Chapter 9
Isabella of Gloucester is a unique individual in the story of Magna Carta. She is a shadow in the pages of history, and yet she held one of the greatest earldoms in England. There are no pictures of her, not even a description of her personality or appearance. At one time, no one even seemed certain of her name; she has been called Isabel, Isabella, Hawise, Avice – but Isabella is how she appears in the Close Rolls.1 Isabella was the youngest daughter and co-heiress of William, second Earl of Gloucester, who was himself the son of Robert of Gloucester, an illegitimate son of King Henry I. Earl William’s wife was Hawise, the daughter of Robert de Beaumont, third Earl of Leicester. Isabella’s only brother Robert had died in 1166, making Isabella and her two sisters coheiresses to the earldom of Gloucester. Although her date of birth has been lost to history, it seems likely she was born in the early 1160s.
We know very little of Isabella’s childhood, although, considering her social status, as the daughter of one of England’s wealthiest earls, it is likely that she was given the education expected of a high-ranking noblewoman and taught to run a large household, as well as the social graces of singing, dancing and needlework. Her parents’ marriage appears to have been a successful one. Isabella’s mother, Countess Hawise, was a regular witness to her husband’s charters and was mentioned in several of them, especially in the pro amina clauses of grants made to religious houses that sought spiritual benefits for those named.2 Isabella’s father had a complicated relationship with King Henry II, especially after the king had taken Bristol Castle from the earl; the castle had been held by William’s father before him. Despite remaining loyal to Henry II during the rebellion of the king’s sons in 1173–74 and agreeing to the marriage of his youngest daughter to Prince John, Earl William’s loyalty remained suspect and he was arrested and imprisoned in 1183. The earl died whilst still a captive, on 23 November 1183.3
Isabella was betrothed, in 1176, to Prince John, the youngest son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. John was 9 years old at the time of the betrothal, with Isabella probably a few years older. Under the terms of the marriage agreement, Earl William recognised John as heir to the earldom of Gloucester.4 The marriage was to be a way for Henry II to provide for his youngest son. After the Earl of Gloucester’s death in 1183, his entire estate was passed to Isabella, who had been made a ward of the king. Isabella’s older sisters were both already married; Mabel was the wife of Amaury of Évreux and Amicia was married to the earl of Hertford. On their father’s death they had both been explicitly excluded from the estate to prevent the division of the comital inheritance and they received annuities of £100 each in compensation.5 Henry II therefore seized all the Gloucester lands, took Isabella into wardship and made the income available for John’s use, as her future husband. The king, however, kept his options open and had not finalised John’s marriage to Isabella by the time of his death, in case a more suitable alliance came along. King Richard I, on the other hand, thought it expedient to get his brother safely married, on his own accession to the throne in 1189.
The wedding took place at Marlborough Castle in Wiltshire on 29 August 1189; John was 21 and Isabella may have been approaching 30.6 Baldwin, the archbishop of Canterbury at the time, opposed the marriage as the couple were related within the third degree of consanguinity; they were second cousins, both being great-grandchildren of Henry I. Canon law forbade marriage within seven degrees of consanguinity. When arranging the marriage with Earl William King Henry had agreed that, if the pope opposed the match on these grounds, he would arrange another suitable match for Isabella. The wedding, however, went ahead, despite the archbishop’s objections. The archbishop summoned John to appear before him, placing an interdict on John’s lands when he ignored the summons.7 This was removed after the intervention of the papal legate, Giovanni di Anagni, and John promised to seek a papal dispensation to overcome Baldwin’s objections, although it appears this was never obtained.
Although Isabella and John were married for ten years, their marriage was neither happy nor successful. They spent some time together in the first years of their marriage as they issued charters together during a visit to Normandy around 1190–91.8 However, they appear to have spent less and less time together as the years went on. They never had any children and it is during this time in his life that John’s illegitimate children were born, a further suggestion that the couple were not close. In 1193, as part of his plotting with Philip Augustus, John promised to marry his half-sister, Alice, who had previously been betrothed to John’s own brother, Richard. Nothing eventually came of the marriage proposal, but it was an implicit rejection of Isabella as his wife.
