Isabella of France - Legacy

Legacy

Queen Isabella appeared with a major role in Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II, and thereafter has been frequently used as a character in plays, books and films, often portrayed as beautiful but manipulative or wicked.

Thomas Gray, the 18th-century poet, combined Marlowe's depiction of Isabella with William Shakespeare's description of Margaret of Anjou (the wife of Henry VI) as the "She-Wolf of France", to produce the anti-French poem The Bard, in which Isabella rips apart the bowels of Edward II with her "unrelenting fangs". The epithet of the "She-Wolf" stuck, and was re-used by Bertolt Brecht in his The Life of Edward II of England.

In Derek Jarman's 1991 film based on Marlowe's play, Isabella is played by actress Tilda Swinton as a 'femme fatale' whose thwarted love for Edward causes her to turn against him and steal his throne.

Similarly, Isabella appears in Jean Plaidy's novels The Follies of the King and The Vow on the Heron as an antagonist. She is depicted as a murderous sociopath from childhood, having inherited bloodthirsty tendencies from her father. She is deeply homophobic and becomes obsessed with destroying Edward II and his male companions, due more to damaged pride than unrequited love. She is also portrayed as a very vain egoist with a deep streak of sadism. After Edward's murder, she is troubled by nightmares and sleepless nights, and is tortured by guilt. She is still intoxicated with power, however and is unwilling to hand it over to her son. As in the real histories, Isabella and Mortimer are eventually deposed by the future Edward III.

Isabella has been the subject of a number of other historical novels, including Margaret Campbell Barnes' Isabel the Fair, Hilda Lewis' Harlot Queen, Maureen Peters' Isabella, the She-Wolf, Brenda Honeyman's The Queen and Mortimer, Paul Doherty's The Cup of Ghosts and Edith Felber's Queen of Shadows. The Queen figures prominently in the later books of Michael Jecks' Knights Templar Mysteries series.

She is very sympathetically portrayed in Isolde Martyn's 'The Knight and the Lady' – the 'lady' of the novel becomes a great friend and confidant to her.

She is the title character of The She-Wolf of France by the well-known French novelist Maurice Druon. The series of which the book was part, The Accursed Kings, has been adapted for French television in 1972 and 2005.

Most recently, Isabella figures prominently in The Traitor's Wife: A Novel of the Reign of Edward II by Susan Higginbotham. Ken Follett's 2007 novel, World Without End uses the alleged murder of Edward II (and the infamous letter) as a plot device. Susan Howatch's Cashelmara and The Wheel of Fortune, based on the lives of the Plantagenet kings, depict her as a young abused wife and an old widow hidden from her grandchildren in a retirement home run by nuns. She features in a fictional autobiography, written by Alice Walworth Graham, of Elizabeth, the daughter of Guy de Beauchamp, 10th Earl of Warwick and later the wife of Thomas of Astley, 3rd Lord Astley; the book is entitled The Vows of the Peacock.

In contrast to the negative depictions, in Mel Gibson's Braveheart, Isabella was played by the French actress Sophie Marceau more sympathetically. In the film Isabella is fictionally depicted as having a romantic affair with the Scottish hero William Wallace despite being 9 years old at the time of Wallace's death. Additionally, Wallace is incorrectly portrayed as the real father of her son, Edward III, despite Wallace's death many years before Edward's birth.

Alison Weir in her 2005 biography also attempted to portray Isabella more positively through first-hand accounts and archival evidence, in particular stressing her marital patience and loyalty.