10

WINTER IS COMING

Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north.

—OLD NAN

Farmers in the Saastal Valley in Switzerland were probably the first to notice the changing weather, back in the 1250s, when the Allalin glacier began to move down the mountain.1 Or perhaps the Norse colonists in bitterly-cold Greenland, already on the edge of survival, may have felt the pressure starting to tell. Ivar Baardson, a Norwegian priest of the time, wrote: “The ice now comes . . . so close to the reefs none can sail the old route without risking his life.”² But across the known world more and more people would have noticed the weather, as four cold winters in a row hit from 1308; the Thames even froze, dogs chasing rabbits across the icy surface, and nobody could remember that ever happening.

And yet no one in Europe could have had any inclination of the approaching disaster. The Chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis, written by a monk at the Abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris, recorded that in April 1315 the rains came down hard—and didn’t stop. The deluge continued day after day until August, one account stating that it rained for 155 days continually, everywhere in Europe north of the Alps and west of the Urals.³

The rain flooded the fields and, drenched and starved of sunlight, the crops failed. The price of food doubled and then quadrupled, and desperate bands of starving country people could be heard groaning in despair; the poor “gnawed, just like dogs, [on] the raw dead bodies of cattle” and “grazed like cows on the grasses of the field.”⁴ There was misery “such as our age has never seen,” a chronicler recorded sadly.⁵ As many as a tenth of the population of England starved to death over the next two years, and some parts of the continent suffered even worse. It was the worst famine Europe had ever known.

The climate is always at the mercy of faraway events, and human catastrophes often arise as a result of volcanic eruptions in distant continents. Explosions in Tambora, Indonesia in 1815 and Laki in Iceland in 1873 caused severe famines around the world, and back in 1257 a huge volcanic eruption in Indonesia led to widespread hunger in Europe; one of the consquences of this was the popular discontent that led to Simon de Montford’s rebellion and the establishment of Parliament.

But this was on an altogether new level. The years from 1303 to 1328 were the coldest twenty-five-year period ever recorded. Four of those years were “severe,” the worst winters in four centuries, with snow from fall to spring and rivers and lakes frozen for at least a month across the continent. It became so frigid that horsemen could travel on the frozen sea all the way from Denmark to Sweden, a distance of two miles at its shortest.

In historical times, the planet went through a number of extended periods of relative warmth and cold, rather similar to the long winters of Westeros, and cold spells, it was always known, brought hunger. In pagan times, Germanic people would hang evergreen trees outside their houses to ward off the winter, and Ded Moroz, the Slavic equivalent of the Germanic Santa Claus, has its origins in Zimnik, the pagan god of winter (transformed into a benevolent figure by Christians). Christmas trees may be a modern-day hangover from that ancient terror.

For a number of reasons relating to atmosphere, the earth intermittently goes through ice ages, of which there have been four major ones in the last billion years. We are technically within one right now, but within these large ice ages there are warmer periods called interglacials and colder periods called glacials, colloquially also known as “ice ages.” For four hundred years Europe experienced the Medieval Warm Period, something we know because of the amount of radioactive isotope Carbon-14 found in tree rings. This is formed by cosmic-ray interaction with nitrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere, so the less solar activity, the more Carbon-14. Victorian historian H. H. Lamb was the first to suggest the idea based solely on chronicles that, he noted, referred to strange phenomena, such as vineyards in the north of England. He was right, and since then a huge variety of different measurements have proved him correct, among them not just tree rings, but also the height of tree-lines and pollen in peat bogs.

This long summer started in the ninth century, and for many years vineyards were scattered across England, including such areas as Ely in East Anglia and the Vale of Gloucester in the west. William of Malmesbury, a twelfth century chronicler, wrote that “In this region the vines are thicker, the grapes more plentiful and their flavor more delightful than in any other part of England. Those who drink this wine do not have to contort their lips because of the sharp and unpleasant taste, indeed it is little inferior to French wine in sweetness.”6

The increased warmth led to an extra twenty days growing season in Europe, and as a result far more food was available. England’s population went from one and a half million in 1000 to five million in 1300, France’s from under six million to between seventeen and twenty-one million in the same period. In Europe as a whole, the number of people increased fourfold.

And yet as the population grew, so did the number of people scratching a living on poor-quality, marginal land. Calorie intake went into decline, and surviving skeletons show that the average height in England fell from about 174cm (5'7") at the turn of the millennium to 168cm (5'5") in the fourteenth century.⁷ And so when winter arrived suddenly between 1310 and 1330, millions starved.

