u/AnantaPurima

"Say, nephew, I got crowned once too, you know."

"Yeah, with a fucking hat."

Kathryn Warner has, over the years, made several quite categorical remarks about our ability to reconstruct Isabella of France's appearance. In 2013, she stated that "(n)o source records Isabella’s appearance, other than that she was very beautiful... We have no idea whether her hair was blonde or black or chestnut brown or auburn, whether she was slender or plump, short or tall, pale-skinned or darker, whether she had blue or green or hazel or brown eyes." Having looked at the available evidence, however, I've concluded that this degree of agnosticism is unwarranted. We actually are able to reconstruct, with a fair degree of certainty, aspects of her appearance, and one of those aspects is her hair colour. There are two main pieces of evidence I wish to present in this regard:

1. Isabella is explicitly referred to as being blonde in at least one English source dating from her lifetime.

And it is a very famous source indeed, one you would have almost certainly encountered before if you have explored the historiography of Edward II's life and reign before: the Lament. The relevant description occurs in the eighth stanza:

Parti m'ount un ju saunz joie;

de tel tristour my qoer se pleint

De cele est qe trover quidoye

fyn loialté, vers moi se feint.

Dieux! come bien amay la bloye;

mais ore est l'estencele esteint

fyn amour; pur ceo ma joie

s'en est alee, come est de meint. *

The fifth line reads, quite clearly, as "Oh God, how much did I love the blonde one!" Those who are familiar only with Paul Studer's translation of the poem, in which the relevant word is rendered simply as "fair", might assume it simply means "fair" in the sense of "beautiful" or "comely." Not so. La bloye is, unambigously, a reference to hair colour. When used as a noun-phrase, the Anglo-Norman dictionary explicitly translates bloi as "blond-haired person." It is true that blond hair, or crine bloie, was an element of courtly descriptio, one of the set of conventional features with which the domnas of courtly love poetry or the heroines of chivalric romances were described with as a matter of course. But there is an obvious difference between giving a fictional female character a specific hair colour in line with contemporary beauty standards and describing a famous living individual, who the reader is supposed to be able to identify, with a hair colour she did not have. If Isabella had had an unflattering hair colour, the author could simply have not made any mention to it at all. The Chronique métrique of Geoffrey of Paris describes Isabella as being “la plus belle des belles", so, to me, the most parsimonious explanation of the poem's phrase is that Isabella was indeed blonde, and this was one of the ways in which her appearance aligned with the beauty standards of the day.

There's an additional point to be made about the language of the poem itself. Anglo-Norman courtly love poetry would have had a readership that skewed heavily towards the societal elite. The people of England outside of the orbit of court still overwhelmingly spoke English. A substantial portion of the people who could even read this poem would have also seen Isabella in person on public occaisons. It remains, of course, possible this description was a mere idealisation with no relation to her actual appearance, but I really do not find that particularly probable.

2. Her father was explicitly described as blond too, and Geoffrey of Paris draws a direct connection between Isabella and her father's good looks

Philip IV is explicitly described, in an anonymous royal chronicle written c. 1342, when he was definitely still in living memory, as having been flavus, rubicundus et candidus et decorus; which Elizabeth A. R. Brown translates as “golden-blond, ruddy, fair, and seemly." While this may not seem all that relevant to Isabella, given that genetic inheritance is not deterministic, we do have a contemporary source that gives a fairly strong indication that Isabella did indeed resemble her father, and it is, once again, the Chronique métrique. Right after describing the dramatic incident in which Edward II saved Isabella's life after a fire broke out in their silken pavillion in Pontoise, Geoffrey of Paris, apropos of nothing, writes:

La noble et sage dame Ysabiau,

Son père des biax le plus biau;

Si est bien droite égalité,

Que bel engendroit grant beauté.

Which I would translate as:

"The noble and wise lady Isabeau,

her father, the fairest of the fair;

It is only right and proper,

that so fair a man should beget such beauty."

