Free Princesses Behaving Badly by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie Page B

II, the emperor of the eastern portion. Taken aback, Theodosius sent a messenger to coemperor Valentinian advising him to placate the Hun and hand over his sister.
    Valentinian would have none of it; giving up Honoria meant giving the Hun a claim to the throne. Torturing Hyacinthus into a confession, Valentinian learned the full story of Honoria’s treasonous plans. After lopping off the eunuch’s head, he then took aim at his sister’s. Only the intercession of their mother, still the real power behind Valentinian’s throne, kept it firmly attached to her neck. As penance, however, Honoria was stripped of her Augusta title, forcibly hitched to the senator, and exiled from both courts.
    Attila, meanwhile, dispatched an embassy to Valentinian’s court, declaring Honoria innocent of all treason, insisting that her imperial title be restored, and, oh yes, demanding that they hand her over as his rightful bride. He was rebuffed—she
was
married after all. But that didn’t stop him from trying again in 452, using the marriage claim as a pretense to invade Italy. Though he didn’t manage to conquer Rome, he left a lot of the countryside in ruins while trying.
    What happened to Honoria after this disastrous episode is unclear. By 455, just six years after the unfortunate affair with Eugenius, she dropped off the radar, probably dead (whether of natural causes or by order of the emperor is up for debate). What is known is that, having fallen out of power and out of favor, she did not live happily ever after.
    Neither did the Roman Empire. Honoria, it seems, inspired other princesses to try to get out of bad marriages by inviting barbarians over for a bit of tea and sympathy. In 455, for example, Licinia Eudoxia, forced to marry the successor of her murdered husband, Valentinian, took a cue from Honoria and invited the Vandal king Gaiseric to lay waste to Rome. Gaiseric did so with gusto, sacking the city and taking Licinia and her two daughters as willing “hostages.” Ultimately, Attila’s repeated attacks, which lasted until his death in 453, Gaiseric’s invasion, the predations of other barbarians, and internal struggles led to the hacking off of the empire’s gangrenous western half. In 476, when the last western Roman emperor was deposed by a Germanic prince, the great superstate was downsized to the much more manageable Byzantine Empire in the east.
    And Honoria is remembered as the treacherous princess who held open the door for the invading barbarians.

Isabella of France
T HE “S HE -W OLF ” P RINCESS
    1295–1358
C IVIL - WAR - TORN E NGLAND
    F rench princess Isabella was only 12 years old in 1308 when she sailed into the court of English king Edward II as his wife. And he, the 24-year-old freshly crowned monarch, was very much in love … just not with her.
    The person Edward
was
in love with was a young knight named Piers Gaveston. That Edward had a lover wasn’t shocking, nor was it a big problem that his lover was a man. The problem, as the English court saw it, was how “immoderately” Edward loved the glamorous, arrogant Gaveston—enough to risk his entire kingdom and the lives of thousands of soldiers. When Gaveston was around, Edward was worse than useless,barely able to hold a conversation, much less govern. When Gaveston wasn’t around, Edward was a wreck.
T HREE ’ S A C ROWD
    While Edward and Isabella were married in France, Gaveston stayed in England with his own child bride, Edward’s 15-year-old niece. Less than a month later, Isabella witnessed firsthand just how deep the man’s hooks went into her husband’s heart. During the ceremony at Westminster Abbey investing Isabella with the title of queen, it was Gaveston who held the crown. At the coronation feast afterward, he sat next to the king under tapestries that depicted not the emblems of Edward and Isabella but the arms of Edward and Gaveston. And just to turn the dagger a bit more, Edward handed over the wedding gifts from