John succeeded to the throne on the death of his older brother Richard the Lionheart, on 6 April 1199. He was crowned, alone, on 27 May 1199; the fact that Isabella was not crowned with him suggests that John was already looking for a way out of the marriage. Isabella would never be styled ‘queen’ and it was possibly as early as August 1199, but certainly by 1200, that John obtained a divorce on the grounds of consanguinity, the very objection for which he was supposed to have obtained a dispensation when he married Isabella in 1189. The bishops of Lisieux, Bayeux and Avranches, sitting in Normandy, provided the required judgement. One chronicler said of John that ‘seized by hope of a more elevated marriage, he acted on wicked counsel and rejected his wife.’9
Keen to keep his hold on the substantial Gloucester lands, John took Isabella into wardship, again, holding her in ‘honourable confinement’ for the next fourteen years. Little is known of her day-to-day life, although she does appear to have remained on civil terms with King John. John met the expenses of Isabella’s household and staff and sent her numerous gifts, including wine and cloth. Things may well have been a little awkward at times, however. When John remarried in 1200 to Isabelle d’Angoulême, he appears to have housed his new wife with his ex-wife. Queen Isabelle was still very young, probably no more than 12 years old on her marriage and was placed in Isabella of Gloucester’s household at Winchester, until the birth of her first child, Henry, in 1207.10 Isabella of Gloucester was maintained in her own household at the cost of £80 a year but was moved to Sherborne before the queen gave birth and her allowance was reduced to £50 a year.11
The title of earl of Gloucester, and a small portion of the estates, were conferred on Amaury, Count of Évreux, Isabella’s nephew by her oldest sister, Mabel, in compensation for John’s surrender of Évreux to France in the treaty of Le Goulet in 1200.12 In 1213, however, Amaury died childless and Isabella was once again heir to the earldom of Gloucester. In anticipation of her death, possibly after succumbing to an illness, Isabella made a will in that same year, disposing of all her movable goods, confirmed by King John at Bristol on 14 March. However, she was still among the living in 1214, when this second wardship ended and Isabella was finally allowed to remarry. This new marriage, arranged for her by John, was to a man who was more than sixteen years her junior. In 1214 she was married to Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, who had paid the considerable sum of 20,000 marks to become her second husband and earl of Gloucester jure uxoris (by right of his wife). The new earl was granted all the Gloucester estates, save for the valuable manor of Bristol, which was retained by the crown. King John issued letters patent on 28 January 1214, informing all the knights and tenants of the honour of Gloucester that ‘we have given Isabella, countess of Gloucester, our kinswoman’ in marriage to Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex.13
Geoffrey de Mandeville was the son and heir of Geoffrey Fitz Peter, Earl of Essex, a long-serving justiciar to King John and King Richard I before him. Geoffrey’s mother was Beatrice, daughter of William de Say and heiress to the Mandeville earls of Essex. Beatrice’s children styled themselves ‘Mandeville’ to emphasise their family’s ancestral connections.14 Geoffrey’s first marriage had been to Maud, daughter of Robert Fitzwalter, an important Essex landowner who was one of the leaders of the baronial rebellion against King John. There is a story in the Histoire des ducs de Normandie which tells of Fitzwalter jumping to the defence of his son-in-law when Geoffrey de Mandeville was accused of killing a manservant in an argument over lodgings at court. John had threatened to hang de Mandeville. Fitzwalter threatened the king: ‘By God’s body, you will not hang my son-in-law, you’ll see two hundred lanced knights in your land before you hang him!’15 According to the chronicle, when the case went to trial, Fitzwalter did, indeed, appear in court with 200 knights and de Mandeville escaped execution. Maud later died without issue and was buried at Dunmow Priory in Essex.
