The She-Wolf of France: How a Teenage Bride Became England's Most Unlikely Conqueror

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This wedding is supposed to cement peace between England and France after decades of war. Isabella's father, Philip IV—known as "Philip the Fair" for his looks, not his temperament—has negotiated a treaty that required Edward's father to acknowledge French sovereignty over contested territories. Now the alliance needs a human seal: Isabella.

The girl is considered one of the most beautiful princesses in Europe.¹ She's been raised in the most sophisticated court on the continent, educated, multilingual, and trained in the arts of queenship. She's also a pawn, which is pretty much the job description for medieval princesses.

Edward II is twenty-three, tall, athletic, and by most accounts handsome. He's also completely uninterested in the woman he's marrying.

During the wedding feast, Edward ignores his bride almost entirely. He spends the day laughing with, touching, and openly favoring a Gascon knight named Piers Gaveston, whom Edward's father had exiled specifically to keep him away from Edward.² The English barons are scandalized. The French delegation is insulted. Isabella sits there, twelve years old, watching her new husband make it crystal clear where his affections lie.

Piers Gaveston is wearing royal purple—a color reserved exclusively for royalty—and jewelry from the royal treasury that Edward gave him as wedding gifts. Gifts that, by tradition, should have gone to Isabella³.

Welcome to England, Your Majesty.

What Isabella doesn't know yet is that this wedding day will teach her the most important lesson of her life: patience is a weapon, and humiliation has a very long memory.

But that comes later.

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The spectacular collapse of Edward II's reign has a name, and that name is Piers Gaveston.

Edward and Piers had grown up together at the English court. Piers was the son of a Gascon knight—Gascony being that contested region in southwestern France that English kings had spent centuries fighting over and losing—who'd served Edward's father loyally. He was charming, witty, athletic, fashionable, and absolutely insufferable to the English nobility.⁴

The exact nature of Edward and Piers's relationship remains debated by historians. Medieval chronicles describe their bond as "excessive" and "immoderate."⁵ Edward showered Piers with lands, titles, and wealth on a scale that would be remarkable for a royal favorite under any circumstances. Whether their relationship was romantic, sexual, or an intensely devoted friendship doesn't actually change the political problem: Edward was so obsessed with Piers that he couldn't function as king.

Piers didn't help matters. He mocked the English barons with cruel nicknames—calling the Earl of Gloucester "the cuckold's bird," the Earl of Lancaster "the fiddler," and the Earl of Warwick "the black dog of Arden."⁶ Imagine being one of the most powerful men in England and having your king's boyfriend publicly humiliate you at court while the king laughs.

Edward's father, Edward I—a genuinely terrifying warrior-king nicknamed "Longshanks" and "the Hammer of the Scots"—had seen this disaster coming. On his deathbed in 1307, he'd reportedly made Edward swear not to bring Piers Gaveston back to England.⁷ Edward waited approximately one month after his father's funeral to break that oath.

The barons were furious. They forced Edward to exile Piers in 1308. Edward made him Lord of Ireland. Piers came back in 1309. The barons threatened rebellion. Edward exiled him again in 1311. Piers came back again in 1312.

This is the government Isabella is living under: a king who will burn down the entire realm rather than give up his favorite. By 1312, the barons had had enough of this cycle. They'd given Edward chances. They'd negotiated. They'd accepted promises that Edward immediately broke. The relationship between the king and his most powerful nobles—the fundamental partnership that made medieval monarchy function—had completely disintegrated.

In June 1312, the Earl of Warwick—remember, that's "the black dog of Arden"—captured Piers Gaveston at Scarborough Castle and had him executed without trial.⁸ Legally speaking, this was straight-up murder: Gaveston was entitled to a trial by his peers. But Warwick and his allies calculated that another trial would just mean another exile, which would mean Gaveston would come back again, and they were done with that particular merry-go-round. They ran him through with a sword and beheaded him, just to be absolutely certain.

Edward was devastated. He refused to bury Piers's body for two and a half years, keeping it above ground while he planned elaborate funeral rites.⁹ The king of England spent two years mourning his executed favorite while the actual business of government—settling legal disputes, collecting taxes, maintaining roads, defending borders, conducting diplomacy—effectively stopped. Letters went unanswered. Writs were delayed. Parliament barely functioned. The machinery of medieval governance ran on the king's active participation, and Edward had checked out.

Isabella was now about sixteen years old. She'd been queen for four years. She'd produced one heir already—the future Edward III, born in 1312. And she was watching her husband's grief for another man paralyze the kingdom.

This would have broken most people. Isabella just... waited.

