Alison Weir - Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England

In Newgate Street, in the City of London, stand the meager ruins of Christ Church, a stark reminder of the devastation caused by the Blitz during the Second World War. This is the site of Christ's Hospital, the Blue Coat School founded by Edward VI in the sixteenth century, destroyed during the Great Fire of 1666, and rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren some years later. Yet these ruins stand on the site of an even older foundation, the magnificent monastery of the Grey Friars, originally built in 1225 and later endowed and reconstructed through the generosity of pious medieval queens. In the fourteenth century, this was a royal mausoleum set to rival Westminster Abbey as the resting place of crowned heads, yet tragically its splendors are long gone, having disappeared after Henry VIII dissolved the monastery in 1538, during the Reformation.

One of those who was buried in Greyfriars Church at Newgate, and whose tomb was lost, was Isabella of France, Edward II's queen, one of the most notorious femmes fatales in history. Nowadays, popular legend has it that this sinister woman does not rest in peace but that her angry ghost can sometimes be glimpsed amid the ruins, clutching the heart of her murdered husband to her breast.

It is also claimed, even in the reputable publications of English Heritage, that this Queen's maniacal laughter and agonized screams can be heard on stormy nights at Castle Rising in Norfolk, one of her favored residences. The belief still persists that, demented and insane, she was kept a prisoner here for twenty-eight years. And her unquiet ghost is also said to walk the secret passages below Nottingham Castle; she is believed to be searching in vain for her lost lover.

There is no doubt that the legends about Isabella of France paint a picture of a tragic, tormented, cruel, and essentially evil woman. And indeed, her historical reputation is not much more favorable. Since 1327, she has been more vilified than any other English queen. In her own lifetime, the chronicler Geoffrey le Baker called her that harridan or that virago, referring to her as Jezebel and to her episcopal followers as priests of Baal. Other chroniclers, although more discreet, were equally disapproving.

In 1592, in his play The Tragedy of Edward the Second, Christopher Marlowe wrote scathingly of that unnatural Queen, false Isabel and had Edward refer to her as my unconstant Queen, who spots my nuptial bed with infamy. So, too, in his controversial 1991 filmed adaptation of the play, the director Derek Jarman showed little sympathy for Isabella, portraying her as a sexually repressed virago.

Shakespeare had invented the epithet She-Wolf of France for Margaret of Anjou, the scheming, vindictive wife of Henry VI, but in the eighteenth century, when England was at war with France, the poet Thomas Gray applied it to Isabella, and it has stuck ever since. In his The Bard (1757), he speaks, with horrific significance, of the ... She-Wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs, That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate.

In the twentieth century, the German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht revived the same theme in his Life of Edward II of England. In this, Isabella declares:

I shall become a she-wolf

Ranging bare-toothed through the scrub,

Not resting

Until earth covers Edward ...

Drenched by the rain of exile,

Hardened by foreign winds ...

And in 1960, in his novel The She-Wolf of France, the acclaimed French writer Maurice Druon describes Isabella as having small, sharp, pointed carnivore's teeth, like those of a she-wolf. Thus, the legend has become deeply entrenched in the popular consciousness.

Isabella has fared little better with the historians. In the mid-nineteenth century, Agnes Strickland wrote loftily that, since the days of the fair and false Elfrida, who is believed to have arranged the murder of her stepson King Edward the Martyr in 979, no Queen of England has left so dark a stain on the annals of female royalty as Isabella, who is the only instance of a queen of England acting in open and shameless violation of the duties of her high vocation, allying herself with traitors and foreign agitators against her king and husband, and staining her name with the combined crimes of treason, adultery, murder and regicide. This proved almost too much for Miss Strickland, with her highly developed Victorian moral values, and her account was strictly bowdlerized, but even more modern historians have little that is good to say about Isabella, and most repeat the calumnies of the old chroniclers. In 1955, V H. H. Green called her a woman of no real importance or attraction, which is as inaccurate as it is dismissive, while in 1967, Kenneth Fowler denigrated her as a woman of evil character, a notorious schemer who was infamous for her marital inconstancy, although he did concede that this was in part excused by her husband's weaknesses. Elsewhere, Isabella is one of the most beautiful but depraved women of her time, or simply Isabella the Mad.