Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England

Alison Weir, the best-selling author of The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Eleanor of Aquitaine, turns her expert eye to the dark reign of another notorious and charismatic medieval monarch, Queen Isabella of France. The only daughter of France's King Philip IV, Isabella married English king Edward II in 1308 at the age of 12 to cement the peace between France and England. But the marriage soured quickly. Edward preferred his young male courtiers to his bride and his kingdom. When Isaballa's patience was exhausted, she fled with her eldest son back to France and into the arms of her husband's enemy, the powerful Baron Roger Mortimer. Together, Isabella and the baron raised an army, forced Edward II to abdicate the throne and then, it was later asserted, had the former king brutally murdered--allowing them to rule England while Isabella's son, Edward III, was still a minor. A work of extraordinary scholarship, this first full-length study of Queen Isabella offers groundbreaking insights into the life and reputation of this most vilified of queens, a woman who was in her own way as brave, compelling and complicated as Eleanor, but to whom history has been much less kind.