A Woman Scorned

QUEEN ISABELLA

Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England

By Alison Weir

Ballantine. 487 pp. $27.95

Alison Weir's 10th work of historical biography, Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England , is the first full-length study of Isabella, daughter of Philip IV of France. It is meticulously researched and engagingly written, a highly readable tour de force that brings Queen Isabella vividly to life and proves that Isabella is a match for that other formidable female figure from medieval history, Eleanor of Aquitaine, subject of an earlier, best-selling book by Weir.

In spite of her reputation in her day as a considerable beauty of impressive intelligence, Isabella has been largely overlooked by history. By contrast, her husband, Edward II, King of England, is notorious. He is remembered for his public and passionate homosexual relationship with his court favorite, Piers Gaveston. Besotted with Gaveston to the point of political recklessness, Edward lavished a kingdom's worth of titles and riches upon him and neglected state business. Eventually deposed and replaced by his son Edward III, Edward II met a nasty end -- murdered in his prison cell by assassins who impaled him on a red-hot poker, smothered him with a featherbed and finished him off by placing a table on top of him and stamping on it until he expired.

In Queen Isabella, Weir painstakingly uncovers the private and public life of Edward II's long-suffering wife and consort. Betrothed to Edward at the age of 7, married to him at 12 and neglected by him in favor of his "minion," Gaveston, Isabella nevertheless grew up to become a formidable power within the land. She had been forced to play politics from girlhood in order to protect her position and secure the income and estates to which she was entitled (even before the wedding celebrations were over, Gaveston was wearing the fabulous jewels presented by the King of France and intended for Isabella). By her twenties, she was as adept at manipulating events and policy as any of the warring nobles surrounding Edward.

In his sensational stage version of Edward II's reign, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's contemporary, dramatized Isabella's relationship with her husband as a stereotype of the wronged wife:

O miserable and distressed Queen! . . .

Like frantic Juno will I fill the earth

With ghastly murmur of my sighs and cries;