Noble Blood - The She-Wolf, Her Husband, and Their Lovers

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

Isabella of France was a pre-teen when she came to England to marry King Edward II. Though the two had plenty in common, a series of betrayals would ultimately drive Isabella to crossing the sea with an invading force. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and pre-order its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. In 1326, the billowing sails of eight warships rose over the sea on the English horizon. They were flanked by 132 smaller vessels, all ready for an invasion. The ships had come from France. They had sailed from Flanders and were heading toward the Thames Estuary that September as summer turned to fall. They were coming to depose the King of England.

No invasion of England by sea had succeeded since the Norman conquest, 260 years, earlier in 1066. But this was no ordinary invasion by some hostile foreign power. The man leading the charge had been condemned to death, and he had been spared by the very king he was now coming to depose. But far more shocking was the woman standing next to him. She was the man's lover, an adulterous scandal. She was said to be among the most beautiful women in the world.

She had blonde hair blowing against her forehead now in the sea wind. She was dressed in widow's weeds, the black clothes of mourning. But her husband was alive, for now. Her name was Isabella. She had been born in France, but she wasn't some foreign usurper. She was the wife of King Edward II of England. She was the most treasonous queen in all of English history, born the daughter of the King of France, adored and then despised by her subjects.

Mother of the future sovereign, scorned and humiliated by an unpopular husband, more interested in having affairs with men than in her. She's known to history as a sinner, a Jezebel, maybe even a murderer. known in the end as the she-wolf of France. She was Isabella, Queen of England, and she was sailing from the continent with troops and her lover by her side and a steely glint in her eye,

ready to depose her king. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood. The little girl who would someday overthrow the king of England was born Isabel, Princess of France, around the year 1295. She was the daughter of Philip the Fair, the handsome and fearsome king of France. She was one of seven children, the only daughter to survive to adulthood. Her father had keen political designs for each of his children's marriages, which this podcast actually covered in our episode on the Tour-Denelle affair.

Suffice to say that in 1303, at only seven years old, as a prized princess, Isabella was betrothed to then-prince, Edward of England, who was 19. At the betrothal ceremony, Isabella made herself as tall as she could in front of an archbishop who was Edward's proxy. She put her little hand in the archbishop's big one and hoped with her child's heart, that her husband would be good to her when they finally met, that he would love her, that he would fulfill her father's hope for a future king of England descended from both the French and English lines. But she must have noticed that her future husband never sent her any gifts across the English Channel, nor any letters.

Even as a child, she may have wondered, why not? Five years later, she would find out. On January 25, 1308, 12-year-old Isabella formally married Edward, who was by then King of England. Despite the mismatch in age, Edward was a handsome groom. Isabella biographer Alison Weir describes the six-foot-tall Edward like a dang Disney prince for Isabella. Quote, he was well-proportioned and had curly, fair, shoulder-length, hair, with a mustache and beard. He was also well-spoken. His mother tongue was Norman French, and articulate, and he dressed elegantly, even lavishly. End quote. One limitation of histories this

old is we have very little insight into Isabella's thoughts around this time. Even the biographies and articles about her are frequently about her husband, which leaves a blank space in our understanding. The fact is that Isabella was 12 years old at her wedding to a man twice her age. Both Isabella's mother and her new husband's mother had been married by age 11. 12 was the youngest age at which the church permitted sex between husband and wife. Historians generally believe that Isabella and Edward didn't consummate the marriage on their wedding night. I can imagine a young Isabella who was grateful for this reprieve. Maybe she felt like a child thrown into a stranger's bed, albeit a bed that she had been

preparing for since youth. Maybe she viewed her new husband's restraint as chivalrous or loving. But that wasn't all it was. This podcast has covered the story of Edward II and his affair with the love of his life, his boyhood courtier, Pierce Gaviston. The fact that he's the tragic hero of one episode of this podcast and a side character in this one, it's just more proof that history can be told from many angles. Love for one person is heartache for another. The difference between comedy and tragedy is often just a matter of who your main character is. When Isabella arrived in England after the wedding, her husband greeted Gaviston with a degree of enthusiasm that shocked Isabella's relatives. Isabella had to watch as Gaville,

Avastin wore jewels that were part of her dowry, and he wore purple to the coronation, the color of royalty, as though he were the true spouse of Edward being elevated to the throne. For Isabella, it was embarrassing. She told her father that she was, quote, the most wretched of wives. She received no money from her husband. She was miserable. She wasn't the only one, the English barons all wanted the king's favorite, Gaviston, gone, and they got their way in 1308. Six months after Isabella arrived in England, Gaveston was banished from the country. With Gaviston gone, Isabella's husband warmed to her. He started giving her lands and money.

