The She-Wolf Who Overthrew Her Own King

Isabella of France earned one of history’s most chilling nicknames — the “She-Wolf of France” — and her story is one of the most dramatic in the entire history of the English monarchy: a queen who overthrew and destroyed her own husband, the King.

She was born around 1295, the daughter of the powerful King Philip IV of France — the same king who destroyed the Knights Templar. At just twelve years old, she was married to King Edward II of England to seal a peace between the two nations. She was intelligent, politically gifted, and famously beautiful. But her marriage was a disaster.

The Horror

Edward II was a weak and unpopular king, and he was obsessed with a series of male “favourites” — first Piers Gaveston, and later the grasping, cruel Hugh Despenser the Younger. Edward lavished these men with power, land, and affection, while sidelining and humiliating his queen. The Despensers grew so powerful and so hostile to Isabella that they turned the king against her, seized her lands, took her children from her custody, and left her humiliated and endangered at her own husband’s court. Isabella came to hate them, and to hate the husband who let them destroy her.

In 1325, Isabella was sent to France on a diplomatic mission to her brother, the French king. And she saw her chance. She refused to come back. In France, she allied herself with — and became the lover of — Roger Mortimer, a powerful English baron who had escaped from the Tower of London and was Edward’s sworn enemy. Together, this queen and her lover did the unthinkable: they raised an army to invade England and overthrow the king.

In 1326, Isabella and Mortimer landed in England with their force. And the country, sick of Edward and the hated Despensers, rose to join them. Edward’s support evaporated almost overnight. He fled west and was captured in Wales. The Despensers were hunted down and executed with horrifying brutality. And Edward II — the King of England — was a prisoner of his own wife.

They forced him to abdicate the throne in favour of his and Isabella’s fourteen-year-old son, who became King Edward III — but who was only a boy, meaning the real power lay entirely with Isabella and Mortimer. The She-Wolf now ruled England.

But a deposed king is a dangerous thing. As long as Edward II lived, he was a rallying point for anyone who might want to restore him — and there were already plots forming to free him. He was moved to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire and held in grim confinement. According to the tradition, his jailers first tried to kill him quietly by neglect — throwing rotting animal carcasses into his cell hoping he’d sicken and die of disease — but the former king was strong and stubbornly survived.

So, the accepted story goes, on or around the 21st of September 1327, they murdered him. And they did it in a way calculated to leave no visible wound on the royal body, so it could be passed off as a natural death. The infamous legend holds that a red-hot iron was thrust into his bowels, killing him internally with no outward mark. And the people of the town of Berkeley, it was said, were woken in the night by the agonised screams of their dying king echoing from the castle — screams so terrible that those who heard them prayed for his soul.

Officially, Edward II had died of natural causes. Almost nobody believed it.

THE MODERN RELIC Isabella and Mortimer now ruled England in the young king’s name — and they ruled greedily and badly, seizing vast wealth and executing their rivals, becoming as tyrannical as the regime they’d overthrown. But they made one fatal mistake: they underestimated the boy king.

Edward III grew up fast, watching his mother’s lover Mortimer dominate the kingdom and, very possibly, knowing he had murdered his father. In 1330, at just seventeen, Edward III struck. In a daring night-time coup, he and a handful of loyal companions crept through a secret tunnel into Nottingham Castle, seized Roger Mortimer, and arrested him. Mortimer was condemned as a traitor and hanged. And the young king took full control of his kingdom.

He spared his mother. Isabella, the She-Wolf, was stripped of her power but treated with respect. She lived out the rest of her life in comfortable retirement, growing increasingly religious, and died in 1358 — more than thirty years after her husband. And in death, she revealed something strange and haunting. She asked to be buried in her wedding dress. And she was interred with a silver casket placed on her chest — containing the heart of Edward II, the husband she had overthrown and, quite possibly, had killed, kept for thirty years and taken with her to the grave.

The relics are magnificent and you can visit them. Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire is still standing, still owned by the same family after nearly 900 years — one of England’s most remarkable inhabited castles. You can tour it, and see the cell where Edward II was imprisoned and, tradition says, murdered. And at Gloucester Cathedral, just a few miles away, stands the beautiful and elaborate tomb of Edward II — a magnificent alabaster effigy of the murdered king, crowned and serene, which became a place of pilgrimage. The king his own wife destroyed lies in glory beneath one of the finest tombs in England, while the She-Wolf of France sleeps in London with his heart on her breast.

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