Notice that Geoffrey is using the grammatically masculine version of the same phrase he used previously for Isabella: the fairest of the fair. This is Geoffrey stating, in no uncertain terms, that Isabella got her good looks from her father. If her father was blond, as we have fairly good reason to believe, we have a good reason for taking the description of her in the Lament at face value. As much as it bums me out, as a Raven-haired Isabella headcanoner, I see no reason to doubt the preponderance of evidence here.

*As a side note, Studer translates the relevant line as "Fair Isabel I dearly loved" based on the version of the poem found in Longleat Manuscript 26, in which the line reads "beux tant amay la bloye." I have instead used the version of the poem found in the Royal manuscripts, in which the line reads as above. Studer and Aspin take "beux" as being a hypocorism of "Isabeaux" and translate it as "Isabel" on that basis. I, however, concur with Smallwood's critcism of this choice: "Studer's emendation from MS Beux or Deux relied chiefly on romantic appeal, and R's line must be preferred. It has never been shown that Beux was a known pet-form of Isabel."

Charles of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia and Count of Luxembourg, was elected King of the Romans in 1346 and crowned Holy Roman Emperor as Charles IV in 1355; his daughter Anne of Bohemia later became the first wife of Richard II. He was distinctly unusual among medieval European monarchs for having written, at least in part, his own autobiography, the Vita Caroli Quarti. While his intent in chronicling his life was clearly to provide spiritual edification and wisdom to his successors, as well as to carefully curate his own image for posterity, it nevertheless affords us a rare opportunity to access the interior life of someone who was not only alive at the same time as Edward II and his family, but who would have also been an eyewitness to some of the most momentous events in Edward II's reign. As a young boy, he had been sent by his father, John I of Bohemia, to France as a ward of Charles IV's, accompanying his aunt Marie, who became Charles' short-lived second wife after his long-defunct marriage to Blanche of Burgundy was finally annulled. It was there that Charles IV became his godfather, conferred upon him the name Charles (his birth name had been Wenceslaus), and arranged his marriage to Charles IV's much younger first cousin, Blanche of Valois, daughter of his uncle, Charles, count of Valois, by his third wife, Mahaut of Châtillon. Charles was present as a boy of nine or ten when Isabella of France arrived to negotiate with her brother an end to the War of St Sardos, and when Edward of Windsor, only a few years older than him, arrived to perform homage to his uncle as his suzerain for the lands of Gascony. He would have witnessed, or at the very least have heard of, Isabella's infamous refusal to return to England so long as her husband remained in the company of Hugh le Despenser, as documented in the Vita Edwardi Secundi. Indeed, we know Charles was aware of these events, as he actually mentions them in the Vita Caroli Quarti. This is what he says about Isabella and her son:

"There was a great conflict between the king of England at that time and the king of France. The king of England had married the sister of the aforementioned king, but had driven her out of England, together with his first-born son, Edward. She came to her brother and remained in exile in France with her son. The King of France was angry at the expulsion of his sister and her son, and he asked my father-in-law Charles [of Valois], his uncle, to redress the shame which had been inflicted upon their family. The latter, when he had gathered an army, invaded Aquitaine and conquered almost all of it, except for Bordeaux and some other fortifications and castles. When Charles returned in triumph to France, he gave the daughter of his daughter, the countess of Hainaut (the sister of my wife), in marriage to the son of the aforementioned king of England, Edward, who was still in exile; and then he sent him, together with his escort, to England. He prevailed over his father, took him captive, deposed him, and set the crown upon his own head. That same year, the father of the new king was murdered while in prison."

I have posted this exact excerpt once before, but it still utterly floors me just how... wrong he is. Keep in mind that Charles of Bohemia was a first-hand witness of these events. He knew Charles IV and Charles, count of Valois personally. He was a boy at the time, yes, writing decades later, and no one would expect his memory to be perfect, but he doesn't even get the broad shape right. He says the War of St Sardos was begun in retribution for the expulsion of Isabella and Edward of Windsor from the English court; in reality, the War of St Sardos began when a French bastide was constructed in Gascony and torn down by the local populace, providing a pretext for Charles IV to confiscate Gascony and Ponthieu after Edward II had already been prevaricating about coming to France to perform homage for those lands. Isabella was, of course, sent to negotiate a peace settlement, and Edward of Windsor was sent to perform homage on his father's behalf. He also paints his own father-in-law Charles, count of Valois as the main architect of the deposition and the Hainault alliance. In reality he had already died in 1325, before any of that had even occured. He characterises Edward of Windsor as the primary force behind the invasion once it reached England, which, obviously, couldn't be further from the truth. He also says Edward II was killed within the same year as the invasion. Again, simply wrong.

