by Jean Plaidy
There was nothing for her in the outside world. All she sought now was death.
So earnestly did she seek it that within two years of her flight from Lusignan it came to her.
They buried her, as she had wished, not in the church but in the common graveyard, for she had said, ‘Proud was I in life but humble in death.’
Thus passed the turbulent Isabella of Angoulême, and on her death Louis saw no reason why Hugh and he should be enemies. He had known – and Blanche had known – that only Hugh’s excessive love for his wife had made him a traitor of him. Such good friends did they become that Hugh accompanied Louis when he realised one of his main ambitions: to join a crusade to the Holy Land. It was on this crusade that Hugh was mortally wounded.
Six years later after Isabella’s death Henry, King of England, on a visit to Fontevrault, was shocked to discover that his mother lay in a common grave.
He ordered that her body be taken from it and buried beside his grandfather and grandmother, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Then he caused a tomb to be built over it and a statue of her in a flowing gown caught in by a girdle and a wimple veil framing her face.
‘I remember her beauty in my childhood,’ he said, ‘and when I met her later she was as fair as ever. I never saw a woman as beautiful as my mother, Isabella of Angoulême.’
Bibliography
Appleby, John T., John, King of England
Ashley, Maurice, The Life and Times of King John
Aubrey, William Hickman Smith, National and Domestic History of England
d’ Auvergne, Edmund B., John, King of England
Barlow, F., The Feudal Kingdom of England
Bémont, Charles (translated by E. F. Jacob), Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester
Brooke, F. W., From Alfred to Henry III
Bryant, Arthur, The Medieval Foundation
Davis, H. W. C. England Under the Angevins
Funck-Brentano, Fr. (translated by Elizabeth O’Neill), The National History of France The Middle Ages
Guizot, M. (translated by Robert Black), History of France
Hume, David, History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution
Labarge, Margaret Wade, Simon de Montfort
Norgate, Kate, England Under the Angevin Kings
Pernoud, Régine (translated by Henry Noel), Blanche of Castile
Powicke, Sir Maurice, The Thirteenth Century 1216–1307
Stenton, D. M., English Society in the Middle Ages
Stevens, Sir Leslie, and Lee, Sir Sidney, The Dictionary of National Biography
Strickland, Agnes, Lives of the Queens of England
Wade, John, British History
Young, Denholm, N., Richard of Cornwall