If you're thinking, "surely Edward learned his lesson about favoritism destroying his reign," you don't know Edward II.

By 1318, Edward had found new favorites: Hugh Despenser the Younger and his father, Hugh Despenser the Elder. If Piers Gaveston was bad, the Despensers were catastrophic. At least Piers had been charming. The Despensers were just greedy.¹⁰

Hugh the Younger became Edward's new obsession. Medieval chronicles describe him as Edward's "beloved" and note that the king "delighted in his counsels."¹¹ But while Piers had antagonized the barons with mockery, Hugh antagonized them by systematically stealing their land.

The Despensers accumulated territory in Wales and the English Marches through a combination of legal manipulation, intimidation, and outright theft. They used Edward's authority to cancel existing land grants—essentially erasing the legal documents that proved someone owned an estate—reverse legal judgments, and seize properties¹². They were running a medieval protection racket with the king as their enforcer.

The barons rebelled again in 1321, demanding the Despensers' exile. Edward caved. Then, like clockwork, he brought them back within months and started a civil war to keep them.¹³

During this chaos, Isabella was trying to do her actual job as queen: diplomacy, managing estates, producing heirs. She'd had three more children by 1321. She was also starting to accumulate real political power—managing lands, conducting negotiations, building relationships with French and English nobility.

Then, in 1324, everything changed. War broke out between England and France over disputed territories in Gascony. Isabella's position became impossible: she was an English queen, but her brother was now Charles IV of France. English propaganda began questioning her loyalty. Hugh Despenser convinced Edward that Isabella might be spying for France.¹⁴

Edward confiscated Isabella's estates, seized her income, removed her French attendants, and took away her children.¹⁵ The queen of England was suddenly a prisoner in her own court, financially dependent on her husband's favorites, separated from her children, and under suspicion of treason.

Isabella was now twenty-nine years old. She'd spent seventeen years as queen, watching her husband choose favorites over her, over their children, over the stability of the realm itself. She'd been diplomatic, strategic, and endlessly patient.

She was done accommodating.

In March 1325, someone needed to negotiate peace with France over the Gascony situation. Charles IV refused to negotiate with Hugh Despenser—he despised him. The English barons wouldn't go—they didn't trust Edward or the Despensers. The Pope, who'd been trying to mediate, suggested the obvious solution: send Isabella.¹⁶

She was French royalty, trusted by Charles, and had diplomatic experience. Edward and the Despensers, incredibly, agreed to this plan.

Why would they possibly send their greatest political threat to France with the perfect excuse to stay there? Because Edward had spent seventeen years getting exactly what he wanted—Gaveston back from exile, the Despensers in power, the barons defeated—and he'd started to believe he was simply better at this than everyone else. Hugh Despenser, equally confident, apparently thought Isabella was too afraid of losing access to her children to risk defying them. They'd systematically dismantled her power base, taken her money, isolated her from allies, and assumed she understood she had no options.

They were about to discover they'd miscalculated catastrophically.

Isabella arrived in France in March 1325. She negotiated a treaty. Then she sent a message back to England: the French king would only complete the agreement if Edward came to France to pay homage for Gascony in person.

Edward couldn't go—leaving England with the barons this angry would be suicide. But there was a solution: send his heir, twelve-year-old Edward, to do homage instead. Hugh Despenser advised against it. Sending the heir to France while Isabella was there was dangerous. But Edward was trapped by his own greed—he needed those Gascon territories secure. Gascony produced wine, generated customs revenue, and represented what remained of England's once-vast French holdings. Losing it would be both an economic disaster and a humiliation Edward couldn't afford.¹⁷

In September 1325, young Edward crossed the Channel. Isabella now had her son. She had an excuse to be in France. And she had absolutely no intention of coming back.

In a letter to Edward II, Isabella declared she would not return to England while Hugh Despenser remained at court¹⁸. This wasn't a request or a negotiation. It was a public declaration that the Queen of England was choosing exile over her marriage—a scandal of the first order. Isabella had just announced to all of Europe that her husband's relationship with Hugh Despenser was more important to him than his wife, his children, or his kingdom.

The English government panicked. They declared Isabella's lands forfeit. They demanded Charles IV send her back. They froze her finances. They essentially announced that the queen of England was in rebellion.

Isabella's response? She started building an army.

Here's Isabella's situation in late 1325: she's an exiled queen with no army, no money, and technically no legal claim to do anything she's about to do. Her brother Charles likes her but isn't going to start a war with England for her. The Pope is demanding she return to Edward. English agents are watching her constantly.

