The game is simple - match one of our big, giant personalities to one or more of the seven deadly sins:
Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, Pride, Envy, Sloth
An old stained glass window and a newer one from Gloucester Cathedral. Edward II is buried to the left of the big, older stained glass window. Robert Curthose’s effigy is just outside the chapel with the newer stained glass window.
You know what to do. Just for laughs, even though the scenario portrayed was anything but light hearted. But those facial expressions do perhaps lend themselves to comedy.
The execution of Hugh the Younger.
EDIT: The guy with the red coat and black chaperon could respond to his pal with 4.
Or three evils?
There was a ten year period between Piers Gaveston's murder and the rise of Hugh Despenser the Younger wherein court gossip wondered who was going to rise to be the new Gaveston. Popular choices included Roger Damory, Hugh Audley, William Montague and the Italian money guy Antonio Pessagno.
The smart money was on the two rising knights, Roger Damory and Hugh Audley, both of whom Edward II married to his nieces Elizabeth and Margaret, both of whom were in line to a portion of the massive De Clare fortune.
Yet, quoting Seymour Phillips (from a book I don't have access to) Frances Underhill says Phillips calls Damory "malignant" "irresponsible" and "dangerous." Elizabeth resisted marrying him to the degree where she may have eloped against Edward's wishes with her second husband and after he died, she continued to resist, until she relented.
And a comment from our sub u/AnantaPurima, points out that Damory and Audley took their grievances out on the tenets during their rebellion, something Hugh the Younger never did.
And remember, none of Edward's barons or their wives or Edward's queen didn't covet lands and power. Most or all of them appear to have had a vindictive streak.
Hugh was brutal. Hugh was greedy. Hugh manipulated and controlled Edward II, with the help of his wife and his father.
Hugh also was bad at reading the room, terrible at compromise and good at getting everyone to turn against him.
But would Damory have done the same or worse, if it was Elizabeth and himself in the positions that Hugh the Younger and Eleanor found themselves?
Would it have been worse for the tenets if Damory or Audley had found favor?
Further Reading:
Phillips, J.R.S, Aymer de Valence: Earl of Pembroke 1307-1324. Baronial Politics in the Reign of Edward II, Oxford University Press, 1972. (This is the one I don't have)
Phillips, J. R. S.Edward II. Yale University Press, 2011.
Underhill, Frances A. For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady of Clare. St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Everyone who knows anything about the fourteenth century knows Hugh Despenser the Younger was the worst. I've been reading Frances Underhill's biography of Elizabeth de Clare and it's probably the clearest and best account of Hugh's brutal crimes I've read.
And yet....
His avarice left England's coffers filled, to the point that even Mortimer & Isabella's avarice didn't leave Edward III broke when he finally took the reins.
His children all seemed to turn out fine, and Huchon, his oldest son, was so liked that John Felton and his garrison refused to give the young man up for execution.
In an era when greed and corruption was normalized, he was the best at it.
Somebody with an iron fist had to run the country when the king was busy thatching roofs, swimming and digging ditches.
He really seemed to enjoy being evil, even with some wit at times.
There are many examples of kings hating their queens. Which queens hated their kings?
This is R.M. Haines, on page 324 in his 2003 book 'King Edward II Edward of Caernarfon His Life, His Reign and its Aftermath' describing the chronicler Geoffrey le Baker's version of the events leading to Isabella's invasion.
Baker is extremely critical of Isabella in his imaginative chronicle, written in the mid 14th century.
Thankfully, Haines does not seem to share this highly misogynistic view. Although he doesn't criticize it either...
Even the chroniclers and historians who despise Edward II admit that he loved his children and wanted the best for them. This included his young daughters, Eleanor and Joan, whom he planned to make Spanish queens.
Edward was so often caught up in the morass that was Scotland and France, it's easy to forget that he was half-Spanish through his mother - the only other half Spanish English monarch other than Mary I.
Anyway, the best way a Medieval monarch could provide for his daughter was to make her a queen. However, when Edward fell, his little daughters went from being the daughters of a king to the sisters of a king and the daughters of a disgraced former king. While still royal, their status had changed in a world where status meant everything.
Edward betrothed Eleanor to Alfonso XI of Castile, but after his downfall, she was married off at fourteen to Count Reinald II of Gelderland. They had two sons, though it wasn't a particularly happy marriage and legends swirl of marital conflict. Also, the two sons engaged in a bitter feud/civil war and neither produced a son, so the kingdom eventually went to a different relative. After she was widowed, Eleanor apparently lived in poverty and was too proud to ask her brother, Edward III, for help. She predeceased her mother Isabella, dying at 36.
And to be completely fair, Alfonso of XI was a crap husband to his eventual wife, Maria, and that couple produced a son known as Pedro the Cruel. So Eleanor may not have been better much off, but there was still more wealth and prestige there than in Gelderland.
Edward II planned to marry his little daughter Joan of the Tower to Pedro of Aragon, who was not a crap husband and ruled over a splendid kingdom. Instead, Joan married David of Scotland, son of her father's enemy Robert the Bruce. The pair were married as children, but as they grew up, they developed an aversion to one another. He had a mistress that he flaunted, and she clearly preferred being in England to Scotland. Worse, his reign was such a spectacular failure that he makes her father look like a political and military genius.
They spent some time exiled with her French relatives, before her brother captured him and clapped him in the Tower. She eventually went to live with her mother, with whom she was very close. She never had any children with David and died shortly after her mother.
Isabella of France could not have wanted this for her daughters, and one wonders if she ever felt any guilt as she watched both their lives implode. It speaks to the theory that she never wanted to depose her husband but things just got out of hand, because she knew how things worked and what their father's deposition would mean for her girls.