The first signs of the coming winter came in the thirteenth century, when pack ice in the North Atlantic began to advance south, as did glaciers in Greenland. Surviving plant material from Iceland suggests an abrupt decrease in the temperature from 1275—and a reduction of one degree made a harvest failure seven times more likely. As the spring of 1316 approached, there were prayers for the return of the sun. They were not heard. In April, the grey skies turned black and the rain came down again: “Cold, hard, and pelting; it stung the skin, hurt the eyes, reddened the face, and tore at the soft, wet ground with the force of a plough blade.”⁸

In October, four mills along the river Avon in the west of England were swept away, as were fourteen bridges on the Mur in Austria. In Saxony more than 450 entire villages, along with their people, cattle, and houses, were submerged, with huge numbers of casualties. Dykes and bridges disintegrated, and buildings were flooded and collapsed.

Wood and peat became too wet to burn, and no crops could be planted nor harvested. In England, a quarter of wheat or beans or peas sold for twenty shillings, four times its price in 1313, and barley, oats, and salt saw similar rises in the region of 300 percent. In May and June 1316, crop production in England was down by up to 85 percent and there was “most savage, atrocious death” and “the most tearful death.”⁹ Hopeless townsfolk walked the fields, searching for any bits of food; men wandered across the country to work, only to return and find their wife and children dead from starvation. Bodies were seen face down in flooded fields, weak from hunger. At one point, on the road near St Albans, no food could be found even for the king.

An observer in Flanders wrote that “the cries that were heard from the poor would move a stone.”10 In Ireland the starving “extracted the bodies of the dead from the cemeteries and dug out the flesh from their skulls and ate it.” A German monk wrote: “Certain people . . . because of excessive hunger devoured their own children. In many places, parents, after slaying their children, and children their parents, devoured the remains.”¹¹

At the time most people received between 80–90 percent of their calories from crops; the Normans who conquered England, for instance, got 80 percent of their calorific intake from just one type of bread. Meat was rare, and lamb was a great luxury eaten by aristocrats once a year, while the poor would never see it on their plates. Most people at the time of the famine already lacked protein, and even during good years, the diet of at least half the population was deficient in calories and also calcium, Vitamins A, C, and D, magnesium, and zinc.

Rye bread was widespread in northern Europe, but it was vulnerable to ergotism, a fungus that has the same essential property as LSD; some blame the various demonic possessions of the period on ergotism, although people at the time often attributed it to the Devil. Eating mouldy rye would lead to the fungus attacking the nervous system, and it can even cut off circulation and cause gangrene. There was also gastrointestinal anthrax caused by eating infected meat.

Fish was also essential to many people’s diet, but the trade relied on salt for preservation, again dependent on the weather. England’s long coast held huge seaside salt pans, depressions built between lines of high and low tide in which salty water was captured until it evaporated. But because of the lack of sun there was a huge shortage of salt from 1315, so between 1315–1319 fish prices rose to a record level.

The production of wine was also devastated, as grapes require one hundred days of sun a year, which is why today Saxony is the most northerly wine-producing region in Europe. In 1316 “there was no wine in the whole kingdom of France,” much to their obvious distress, and Germany’s great Neustadt vineyard produced “a trifling quantity” the following year. Wine production in England declined, although it continued to be produced for some time, but of far inferior quality; by the Victorian age a popular magazine joked that drinking English wine requires four people—one to drink it, two to hold him down, and the other to force it down the victim’s throat.

As well as starvation, many after 1315 died from scurvy, dementia, or blindness, caused by such things as pellagra (a niacin deficiency) or xerophthalmia (a lack of vitamins). Malnutrition in youth also often leads to problems with the immune system in later life, and this would have very serious consequences later on when an even worse catastrophe befell Europe.

Crime shot up, and there was widespread (if understandable) theft of grain, while rioters took over towns such as Douai in Flanders. Landless knights and men-at-arms took to extortion, and mobs from the countryside flooded into Paris, “an assortment of unemployed youths seeking adventure, brigands, thieves, unfrocked priests, beggars and whores.”12 They seized the Grand Châtelet, the city’s main stronghold, pillaged abbeys and also attacked Jews, who were thrown into a fiery pit. In fact, there is a correlation between medieval European temperatures and the intensity of anti-Semitic violence, as resources became scarcer.¹³ Starvation does not bring out the best in people.