Geoffrey’s marriage to Isabella was politically motivated and driven by John as a means of raising cash. Indeed, given the age difference, it is possible that Mandeville was a most reluctant groom, but it did not pay to upset one’s monarch, especially when it was King John. Mandeville was to pay the 20,000 marks in four instalments of 5,000 marks throughout 1214, the final payment to be made at Michaelmas 1214.16 The initial payment had been set to be made before John left for Poitou in February 1214. The earl failed to meet even this first deadline and John ordered his sheriffs to initiate the confiscation of the Gloucester estates. By August, Geoffrey de Mandeville had made some headway on the debt and John restored Gloucester, the heartland of Isabella’s earldom, to the couple and offered to renegotiate de Mandeville’s debt. The marriage appears to have been of little benefit to Geoffrey de Mandeville; now in her late forties or early fifties Isabella was past childbearing age and unable to give de Mandeville an heir. Moreover, although he could enjoy the benefits of the income from her vast Gloucester estates, amounting to 800 marks a year, Isabella’s lands and earldom would pass to her heirs, the de Clare earls of Hertford on her death. It seems likely that de Mandeville acquiesced to the marriage having made a bargain with the king, to protect his own lands from rival claimants of the de Say family; indeed, the de Say claims were thrown out of court shortly after King John had set sail for Poitou.17
Despite their financial woes, the new earl and countess of Gloucester appear to have had a contented marriage. Isabella regularly issued charters jointly with her husband; she had her own seal which depicted a standing female figure, dressed in a long, flowing gown, girded at the waist. In the seal, the countess is facing forwards, with a bird in her left hand and a flower in the right hand. In the legend on the seal, she is styled as she was when married to John; ‘Isabella, countess of Gloucester and Mortain.’18 The earl and countess of Gloucester’s financial burdens, imposed on them by King John, and Geoffrey de Mandeville’s connections to one of the leading rebels, Robert Fitzwalter, however, serve to explain why the couple joined the growing baronial rebellion. Another explanation may be gleaned from the rumours mentioned by chroniclers, that his first wife, Robert Fitzwalter’s daughter, Maud, had been the victim of the unwanted sexual advances of King John.19 Whatever the reason, in June 1215, Geoffrey de Mandeville was named among the list of the Twenty-Five, the barons appointed to enforce the terms of Magna Carta (see Appendix B), alongside his former father-in-law. Joining the rebellion, however, had cost de Mandeville his lands, which were declared forfeit and on 20 December 1215. King John granted them to Savary de Mauleon:
The King to all knights, free men, and all others who held of Geoffrey de Mandeville the lands which came to him from his father and his mother, greetings. Know that we have given to our trusty and well-beloved Savary de Mauleon all the lands and tenements which were the aforesaid Geoffrey de Mandeville’s by his patrimony from his father and his mother, excepting the land of William de Mandeville his brother, which he held and which he obtained from the same patrimonies. We therefore command that you do heed and obey the said Savary as your lord in all things. And in testimony hereof we send you etc. … Witness myself, at Dunstable, the twentieth day of December, in the seventeenth year of our reign. It is also commanded of all the Sheriffs in whose bailiwicks the said Geoffrey had lands and tenements, that they do forthwith cause the said Savary de Mauleon to have full seisin of all those lands, as aforesaid. Given the same.19
Unfortunately, the marriage was not to last long. Just two years later, on 23 February 1216, Geoffrey de Mandeville died from wounds he had received at a tournament in London, then occupied by rebels and their French allies. The tournament is described as a ‘bohort’ by the chronicler known as Anonymous of Béthune, which suggests a non-lethal joust, or mêlée, with weapons. The knights were not dressed in full armour and de Mandeville was wearing merely a padded gambeson to absorb any blows. The chronicler reported:
At this time there was a notable event in London. The knights began to bouhard to amuse themselves; Geoffrey de Mandeville, who was the earl of Essex, was there with the others, but was not wearing either a gambeson or pourpoint. One of the French knights, called Acroce-Meure, charged towards him with a truncheon. The earl cried out when he saw him coming. “Ha! Crocemeure, don’t hit me, I haven’t got a pourpoint on.” The shouting was futile, for he hit him in the belly and killed him.20
Ralph of Coggeshall also recorded the event; ‘Geoffrey de Mandeville died at London, from the wound he sustained whilst riding as a knight, in the French fashion, when riders charge each other in turn with spears or lances, on the day before the start of Quadragesima; he was buried at the priory of Holy Trinity in London.’21 Although the description of events differs slightly, the outcome is the same, Geoffrey de Mandeville died from the encounter and Isabella was now a widow.
For probably the first time in her life, Isabella had some level of independence, and evidence from her charters suggest that she revelled in it. She issued a large number of charters in 1216 and 1217, many confirming gifts by members of her family to religious houses, styling herself as ‘countess of Gloucester and Essex in my free widowhood’.22 As Geoffrey de Mandeville was in rebellion against the king when he died, many of his lands were confiscated by the crown, although her reduced circumstances do not seem to have marred Isabella’s new-found sense of freedom.
