Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II - Hardcover

Doherty, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786711930 ISBN 13: 9780786711932

Publisher: Basic Books, 2003

Synopsis

For good reason, the queen in chess inherits its fearsome power on the game board from the reputedly murderous maneuvers of the fourteenth-century Queen Isabella of England, as historian and biographer Paul Doherty shows in his engaging account of a savage chapter in medieval English history. What begins with a peace match—the marriage of the twelve-year-old daughter of France's Philip IV to the dissolute Edward II in 1308—ends in bloody conflict, a possible regicide, the usurpation of royal power, execution, and exile. In a lively narrative that brings a fresh perspective to the history of Isabella's catastrophic marriage, Doherty illuminates the people, passions, and politics that prompted the young queen, after thirteen years, to flee the feckless, ineffectual king who had sacrificed the English army to ignominious and unnecessary defeat at Bannockburn and to escape court intrigues and her personal persecution by men like the sinister Hugh Despenser. At Isabella's command, though, Despenser eventually met a gruesome death, when she returned to England with the exiled Roger Mortimer and a mercenary army that deposed Edward and enthroned the conquering queen in the name of her young son, Edward III.

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Reviews

This tidy survey of the 14th-century reign of British king Edward II and his queen, Isabella, provides thumbnail sketches of a series of massacres, tortures, plots and counterplots leading to the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Edward, the first English king to be deposed from the throne. The prolific Doherty (author of the recent, compelling The Mysterious Death of Tutankhamun) is better known for writing several series of historical mystery novels, including the criminal investigations in an older Britain of Hugh Corbett and Brother Athelstan. Renowned for a sure ability to bring these periods to life in his fiction, Doherty seems strangely hog-tied by facts here. He notes in regard to the problems of determining why celebrity marriages go south today, that the difficulty is compounded by speculating on such events which occurred 700 years ago. The arranged marriage of Edward, heir to the English throne, and Isabella of France, went spectacularly wrong, with the queen, after she had been in exile in her native France, returning to England with an army to depose Edward. According to one tradition, Isabella arranged his death by means of a red hot poker thrust up into his bowels. Doherty postulates that Edward may have escaped this dire end in the year 1327, while duly recording Isabella's political supremacy and influence on history, which symbolically lives on in the powers invested in the queen in chess.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Oh, the color and drama of the Middle Ages. Doherty whisks us off to those vibrant but cruel days in this accessible biography of the queen of England's Edward II (who ruled during the years 1307-27). The son of the mighty but brutal Edward I married Isabella, a princess of France, but the great love of his life was a foreign-born man, Piers Gaveson. Edward II insisted his friend be treated as co-king; naturally, the favorite one made enemies, and those enemies eventually dealt him a fatal blow. For some years after that, Edward and Isabella were close, but soon the king had another male favorite; and, not surprisingly, the king's favorite and the queen had it out. As a result, Isabella fled home to France, came back with an army, and deposed her husband in favor of their son, Edward III. And what should she do with her husband, whom she now despised? Traditional historiography has it that she had him murdered; however, Doherty finds otherwise. Brad Hooper
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Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786711930
• ISBN 13: 9780786711932
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256