From 1317 gangs of schavaldores, a local word meaning robbers, terrorized Northumberland, robbing people at home and in the fields, stealing their cattle and pigs, and often killing them—perhaps a mercy, as they would surely starve otherwise. In the north of England, desperate Scots were more of a menace than ever.

There was also cannibalism, which occurs during all periods of hunger (during a famine in China in the third century BC, the emperor had even officially allowed parents to eat their own children). In Estonia, “the mothers were fed their children,” while an Irish chronicle wrote that people “were so destroyed by hunger that they extracted bodies of the dead from cemeteries and dug out the flesh from the skulls and ate it; and women ate their children out of hunger.” In Poland and Silesia there were reports whereby “parents devoured their children and children their parents.”¹⁴ Some also ate the bodies of hanged criminals. The somewhat sinister fairy tale Hansel and Gretel comes from the famine years, when sending children off to the forest was not an unknown way for desperate parents to avoid watching their children starve.

The winter of 1317–8 was the harshest of all, with cold weather lasting almost until May. The Baltic froze in 1318, the third time since 1303, and rivers feeding it turned to ice too, isolating coastal cities.

There were now a series of huge storms in the North Sea basin, caused by the growing temperature differences between the Arctic Ocean and Gulf Stream. These tempests became more severe in the English Channel, a funnel between two seas and so more dangerous; Dunwich in East Anglia, one of the largest towns in England at the time was devastated by one flood after another, losing 269 buildings. It never really recovered, and today is home to just eighty-six people. The Chronicler of Salzburg described how in 1317, floodwaters in the Mulde River near Leipzig were so violent that a church was lifted off its foundations and drifted away.

Most estimates of the Great Famine suggest that between 5 and 12 percent of Europe’s population died, mostly from starvation. This disaster was followed by a disease of cattle and sheep; the parasitic worms Fasciola heaptica, known as sheep liver fluke, reduced sheep and goat numbers by 70 percent from 1321, while flocks were likewise hit by sheep pox, also known as the Red Death. The cattle disease murrain hit the country in 1319, devastating the population—it was the same disease that afflicted Egyptian-owned cattle but spared the Hebrews during the time of Exodus. What more obvious sign of God’s displeasure could there be?

A LANCASTER ALWAYS PAY HIS DEBTS

Just six weeks after Bannockburn, the Scots, led by Bruce and “Black” James Douglas, were piling into the counties of Northumberland and Durham, and the following year the raids were even worse. Over the summer of 1316, they reached as far as Yorkshire, led by the courageous but ruthless Douglas. Back in 1308, Black Douglas had become notorious when his men attacked an English garrison on Palm Sunday, entering a church and shouting “Douglas!” Prisoners were taken to the castle larder where they were beheaded and their corpses put on a pile, which was then set on fire, after which the Scotsmen poisoned the wells with salt and dead horses. Douglas also removed the right hand of the captured archers, hated and feared across the border, for as the proverb stated, “every English archer carried 24 Scottish lives in his belt.”15 It became known as the Douglas Larder and made Douglas more notorious “than the devil in hell.”¹⁶

By 1318, the city of Berwick was slowly starving and surrounded by Scots, the English reduced to eating their horses. The edge of the town fell in March after street fighting, but it was another three months before Berwick Castle surrendered to Black Douglas, whose father William had handed it over to the English twenty-two years earlier. The Scots now penetrated deeper into English territory, at one point controlling almost all the north, yet the realm was crippled by conflict between King Edward and his enemies. In 1319, the king summoned twenty-three thousand soldiers to muster at York, but only eight thousand appeared, and further disaster occurred with a horse epidemic, the pathogen burkholderia mallei, killing half of all the animals between 1320–1322. Edward invaded Scotland with a cavalry force but returned with infantry.

And with Gaveston out of the way things, perversely, got worse. Opposition continued to revolve around Lancaster, but there were also deep divisions, made worse when Thomas’s father-in-law, the Earl of Lincoln, the most moderate of the king’s critics, died in 1311. Meanwhile after the death of Gaveston, Edward had found solace in an even more venal favorite Hugh le Despenser, a brutal, violent bully who became Edward’s lover.17 Despenser had recently murdered a captive, Llewelyn Bren, a shocking crime that broke the laws of chivalry, but it was certainly not the only one, and on another occasion “one John de Sutton was held in prison until he had surrendered the castle of Dudley,” while a wealthy heiress called Elizabeth Comyn was kidnapped and held hostage for a year until she handed over her estates.¹⁸ Despenser was particularly notorious for preying on widows with desirable houses; one of his victims, Lady Baret, was tortured so much that her four limbs were broken and she went insane as a result. And yet he had a hold over the king—much to the queen’s distress.

