Today's show is sponsored by Audible, the home of over 150,000 audiobooks.

To get a free, yes, free audiobook, go to Audibletrial.com forward slash queens and go find yourself something awesome to listen to today.

Sign up for a free trial membership at Audibletrial.com forward slash queens.

And better yet, by doing so, you'll be showing your support for the Queens of England podcast.

Hello and welcome to the Queens of England podcast.

Episode 17, Isabella of France, the fairest and noblest of them all.

Yeah. them all. After a lot of very obscure, though very worthy queens, we are now back to someone a little better known, Isabella of France.

Like Eleanor of Akitaine, she is someone who has appeared in multiple guises on stage and screen,

but is best known in two particular adaptations.

In Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, she is portrayed as a complex character,

at first loyal to her husband, but then the evil and conniving accomplice of Mortimer,

later in the play. In Mel Gibson's Oscar-winning bulldozer of history, Braveheart, she's portrayed by

Sophie Marceau as a clever yet doe-eyed French princess, put off by the gayness of her husband and

brutishness of her father-in-law into the arms of the brave and heroic Scott, William Wallace.

The place of Isabella in the popular imagination is generally more of the Marlowe type,

with the sympathetic, though wildly inaccurate portrayal given in Braveheart, being a far more

revisionist interpretation. Yet neither of these truly get to the heart of what made Isabella

such an interesting woman.

This is because both Marlowe and Gibson, along with Legion other writers who use her in their stories,

never failed to show Isabella as being anything other than a pawn in the games of others,

be it Mortimer, Edward I, or William Wallace. In these stories, she needs men to show her the way. In reality, though, it was she that guided the men in her life to do her bidding.

Now, covering Isabella is going to be a little bit different from previous episodes, as it will not be as sharply focused on her as I would have liked, as the context is so important

...