A queen against the odds
Philippa was traded for ships and soldiers so her mother-in-law could invade England – the most unromantic marriage imaginable
On 24 September 1326 Isabella of France, the estranged queen of Edward II, landed on the Suffolk coast. She arrived at the head of a force of 1,500 mercenaries, there to enforce her audacious plan to take the English throne from her husband in favour of the couple’s son, Edward of Windsor, the future Edward III. She had also sworn to destroy her husband’s powerful, detested and despotic chamberlain, Hugh Despenser the Younger.
Isabella succeeded. Within two months, a man the king had elevated to the status of his co-ruler had been executed – a term that hardly does justice to the grotesque humiliations he endured on the day of his death. Despenser was dragged through Hereford by horses, hanged, cut down, disembowelled, castrated and finally beheaded. In January 1327, meanwhile, Edward II was forced to abdicate and probably followed Despenser to the grave at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire in September 1327 – though almost certainly not via the red-hot poker of legend.
But there was a price to be paid for mounting this coup, both in hard coin and in human terms. Isabella had come to an agreement with Willem, Count of Hainault (in modern-day