Queen Isabella had in 1322 given birth for the fourth time, to a girl, and as she grew into her role she had been handed more power and responsibility at court, the king valuing her advice. Her relentless acquisitiveness and love of luxury remained unbated, however, and despite the country’s hardships, she still kept sixty seamstresses to ensure her household kept up with the latest fashions, as well as 180 servants, including “an almoner, whose only job was to dispense alms on feast days and holy days, using ‘the Queen’s great silver alms dish.’”¹⁹ A Queen was expected to show pity to the poor.

Such was Lancaster’s unpopularity that there had also formed a middle party, opposed to both the royal cousins, led by Bartholomew Badlesmere—an MP, baron, and veteran of Edward I’s wars—whose home was Leeds Castle in Kent. Other magnates had remained loyal to the king, despite his faults, among them the marcher (border) lord Roger Mortimer, whose family had held the title of Baron Wigmore since 1074. Mortimer was “tall, swarthy of complexion, and strongly built . . . tough, energetic, decisive, and versatile in his talents.” He was also “arrogant, grasping and ambitious” and proud of his family pedigree and background.20 He had refined tastes and had turned his castles in Wigmore and Ludlow into palatial properties worthy of his grand name.

And yet the brutality of the Despensers was too much even for him. On top of this, the Despenser and Mortimer families also had an old grudge that went back to the 1260s, when Roger’s grandfather, another Roger Mortimer, had killed Hugh’s grandfather, also his namesake, at the Battle of Evesham. Despenser, ever greedy for land, preyed on his rival’s territory and so, in the spring of 1321, Mortimer mobilized a group of marcher lords where they attended a meeting in Yorkshire with Lancaster and other northern rebels.

The more moderate Pembroke, seeing that the king’s relationship with Despenser was destroying him, warned Edward: “He perishes on the rocks that loves another more than himself.”²¹ The queen had begged her husband on her knees to remove Despenser from court, but to no avail. Isabella had been a mere child when her husband had humiliated her with Gaveston, but now she was a grown woman, had borne her king two sons and two daughters, and deserved respect. Yet King Edward was as much under the spell of Despenser as he had been of his previous obsession, and his favorite was intent on ruining and, if possible, removing the queen.

To add to Isabella’s humiliation, Edward also had an interest in low-born men; records showed that he made payments to various individuals, including Wat Cowherd, Robin Dyer, and Simon Hod. This may have been an ongoing feature of their marriage, for back in 1314, Edward and Isabella had spent Christmas apart, the king “rowing in the Cambridge Fens with a great concourse of simple people, to refresh his spirit” and swimming with “silly company.”²²

In August 1321, Lancaster turned up in Parliament with a force of five thousand armed retainers, ordering that Despenser and his father Hugh le Despenser the Elder be banished. The younger Despenser fled to his vessel and became a pirate, capturing a Genoese ship and killing the entire crew, and stealing five thousand pounds worth of treasure—but he soon returned.

As Despenser became more powerful and ingrained at court, moderate men like Badlesmere turned increasingly toward Lancaster. The king responded by having Badlesmere banned from his county of Kent, and in October 1321, while he was away in Oxfordshire, the queen was sent, en route to London, to stop at Leeds Castle. When Isabella arrived, however, and demanded entry, Lady Badlesmere instead ordered her archers to fire on the queen’s retainers, killing six men in front of her eyes. The queen headed back to London, shaken, to inform her husband.

Things came to a head the following March when an army loyal to Edward met Lancaster’s force at Boroughbridge where the northern barons’ cavalry was overwhelmed by the king’s archers. Lancaster’s ally the Earl of Hereford was stabbed by a pike-thrust from below his horse and died horribly, bowels hanging out.23 Lancaster was taken prisoner and condemned to death by being hanged, drawn, and quartered, but out of respect for his royal blood this was commuted to beheading; Lancaster was forced to ride to his execution on an old mare, wearing a ripped hat, while locals pelted him with snowballs. Alice de Lacy, the earl’s unhappy wife, afterward married her lover, Eubulo L’Estrange.