She needs to raise an invasion force, equip it, transport it across the Channel, and somehow overthrow an anointed king who commands the entire English military.

So she pawns her jewelry¹⁹.

Isabella literally goes to Flemish merchants and Italian bankers and trades her crown, her jewels, and her plate for cash and promises. She's running a medieval crowdfunding campaign: "Back my invasion, get land grants in England—if we win."

She also acquires an ally: Roger Mortimer, an English baron who'd escaped from the Tower of London in 1323 and fled to France.²⁰ Mortimer was a skilled military commander, charismatic, ambitious, and had his own reasons to hate the Despensers—they'd stolen his lands.

Medieval chroniclers later claim Isabella and Mortimer became lovers. Probably true. Definitely scandalous. Also, strategically useful—Mortimer knew English politics, had military experience, and could claim to represent the English barons in rebellion.

Together, Isabella and Mortimer recruit mercenaries from Hainault. They negotiate a marriage contract between young Edward and Philippa of Hainault—the price of 700 Hainault soldiers.²¹ They promise lands, titles, and wealth to anyone who joins them. They're essentially running an early version of a leveraged buyout: promising to pay everyone with assets they don't actually control yet.

On September 24, 1326, Isabella's invasion fleet landed on the Suffolk coast.²²

She brought fewer than 1,500 men.

Edward II commanded the entire English military. He had the treasury. He had the royal castles. He had the legal authority of kingship. He should have crushed Isabella's tiny mercenary force immediately.

Instead, his government imploded in real-time.

The English barons didn't fight for Edward. They joined Isabella. One after another, magnates declared for the queen and her son. The northern lords, the western lords, the Marcher lords—everyone who'd been abused, robbed, or humiliated by the Despensers saw their chance and took it²³.

Within weeks, Isabella commanded an army of thousands. Edward's forces melted away. The king fled from London to Wales, taking Hugh Despenser with him, still refusing to abandon his favorite even as his kingdom collapsed around him.

The people of London rioted, hunting down anyone associated with the Despensers. They caught Hugh Despenser the Elder and hanged him without trial.²⁴ They opened the Tower of London and freed prisoners. They declared for Isabella and Prince Edward.

Edward II and Hugh the Younger tried to escape by ship to Ireland or Scotland. The weather turned against them—storms drove them back to Wales²⁵. On November 16, 1326, Edward II was captured at Neath Abbey.

Hugh Despenser the Younger was tried for treason—or rather, subjected to a show trial where his crimes were read aloud while he was denied the right to speak. He was convicted of everything: stealing land, corrupting the king, causing rebellion, and just generally being terrible.

His execution was designed to match his crimes. He was dragged through Hereford behind horses, then hanged, but cut down before he died. While still conscious, his genitals were cut off and burned in front of him—a pointed reference to his relationship with Edward. Then he was disemboweled, his heart cut out, and finally beheaded. His body was quartered and distributed to various English cities²⁶.

Medieval justice was not subtle.

Edward II was imprisoned in various castles, moved regularly so his supporters couldn't rescue him. On January 20, 1327, Parliament was summoned—not in Edward's name, but in the name of his son, Prince Edward.²⁷

This was the constitutional crisis: how do you legally depose an anointed king? Kings ruled by divine right. You couldn't just vote them out. The solution was creative: they forced Edward II to abdicate in favor of his son. On January 24, 1327, Edward II formally renounced the throne. His fourteen-year-old son became Edward III, with Isabella and Mortimer as regents²⁸.

The entire invasion, from landing to abdication, took exactly four months.

A queen with 1,500 mercenaries had overthrown the King of England without fighting a major battle, because Edward II's government was so dysfunctional that the entire kingdom was waiting for someone—anyone—to replace him.

Edward II didn't die quietly in prison. He couldn't—his existence was a permanent threat to Isabella's regency. As long as he lived, loyalists could try to restore him.

On September 21, 1327, Edward II died at Berkeley Castle under suspicious circumstances. The official cause was "natural causes."²⁹ Medieval chroniclers had other theories, including one particularly horrific account that was probably propaganda but became the accepted story: that Edward was murdered by having a red-hot poker inserted into his rectum, leaving no external marks.³⁰

Whether true or not, the story's purpose was clear: Edward's death was divine punishment for sodomy. Medieval morality plays don't mess around.

