford, Hugh himself was dragged behind four horses, hanged to the point of suffocation, cut down just before he died, then tied to a ladder where his penis and testicles were sliced off and burned before his eyes. While he was still conscious, his abdomen was cut open and his entrails and heart removed. Afterward, his head was hacked off and mounted on the gates of London, while the four quarters of his body were sent to Bristol, Dover, York and Newcastle.

King Edward, meanwhile, had been forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Edward III, who was “crowned” at a ceremony in January 1327. Though monarch in name, the new king was treated as a puppet by Mortimer, who, though taking no official position, controlled the country with Isabella for the next three years, handing out titles and lands to his family and granting himself the ostentatious title “the earl of March.” Edward II was taken in April to Berkeley Castle, home of Mortimer’s son-in-law Thomas Berkeley, and never seen again. According to a later history by Sir Thomas More, he was killed at Mortimer’s instigation by means of a red-hot poker inserted into his anus (thus leaving no marks).

Mortimer’s despotism and greed provoked fury among the country’s barons, prompting him to keep a body of armed men at court at all times, but he finally overreached himself when, in 1330, he ordered the execution of Edward’s popular uncle, Edmund, earl of Kent. Fearing that Mortimer planned to usurp the throne, prominent barons, led by his former ally the earl of Lancaster, urged Edward III to strike against Roger before it was too late, and the young king, almost come of age and determined to throw off Mortimer’s hated yoke, eagerly took his chance. While the royal household was at Nottingham Castle in October, he and his supporters, guided by two members of the royal household—Richard Bury and William Montagu—bypassed Mortimer’s guards via a subterranean passage (still known as Mortimer’s Hole) and took Mortimer and Isabella by surprise in the queen’s bedroom. Despite Isabella’s plea, “Fair son, have pity on the gentle Mortimer,” Roger was arrested and taken to the Tower of London, where, without trial, he was condemned for treason and sentenced to death. On November 29, 1330, he was taken to Tyburn, stripped naked, and hanged—the fate usually reserved for a commoner—his body being left on the scaffold for two days before being cut down. Notorious as a femme fatale and mariticide, Isabella lived long as an honored queen mother at the court of her son, one of England’s greatest kings.