It was not until the year after King John’s death that Isabella’s lands were finally returned to her, on 17 September 1217:
The King to the Sheriff of Oxford, greetings. Know that the Countess of Gloucester has come to our fealty and service. We therefore order that you do forthwith cause her or her accredited messenger bearing these letters to have such seisin of the lands, wardships, and escheats in your Bailiwick, with their appurtenances, as she had before the war that occurred between the lord King John our father and the Barons of England. And since we do not yet have etc. … Witness the Earl [of Pembroke], at Kingston, the seventeenth day of September. The same is commanded of the Sheriffs of Gloucester, Wiltshire, Worcester, Somerset, Dorset, Bedford, Cornwall and Cambridge.23
At about the same time as she recovered her lands, or shortly after, Isabella was married for a third and final time, to Hubert de Burgh. The origins of Hubert De Burgh are quite obscure. His mother’s name was Alice, as evidenced by a grant he made to the church of Oulton in about 1230, stating the gift was ‘for the soul of my mother Alice who rests in the church at Walsingham.’24 Hubert de Burgh’s father may have been the Walter whose daughter Adelina owed 40 marks in the Pipe Rolls of Henry II, for recognition of a knights’ fee at Burgh in Norfolk; although this is little more than a possibility.25
De Burgh was the younger brother of William de Burgh who had accompanied the king’s youngest son, John, to Ireland in 1185; he eventually became lord of Connacht. Hubert de Burgh also had two younger brothers. Geoffrey became archdeacon of Norwich in 1202 and bishop of Ely in 1225. A third brother, Thomas, was castellan of Norwich Castle in 1215–16.26 Hubert de Burgh was a self-made man, coming from a family of minor landowners in East Anglia centred on the manor of Burgh in Norfolk. He first appears in official records on 8 February 1198, when he witnessed a charter of John, as count of Mortain, at Tinchebrai in Normandy. In a charter of 12 June in the same year, he was identified as chamberlain of John’s household and in 1199, when John succeeded to the throne, he was created chamberlain of the royal household.27
Hubert de Burgh’s career in royal service developed rapidly. In December 1200 he was made custodian of two important royal castles, Dover and Windsor. In 1201 he was sheriff of Dorset and Somerset and when John departed for France in June 1201, along with the two senior marcher lords, the earl of Pembroke and constable of Chester, de Burgh was created custodian of the Welsh Marches with 100 men-at-arms at his disposal. He was also given the castles of Grosmont, Skenfrith and Whitecastle ‘to sustain him in our service.’28 Further grants followed, making Hubert de Burgh a significant and powerful figure in the royal administration by 1202. In the same year, Hubert de Burgh was one of the ambassadors despatched to Portugal to negotiate a possible marriage between John and a daughter of Portugal’s king, but the embassy was abandoned after John married Isabelle d’Angoulême.
Later in 1202 Hubert de Burgh was sent to France and made constable of Falaise Castle in Normandy, where he was entrusted with guarding Arthur of Brittany following the latter’s capture at Mirebeau. Hubert was given the order to have Arthur blinded and castrated but refused to carry out the punishment, claiming that the king had given the order in anger and would come to regret it – and lay the blame on the one who carried it out.29 The fact Hubert de Burgh faced no repercussions on refusing the order suggests that he had read the situation perfectly. Moreover, given the persecution John inflicted on William de Braose, following his complicity in Arthur’s murder at Rouen the following year, it is clear that Hubert de Burgh knew John well.
