The Battle of the Queens

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

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