Part of me wonders if his characterisation of Edward III is coloured by political hindsight. He and Edward III were not allies by any stretch of the imagination. Edward III was a close ally of Charles' great nemesis, the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV, who conferred on him the imperial vicarate. Charles and his father John also remained loyal to the French during the Hundred Years' War. John actually died fighting on the French side at the Battle of Crécy, so he definitely had a personal stake in the matter. But if he was deliberetely trying to cast Edward III in the worst light possible, why play up the role of his own father-in-law, Charles, count of Valois, to do so? Why unnecessarily taint his first wife's father by association? Is it possible this is just reflects the general outline of what Charles IV of France was telling people, or what rumours were spreading around the French court, even amongst people who should have been easily able to check? Was Isabella herself possibly misrepresenting her own situation to people? That hardly seems possible with her public statements and her having dressed in widow's weeds. Surely Charles of Bohemia would have at least seen her wearing those clothes at least once? Perhaps it is simply Charles relying on garbled memories from decades prior, but speaking at least for myself, I can remember events that occured when I was about nine or ten with much greater accuracy than this. I don't think having accurate memories from around ten is that abnormal.

What do you think was going on?

If I had a nickel for every time I had been oddly charmed by a historical ruler who was criticised for largely abnegating the responsibilities of rulership to pursue his own ideosyncratic hobbies, who developed all-consuming attachments to male favourites he subsequently raised far above the stations of their births, his last favourite in particular being a deeply ruthless and unscrupulous man who served as his royal chamberlain, who allegedly either was the ruler's lover himself or who pimped out his wife to be his lover, the ruler's reign ultimately ending in catastrophe, with him being overthrown and murdered, I'd have two nickels. Which is not a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.

Of course, in the Byzantine Emperor Michael III's case, he was betrayed and brutally murdeted by his own ruthless and unscrupulous male favourite, Basil the Macedonian, after Michael began turning his attentions towards another male favourite. Say what you will anout Hugh le Despenser the Younger, at least he never betrayed Edward II, even when the ship was going down.

​

Joanna I of Naples' entire life was absolutely insane and it is a travesty it is not better known. Apologies for the long post but the sheer amount of chaos in her life is just breathtaking.

Right off the bat, she comes to the throne with a succession crisis. Basically, her great-grandfather, Charles II of Naples, was married to Maria of Hungary, and after her brother, Ladislaus IV of Hungary, died childless, Maria decided to claim the Hungarian throne for her eldest son Charles Martel, and then, after his death, for his son, their grandson Charles Robert (side note, Charles Robert’s sister was Clementia of Hungary, who was Louis X of France’s replacement wife after the Tour de Nesle affair). Charles Robert successfully pressed his claim and became Charles I of Hungary, but his grandfather Charles II of Naples had decided to pass over him to instead give Naples to his own younger son, Robert, clearly thinking his grandson had enough on his plate with the Hungarian claim. This started a lot of bad blood between the Neapolitan and Hungarian branches of the family, and so Robert, now Robert I of Naples, arranged a marriage between his granddaughter and heiress, Joanna, and Charles I of Hungary’s son, Andrew, to repair relations between the two branches.

This marriage, however, was a shambles. After Robert I died and Joanna succeeded as Queen of Naples in her own right at only 17, Andrew demanded to be made King of Naples by right of his marriage to her, which the late King Robert I had explicitly barred from happening. Andrew and his Hungarian courtiers were widely hated in Naples and seen as churlish and unsophisticated. Joanna herself had little time for him, and later began an affair with her half-cousin, Louis, Prince of Taranto. Eventually, Andrew, aged only seventeen, was strangled to death and flung outside a window. It was widely suspected that Joanna herself had ordered his assasination, and his older brother Louis, now Louis I of Hungary, was livid. He revived his own claim to the throne of Naples and invaded to seek revenge for his brother’s death, forcing Joanna to flee to her lands in Provence, in modern-day France. There, she was forced to sell the city of Avignon to the Pope in order to get him to declare her innocent of her husband’s murder. In the meantime, Louis I of Hungary had been forced to return to Hungary after an outbreak of the Black Death in Naples, allowing her to return.

