n Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II by Paul Doherty (Constable & Robinson, £17.99)

I WASN'T aware of anything strange in the way that Edward II died.

Brutal, perhaps. He was carted off to Berkeley Castle and had a red hot poker shoved up his bottom. That was the price you paid in the Middle Ages, when your Queen was a legendary French beauty, hungry for power, in love with someone else... and you were a passenger on the other baggage train.

That's how history has written it, but Doherty begs to differ.

Isabella, the daughter of Philip IV, was 12 years-old, and a pawn in the English and French tug-of-war over Gascony. Pawn is an apt word, for by the age of 28, Isabella had become the "She-Wolf, the new Jezebel"... the original chessboard queen.

At the time of their marriage, Edward was 23 and the love of his life was another man; his "favourite", Piers Gaveston, who the barons despised and engineered to have killed.

Doherty suggests Edward was bi-sexual and that as a teenage bride Isabella had put up with her husband's infidelities. However, by 1321, after 16 fulfilled years and four healthy children the Queen was not so happy about new favourite Hugh de Spencer.

He was astute, rapacious, much more sinister than the murdered Gaveston and intent on tearing the couple apart. The King had never forgiven the barons for the death of Gaveston and influenced by de Spencer he let loose a bloodbath across England.

Isabella set up an alternative Government and with her lover the exiled Marcher warlord Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, rode to the country's rescue.

De Spencer suffered a particularly slow and painful public death in Hereford. The captured king, under house arrest, was deposed and his teenage son placed on the throne with Isabella as Regent.

Within a few months Edward II was dead and his heart delivered in a silver casket to Isabella at Worcester.

But having destroyed one tyranny, Isabella replaced it with another and her fall from grace, along with Mortimer's, was not long in coming. He was beheaded and the Queen, forced to withdraw from public life, died in old age.

Doherty maintains that Isabella was a remarkable Queen, "a woman of outstanding ability, but flawed by her infatuation for Mortimer".

His twist in the story is the evidence that suggests Edward II did not die at Berkeley Castle, but escaped to the Continent and that the person now under the Purbeck marble sarcophagus in Gloucester is an imposter, placed there by Isabella and Mortimer as part of an elaborate plot to seize the country.

It's brutal, bloody stuff, but Doherty does fail to explain the origins of the poker theory, which would have been carried out not for its significant sexual connotation but to hide the manner of regicide.

David Chapman