Wherever he traveled, she went with him. She may have felt like any girl who has a crush on a guy who has a crush on someone else. It hurts, yes, but maybe his affections can be turned. But then Edward brought Gaviston back. Everybody likes a catfight. Sensationalized history would have us believe that Isabella hated Gaviston to the end. Isabella was probably pained to see the return of her competition. But she was quite a bit older now with some relationship of her own with the king,

and she reached some equilibrium with Gaviston. It's worth noting that everyone in this saga, from Gaveston to the lovers of both king and queen that I'll mention later in this episode, was married to a member of the opposite sex and had children of their own. Once Gaveston came back, Isabella was kind to his pregnant wife.

She spent time with Gaveston. She may have even found him kind of amusing. But if Isabella mellowed, somewhat towards Galveston, the English courts as a whole did not. They wanted him gone for good, violently, if need be. As violence mounted around them in 1311 and 12, Isabella told her husband that she was pregnant, probably hoping that with that news, Edward would prioritize her protection. He didn't. He left her at Newcastle while he protected Gavin. Gaviston instead. Some piece of her must have learned. No matter how good her relationship with

Edward seemed, she would never really come first. Gaviston would be brutally executed on June 19, 1312. The details of that brutality belong to Edward's story, covered in another episode. This is Isabella's story, and here it's more interesting to imagine her reunion with her grieving husband in the aftermath. I wonder if she felt a victor's gladness at being the only remaining competitor for her husband's heart, or a wife's sorrow for her husband's grief, or maybe she felt the empathy of the fellow unlucky in love. Either way, five months later, at age 17, Isabella gave birth. birth to the heir to the throne, another Edward. She went on to have three more children with the king, and whether there was any love in the

act of conception or purely dynastic duty was a secret that died with their history. What's certain is that once Gaviston was out of the picture for good, there was at least mutual respect between Isabella and her husband. Isabella was smart and savvy, versed in both English and and French territorial and political interests. She was also impressively involved in negotiations and diplomacy. Edward, never one of the greats when it came to Statecraft, seemed to like having his queen involved.

They simply liked each other. They wrote letters to each other anytime they were apart. They played gambling games together as a team. It would have been hard to imagine that this beautiful woman laughingly playing games chance beside her husband would someday gather the flotilla that would overthrow him. But maybe there were hints. At one point, giggling, playing a game, Isabella's ladies fake captured the king and wouldn't let him go until the fake ransom had been paid. Some games seem more

ominous in retrospect. Isabella spent years developing mutual respect with her husband, maybe even genuine affection, so she must have been devastated when she learned that his dalliances did not die with Gaviston. Not yet a decade after Gaviston's death, Edward took a new lover, Hula Dispenser, Royal Chamberlain. This dispenser was nothing like Isabella's earlier rival, Gaviston, who honestly seemed kind of meek, almost cute by comparison. Dispenser was a cruel and violent man. man, especially depraved toward women. He had one widow tortured until all four limbs were broken, and she was said to have lost her mind. Isabella hated him. Dispenser began to turn her husband against her. It's possible that dispenser actually sexually harmed Isabella in some way,

although the details aren't quite clear. As relations between France and England worsened, Dispenser whispered in the king's ear and Isabella lost everything. King Edward asked the Pope to annul their marriage, though the Pope declined. Isabella's lands were taken from her. French servants who had come to England with her when she was 12 years old were taken from her household. Finally, her three younger children were taken from her, on suspicion that she would incite them to treason because she's a French woman. you tell someone what they are enough, they might believe you.

She didn't deserve this treatment. Isabella was the Queen of England, the daughter of King Philip of France. She had spent years giving Edward children, doing his diplomacy, playing games with him, delighting side by side at the animals in their menagerie. No, she deserved a husband like her father had been, who never remarried after the death of his wife, Isabella's mother, loyal to the end. Isabella's father was harsh as a king,

but as a father, he was in touch with his daughter constantly. He mentioned Isabella's name in every written record of French concessions to England. Knowing that she loved books, he made sure she got the gift of an ornately illustrated apocalypse. When she burned her hand,