This was followed a week later by the killing of six of Thomas’s leading followers. On March 22, another twenty-four of Lancaster’s associates were executed in various horrible ways, and over the next month 118 in total were put to death, including six leading noblemen. For his role in the rebellion, Baron Badlesmere was dragged through the streets of Canterbury before being decapitated, and afterward “his head spread on a pike and set to stare down, hollow-eyed, on the cowed townspeople from the city’s east gate.”²⁴ Edward also hanged the constable of Leeds Castle along with thirteen others, and imprisoned Lady Badlesmere and her children in the Tower of London. Also jailed was Lancaster’s elderly mother-in-law, the countess of Lincoln, whose husband had been a loyal, if critical, subject. The king’s troops also captured Mortimer, who was sentenced to death, but with the bloodlust burning out he was instead locked up in the Tower indefinitely.

This ruthless purge of his enemies made Edward appear strong, although his temporary popularity did not last. Europe’s barley harvest collapsed, worse in 1321 than even in 1315, and the following year fifty-two people were crushed at the gates of the Preaching Friars in London, fighting over food. The king became increasingly tyrannical under the sway of Despenser, now more powerful than ever. The Earl of Carlisle, who had loyally defeated Lancaster on behalf of the king, had accepted peace overtures from the Scots, and when the king learned of this, he had him cruelly executed.²⁵

In August 1322, Edward II invaded Scotland, but Bruce escaped beyond the Forth and now the Scots chased them back and the Earl of Richmond was captured, yet another humiliation. Worse still, Edward had left his queen at Tynemouth Priory on the Northumbrian coast, at the mercy of the Scots nearby, and made no attempt at rescue her from the Earl of Douglas nearby. This was the second time he had deserted her in this way, the first being when he had fled with Gaveston; the queen and her damsels eventually escaped in a boat, but in their desperation one of her ladies fell overboard and drowned. Her hatred was growing, and the She-Wolf would not take the humiliation forever.

“I HEARD IT SAID THAT POISON IS A WOMAN’S WEAPON.”

In August 1315, King Louis’s wife Margaret died in a Normandy dungeon, supposedly of a cold, although poison was suspected; at the very least she was heavily maltreated. However, the following year Louis died too, aged just twenty-six, from a chill caught after playing tennis, and many spoke of poison at the hands of his brother Philippe’s mother-in-law Mahaut of Artois. A few months later, Louis’s heavily pregnant second wife Clemence gave birth to a boy, John, but he succumbed after just six days, and so the crown passed to the Iron King’s second son, conveniently for Mahaut.

Poison was often suspected in French court politics, but as forensics was not capable of detecting its presence in a corpse much is just speculation. Mahaut was rumored to be a killer, and some even believed her to have murdered the infant king too to further her daughter’s position. Perhaps. Just as poison was prevalent in Essos and Dorne, so courts in France, Italy, and Spain were said to be hotbeds of such trickery. The Normans in particular were notorious for it, and their dukes certainly poisoned at least one Duke of Brittany—their chief rival—but many other rivals died under mysterious circumstances. In Moorish Spain in 1008, Abd al-Malik, ruler of Cordoba, was on his way to fight the Christians when he collapsed, apparently after his brother had offered him an apple laced with deadly poison. This Spanish tradition was maintained by the caliphate’s Catholic successors and, in the fourteenth century, Blanche of Bourbon, Queen of Castile, was fatally drugged at the behest of her husband, King Pedro the Cruel.26

Many believed unicorn horns were an antidote to poison, and these were bought at markets across Europe; although as unicorns don’t actually exist, what they were being sold was the horn of the narwhal, a type of whale found in the cold, northern seas. In reality, there were no known cures for most types, and so the French court kept a Master of the Stomach to protect the monarch from anyone who might wish to remove him. Being a royal food taster to the king of France, however, would not have been the worst job, as the Valois kings helped to invent what we now think of as cuisine. They employed one of the most important figures in the history of the culinary arts, Guillaume Tirel, who was enfant de cuisine (kitchen boy) to Charles IV’s queen Jeanne. Later he became head chef to Philippe VI, and wrote Le Viandier, the first cookbook of the medieval period, which details the food of northern France; it is because cuisine was first developed formally in Paris that, even today, to become a chef is to learn, firstly, about French food.

