Chapter 10
After King John, Isabelle d’Angoulême is one of the least sympathetic characters of the Magna Carta crisis. Even in her lifetime she was blamed for much of the nation’s ills. Not even a teenager when she was married, it does seem unfair that she was held responsible for the loss of Normandy and the crisis that led to the issuing of Magna Carta. Although her later actions served to add fuel to the fire, it was not Isabelle who caused the problems, but Isabelle’s marriage. This marriage has often been depicted as one of lust over common sense, especially in novels, with Isabelle’s beauty blinding John to the political implications of stealing his bride from one of his own vassals. However, marrying Isabelle was a politically expedient move at the time, even if it did backfire on King John rather dramatically.
Isabelle d’Angoulême was the only child of Audemar, Count of Angoulême and Alice de Courtenay. Alice had previously been the wife of Guillaume I, Comte de Joigny, but the marriage was annulled in 1184 on the grounds of consanguinity. Alice was the daughter of Peter de Courtenay, Lord of Montargis and Chateaurenard, and a cousin of Philip, the king of France. Through her Courtenay family connections, Isabelle was also related to the royal houses of Jerusalem, Hungary, Aragon and Castile. Her mother Alice is first recorded as the wife of Count Audemar in a document granting land to the abbey of St-Armand-de-Boixe in 1191.1 This has raised some questions as to Isabelle’s age when she married King John in 1200, suggesting that Isabelle may have been as young as 10 at the time of her marriage. The canonical age at which girls were allowed to marry was 12. The chronicler Roger of Howden maintained that Isabelle had not yet reached the age of consent, which was why she was still only betrothed to Hugh de Lusignan, rather than married to him.2
Count Audemar was one of the most prominent barons of the duchy of Aquitaine, his province lying between the Plantagenet strongholds of Poitiers and Bordeaux. He had a long-running rivalry with the Lusignan family, who were the lords of neighbouring Lusignan, who had a chequered history with the Plantagenet regime; they had once ambushed Eleanor of Aquitaine in an apparent attempt to abduct the queen of England. However, Hugh de Lusignan had developed a friendship with King Richard I during the Third Crusade and the king showed them favour thereafter, promoting the Lusignans above their Angoulême rivals. In January 1200 John had awarded Hugh IX de Lusignan the county of La Marche.3 Shortly after Hugh was betrothed to Isabelle; as the heiress to Angoulême marriage between Isabelle and Hugh de Lusignan would make Hugh the most powerful man in the region, having control of two strategically important counties which could, effectively cut Aquitaine into two, jeopardising the stability of the borders of Poitou and Gascony.
John could not help but see the threat posed by the impending marriage. Having divorced his first wife Isabella of Gloucester in 1199, he was free to pursue Isabelle for himself. Count Audemar, it seems, was quite receptive to the suggestion to abandon the Lusignan match so that his daughter might become queen of England. Two chroniclers of the time, Roger of Howden and Ralph of Coggeshall, both reported that King Philip II of France had advised John to marry Isabelle.4 John had already sent ambassadors to Portugal with a view to marrying the daughter of the Portuguese king, but these plans were hastily abandoned. The speed in which John rushed into marriage did not go unnoticed by the chroniclers:
Lord John, King of England, having in mind to marry a daughter of the king of the Portuguese … sent from Rouen some great notables to bring her back to him. But he married Isabelle, only daughter and heir of the Count of Angoulême, and he did this while they were on the journey, without having warned them, taking much less care for their safety than was worthy of the Royal majesty.5
Isabelle and John were married at Angoulême on 24 August when she was 12 years old at the most while John was 34. The wedding was officiated by the bishop of Bordeaux, with the bishops of Saintes, Périgueux, Angoulême, Limoges and Waterford assisting.6 Isabelle then accompanied John to Chinon and on to England, where she was crowned queen of England at Westminster Abbey on 8 October 1200:
with all his enemies pacified and subdued he [King John] returned to England at the time of the feast of St Michael, 29 September. He came with his wife Isabelle, the daughter of the count of Angoulême, whom he had married overseas with the consent of King Philip. He had put aside his first wife in the previous year on the basis of their consanguinity. The next day, John wore the crown at Westminster and his wife, who was about 12 years old, was crowned queen.7
John was crowned alongside his bride, in what he described as his ‘second coronation’. Unlike Isabelle, however, he was not anointed with holy oil because that was seen as a sacrament he could receive only once, which he did at his first coronation. After the ceremony, John paid those who had assisted in the ritual, ordering: ‘Give from our treasure 25 shillings to Eustace the chaplain and Ambrose, our clerks, who sang the Christus Vincit at our second coronation and at the unction and coronation of Queen Isabelle our wife.’8 A further crown-wearing, or coronation ceremony, was conducted at Canterbury at the beginning of 1201, at which both John and Isabelle were crowned by Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury.9