Sources:
Kathryn Warner's blog.
Phillips, J. R. S. Edward II. Yale University Press, 2011.
Image: Joan and David go to France, from Froissart.
There was some good debate yesterday in our sister sub at Which consorts hated their husbands? : r/UKmonarchs and with a question like that, Isabella was always likely to get a few mentions. Of course, as always, there are those who remain adamant that Isabella was horribly wronged throughout her marriage and that she absolutely hated her husband and wanted him to suffer the most painful death she could imagine, which is something all serious historians will deny. That's not to say they were some sort of dream couple either, but there were definitely nuances and they had some good years as well. Somehow even mentioning this harmless fact is seen as provocative to some people, who will start hurling abuse and accusations.
We occasionally see a few of these angry and confrontational people who believe in this relatively new fan fiction of Isabella's supreme victimhood turned into epic heroine who gets her revenge and then some in this sub as well, but their hateful and unpleasant attitude tend to get them banned. Rule number 1 is non-negotiable.
Historian Kathryn Warner has noticed this troubling modern trend to turn real history into made up entertainment. Here's what she has to say about it (abridged, original sources below).
A lot of the modern inventions about Edward II and Isabella of France's marriage make me deeply uncomfortable. According to some people, Isabella did not only endure the Worst Marriage Ever, she was raped, sexually assaulted, demeaned and humiliated. Piling utter humiliation on a woman, turning her husband into a nasty gay caricature who loathes women and who gets a kick out of demeaning his royal wife and queen in the coarsest, crudest way possible, is simply revolting.
The fiction about Edward giving Isabella's jewels to Gaveston was invented by Agnes Strickland in the nineteenth century. The idea that Isabella was forced to endure an excessively long wait for any income is not borne out by comparison with other grants of dower in the early fourteenth century (it took about three months, and the situation was complicated by the fact that Edward II's stepmother Marguerite, Isabella's aunt, was alive. Compare this to the more than two years Isabella forced her daughter-in-law Philippa of Hainault to wait for her own rightful lands). The tale that Edward abandoned Isabella weeping in May 1312 was based on one chronicler's confusion of events of 1312 and those of 1322, and is disproved by their own household accounts of that year which show that the royal couple left Tynemouth at the same time and that Isabella travelled by land to meet her husband a few days later, being in the first trimester of pregnancy and therefore deciding to avoid the North Sea.
The most egregious invention is the idea that Edward deliberately and cruelly removed Isabella's children from her, and since the late 1970s when this daft notion was first dreamed up by Paul Doherty, we've had novels where Isabella's young children are ripped, screaming, from their mother's arms, after Isabella has spent much of the novel telegraphing this cruelty by stating over and over how dreadful it would be if she lost her children. For pity's sake. The whole absurd melodrama of it all; it's less subtle than a sledgehammer.
There are some truly bizarre, even sickening fan fiction books out there written by people hellbent on portraying Isabella as some sort of long-suffering heroic martyr. We’re told that Isabella's husband permitted his own lover to assault her sexually or even to rape her, her own father and three older brothers do too in a series of popular recent novels, before Isabella marries Edward and when she is still only a child. Seriously, what the hell is this? Why does this happen? Why do people do this? Why do Isabella's fans feel this need to pile ever more abuse and humiliation on her? And why do people complain on the one hand about the 'sexual prejudices' suffered by Isabella but think it's a mighty fine idea to pile homophobic abuse on Edward II? Why is it OK to accuse people of deeply serious, violent crimes without the slightest evidence? Why is it seen as a good idea to rescue Isabella from the opprobrium heaped on her for so long by heaping it on her husband instead?
The whole thing is so childishly simplistic, no nuance, no depth, just idiotically one-dimensional Good People and Bad People. Even stuff like Isabella being forced to endure the company of Eleanor Despenser née de Clare, supposedly foisted on her by Edward and Hugh against her wishes, paints the queen as a helpless, passive victim who couldn't even choose who she wanted to spend time with. I just don't get why people do this. The absolute last thing Isabella of France was, was a helpless, passive victim.
After suffering so so so so so so so much at the hands of her nasty cruel perverted gay husband, the story goes, Isabella finally finds love and fulfilment and great sex in the arms of a strong manly virile heterosexual lover who is, conveniently enough, the exact opposite of Horrid Gay Edward. This is a narrative that's been created in fairly recent times and has had the names of real people added to it. It's not true. There's not one part of it that's even remotely close to being historically accurate.
Kathryn's comments on Alison Weir's homophobic paragraph (the second image in this post):
Isabella of France, one of the most awesome and powerful women in medieval English history, is written as a panting heroine from a bad 1950s bodice-ripper who 'surrenders herself' to Our Manly Hero's healing embraces. This is so, so bad it makes me want to bleach my brain. Make it stop make it stop make it stop.
There are of course far more examples of Isabella's super-tragic victimhood both from fiction and non-fiction, but I don't quite have the heart to get into any more now, because picking up books about Isabella of France involves having to read stuff like Edward II was 'too cowardly to become violent' with a woman and 'could not even beat his wife properly', and that raping a human being to death with a burning metal implement is 'ingenious', and I'm afraid I can't, I simply can't.
All of this 'Victim!Isabella' fan fiction is about as accurate as Braveheart.
Edward II: The Victimisation of Isabella of France
Edward II: A Sneer of Disdain: Isabella of France, the Victim
I bet Edward II had more impressive chairs. I can just hear Piers mumbling about this one and offering to sit on it instead.