After Andrew’s death, Joanna had married Louis of Taranto, who acted as her great defender. Eventually, he was declared her co-ruler and crowned King Louis I of Naples by right of his marriage to her. Surely, now, Joanna has the chance to finally begin her reign in earnest, right? LOL Nope. Louis immediately turned on her, stripped her of all her power, purged the Neapolitan court of her allies, and effectively treated her as his prisoner. Meanwhile Louis I of Hungary invaded Naples again, with Louis I of Naples just barely defeating him. As if to add to their troubles, the Pope then excommunicated them for failing to lay the annual tributes they owed (as the Kingdom of Naples was considered a vassal of the Papacy), forcing them to go back to Avignon to resolve the issue. Eventually, Louis I of Naples died, and Joanna, now free, actually was able to start ruling now. And by all accounts, she was actually pretty good at it! And so she ruled her realm, happily and securely, until the end of her days. Oh wait actually no.

All of Joanna’s children from her previous marriages had died young, and so it was determined that she would need to remarry to secure the succession. For this, rather inexplicably, she chose James IV, the titular King of Majorca. I stress that he was the titular King of Majorca, as his father, James III, had been killed in battle and his realm had been annexed by Peter IV of Aragon. James himself had been confined in a small iron cage for over a decade before he had escaped and fled to Naples, and the experience... affected his mental health, to say the least. According to a letter Joanna herself sent to the Pope, James began acting erratically only eight days into the marriage, and demanded a more substantial role in Naples’ governance. Joanna, unsurprisingly given her experiences with her first and second husbands, refused outright, and so a dissatisfied James instead left to attempt to reclaim his kingdom. His attempt was a consummate failure, and he ended up getting captured by Henry II of Castile, with Joanna forced to pay a ransom to free him. He then promptly wandered off again to try to reclaim his lands once more, only to die in the process. Their marriage had been childless. By now, Joanna was in her 40s and there was no longer any realistic chance of her having any more children. She did, however, marry a final time to Otto, the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg. He was a middle-aged widower himself, and, at least this time around, Joanna seems to have finally found a man who wasn’t a wrong’un. So, does she finally get to live out her remaining years in peace? The answer, I’m afraid, is an emphatic no.

In 1377, Pope Gregory XI finally returned the papal court to its ancient seat in Rome after 66 years of it being located in Avignon. He died the next year, and the Roman populace, intent on ensuring that the next Pope would remain in Rome, intimidated the College of Cardinals into electing the Archbishop of Bari, Bartolomeo Prignano, as Pope Urban VI. A substantial number of the cardinals, however, felt that the validity of the election had been compromised due to the duress they had been subjected to. A group of these cardinals then elected their own preferred candidate, Robert, Count of Geneva, as Pope Clement VII. (Anti-)Pope Clement VII was forced to flee from his prior base in Anagni and instead went to Naples, where Joanna received him as an honoured guest. He then returned to Avignon under the patronage of Charles V of France and established his own papal court there, marking the beginning of what would be known as the Western Schism, wherein christendom was divided between the adherents of the Roman popes and the Avignon popes. As Joanna had taken Clement VII’s side in the schism, Urban VI responded by excommunicating her (for the second time!), declaring the throne of Naples vacant, and bestowing it upon her second cousin, Charles of Durazzo.

Joanna responded to this by disinheriting Charles and instead adopting as her designated heir Louis, Duke of Anjou, the brother of Charles V of France. Charles of Durazzo then rallied his forces against Joanna, and, with the support of her perennial enemy, Louis I of Hungary, resolved to depose Joanna and seize what he believed to be his rightful crown. Joanna’s husband, Otto of Brunswick, attempted to rally forces against him, but was defeated. Charles eventually conquered Naples and triumphed over Joanna, placing her under house arrest. At this point, Louis of Anjou decided to finally intervene to rescue Joanna, and began organising a relief effort for her. Charles of Durazzo, to preempt this, had Joanna herself smothered to death. She was 56 years old and had been Queen of Naples for 39 years. Charles succeeded her as Charles III of Naples. Louis of Anjou failed to claim Naples off of Charles, but his descendants would continue attempting to prosecute the claim to Naples they inherited from him.

