The Ides of March Redux

I came across this old March 15th post and decided to repeat it, partly because Stephane’s quip made me laugh and partly because I feel confident that very few will remember something I posted four years ago. We’re all in favor of recycling, right? Stephanie has very generously offered to show me how to set up an Author Page, so I hope that will be up soon, at which time those who’ve friended me on my personal Facebook page will have to migrate over to the new page. I’m not happy about this, but Facebook doesn’t care. Anyway, here is that old post.
Several of my Facebook friends teased me because I’d called yesterday a “slow history day,” or as Stephanie put it, “Et tu, Sharon?” I explained that I was not dissing Julius Caesar, but simply being true to my laser-like focus on the MA. But I did forget an important medieval death that occurred on March 15, 1190, all the more unforgivable since it was mentioned prominently in Lionheart, and I’d like to thank my friend Kasia for reminding me that Isabelle of Hainaut, the first wife of the French king, Philippe Capet, died a month shy of her 20th birthday, after giving birth to two stillborn twin sons. She sounds like a fascinating young woman, for she’d managed to outwit Philippe at the tender age of 14 when he attempted to end their marriage on the bogus grounds that she’d failed to give him a son. She took to the streets of Senlis clad in a penitent’s shift, going from church to church to pray that her lord husband be saved from his evil advisers, and got so much sympathy from the public that Philippe was forced to relent and take her back. And the clever girl then deflected Philippe’s anger at having his royal will thwarted when he offered to wed her to any highborn lord in his realm. “Sire,” she said, sweetly and demurely, “it does not please God for a mortal man to lie in the bed in which you have lain.”