The Unhappy Marriage of Edward II and Isabella of France
The turbulent history of the late 13th and early 14th century King Edward II of England and Isabella of France throws up many parallels with monarchical Game of Thrones characters. Isabella was renowned for her incredible beauty: “the most beautiful in the kingdom and the empire” in the words of the French chronicler Godefroy de Paris. Behind her beauty, however, lay a wrathful temperament. She married her husband, the handsome King Edward II, at the tender age of 14. But while husband in name, Edward’s affections were directed less towards her and more towards his male courtiers.
The most obvious plotline Isabella’s embittered relationship with Edward ties into is the relationship between Cersei Lannister and Robert Baratheon. Cersei is constantly vying for Robert’s attention but is powerless to hold him back from having numerous affairs. Just as Isabella had to compete for first place with her husband’s “favorite”, Piers Gaveston, even at her own coronation, Cersei is also condemned to being second best to the memory of Robert’s one true love, Lyanna Stark. After all, in Westeros what’s dead may never die.
Then there’s the fact that, along with her lover (though not, as in Cersei’s case, her brother) Isabella ultimately orchestrated the removal of her husband and the coronation of her ungrateful wretch of a son, the 14-year-old Edward of Windsor. Rather than getting her husband drunk and impaled by a boar, however, Isabella was content merely in having Edward arrested and imprisoned. What goes around comes around though, and before her son had even turned 18 he launched a coup of his own, putting his mother under house arrest and having her lover, Roger Mortimer, hanged. Shame.
Westeros has another queen who’s forced to play second fiddle to an unfaithful king: Margaery Tyrell. She has a pragmatic but passionless marriage to Renly Baratheon, a man who gets infinitely more sexual stimulation from her brother than he does from her. And here again, the parallels between Edward and Isabella are clear. Piers Gaveston wasn’t the only male courtier that caught Edward’s eye. The king had what seems to have been a sexual relationship with Hugh le Despenser, who met his end shortly after Edward fell from power in 1326. His death, described by Froissart, was brutal: raised up on a ladder before a jeering crowd, he was castrated and disemboweled while fully conscious, before finally being beheaded and quartered, his body strewn across London.