Philippe V had been able to claim the throne because of the suspicions of illegitimacy hanging over his brother’s surviving daughter; it was instead decreed that the crown could only be inherited through the male line, using a dubious historical precedent, the “Salic Law” of the Franks. In just a few years, this legal dispute would explode into a war costing millions of lives, but this was all in the future. Tragically, however, Philippe died aged just twenty-nine, further proof of the curse of the Templars in some people’s minds, and the crown in turn passed to his youngest brother Charles in 1322.

As well as the throne, Charles IV had inherited the dispute with the English over the border region between Gascony and French-controlled Aquitaine. When the kings of England and France had met in June 1320, Philippe V had demanded Edward do fealty for Gascony. Edward had already done homage, which involved the surrender of a particular fief, or property, by a vassal to a lord where he swore to become his man, from the French homme; the lord then returned it, symbolically handing him an item associated with the property, often something that grew on the land. Fealty was something different altogether, an oath of fidelity to serve against all others, something that Edward as king could not do; he exploded in anger.

Then in November 1323 conflict broke out when some Gascons tore down a fortress that a French lord had built on disputed territory. The following year King Charles declared Edward’s land in Gascony forfeit and the countries were now sliding into war.

For Despenser, this was the perfect pretext to undermine the queen; all French nationals were dismissed from the court, depriving Isabella of her closest friends and confidents, and all their goods confiscated. It got worse, with the queen’s children taken away from her, the girls being sent to live with Despenser’s family while Despenser’s wife Eleanor de Clare—also the king’s niece—was appointed as the queen’s housekeeper to follow her everywhere. She was also, quite obviously, a spy who kept the queen’s seal on her person and reported everything back to her husband and his clan.

Isabella must by now have hated her husband’s lover, and yet the queen was more skilled at the art of court politics than her enemies, perhaps having learned it in Paris. One element of court life represented by Margaery Tyrell in Westeros is the art of dissembling, because for a woman at the center of court no one should ever really know her true feelings. Isabella mastered this skill, and never gave away any signs of her real, burning hatred toward Despenser and, increasingly, her husband.

The impasse with King Charles threatened to descend into all-out war, and it was now that Queen Isabella, outwardly forgiving to her dear husband and his trusted advisor, suggested that she take their son Edward over to do homage for Gascony in Edward’s place. This would satisfy the king of France without humiliating the king of England and, for Despenser, remove an irritant from the king’s presence.

When the queen left for France, Edward wrote, “on her departure, she did not seem to anyone to be offended” and gave a farewell kiss to Despenser: “towards no one was she more agreeable, myself excepted.” He noted “the amiable looks and words between them, and the great friendship she professed for him on her crossing the sea.”27 Despenser had been unsure about the queen’s suggestion and her motives, but when at last he realized how they had been outwitted and placed in check, it was too late.

Meanwhile Roger Mortimer had been languishing in the Tower of London, a fortress from which only one man had ever escaped. And yet the earl could be persuasive and had managed to turn the captain of the dungeon, who therefore arranged to drug all the guards on the night of a banquet held once a year to honor the Tower’s patron saint. Mortimer made a daring escape, dug his way through a passageway and in the darkness climbed down to the river where a waiting boat took him away. The king sent out search parties, expecting him to head toward his stronghold in the border region, but in fact he had gone in the opposite direction, to France, where his wife had relatives.

Mortimer went to Picardy, and from there to Paris—where he and Isabella fell in love. The marcher lord was an extremely domineering and masculine man, already had ten children by his wife, and for a woman in a loveless marriage with a man who did not desire her, he may have been irresistible.²⁸

Romance runs through Martin’s world, with the young Sansa Stark epitomizing the naive idealization of honorable knights and damsels in distress, at least until the grim reality of the world sinks in. At the start of the epic she believes in the idea that a handsome prince such as Joffrey must by definition have the qualities attached to his class, such as nobility and gentleness (both of these words originally meant “high-born”); unlike her sister she enthusiastically adopts the traditional roles expected of an aristocratic lady, in particular courtesy.29 However, a fondness for such a romantic idealization did not suggest weakness or even naivety. Isabella, as strong-willed as her father, was nevertheless obsessed with romance books—indeed, that is one thing she had in common with her lover, who also saw himself as a latter-day King Arthur, and they both “possessed an inordinate fondness for dreadful, bodice-ripping chivalric romances of heroic derring-do.”³⁰

Isabella regularly borrowed books from the Tower of London library, all of them romance stories that we might think of as somewhat corny. For all that she had seen and experienced, and understood how weak and devious men could be, she still believed in the ideal.