he sent doctors to attend to her in England. Isabella's husband didn't show loyalty anywhere nearly that much. But Isabella's husband had never been loyal to her. So why, she thought, should she be loyal to him? Isabella started smiling. It hurt far more to have lost her husband's respect as a 30-year-old adult than it had been as a child to have never had it. But she played it nice, so nice that Edward himself allowed his beautiful, smiling wife to go alone to France, ostensibly as a peacemaker between the nations. A nightmare dressed like a daydream. When Isabella arrived in France, she kissed her brother, King Charles IV, who looked so much

like their departed father. She breathed in the sweet scent of home, and soon enough, she encountered a man named Roger Mortimer. He had once been a friend and ally of King Edward, until, under dispenser's cruel regime, he turned against the English king. They had this in common, Mortimer and Isabella. Mortimer had once been sentenced to death for treason against the king, but Edward had commuted the sentence. He could not have known at the time that he was sparing the life of the man who would become his wife's lover. Yes, Isabella started an affair with Mortimer, fueled by the aphrodisiac of shared hatred for her husband. There's something almost tragic that Isabella and Edward had so much in common. Both were trapped in a marriage when

their real devotions were elsewhere. Both turned to an adulterous affair. We can imagine in a different life, in a different time in history with a different understanding of sexuality, the wife and husband might have divorced, might have even remained married but understood their desires for people that their spouses could never be. They had respected each other once upon a time, but that time was now long past. By 1325, Isabella and Mortimer were playing it very smart, while at the exact same moment, Edward played it very dumb. Edward sent his first-born son to visit Isabella in France,

which put all the power in her hand. She now had the heir. The king pretty soon realized his mistake. He started sending a little bit of a little bit. He started sending letter after letter to Isabella, to Charles, to anyone he could think of. He asked Isabella to come home to England with their son. She sent back demure letters with feeble excuses. Oh, I couldn't possibly leave France.

My brother wants us to stay. Edward started to get very nervous. He was right to. Isabella was hanging out in France with English exiles who hated Edward. She was wearing the black garb of a widow, major alarm bells. It was probably seen as a symbol of her displeasure with her husband's infidelity, but it was also a threat. If she wasn't a widow yet, she would be one soon. She would make sure of it. Edward kept asking Isabella to return with their son, and Isabella kept defying him. It became like a game of keepaway. Finally, she made it plain.

She would not return to England except upon, quote, the destruction of Hugh. At this point, Edward really and rightly freaked out. On December 1st, 1325, his bishops wrote to Isabella, quote, the whole country is disturbed by the answers which you have lately sent to our Lord King, and because you delay your return out of hatred for Hewla Dispenser, we warn you as a daughter to return to our Lord King, your husband. It's striking that Edwards Bishops wrote from the perspective of a father figure to this woman whose father had actually helped her in her life.

Isabella knew whose daughter she really was. So she and Mortimer drew up plans. They would invade England by sea. At the time, it had been 200 years since the last successful sea invasion. Far, but not so far outside living history, that it couldn't be done again. They gathered their eight warships and 132 support vessels. Together they set sail. They landed in England two days later, September 24th, 1326.

As far as invasions go, it was a shockingly easy and bloodless one. As had happened with Gaviston, Isabella's hatred of Dispenser matched the public sentiment. Under dispenser's influence, Edward had become a tyrant. The people were on her side. Isabella and Mortimer captured Cambridge, then Oxford. Militias that were called in defense of the king, instead defected to the side of the invaders. When Isabella found out what her husband did next, perhaps she felt only a superior, justified kind of vengeance. Perhaps she felt a twinge of sorrow at how predictable her husband was, how well she knew his heart,

how much she had changed while he had not. As his reign collapsed around him, Edward left with dispenser, just as he had with Gaviston years before, when she'd been left alone and pregnant with their son. Isabella's husband had never been a great tactician. His actions gave her the chance to claim that he had abandoned his people, given up his throne. No one was willing to fight for him.

The will of the nation was with Isabella. Dispenser was captured and brutally executed. He was hanged, castrated, and burned. Edward II was kept under guard in Berkeley Castle. On January 25, 1327, Edward III was proclaimed King of England. As he was only 14, not yet of age, someone else would have to rule as regent in his stead. while one woman was up to the task, Queen Isabella had invaded. With popular support, she had deposed her husband. She, essentially, took the crown. Queen Mother Isabella came to rule on behalf of her

son on a wave of public popularity. But the public is fickle. On September 21st, 1327, former King Edward II was murdered in his captivity. It was said that he was suffocated by a pillow to the mouth and a heavy table to the stomach and then killed, my apologies, by a hot iron up the rectum. Rumors swirled that Isabella and Mortimer had secretly ordered the king's death. After all, a living former king who had been deposed by his French wife and her lover would always be a threat to their rule. The public is fickle, after all. This was the Middle Ages. What if opinion had turned?