Remember: no matter how bad things might seem in your life, at least you're not Joanna I of Naples.

But it's ok cause you got to found a college at Cambridge! Also you're indirectly the source of the name Clarence. Hooray for legacy!

​

Henry VIII faces this situation by the mid-1520s:

Princess Mary is his only surviving legitimate child and his heiress presumptive. Her marriage will inevitably determine England’s geopolitical alignment. She cannot marry into the Houses of Valois or Habsburg without risking England becoming permanently subordinated to either France or the Empire, which is particularly humiliating in the case of the Valois, who have illegitimately usurped the French throne according to England; the Portuguese House of Aviz are themselves bound to the Habsburgs via their own marital alliances; minor German and Italian potentates offer minimal benefits and are embroiled in the Franco-Imperial rivalry regardless. The princes of the Schmalkaldic League, as well as Denmark and Sweden, are obviously unacceptable for doctrinal reasons to Henry at this point in time, and would in any case constrain Henry into an aggressive posture against Charles V, preventing the diplomatic flexibility key to England's survival in this period. Mary marrying a German prince more generally would in any circumstance risk a repeat of the Aquitaine situation with France but for the German state in question with Charles V as suzerain of the Empire. He would demand homage and threaten confiscation accordingly. The only truly ideal prospective husband is his nephew, James V of Scotland, which would be appropriate to her rank and wouldn't risk foreign domination due to Scotland’s relative weakness. This, however, is foreclosed by the Treaty of Rouen, which Scotland signed with France in 1517 to maintain the Auld Alliance, stipulating that James V is to marry an unspecified daughter of François I (he later marries Madeleine of Valois in 1537). After the humiliation of the Battle of Flodden in 1513, Scotland had no appetite whatsoever to be subordinated to England, its traditional enemy.

Aside from foreign candidates, she cannot marry a domestic candidate without provoking chaos by elevating a specific noble family to quasi-royal status, which would provoke factional resentment even more acutely than the rise of the Woodville family in the 15th century did. A fortiori, civil war would have ensues. She cannot marry her illegitimate half-brother Henry FitzRoy. That would be incest. Nor can she marry her cousin Reginald Pole, as his royal blood comes from his descent from George, Duke of Clarence, who was attainted and executed in 1478. That attainder was precisely the legal ground on which Edward, Earl of Warwick was passed over for both Richard III and Henry VII. Repealing that attainder would also have reopened the very sensitive issue of Warwick's execution by Henry VII. Other than Reginald, the other sons of the Countess of Salisbury are already married. The only other male of collateral descent from the royal line is Edward Courteney, who was only born in circa 1327 and would have had no guarantee of reaching adulthood. Henry cannot simply just designate Henry FitzRoy or any other bastard he might have his heir by fiat, since the factor of illegitimacy will inevitably result in people championing Mary's claim and having a canonically unimpeachable reason to do so, especially with the international support her claim would receive as opposed to FitzRoy.

Therefore, Mary will inevitably succeed Henry VIII as Queen Regnant unless displaced by a male heir. Ctherine cannot provide that male heir, as her last recorded pregnancy, resulting in a stilborn girl, was in 1518, and by the early 1520s they had ceased regular marital relations. Nevertheless, Catherine is alive and physically healthy, she could easily live for years or decades, rendering the crisis more acute as Mary begins to enter marriageable age. Henry cannot guarantee that he will be able to keep her unmarried indefinitely, as, if England suffers military reverses, a victorious power could obligate him to offer her via treaty terms.

