There was a further charge against Ireland, which has been ever since received as historical fact, though it was not substantiated by a single document, nor by any thing but the bare word of the conspirators, and some inferences from circumstantial evidence, which might or might not be true. The Duke had always lived unhappily with his Duchess, who was a cousin of the King. The differences between them were partly ecclesiastical, he siding with the Antipope Urban, she with Pope Clement. There is also reason to suspect that her temper was somewhat less than angelic. The chroniclers tell us that Ireland fell violently in love with a German lady in the Queen’s suite, whose name was Lancerona or Lancecrona (a suspiciously manufactured epithet): that the Queen wrote a letter to Pope Urban entreating that he might receive a divorce; that Urban thereupon divorced Ireland and Philippa, and that the Duke married his German love: that his mother was extremely indignant, and took Philippa to live with her; that the Sire de Coucy, father of the Duchess, and the King of France, almost took up arms against England in consequence of these wicked proceedings. The real truth of the matter is that no evidence whatever exists to support these alleged facts. We have evidence that Gloucester and others took pains to spread them as a rumour, but none to show that they were true. Not only is the Queen’s letter not forthcoming, but there is no document to show that a divorce ever took place![#] There is no evidence—except the _ipse dixit_ of Gloucester and his partisans—that Ireland ever contracted a second marriage; while the facts that after his banishment he was invited to visit the French Court, that his wife bore the title of Duchess of Ireland to the day of her death, which followed his, and that his mother ran great personal risk in warmly espousing his cause and that of King Richard when both were at the lowest ebb, do not took favourable to the representations of Gloucester. It may be added that this Lancecrona, who is stated to have been a lady in waiting and a laundress—two utterly incompatible positions, even more so at that time than now—does not appear at all as one of the royal suite in any mention of them contained in the state papers, and there is cause for suspicion which almost reaches certainty, that she never existed beyond the inner consciousness of my Lord Duke of Gloucester. [#] Carter, one of the most accurate of our historians, records his opinion that "there is no reason to think that a divorce was ever granted, _nor even solicited_, between Ireland and Philippa." (ii. 581.)