Daughter of Philip IV of France and wife of Edward II, who turned against her husband's favourites, invaded England with Roger Mortimer in 1326, deposed Edward, and ruled as regent until her son Edward III seized power in 1330.
Isabella of France was the daughter of Philip IV of France and queen of England as the wife of Edward II. Married at about twelve to a king whose affection went to his favourites, first Piers Gaveston and then Hugh Despenser the Younger, she became in 1325–1326 the leader of the opposition to her husband, invaded England with her lover Roger Mortimer, and brought about the first deposition of an English king.
From 1327 to 1330 she and Mortimer ruled in the name of her son Edward III of England, making peace with Scotland in the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton, until the eighteen-year-old king overthrew them. Her descent from the French royal house gave Edward III the claim to the French throne on which he began the Hundred Years' War.
Isabella was born in Paris around 1295, the only surviving daughter of Philip IV and Joan I of Navarre; each of her three brothers would reign as king of France. Her marriage to Edward, prince of Wales, was agreed in 1299 as part of the peace that ended the Anglo-French war over Gascony, and she married Edward II at Boulogne on 25 January 1308, six months after he became king. At their coronation in February, Edward's open favour to Piers Gaveston, who carried the crown, offended her kinsmen and the English magnates alike.
Contemporaries praised Isabella's beauty and intelligence, and for years she was a loyal and effective queen, mediating between Edward and his barons and representing him in France. The same chroniclers, and still more the writers of later centuries, condemned her adultery with Mortimer and her part in her husband's fate, and the eighteenth-century poet Thomas Gray gave her the name She-Wolf of France.
Modern historians have weighed the provocation she endured. In 1324 the Despensers seized her estates, placed her household under watch and reduced her to an allowance, and her children were taken from her. Her rule after 1327 was grasping, and she granted herself one of the largest incomes ever held by an English queen, but she was a skilled politician who used diplomacy, marriage alliances and propaganda to overthrow a king.
In 1325 Edward sent Isabella to Paris to negotiate with her brother Charles IV over Gascony. Once there she refused to return while Hugh Despenser remained at court, and she was joined by Edward's enemies in exile, among them Roger Mortimer, who had escaped from the Tower of London in 1323 and became her lover. When her son Edward crossed to France to do homage for Gascony, she kept him with her.
She arranged the boy's marriage to Philippa of Hainault in return for ships and troops, and in September 1326 she landed in Suffolk with a small army. Support for Edward II collapsed; he fled west and was captured, the elder Despenser was executed at Bristol and the younger at Hereford, and in January 1327 the king was forced to abdicate in favour of his son. Edward II died at Berkeley Castle in September 1327, almost certainly murdered.
Isabella and Mortimer then governed for Edward III. They made peace with Robert the Bruce, recognising Scottish independence in 1328, and enriched themselves and their followers. In October 1330 the young king and a few companions entered Nottingham Castle by a secret passage and arrested Mortimer, who was hanged at Tyburn the next month.
Isabella was spared. She retired to Castle Rising in Norfolk and later lived at Hertford, visiting her son's court and taking part in negotiations with France. She died at Hertford Castle on 22 August 1358 and was buried in the habit of the Poor Clares in the Franciscan church at Newgate in London, reportedly with the heart of Edward II.
Isabella's position as sister of the last three Capetian kings passed a claim to Edward III, and when the French crown went instead to her cousin Philip VI of France in 1328, that claim became the English case for war that opened the Hundred Years' War in 1337. Her overthrow of Edward II also created the precedent for removing a crowned king with the consent of Parliament, used again against Richard II in 1399.