Credit where credit's due, Henry knows all of this. He says as much in the introduction to the 1532 pamphlet A Glasse of the Truth:

"For tho we haue a female heyre, whiche is bothe indued with moche ver­tue & grace in many dootes and gyftes, yet if a male might be atteyned it ware moch more sure, if we well perpende and pondre many vrgent & wayghtie causes. Amongest whiche this one, is depely to be forsene, that if the female heyre, shall, chaunce to rule, she can nat cotinue longe without an husbande. whiche by goddes lawe, muste than be her gouernour and heed, and so finally shall directe this re­alme. But who that shulde be,with the contentement of the subiectes, me thin­keth, it were harde to excogitate. For proximitie of blode, is to great a lette to some, otherwise mete for that purpose, except we wolde be so beestly to put our necke eftsones in the snare of this erro­nious prohibited errour, whiche is, and hathe ben alwayes detested by the moste parte of all the famous clerkes of christendome. The punisshement whereof, were to terrible to be suffered, and also to ab­hominable to be harde of, emonges chri­sten folke. On thother side, to other some, it were daungerous, leste we shulde make the superiours to vs, ouer whome, we clayme superioritie, seynge the manne must rule the woman. Others outwarde mete personages our sklender wittes can nat comprehende. And as touchinge any mariage within this realme, we thinke, it were harde to deuise any condigne and able person, for so highe an enterprise, moche harder, to finde one, with whome the holle realme wolde & coulde be con­tented to haue him ruler and gouernour. Wherfore we thinke the establysshement of titles is nat so surely rooted nor yet so entierlye mainteyned by the female as by male. Whiche well consydered syns the vnion of all titles do remayne and be collocate in him onely, we oughte of duetie if oure wittes may thereto ex­tende) to excogitate all wayes to vs pos­sible, howe we might atteyne the succes­sion of heyres male."

He is, here, quite explicitly referencing the impossibilty of marrying Mary to Henry FitzRoy (the "erroneous prohibited error" being incest), as well as the untenability of her prior betrothal to Henri, Duke of Orléans (the future Henri II) as a permanent solution ("lest we should make the superiors to us [those] over whom we claim superiority" means risking Henri becoming King of England jure uxoris, a humiliating inversion of the old Plantagenet claim to the French throne through Isabella of France).

Indeed, exactly this sort of scenario almost came true with Mary and Philip's marriage; however, that marriage was only ever accepted because there wasn't a direct risk of personal union so long as Don Carlos was alive as the heir apparent to Spain. Given that Don Carlos ended up dying childless, it was only the biological accident of Mary's sterility that prevented a personal union that would have turned England into a permanent Spanish client. Had they had children, they would have inherited England and the Spanish Empire in personal union. The terms of Mary and Philip's marital treaty did nothing to solve or ameliorate the issue of a personal union vested in a single individual beyond a vague request that they respect the customs and privileges of each of their individual realms. That would have meant next to nothing in actual fact, just as the privilages of the Seventeen Provinces meant nothing to Philip when they proved inconvenient.

Based on all of this, I simply do not think Henry can be faulted for initiating annulment proceedings. It was, by any reasonable measure, a geopolitical necessity. The papacy had granted transparently politically motivated annullments before. Pope Alexander VI annulled the married of Louis XII of France and Joan of Valois to allow him to marry Anne of Brittany and thereby maintain control over the Duchy of Brittany for France. The pretexts in that case were even more transparently flimsy than in Henry's case. Say what you will about his subsequent actions, and there is indeed a lot you can say about him, I don't think Henry really had much choice in the matter concerning the annulment. Given how overdetermined the annulment was, I doubt that his passion for Anne Boleyn was the primary motivation of what occured. His fondness of Anne was certainly what made her his desired replacement in his mind, but the annulment would have occured regardless of whether Henry had become infatuated with her. I think her structural importance to the Great Matter is somewhat exaggerated.

If so, do you use the likenesses of other, more visually well-represented individuals to imagine what they'd look like? I'm not necessarily asking who you would cast as either Edward or Isabella per se, as obviously there are a lot of other considerations relevant there.

For example: I have a very particular mental image of Edward of Carnarvon, but it doesn't really correspond to anyone else directly. On the other hand, my internal model of Isabella corresponds exactly to the famed French actress Isabelle Adjani, particularly in her portrayal of Marguerite de Valois in La Reine Margot, albeit with her wearing the fashions of the 14th century. I'd be very interested to see how others imagine these figures when discussing them, if only to see how likely different our mental images of them are!

