Adela of France

So the future conqueror was born in the very town his father had held against his own brother, something that later chroniclers found poetic.

Richard, meanwhile, had other business, and a charter from January 1027 shows him granting a marriage settlement to a bride named Adela.

She's often identified as a daughter of King Robert II of France, but the charter never names her father.

A marriage meant a significant possibility of a legitimate heir down the road.

Handing a rival potential heir to the church was a tidy and entirely respectable way of taking him off the board in terms of inheritance.

Further, since he wasn't a legitimate son of the deceased Duke, he had little chance of building a power base from a secluded monastic life.

As for the French Princess Adela, she was raised in Flanders as the future wife of Baldwin V, and their daughter, Matilda of Flanders, would marry William the Conqueror in the early 1050s.

If she really was the girl once promised to Richard, then the son of the suspected poisoner ended up married to the daughter of the poisoned duke's intended bride.