Isabella: Braveheart of France

Colin Falconer, author of 20 books, has just issued a superb historical novel, ISABELLA BRAVEHEART OF FRANCE, which I enthusiastically recommend to all devotees of this genre. Isabella, daughter of King Philip the Fair of France, at the age of 12 is married to the 23-year old King Edward II of England. That was in 1307.In the late 1980s, Princess Diana told Martin Bashir during an infamous BBC interview, "There were three of us in our marriage so it was a bit crowded." She was referring to the royal triangle with Charles and his longtime mistress Camillla. Well, Isabella quickly found out that there were three in her royal marriage as well. Her husband the king had a male lover Piers de Gaveston. It was a sobering thought for a queen to cope with in the hurlyburly world of the Plantagenet court. Colin has a gift for wonderful dialogue to move his narrative along. As Edward says to his young bride, "This love your minstrels sing about, might it always be a knight and a lady? Who made this law? Was it God? Then God is a trickster for there is no one else will do for me." He was putting it bluntly on the line.King Edward's father the formidable Edward I (the monarch in Mel Gibson's great film BRAVEHEART) was the one who first got his young son hooked up with Piers in the first place. They were both 16-year old hot blooded youths and the king thought that Piers, who was so adept at jousting and archery, would teach his son these skills. They became bedfellows and the king thought this was just a rite of passage and that these lusty lads would be wooing the wenches soon, but things didn't pan out that way. They both did marry and father children (Edward doing his dynastic duty by having two sons and two daughters) but they were openly gay for one another. Edward gave his greedy,insolent lover anything he wanted, titles, castles and lands belonging to other lords. Naturally, the disenfranchised lords were provoked by these antics and shenanigans, marshaled their forces and events were brought to a bloody head as the braying hounds of the baronage closed in, charging Piers with having an evil influence over the king and beheading him. Queen Isabella was hoping that she would now have her king all to herself, but not so. King Edward was prostrated with grief, but he had incorrigible lusts and soon found consolation with a new favorite sodomite, Hugh de Despenser, who turned out to be even more greedy than his predecessor. Hugh took over Piers' job as the king's chamberlain, a position that required duties in the royal bedchamber. Isabella had her own bedchamber where she slept alone. "This is a life fit for a nun not for a queen and a mother and a woman," Colin has Isabella lamenting.After several years of humiliation and neglect, Isabella took a lover herself, Roger de Mortimer, and they invaded England from the Netherlands with a small army. Her husband after 20 years of being king was taken prisoner and forced to abdicate, and their 15-year old prince became Edwasrd III. Hugh was taken prisoner in Bristol and hung on a gallows 50 feet high in the public square. He was castrated alive and then cut down and drawn and quartered. Isabella was there, not wanting to miss witnessing this, and her two little princesses had a peak of the gruseome proceedings from a window. The victim was the man whom they knew as Uncle Hugh. The square was filled with crowds who calamitously cheered. As Colin writes, "Nothing like evisceration to keep the common sort amused. That they hate the man is incidental, it's the entertainment that they love, lots of blood... There is a feast afterward to celeebrate." Remember, this was back in the day before the telly. Exercising literary and poetic license, Colin doesn't give us the final fate of Edward that's precisely in the history books. Christopher Marlowe did in his play EDWARD II written in 1592, 165 years after the event, in which he dramatized the final scene in Berkley Castle on stage, the king is held face down by two men with a table on his back, while a third assasin takes a red hot poker and inserts it through a horn into the royal rectum, burning out his insides. Later the body is displayed naked in public without a mark on it. Colin gives us a trick ending which I won't spoil for potential readers and I urge them to get the book and read it for themselves and be surprised and delighted with how he cleverly wraps up his version of this thrilling and tumultuous saga.In reading Colin's novel, I came to realize that throughout history, being a royal favorite was always a dangerous position to have. Incidents of royal gay bashing in history abound with periodic parallels. Edward II's gay great-grandson Richard II and his favorite Robert de Vere were both murdered by exasperated barons and magnates. Later royal gay bashing also broke out in the courts of France and Spain. King Jean II of France, a father of 10 children, was in thrall to his boyhood friend and favorite Charles de la Certa, his Constable of France. This favorite was beheaded in 1354, 27 years after Edward and Piers had met their doom. And Richard II's first cousin, King John II of Castile (son of his uncle John of Gaunt) had a boyhood chum Alvara de Lune, his Constable whom his queencontrieved to be beheaded. Mary Queen of Scots saw both her gay favorite and secretary David Rizzio and her gay husband Lord Darnley murdered by homophobic Scots lords. When Mary's son James VI became James I of England in 1603, being openly gay and making his favorite George Villiers the Duke of Buckingham didn't faze his consort nor the lords of the English court.In his always interesting blog, Colin recently posted that Rasputin, a favorite of the Imperial family of the Romanovs in Russia, was assasinated in 1916 by the openly gay but married to the Czar's niece Prince Felix Yussoupov. Colin blogs that Felix lured the monk to his luxurious Moika Palace in St. Petersburg and in the process of murdering him, cut off his victim's 13-inch penis before he was drowned in the Neva River, a ghasly but titillating tidbit that Robert K. Massie failed to report in his book NICHOLAS AND ALEXLANDRA published in 1967. In this incidence, it was a gay man who did the bashing of a straight notorious well-hung Siberian womanizing holy man. Be that as it may, to get back to Colin's new novel, he has given us an audacious take on the fascinating figure of Queen Isabella. Feminists will love it and male gay readers will be charmed by the ending. I was first turned on to these charismatic Plantagenets when I read Thomas B. Costain's THE THREE EDWARDS in my youth and then a novel HARLOT QUEEN by Hilda Lewis back in the 1980s. In Akira Kurosawa's RASHOMON, the 1950 cinematic masterpiece, there are 4 different accounts of a rape murder of what happened. I'm always open to a new variation and slant on any subject. As for Colin's version of Isabella, it's unique, extremely enthralling and sublimely entertaining and all those who have a penchant for good historical novels should read it, they won't be disappointed.

