Виктория Холт: The Battle of the Queens

‘Isabella!’ he cried.

‘Let me go,’ she cried. ‘This does not concern you.’

Then she ran out of the hall to the stables and she seized a horse and rode away.

The end, she thought. This is the end. Those fools – to have been caught! If they had not … all would be well.

But what to do? Where to go?

Sanctuary. Fontevrault. No one could take her there. Even Spanish Blanche could not break the rules of Holy Church.

It was her only hope, to reach sanctuary before they took her.

She rode on, thinking of Hugh. He would come for her, fight for her, defend her. Would he? Would even he shrink from one who had planned the diabolical murder of the King who had so recently shown them so much kindness?

It was over. She realised that at last.

Her only hope now was Fontevrault.

She reached the Abbey. The nuns took her in.

They would succour her. There was refuge here for all.

They put her into a secret chamber where none could reach her.

‘I am in flight,’ she said. ‘I have sinned greatly, and I wish to pass my days in repentance.’

They believed her. They knew she was the beautiful Isabella who had been responsible for much strife throughout the land. They had not yet heard of her attempt to poison the King of France.

They left her to rest and to pray.

And she thought: So it has come to this. When a woman must spend her last years in repentance, that is indeed the end.

Alone in her secret chamber she sat brooding on the past. What was there left to her but prayer and repentance? She thought back over her life and was afraid for her sins. It was as though her carefully guarded youth dropped from her now and the years which she had held at bay were at last overtaking her.

There were no lotions to preserve her smooth skin; no oils for her hair; no scents for her body.

If she were truly seeking repentance, she should have no need of such things.

Strange it was that she, proud Isabella, should have come to this.

There was no safety outside for her. If she emerged they would accuse her of attempting to murder the King. Her Spanish enemy would have no mercy on her.

She scarcely spoke to any, and so deep was her melancholy that the nuns believed she would die of it.

They brought her news of the world outside the convent. She heard that her husband and her eldest son had been arrested on charges of being involved in an attempt to poison the King.

‘Oh no, no,’ she cried aloud. ‘They knew nothing of it.’

Hugh defended her as she knew he would. ‘They lied,’ he cried. There had been no poison attempt in which his wife or any member of his family had been involved. The villains had mentioned his wife’s name because of recent happenings and they thought their wicked story would be believed. He challenged Alphonse to single combat that he might defend his wife’s honour.

Dear simple Hugh!

Alphonse would not fight. He declared that Hugh de Lusignan was so treason-spotted that he would not demean himself by meeting him. Young Hugh then offered to fight but his offer was refused because, it was said, with such parents, he was unworthy.

Thus they were all brought low, and since it was believed by Louis and Blanche that Isabella alone was guilty, Hugh was freed and went back to Lusignan to mourn his sad fate.

Isabella would see no one. Nothing would make her emerge from her chosen solitude.

She would take the veil and live out her life seeking forgiveness for her sins.

With the passing of the days her will to live escaped her. She sought nothing now but death.

She told the nuns that when she believed her sins were forgiven she would take to her pallet and rise no more.

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.’

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