Tour de Nesle affair
The Tour de Nesle affair was a scandal amongst the French royal family in 1314, during which Margaret, Blanche, and Joan, the daughters-in-law of King Philip IV, were accused of adultery.
The contemporary bishop of Pamiers described him as "neither a man nor a beast, but a statue";[1] modern historians have noted that he "cultivated a reputation for Christian kingship and showed few weaknesses of the flesh.
[10] Meanwhile, Philip the Fair married his daughter, Isabella, to Edward II of England in 1308 in an attempt to resolve the tensions of his twin problems of conflict over the contested territories of Gascony and Flanders.
Isabella's marriage proved difficult, largely due to Edward's intimate relationship with his close friend and possible lover, Piers Gaveston.
The accusations centred on suggestions that Blanche and Margaret had been drinking, eating and engaging in adultery with Gautier and Philip of Aunay in the Tour de Nesle over a period.
[16] Some accounts have suggested that Isabella's accusations were politically motivated; she had just given birth to her son, Edward, and in theory the removal of all three of her sisters-in-law might have made his accession to the French throne more likely.
[18] Some contemporary chroniclers suggested that Philip IV's unpopular chamberlain Enguerrand de Marigny might have been responsible for framing the knights and women involved.
[6] Having been tortured, the guilty knights Gautier and Philippe were then killed; most histories agree that they were first castrated and then either drawn and quartered[4] or flayed alive, broken on a wheel and then hanged.
[21] Due to the gap in the papacy between the death of Clement V in 1314 and the election of John XXII in 1316, Margaret's marriage to Louis could not be annulled, and she was imprisoned in an underground cell at Château Gaillard castle.
[22] Joan was placed under house arrest at Dourdan in the aftermath of the Parlement acquittal amidst suggestions that she might also have been having an adulterous affair herself, but enjoyed the continuing support of her husband, Philip.
[6] The affair badly damaged the reputation of women in senior French circles, contributing to the way that the Salic Law was implemented during subsequent arguments over the succession to the throne.
Scholars studying the theme of courtly love have observed that the narratives about adulterous queens die out shortly after the Tour de Nesle scandal, suggesting that they became less acceptable or entertaining after the executions and imprisonments in the French royal family.
[15] The story of the affair was used by the French dramatist Alexandre Dumas as the basis for his play La Tour de Nesle in 1832, "a romantic thriller reconstructing medieval crimes on a grand scale".