Now the queen, in possession of her son Edward, was extremely dangerous to her husband, for she presented not just an opposition but an opposition with a viable replacement. The king directed her to return, and when she did not, he cut off payment, continuing to send letters to his wife and son; and yet her brother was not going to allow her to go hungry. Edward also wrote to his son, now thirteen, who was put in a very difficult position; he, no doubt, hated Despenser and what he’d done to the family, but he had no love for Mortimer either, a domineering bully who was now openly the queen’s lover.

King Charles, especially with his own history, was also uncomfortable at the openly adulterous relationship and so Isabella, Mortimer, and Edward had to flee north, to the Count of Hainault in what is now Belgium. Here she was forced to do what many desperate exiles have done down the years—arrange a marriage alliance in return for a foreign army. Pledging her son Edward to the count’s daughter Philippa, she was provided with troops with which to sail across the sea (it so happened that Edward and Philippa had spent time together and had already grown fond of each other).

The Queen of England had now been declared an enemy alien and her lands had been confiscated for the safety of the kingdom, but her rival court abroad began to attract leading noblemen from England, among them the king’s half-brother Edmund, Earl of Kent. She now planned her crossing to England.

Gathering her forces, she made land in East Anglia, and of two thousand soldiers sent to contest Isabella, only fifty-five turned up, and they switched sides. London collapsed into chaos and the invasion was met with widespread support, and soon Edward and the younger Despenser were isolated in Caerphilly Castle in south Wales. They should have stayed there, one of the strongest in Europe, with thirty-foot-high walls that were twelve feet thick, and well supplied. Instead they made a dash for the sea but were stuck for six days in torrential weather before being forced to return.

Hugh le Despenser’s father, aged sixty-five, had been condemned to die as a traitor and hanged. Afterwards his torso was suspended by the arms with two strong ropes for four days, after which it was chopped up and thrown to some dogs. The younger Despenser’s fate would be far worse; after being condemned by a group of barons, including Mortimer and Lancaster’s brother Henry, Earl of Leicester, he was sentenced to be executed in London, but tried to starve himself to death. Instead, now desperately weakened by hunger, he endured an agonizing death in Hereford, as the authorities worried the journey to the capital would kill him. Dressed in a reversed coat of arms—symbol of treachery—a crown of nettles was placed on his head, with mocking biblical verses about hubris carved into his skin with knives. He was dragged through the city by four horses, to the sound of trumpets and bagpipes, and half-hanged on a fifty-foot-tall-gallows so that all might see. At one point he fell unconscious but was cut down and slapped awake before his intestines were cut out; likewise, “his member and his testicles were cut off, because he was a heretic and a sodomite, even, it was said, with the king.” A fire was lit under the scaffold, and Despenser’s genitals were thrown in, followed by his intestines and heart, the dying man watching everything. Then the crowd cheered as his head was cut off.

Mortimer declared that the magnates had deposed Edward because he had not followed his coronation oath and was under the control of evil advisers. And so, in January 1327, Parliament was called in the name of Edward’s son, with Mortimer appointed Keeper of the Realm. Edward II witnessed Sir Thomas Blount, steward of the household, break his staff of office to show the household had been disbanded.

The king was moved to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, but after a rescue attempt by supporters he was found dead. A story soon circulated that he had been killed with a red-hot poker inserted in his anus so that no signs of violence would show on his corpse.31 Almost certainly Mortimer was responsible.

Just a few weeks later, in April 1327, an army was sent north to battle the Scots again, but it ended in failure once more. The English force had gone to Percy-controlled Topcliffe in Yorkshire and onto to Durham, which French chronicler Jean le Bel, a soldier in this army, called “the last outpost of civilization.”³² Believing the Scots to be attacking through Cumberland, the English were tricked, sending their men onto the western approach to the border, while Black Douglas and his men went east and burned and pillaged Northumberland, sending terrified villagers into fortresses and woods. The Scots could not be defeated, and so a treaty was signed in 1328 recognizing their independence formally, much to the fury of the boy king Edward, whose sister Joan was married off to Bruce’s son David. Robert the Bruce died the following year, of leprosy, but the king beyond the wall had succeeded.