Her breasts are lovely to behold,
Like to the driven snow.”
That she had two children seems to be established, but that they were, as often stated, William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, and Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, has been disputed.
Rosamond, we are told, was for sake of her wit and beauty received back by the nuns of Godstow with alacrity. Doubtless she told them many strange tales of the wicked world, for who better qualified to know? Her body was buried before the high altar. King John, according to Lambarde, raised a gorgeous monument to her, inscribed,
Hic jacet in tumba, Rosa Mundi, non Rosa Munda,
Non redolet, sed olet, quae redolere solet.
Speed paraphrased this as follows:
“This tomb doth here enclose the world’s most beauteous Rose,
Rose, passing sweet erewhile, now nought but odour vile.”
A few years later, Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, paying a round of pastoral visits in his diocese, in which Oxford was then included, coming to Godstow, saw this gorgeous monument and asked what great and good person it was, then, who lay here. It was, said the nuns, the tomb of Rosamond, sometime mistress of Henry the Second, who for love of her had done much good to that church. Thereupon the saintly and scandalised Bishop declared that the “hearse of a harlot was not a fit spectacle for a quire of virgins to contemplate, nor was the front of God’s altar a proper station for it”; and he directed that she should be removed and buried outside, “lest Christian religion should grow in contempt.”