The King presently arriving at Pontefract, brought Lancaster to trial before six Earls and a number of Barons; and as his treason was manifest, he was told that it would be to no purpose to speak in his own defence, and was sentenced to the death of a traitor. In consideration of his royal blood, Edward remitted the chief horrors of the execution, and made it merely decapitation; but as the Earl was led to a hill outside the town, on a gray pony without a bridle, the mob pelted him and jeered him by his assumed name of King Arthur. “King of Heaven,” he cried, “grant me mercy! for the king of earth hath forsaken me.” He knelt by the black with his face to the east, but he was bidden to turn to the north, that he might look toward his friends, the Scots; and in this manner he was beheaded. The inhabitants of the northern counties were not likely to think lightly of the offence of bringing in the Scots, and yet in a short time there was a strong change of feeling. Lancaster was mourned as “the good Earl,” and miracles were said to be wrought at his tomb. The King was obliged to write orders to the Bishop of London to forbid the people from offering worship to his picture hung up in St. Paul’s Church; and Drayton records a tradition that “grass would never grow where the battle of Boroughbridge had been fought.” It seemed as if Lancaster had succeeded to the reputation of Montfort, as a protector of the liberties of the country: but to our eyes he appears more like a mere factious, turbulent noble, acting rather from spite and party spirit than as a redresser of wrongs; never showing the respect for law and justice manifested by the opponents of Edward I.; and, in fact, constraining the Royalists to appeal to Magna Charta against him. Still there must have been something striking and attractive about him, for, after his death, even his injured cousin Edward lamented him, and reproached his nobles for not having interceded for him. Fourteen bannerets and fourteen other knights were executed, being all who were taken in arms against the King; the others were allowed to make peace; and the Mortimers, who had been condemned to death, had their sentence changed to perpetual imprisonment. Hereford’s estates passed on to the eldest of his large family, the King’s own nephews. Lancaster left no children, but his brother, Henry Wryneck, Earl of Derby, did not receive his estates till they had been mulcted largely on behalf of the Despensers. The father was created Earl of Winchester, and the son received such bounty from the King, that all the old hatred against Piers Gaveston was revived, though it does not appear that Hugh provoked dislike by any such follies or extravagances.
The elder Roger Mortimer, the uncle, died in the Tower. The younger contrived, after a year’s imprisonment, to make interest with one of the servants in the Tower, Gerard de Asplaye, with whose assistance he gave an entertainment to his guards, drugged their liquor, so as to throw them into a heavy sleep, broke through the wall into the royal kitchen, and thence escaped by a rope-ladder. Report afterward averred that it was the fairest hand in England that drugged the wine and held the rope, and that Queen Isabel,
“From the wall’s height, as when he down did slide,
Had heard him cry, ‘Now, Fortune, be my guide!’”
Thus far is certain, that Isabel and Mortimer were inmates of the Tower at the same time, in the year 1321; for she was left there while the King was gone in pursuit of Lancaster, and she there gave birth to her fourth child, Joan. Whether the prisoner then sought an interview with her, is not known, but he was a remarkably handsome man, and Isabel, at twenty-six years of age, was beautiful, proud, and with bitterness in her heart against her husband for his early neglect. She had been on fairly good terms with him ever since the birth of the Prince of Wales, and her grace and beauty, her affable manners, and the idea that she was ill-used, made her a great favorite with the English nation; but she was angered by the execution of her uncle, the Earl of Lancaster, and from the time of the King’s return she proceeded to manifest great discontent, and as much dislike and jealousy of the Despensers as she had previously shown toward Gaveston.
Mortimer escaped to France, and subsequent events made it seem as if she had been acting in concert with him. He had married a French lady, Jeanne de Joinville, and was taken at once into the service of King Charles IV.
Charles IV., le Bel, was the youngest of Isabel’s brothers, who had succeeded each other so quickly that it seemed as though the sacrilegious murder of the Templars was to be visited by the extinction of the male line of Philippe IV. To Charles, Isabel sent great complaints, declaring that she was “married to a gripple miser, and was no better than a waiting-woman, living on a pension from the Despensers.” There had, in fact, been a fierce struggle with them for power, and they had prevailed to have all her French attendants dismissed, very probably on the discovery of the transactions with Mortimer in the Tower, and a yearly income had been assigned to her in lieu of her royal estates. This was very irregularly paid, for affairs were in a most confused and disorderly state, managed in a most childish manner. It appears that, when hunting at Windsor, the Chancellor Baldock gave the great seal to the King to keep, and that the King made it over to William de Ayremyne.
There were no doubt grounds for complaint on both sides; but Charles le Bel saw only his sister’s view of the question, and resolved to quarrel with his brother-in-law. Homage for the Duchy of Aquitaine had not been rendered to him, and on this pretext he began to exercise all possible modes of annoyance on the borders, and to give judgment against any Guiennois or Poitevins who sued against Edward as their liege lord, Edward remonstrated in vain, and sent his brother Edmund, Earl of Kent, a fine-looking but weak young man of twenty-two, to endeavor to make peace, but in vain: on the first pretext, a war on the borders broke out.
Thereupon Edward took into his custody all the castles belonging to his wife, declaring that he could not leave them in her hands while she was in correspondence with the enemies of the country; and yet, with his usual inconsistent folly, he listened to a proposal from her that she should go to Paris to bring about a peace with her brother.
With four knights, Isabel crossed the sea, and presently made her appearance at Paris in the character of an injured Princess, kneeling before her brother, and asking his protection against the cruelty of her husband; to which Charles replied, “Sister, be comforted; for, by my faith to Monseigneur St. Denis, I will find a remedy.”
Isabel was lodged at the court of France, and treated with distinction. Mortimer and all the banished English repaired to her abode, and all the chivalry of France regarded her as an exiled heroine. She wrote to her husband that peace might be scoured by the performance of the neglected homage, and he was actually setting out for the purpose, when, in a second letter, she told him that his own presence was not needed, but that his ceremony might be gone through by his son Edward, Prince of Wales, provided the duchy were placed in his hands as an appanage.