Who Was Isabella of France?

Isabella of France (c. 1295–1358) was Queen of England from 1308 to 1327 as the wife of Edward II, the mother of Edward III, and the woman who deposed her husband and ruled England as regent for the first three years of her son’s minority. Thomas Walsingham, writing half a century later, called her the “She-Wolf of France” (lupa Francigena), and the epithet has been a fixture of English historiography ever since. It is misleading. Isabella was a serious political operator whose coup of 1326–1327 ended one of the most incompetent personal reigns in English history and made the war of 1337 possible.

Family and marriage

Isabella was the daughter of Philip IV of France and Joan I of Navarre, and the sister of three kings of France — Louis X (1314–1316), Philip V (1316–1322), and Charles IV (1322–1328) — and of two queens, Marguerite of England and Jeanne of Burgundy. The Capetian house of France was at the height of its prestige when she was born. She was married to Edward II of England at Boulogne on 25 January 1308, when she was about twelve. The marriage was a political arrangement to seal the Anglo-French peace, and it was personally unhappy from the first.

The favourites

Edward II’s relationship with Piers Gaveston, a Gascon knight of obscure origins, was the first great political scandal of the reign. Gaveston was banished in 1308, recalled in 1309, made earl of Cornwall, and executed by a group of rebellious barons led by the earl of Warwick in June 1312. The second great scandal was the rise of Hugh Despenser the Younger and his father, Hugh Despenser the Elder, who dominated the king from the mid-1320s. The Despensers took the revenues, the lands, and (in the case of the younger Hugh) the queen’s bedchamber. Isabella was humiliated, and in 1325 she was sent to France on a diplomatic mission that became a one-way trip.

The invasion and the deposition

In March 1325, Isabella travelled to Paris on the pretext of negotiating a settlement over the duchy of Aquitaine. She refused to return, took as her lover Roger Mortimer, the exiled lord of Wigmore, and began to plan an invasion. The fleet crossed from the Hainaut coast to the Orwell in September 1326. The invasion was a triumph: Edward’s supporters deserted, the younger Despenser was captured and executed at Hereford on 24 November 1326, and the king himself was captured near Neath on 16 November. He was forced to abdicate in favour of his son on 20 January 1327 and was murdered at Berkeley Castle on 21 September 1327 — almost certainly on Isabella’s orders.

The regency

The young Edward III was crowned on 1 February 1327. The real power lay with Isabella and Mortimer. The regency is not a success story: Mortimer enriched himself, the war with Scotland ended in the humiliation of the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton in 1328, and Aquitaine was effectively lost. But Isabella also had her competent ministers, and the constitutional innovations of the period — including the deposition procedure of 1327, the first successful deposition of an anointed king in English history — were not negligible. Edward, on his eighteenth birthday, staged a coup at Nottingham Castle on 19 October 1330, arrested Mortimer (who was tried and hanged at Tyburn on 29 November), and confined his mother to comfortable house arrest at Castle Rising and then at Risegate.

The legacy

Isabella lived at Castle Rising, in Norfolk, and then at Risegate, in Lincolnshire, for the last twenty-eight years of her life. She died on 22 August 1358. The “She-Wolf” label, which traces to Walsingham’s Chronica Majora, is the propaganda of the next generation and should be set against the evidence of her own letters and actions. She was a capable, ruthless, and unlucky regent, and her son’s decision to reopen the war with France in 1337 was, in part, a reaction against the cautious diplomacy of the years she had run the kingdom.