What if over time, Edward came to be seen as the wronged party, and he gathered support? God knew if he were reinstated, it would be Isabella's head that rolled. But whoever was responsible for the loss of Isabella's husband, he was gone. Isabella was making royal decisions, and six months later, In 1328, she supported the Treaty of Edinburgh and Northampton, which recognized Scotland's independence and promised her daughter to the son of the Scottish king. The English public felt betrayed. Their support for Isabella fell apart.

In an ironic twist, Isabella did what her husband had done in the face of public disapproval. She unjustly elevated the status of her lover to the consternation. of the public and the pain of her family. Amidst calls for Mortimer's banishment, Isabella defiantly gave him an earldom that she invented for him, pretty much exactly in the mold of Edward's defiant elevation

of Gaviston and then dispenser. Isabella and her husband really did have a lot in common. And just as Isabella had done to her husband, her son did to her. In 1330, he took Isabella's favorite away. Mortimer was convicted of treason and hanged, naked in London, where his body was left dangling for two days. And as for Isabella, for a woman regarded by history as evil, she got off pretty lightly in life. Queens of England have been beheaded and imprisoned for far less than deposing a king alongside an adulterous lover.

But Edward III made sure that his mother was barely even mentioned in Mortimer's trial. Isabella was briefly placed under house arrest, but she lived out the majority of her next 28 years in freedom. Isabella died on August 22, 1358, at 63 years old. Her body was embalmed and, per her own instructions, wrapped in her wedding cloak. It was an odd move for a woman who had been so betrayed by her husband. In the end, she wanted to dress as his bride. History was not kind to Isabella.

The beautiful daughter of the fair king was called Ugly, a sinner, a Jezebel. Until 2006, she had no published biography. But her influence lasted centuries. When her brother, Charles IV, died, she insisted that her son had the rightful claim to the French crown, which eventually set off the hundred years' war between England and France. She instigated the first parliamentary deposition of a king, which set a precedent that would depose five more kings over the next 300 years.

Today, we might call her a femme fatale. They're sort of a hashtag feminist, kind of basic reading of Isabella, which her story lends itself to. She was a slighted woman overthrowing her tyrannical husband and removing his lover, who was a brutal torturer of vulnerable women and widows. But the Middle Ages don't really lend themselves to girl bosses. Mortimer had at one point threatened to kill her. if she didn't follow through with their designs against the king.

However serious or not he was, Isabella had needed Mortimer to do what she did. The role of women was constricted in the 14th century, and while Isabella acted fiercely, audaciously, bravely, she still had to rely on a man in order to do it. In 1591, Shakespeare would coin the term she-wolf of France to describe Henry IV's wife, Margaret of Anjou. Centuries later, in 1757, the English poet Thomas Gray applied the term to Isabella,

quote, She-Wolf of France with unrelenting fangs that terst the bowels of thy mangled mate. The name stuck. Isabella became known to history as the She-Wolf of France. The imagery is striking. a fanged creature waiting in the woods, the suggestion of sexual predation and indiscretion. There's also the suggestion in the phrase, though gray didn't mean it, of a pack, of other she-wolves to come after. That's the story of Queen Isabella deposing her husband the king, but stick around after a brief sponsor break to find out whether she really was

responsible for Edward the Second's murder. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Farrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come. Look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you.

Which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there.

Yeah. It would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the Big Money Players Network.

It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day. And I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come, look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be.

Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. While many sources, including this very podcast, have speculated that Isabella and her lover, Mortimer, were behind the murder of the deposed. King Edward II, not all historians agree. Another story goes that Isabella had nothing to do with the death of her husband. According to that story, Edward escaped his captors in 1326 and a doppelganger was buried in his place. Eventually, he even reunited with his son, Edward III, in disguise, as a humble, unsuspecting Welshman, William the Welshman. It sounds like a married

children's book character, but it has an outside chance of being true. In this version of events, Isabella knew or had reason to suspect that her husband was alive, gave her peace to know she was not his murderer, enough peace that she felt comfortable wrapping herself in their wedding cloak after her death. Her conscience free. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz. Additional writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is produced by Rima Il Kiali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

up everyone. I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.