Before we start, just a quick warning for this episode contains descriptions of violence

or sexual content that may not be suitable for all listeners.

It's a bright spring morning.

A young woman rides out of the gates of Bozhonsea, a town in the shadow of a huge newly built stone

castle on the banks of the River Law in France.

She's in a hurry.

Her freedom and the whole course of the rest of her life depends on whether she can move

fast enough.

She takes with her only a handful of her closest attendants and servants.

People she trusts with her life.

She doesn't take her two little daughters, seven-year-old Marie and Alex, who's only

one.

She knows that in leaving them she may never see them again, but she has no choice.

She also leaves behind something else that tugs her heartstrings.

Something taken from her just days before.

Her crown.

The year is 1152.

And for fifteen years this young woman has been queen of France.

The wife of King Louis VII, one of Europe's most powerful rulers.

But now all that is over.

Her marriage to the king is broken down to the point that even counselling sessions with

the Pope, obviously the world's leading relationship guru, have failed to bring them

...