u/AnantaPurima

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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?