In 1204 Hubert de Burgh was entrusted with the defence of Chinon, against the king of France. He held out for a year, until the summer of 1205, when the walls of the castle had practically been levelled. In a last desperate engagement, de Burgh and his men rushed from the castle to confront the French. A fierce fight followed, in which de Burgh was wounded and captured; he was held for two years. King John helped with his ransom, with writs to the treasurer and chamberlain, in February 1207, ordering them to pay William de Chayv 300 marks ‘for the pledge of Hubert de Burgh.’30 De Burgh returned to England before the end of 1207 and again began to accumulate land and offices. In May 1208 he was given custody of the castle and town of Lafford in Huntingdon and in the following year he married Beatrice de Warenne, a cousin of William de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, who had succeeded her father in the barony of Wormegay; de Burgh became guardian of William, Beatrice’s young son by her first husband, Doun Bardolf. Beatrice was the mother of Hubert de Burgh’s only son, John, who was probably born before 1212, when de Burgh returned to France in royal service, first as deputy seneschal of Poitou and then as seneschal in association with Philip d’Aubigny and Geoffrey de Neville. After the French defeated the English at Bouvines in 1214, de Burgh was one of the witnesses to the truce with King Philp II of France, which agreed that John should keep all his lands south of the River Loire.31
By the time of the Magna Carta crisis in the spring and summer of 1215, Hubert de Burgh was back in England and supporting the king in his attempts to quell the rebellion. He was tasked, alongside the bishop of Coventry, with speaking to the mayor, sheriff and knights of London, who were instructed to listen to what de Burgh and the bishop had to say; despite this, the Londoners opened their gates to the rebels. In the preamble to Magna Carta, Hubert de Burgh is styled seneschal of Poitou and listed eighth among the list of lay barons and by 25 June 1215 he was being styled as justiciar in official documents. Matthew Paris later claimed he had been appointed to the post in the presence of Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the earls of Surrey and Derby, among other magnates.32 As justiciar, in the Magna Carta, Hubert de Burgh is mentioned as being the one to hold ultimate responsibility in the realm whenever the king was abroad; this was a considerable change to the role of justiciar in former reigns, when he was primarily responsible as president of the exchequer and chief justice. He was, essentially, the most powerful man in the land after the king himself. De Burgh was also made castellan of Dover Castle, the gateway to England from the Continent, and was besieged there from 22 July 1216 until King John’s death in October of the same year, when the Dauphin Louis abandoned the siege.
Hubert de Burgh attended a council of the new king, Henry III, at Bristol on 11 November 1216, when Magna Carta was reissued; he appears as justiciar at the head of the list of lay barons on the witness list. In the spring of 1217, he was back at Dover, having reprovisioned it, and from April he was once again under siege. The Battle of Lincoln on 20 May 1217 saw the allied French and rebel forces defeated by William Marshal, causing Louis to lift the siege at Dover and retire to London and await reinforcements. When the sea battle off Sandwich put the seal on the defeat of the French, a truce was agreed with Louis and he departed for France in September 1217.
Hubert de Burgh’s first wife, Beatrice, had died before 18 December 1214. In September 1217 Hubert de Burgh married Isabella of Gloucester, King John’s first wife. On 13 October 1217 the sheriffs of nine counties were ordered to relinquish custody of Isabella’s lands to de Burgh.33 This final marriage for Isabella was, sadly, very short-lived and Isabella was dead within a month, possibly only a few weeks, of her wedding day and almost exactly a year after the death of her first husband, King John. Isabella died on 14 October 1217, probably at Keynsham Abbey near Bristol, and was buried at the cathedral of Christ Church, Canterbury.34 Shortly before her death, Isabella made a grant to the monks of Canterbury, of £10 of land in her manor of Petersfield, Hampshire, which was witnessed by Hubert de Burgh and other members of his household.35 Hubert de Burgh went on to marry Margaret, princess of Scotland as his third wife; his career continued to rise until he fell from office in 1232, amid charges of financial misconduct and treason. He was imprisoned for a time before being forgiven by the king and retiring to his own lands.
Despite her three marriages, Isabella never had children and the earldom of Gloucester went to her nephew, Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Hertford. We cannot know, of course, whether Isabella would have ever become a mother, nor whether it was through infertility, miscarriages or John’s indifference that she did not have a family during their ten years of marriage. Isabella appears to have had very little control over her own life, even less than many women of her time; to the extent that one hopes beyond reason that the year of freedom she experienced, following the death of Geoffrey de Mandeville, was at least a happy one. Isabella endured the whims of John, first as her husband and then as king, through many years, even decades. Her life and future, and her inheritance, were constantly subject to John’s desires and political machinations. Although she lived through the Magna Carta crisis, on the rebel side, she did not gain any benefits from its clauses, not even those safeguarding the rights of widows, as her husband, Geoffrey de Mandeville, was considered a traitor when he died. Isabella’s lands and income were taken from her on at least three occasions; making it even more remarkable that she managed to pass her earldom of Gloucester, in its entirety, on to her nephew.