Isabella and Mortimer now ruled England through the teenage Edward III. They governed effectively for a time—more effectively than Edward II had, which was not a high bar. But they made the same mistake Edward II had made: they got greedy. Mortimer accumulated lands, titles, and power. He acted like a king without the crown. He had rivals executed. He alienated the barons who'd supported Isabella's invasion.³¹

Meanwhile, Edward III was growing up. By 1330, he was eighteen and tired of being a puppet king. On October 19, 1330, Edward III and a group of loyal nobles arrested Mortimer at Nottingham Castle while Isabella watched helplessly.³²

Mortimer was tried for treason and hanged at Tyburn. Isabella was placed under comfortable house arrest at Castle Rising in Norfolk with a generous pension.³³ She wasn't punished—she was Edward III's mother, after all—but her political career was over.

She lived another twenty-eight years, dying in 1358 at age sixty-three. She'd outlived both Edwards, outlived Mortimer, outlived most of the barons who'd fought beside her. She was buried at Greyfriars Church in London, wearing her wedding dress from 1308 and reportedly clutching Edward II's heart.³⁴

Medieval historians aren't sure whether that last detail is symbolic reconciliation or the most savage power move in royal history.

The traditional story of Isabella of France goes something like this: she was a scheming foreign queen who betrayed her husband, murdered him (probably), took a lover, and briefly ruled England before her son had to clean up her mess. The "She-Wolf of France"³⁵—dangerous, sexual, unnatural.

But that story obscures something far more interesting: Isabella executed one of the most successful military coups in medieval history with almost no resources, near-perfect strategic timing, and a level of political sophistication that most of her male contemporaries never achieved.

Consider the logistics. She needed to:

She did all of this in under two years, and the actual invasion took four months.

The 1326 invasion succeeded because Isabella understood something Edward II never did: kingship isn't about who you love or what you want. It's about maintaining the coalition of nobles, clergy, and commons who consent to be governed. Edward II spent nineteen years prioritizing his favorites over that coalition. Isabella spent nineteen years watching that coalition fracture, learning exactly which pressure points would shatter it completely.

When she landed in Suffolk with 1,500 mercenaries, she wasn't gambling on military victory. She was collecting a political debt that Edward's government had been accumulating for two decades.

The Despensers had stolen land from the barons. Edward had alienated the Church. The government had lost wars, raised taxes, and provided nothing in return. Every baron who'd been humiliated, every knight who'd been robbed, every lord who'd watched the king choose Hugh Despenser over the stability of the realm—they were all waiting for someone to give them permission to rebel.

Isabella gave them that permission, wrapped in the legitimacy of royal blood and the protection of the heir to the throne. She didn't need a large army. She just needed to be the alternative that every other alternative had failed to provide.

Isabella's invasion established a template that would be used repeatedly in English history: a royal woman with a legitimate claim, backed by disgruntled nobility, invading to "rescue" the kingdom from a failed king.

It happened again in 1399, when Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) invaded England to depose Richard II, using almost the same playbook: land with a small force, wait for the nobility to defect, force abdication, crown the heir.

It happened again in 1485, when Henry Tudor invaded to depose Richard III at Bosworth Field, winning the crown through a combination of noble defection and being the last man standing.

It happened again in 1688, when William of Orange invaded England to depose James II, in the so-called "Glorious Revolution" that barely involved any fighting because James's government collapsed the moment William landed.

Every single time, the same pattern: a ruler who'd alienated the governing coalition, an alternative claimant with enough legitimacy to provide cover, and a military operation that succeeded more through political collapse than battlefield victory.

Isabella wrote that playbook. She proved that if you broke the contract between monarch and nobility badly enough, the nobility would literally invite foreign armies to replace you.

Medieval chronicles called her the "She-Wolf of France" as an insult—she-wolves were symbols of sexual voracity, foreign danger, and unnatural female power in medieval imagery.

But wolves are also survivors. They're strategic. They wait for the right moment. They don't fight when they can win through patience.

Isabella of France was twelve years old when she married Edward II. She was twenty-nine when she invaded England. She was thirty-two when she effectively ruled it. She made terrible choices afterward—Mortimer was a mistake, holding power too long was a mistake, thinking she could govern through her son indefinitely was a mistake.

But the invasion itself? The overthrow of Edward II? That wasn't a mistake. That was a masterpiece of medieval political strategy executed by a woman with almost no resources except patience, timing, and a perfect understanding of when a government had become so dysfunctional that the entire kingdom was waiting for someone to pull the plug.

The She-Wolf of France didn't destroy England. She saved it from a king who was destroying it himself—and she did it with 1,500 mercenaries and a credit line from some very optimistic Flemish bankers.

If that's not an overlooked corner of history, we don't know what is.

What bizarre historical phenomenon should we investigate next? Drop us a line at [email protected].

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