Also, apologies if you've already seen this post, I have tried to post this before only for it to be swallwed by Reddit for some reason lol

A stained glass image of Hugh le Despenser the Younger at Tewkesbury Abbey, likely commissioned by his widow, Eleonor de Clare.

From their marriage in 1302 until sometime in late 1322, Isabella of France seems to have been a consummate political partner to her husband. She remained unswervingly loyal to him during his conflicts with the Lords Ordainers in the early 1310s and with the Contrariants throughout the Despenser War. We see this no more acutely than in her (quite ballsy) decision to use herself, in 1321, as bait against Bartholomew de Badlesmere's wife Margaret de Clare, engineering the confrontation that occurred between them at Leeds Castle in order to draw out the King's baronial enemies. However, by December 1322, something had clearly gone wrong. Sometime that month, Isabella absented herself from court, and on the 23rd Edward II announced that Isabella was undertaking a pilgrimage to various sites across the country; something, as Kathryn Warner notes, she appears not to have actually done.

By 1323, they seem, at least superficially, to have reconciled with one another; however, as later events would show, Isabella was still clearly very unhappy with the situation, even if she had taken to dissembling her true feelings. Neither of them conceived a child in the roughly four years since Joan of the Tower's birth in 1321, and, of course, the King apparently lashed out at his wife due to the outbreak of the War of St Sardos, confiscating her lands and instead compensating her with an annual income from the Exchequer of approximately £2,613. The main negative outcome of this was almost certainly not financial, but political. It prevented her from strengthening her broader affinity and patronage networks through rewarding her supporters with appointments on her lands. In the meanwhile, Hugh le Despenser, Edward II's current favourite, consolidated his authority through monopolising access to the King through his position as Chamberlain, even to the point of restricting Isabella's access to her husband. Of course, Isabella was later sent to broker a peace with her brother and the rest, as they say, was history.

But what actually changed in 1322? Why is it that Isabella found herself unable to establish a working relationship with him the way she was with her husband's previous favourites? There are multiple theories we can explore. One might say that it was inevitable: Hugh was simply so incorrigibly rapacious that his and Isabella's interests were always going to be on a headlong collision course with one another. This, however, simply does not persuade me. Whatever you want to say about Hugh, the man could work with people when it suited his interests to do so. He worked with the likes of Edmund FitzAlan, Robert de Baldock and Walter de Stapleton. He obviously worked well with his father, and worked very well indeed with Edward II. Though, through what means, we can only speculate 😉. Regardless, the point is, I think Hugh would have seen he had good reasons from the outset to want to cultivate Isabella. There was no a priori reason why she couldn't have benefited from his rapacity or why he couldn't have shared some of his spoils with her to win her over. But if that's the case, then, presumably something must have happened to pit the two against each other. But what, though, precisely?

We know that some early tensions may have existed between Hugh le Despenser and the Queen. Sometime in the early 1320s, Edward II transferred Wallingford Castle, which had previously been assigned to the Queen for life, to Hugh. It might be notable that Wallingford Castle was where Isabella and her adherents spent the festive season in 1326 after their successful coup against the Despenser regime. Nevertheless, however irksome this may have been for Isabella, I am inclined to doubt that this would have been sufficient to ignite the subsequent feud that ensued between them, given how deeply felt it clearly was.

The Annales Paulini, however, records a more consequential incident. According to it, sometime in August 1321, Isabella, alongside the Earls of Pembroke and Richmond, begged on her knees for Edward to exile the Despensers. Did Hugh the Younger perhaps remember this as a slight against him and take revenge against Isabella after Edward was able to recall him and reinstate his position? Possibly; but there is no actual evidence for this, as far as I am aware of. Regardless, Isabella's intercession here almost certainly wasn't an expression of any personal hostility to Hugh at this stage, and more so a case of political theatre to allow  Edward to capitulate to the demands of the Marcher lords while saving face. They had been enraged after the lordship of Gower had been arrogated by Edward, presumably to grant to Hugh, in defiance of Marcher privileges, resulting in them ransacking and occupying the Despensers' lands in the March and demanding their exile. By August, Edward was under immense pressure, and Hugh himself seems to have understood this; it's not like there's any evidence he held a grudge against Edward for what happened, and the same logic would have applied to Isabella.