The British Royals have not changed much in a thousand years. They carry on with their lovers, their jealousies, their lofty excuses for being low lives. They don't draw and quarter each other anymore, but they inflict suffering on each other just the same. This is a well-written novel that could have used a little more editing, but it's instructive and interesting and I read it in two days.

Who can take historical fact and create a page turner with believable characters as Falconer does. And then the last page. Wow.

I read Mr. Falconer's historical novel of Cleopatra and so bought Isabella: Braveheart of France. He doesn't get the history completely right but does a good job of writing women who have had a lousy hand of cards dealt to them and make the best of it. Isabella was 12 when she was married to Edward Longshank's son Edward II. He was already known as being homosexual because his father had his lover banned from England. Edward II brings him back at his father's death and leaves him in charge of the country when he goes to France to pick up his 12 year old bride Isabella. The French king raised his children to be kings and queens and Isabella was an intelligent woman in a 12 year old body and comes back to see her dowry of jewels on his lover and the lands she was promised given to him as well. She has no money to pay for her household. Her father was the king who burned and destroyed the Knights Templar order to plunder their wealth and therefore not one you would want to shame his daughter lightly.Isabella sees her husband's lover killed by his noblemen and finally is able to produce some children and get Edward to take her advice but then he gets a new favorite and she is reduced to poverty and worse by Hugh Despenser the younger. She is not allowed to see her husband or children and has no money for her household. Her father dies and two of her brothers but her brother Charles is very much his father's son. He starts a land grab that forces Despenser to either send Isabella and her son the Prince of Wales or let the King go to France and make himself vulnerable to all the people whom he has cheated. Isabella meets Lord Mortimer, who she was instrumental in commuting his death sentence to life in prison and some said helped him escape to France. He helps her form a marriage for her son and get an army to land in England. She is the figurehead for the most successful invasion of England since William and his Normans invaded. She puts her son on the throne and there is still controversy over whether she had her husband killed or allowed him to be just a common man in exile while another body was used in his place. Edward II was not a bad man, but a gay man. Everyone knew but sent her to him anyway and gave her impossible instructions to make him love her. He was a weak king and was replaced by Edward III who at 18 took control of his own destiny. His children were the cause of the the hundred years war between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists that finally ended with Henry VII (a Tudor who had no real claim to the throne) who married the daughter of the Yorkist claimant which ends the Plantaganet dynasty.Isabella was a kickass woman who took control when she was forced to and did the best she could for her son. Her lover Mortimer seems to have been her reward to herself for all the years she was shamed by her husband. As men go, once he got what he wanted, he too became a tyrant who lost his life. Being a queen is not all it is cracked up to be and Mr. Falconer weaves stories that are not always on the money historically but do specialize in giving a voice to women history has not always treated fairly. Since Edward III's offspring set up the War of the Roses, this is an interesting time in English history and Isabella is a fascinating woman.

The story of Edward, the son of Longshanks, and his queen, the daughter of the French king, is well told . Always full of action - thanks to the skill of the author.

Very entertaining book! Isabella's life is fascinating and in general, terrifying for every modern woman. Such a strong woman who manages to win in an era in which an affair is ok for the man but it it is punishable sin if you are an woman, and woman is expected only to obey and bear children.However, the characters are a bit one dimensional. We are told that Isabella is pretty but how does she look, what are her interests besides trying to win the husband's love? The history tells us that she likes arts...I liked the ending as well!

O livro é interessante e realmente prende a atenção. Mas ele simplesmente ignora vários acontecimentos importantes da época e qualquer traço de interesse em assuntos diversos que a Isabela pudesse ter para a pintar como uma mulher obcecada por seu marido cuja vida é dedicada exclusivamente a ele. A ponto de o livro cobrir apenas o período em que ele esteve vivo, mesmo ela tendo vivido muitos anos após a sua morte uma vida cheia de acontecimentos importantes inclusive do ponto de vista histórico e dos quais ela foi protagonista.

Great read with history lesson as well

It was ok. Not good, because it was written in the present tense. It's a fad that should die a quiet death, because whatever is be said using the present is just as well said using the past tense. It's jarring. It lends no illusion of immediacy and "You are there." because the reader knows she is not in the 1300s and that this is a story told to her.It is not bad, because it shows the relationship of Edward II and Piers Gaveston in a sympathetic light. I would like to read a novel from Gaveston's point of view, or from Edward's. They were brought up together, and who knows how the heart works? Perhaps they needed each other's companionship as much as they needed physical love.

This story shows the evolution of Isabella from child bride to a Queen of England to be reckoned with. Well written.