Product Description

In chess, from the time of Queen Isabella of England, the queen has been considered the most powerful and feared piece on the board. Known to chroniclers as the 'she-wolf', Isabella, daughter of Philip IV of France, married King Edward II of England in 1308 in a union intended to create a lasting peace between the two countries. But after 13 years of enduring her husband's unkind and dissolute nature she fled abroad. With her lover, the exiled Roger Mortimer, she raised an army of mercenaries and invaded England, successfully deposing Edward. Popular belief holds that Edward was murdered in an infamous manner at Berkeley Castle near Gloucester, at the order of his wife and her lover. But after Mortimer's execution a letter arrived at court that cast doubt over Edward's death and raised the possibility of his escape. The evidence remains controversial to this day, and here Paul Doherty examines it in his fascinating detective study, set in one of the most turbulent and exciting periods of English history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #797893 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Print on Demand (Paperback)
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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.

From Booklist
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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About the Author
Paul Doherty is the internationally renowned author of many histories and historical novels. He studied history at Liverpool and Oxford universities, and gained a Doctorate at Oxford. He is now headmaster of a London school and lives near Epping Forest.