There is, however, another famous incident, and one, I believe, that does the explanatory work we need. In September 1322, following the crushing defeat of Edward II's Contrariant foes at the Battle of Boroughbridge, the King decided to capitalise on his newfound political strength and organise a new Scottish campaign. Unfortunately, if predictably, the 1322 campaign was another complete disaster, and soon enough a Scottish counter-invasion had been launched into the north of England. Isabella of France, who had somewhat inexplicably been staying at the coastal Tynemouth Priory at the time, was cut off from the English forces by the Scottish invasion, and was eventually forced to flee on a commandeered vessel by sea. According to one of the few sources that mentioned this incident, one of her ladies in waiting died (possibly of injury) during the voyage and another went into premature labour and died after they disembarked at Scarborough.

We next hear of this incident in 1326, when Hugh was accused in his trial of having "falsely and treacherously counselled our lord the king to leave my lady the queen in peril of her person in the priory of Tynemouth in Northumberland... and in such great misfortune and peril of her person, my lady who was your liege lady, by your treacherous deed might have been lost, to the perpetual dishonour and damage of the king and his realm, if God had not sent her deliverance by sea, thereby rescuing her from danger to her life and saving her honour, in such great grief of heart and body that no good lady of her estate and nobility should have at any time."

Was this true, however? Almost certainly not. Again, as Kathryn Warner points out, had Isabella been captured, the Scots would have demanded a truly ruinous sum for her to be ransomed from them, which was directly antithetical to Hugh's primary ambition in life; the acquisition of ever more financial resources. Indeed, we know that Isabella had not been abandoned by Edward or Hugh at all. The initial plan had been for the Earls of Richmond and Atholl to go and take Hugh's retainers to Tynemouth to defend her, only for Edward to later instead charge the visiting Henri de Sully, Grand Butler of France, with her rescue, as he would be ‘more agreeable than others' to Isabella. De Sully, however, like the Earl of Richmond, was captured by the Scots at Old Byland and never reached Isabella, thus necessitating her escape by sea. The two were, however, ransomed back. Edward's change of plan may have simply been because, as a Frenchman with news from her natal family on the continent, he might have thought Isabella would simply like his company more. Nevertheless, it seems plausible to me that she may have felt the inevitable delay this change caused was what had brought her life into danger. Given that Hugh's retainers were ultimately under his command, she may have indeed held him responsible for the change in plan. Nevertheless, this is all speculation, as none of the surviving sources give us any direct insight into what Isabella specifically believed, or what she had even heard, about what had gone wrong at Tynemouth.

Regardless, whatever had actually happened, Isabella seems to have returned from Tynemouth implacably convinced that Hugh had intentionally jeopardised her life. When we appreciate this, I think the nature of Isabella's progressive marginalisation by Hugh, and her increasing drift from Edward, starts to become far more intelligible. Imagine yourself in Hugh's position in 1322. How would allowing Isabella, believing what she does about you, access to the King be in your interests? It isn't, not remotely. This brings me to my core conceit here. I think Hugh le Despenser's marginalisation of Isabella began not as an aggressive measure, but as a defensive one. A response, essentially, to the beliefs she had somehow acquired about him, and the risk they posed that she would attempt to turn Edward against him when given the chance. From here, I think it is quite clear a vicious cycle was born. Hugh's defensive actions taken against Isabella are interpreted by her as confirming her suspicions about him and his intentions, which further reinforced her conclusions about him, which, in turn, prompted him to become more diligent and intent on marginalising her to protect his status. 

To be clear, I'm not arguing that Hugh was some misunderstood angel. Far from it. Hugh was, undoubtedly, a deeply morally compromised and unscrupulous individual. I'm merely arguing that the degeneration of Isabella and Hugh's relationship may perhaps have been more complex than Nasty Meanie Favourite Makes Poor Queen's Life Hell For No Reason. What do you think?