Isabella of France began life as a twelve-year-old bride sent across the sea to marry England’s King Edward II in January 1308, and she ended it as one of the most feared women in European history. But the moment that defined her most came years before her famous invasion of England. Returning from a dinner in London, she spotted two knights wearing embroidered purses she had designed and gifted to her sisters-in-law. The purses were unmistakable.
She realized at once that the wives of her brothers were carrying on affairs with these knights. For a medieval princess, that was not gossip. It was a direct threat to the legitimacy of the French line. When Isabella reported her suspicions to her father, King Philip IV of France, the result was devastating.
He had the knights and noblewomen seized and investigated. The affair became known as the Tour de Nesle scandal, named after the tower in Paris where the lovers had met. Isabella’s sisters-in-law had their heads shaved and were locked away for life. The knights were tortured and executed, hanged then drawn and quartered.
All because Isabella had noticed a purse at dinner. She had grown up in exactly this kind of world. Born around 1295, Isabella was the daughter of Philip IV, known as Philip the Fair for his handsome face but described by his own courtiers as neither man nor beast but a statue for his unreadable manner. Her mother, Joan, died when Isabella was young, and rumor whispered that Philip had a hand in it.
Isabella was raised in a court defined by beauty, intrigue, and war, and she mastered all three. Her marriage to Edward II was arranged for diplomacy, not love. Edward was about ten years older than she was, and by the time of the wedding he had already fallen in with a favorite, the courtier Piers Gaveston. At the coronation feast in England, Edward reportedly spent most of his time beside Gaveston and ignored his young bride.
She was alone in a foreign court, but not without allies. A strong faction of barons was furious at the power Edward heaped on Gaveston, and Isabella, still a child, wrote to her father in France. Philip was furious at how his daughter was treated. He quietly funded the disgruntled barons and worked through Parliament to push Gaveston into exile.
Yet Edward and Gaveston could not stay apart. Gaveston returned within a year. Isabella, realizing she could not beat him, changed tactics and made herself his ally. It worked, but only for a time.
In 1311 the barons rose again, this time expelling Gaveston and briefly even Isabella from court. By 1312, England was sliding toward civil war. That summer the barons surrounded Gaveston’s castle, captured him, and executed him. On the day he died, Isabella was months pregnant.
In November she gave birth to a son, the future Edward III. The healthy heir secured her position as queen, but it did not calm the realm. Scotland humiliated Edward on the battlefield. The Great Famine descended on England.
The barons turned on both the king and queen, cutting off her funds and trying to control her household. For the first time, Isabella began to think that if her husband could not rule, perhaps she could. She started attending council meetings and acquiring land. Around the same time, Edward found a new favorite, Hugh Despenser the Younger, a man near his own age whose powerful family had long supported him.
The Despensers had many enemies, and the barons were enraged once again when Edward began showering Hugh with gifts. Unlike Gaveston, however, Hugh never formed any alliance with Isabella. In 1322, while Edward and Isabella were campaigning in Scotland, she became separated from her husband. Scottish troops pursued her household and killed two of her ladies in waiting.
She blamed Despenser and let Edward know it. Then she left on a nearly year-long journey around England. Tensions with France were also rising. Fearful of her connections to her homeland, Edward and the Despensers seized her lands, took over her household, imprisoned her French servants, and placed her youngest children under Despenser care.
In 1325, Isabella’s brother, now King Charles IV of France, seized all of Edward’s remaining possessions in France. Edward sent Isabella to negotiate peace. It was a terrible mistake. At the French court, Isabella began an affair with Roger Mortimer, an English noble who had long hated the Despensers.
Mortimer had earlier led a rebellion against the favorites, been thrown into the Tower of London, and made a spectacular escape after friends drugged his guards. Now, with Isabella, he began planning something far larger. When Edward demanded her return, she refused. In 1326, with an army of mercenaries and warships, Isabella and Mortimer sailed for England.
They landed at Orwell on the east coast and marched inland, gathering support as they went. It was astonishingly easy. Most of the country was tired of the Despensers and greeted her as a savior. When Edward heard of the invasion, he fled to Wales.
Within months, both the elder and younger Despensers had been captured, and Edward II himself was found hiding with the younger Hugh. Isabella showed no mercy. The elder Despenser was hanged, and his remains were fed to dogs. The younger Hugh endured Bible verses scrawled across his skin before being hanged like a common thief, then drawn and quartered.
Edward presented a harder problem. He was still her lawful husband and the lawful king. Parliament agreed to depose him and place him under house arrest for life, but Isabella worried they would not follow through. She worried it would not be enough.
By September 1327, Edward was a captive at Berkeley Castle on the Welsh border. On the 23rd of that month, Isabella received word that he had died in a vague fatal accident. The convenience has fueled centuries of debate. Isabella certainly had motive, but it is possible Edward died of illness in captivity.
Some historians have even argued, drawing on a letter from the 1340s, that he escaped and lived out his life under another name in Europe. The truth remains uncertain. Isabella had won everything she had set sail for. She ruled as regent for her young son, with Mortimer at her side.
But it unraveled quickly. They both loved fine things, expensive clothes, jewelry, and displays of power. The court resented them, and tensions nearly ended in civil war. Her son would not tolerate it.
Edward III, now of age, moved against them just days before his eighteenth birthday. He seized both Mortimer and Isabella inside Nottingham Castle. Isabella understood the situation at once. She begged her son to spare Mortimer’s life.
It was no use. In November 1330, Mortimer was hanged, his body displayed on the gallows for two days. Isabella was spared, most likely because she was the king’s mother. She was placed under house arrest at Windsor Castle, and there is some evidence she suffered a breakdown after Mortimer’s death.
In time she recovered, returned to court, and returned to what she loved: jewels, wealth, and her grandchildren. She died quietly at Hertford Castle in her early sixties. Her reputation never recovered. England remembered the queen who had invaded her own kingdom, destroyed the king’s favorites, and engineered the fall of a royal house.
The chroniclers gave her a name that stuck. They called her the She-Wolf of France.