The marriage humiliated Hugh de Lusignan and John further exacerbated the situation by making no effort to compensate Lusignan for the insult. To make matters worse, in 1201 John confiscated the Lusignan county of La Marche and granted it to his new father-in-law, Audemar of Angoulême. He also confiscated the county of Eu, in Normandy, from Hugh de Lusignan’s brother, Raoul d’Exoudun. Ralph of Coggeshall records:
In the year 1202 peace was made between Philip, king of France and John, king of England. But King John immediately launched a bitter attack on the count of La Marche, namely Hugh known as the Brown and his brother the count of Eu, who had rebelled against him because of his marriage to Isabelle of Angoulême.10
The Lusignans appealed to King Philip for justice and John was summoned to the French royal court to answer the charges. The king of England’s failure to appear gave Philip the excuse he needed to pronounce the confiscation of all John’s French fiefs in April 1202.11 Philip then accepted the homage of John’s rival, Arthur of Brittany, for all the confiscated lands, except Normandy. Over the next three years, the French king pursued a campaign of conquest which drove John from Normandy and the bulk of his Continental domains. Isabelle herself was caught up in the war in 1203, when she was besieged whilst staying at Chinon. She sent frantic messages to John, begging for rescue. The king set out for Chinon but only got as far as Le Mans. Fearful of being captured himself, he sent mercenaries to his wife’s aid and the relief of Chinon was achieved.12
It was in this light that John’s marriage to Isabelle was seen as the start of England’s woes, with some of the blame falling unfairly on Isabelle. Contemporary sources report that John spent his mornings in bed with the queen, when he should have been attending to the business of the country, casting the young queen, still only a teenager, as some kind of temptress, irresistible to the king.13 Isabelle, however, had very little control of her life and actions and John’s failures should be laid firmly at his door.
In the early years of their marriage, John appears to have treated Isabelle more like a child than a wife, which she, of course, was and her independence was severely limited by her lack of access to the finances which should have rightfully been hers by right, as queen. Shortly after their marriage in 1200, Isabelle was promised dower lands in Anjou and Poitou, including the lordships of Niort, Saintes and six other towns. Following the death of Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1204, she was also promised the late queen’s dower lands in England and Normandy, including the towns of Exeter, Wilton, Ilchester and Malmesbury, the honour of Berkhamsted, the farm of Waltham in Essex and the county of Rutland together with Rockingham.14 In 1202 Isabelle’s father, Count Audemar, died leaving Isabelle as countess of Angoulême in her own right. She had no role in the government of her lands, however, with first her mother and then John’s officials governing in her name. In fact, in spite of all the financial provisions made for her, Isabelle appears to have controlled no lands of her own during John’s lifetime; with any revenues going into the Exchequer, rather than the queen’s hands. Isabelle relied on occasional payments from the king and, possibly, the queen’s gold, which was an additional levy charged on fines to the crown; although even this appears to have gone direct to the Exchequer after 1207. When she was not at court with the king, Isabelle spent time at Marlborough or in the household of John’s first wife, Isabella of Gloucester, at Winchester. Gloucester’s allowance was raised from £50 to £80 a year, to pay for the extra expenses incurred by housing the queen.15
One may imagine this was quite awkward for Isabella of Gloucester, the discarded wife being forced to host her ex-husband’s young bride. On closer reflection, however, it may also have been a comfort to her. The teenage queen would probably have been lively company for the 40-year-old countess who had never been blessed with children. She may have felt protective and motherly to the girl, especially knowing John as well as she must have done. There is very little mention of Isabelle of Angoulême in the chronicles and not one charter was issued in her own name in the sixteen years she was queen of England, although this may well have been a result of her financial dependence on John and the fact that she did not have money at her disposal to make grants of her own. Furthermore, she is mentioned in only one of John’s charters, a grant to Chichester in 1204, and omitted from charters where you would expect to see her included, for example, John’s grant to Beaulieu Abbey in 1205, which invokes the souls of his parents and brothers, as well as the well-being of his heirs – but not the queen.16
John and Isabelle’s relationship does not appear to have been a particularly close one, though he did send her numerous gifts and took care of her safety. In 1207, for example the king sent the queen a gilded saddle and harness, three hoods of varying colours, a hundred yards of fine linen, two tablecloths, four towels, half an otter skin and a belt.17 Isabelle was rarely in the king’s company after 1205, although they still managed to produce five children. The queen was at Winchester in 1207 when she gave birth to her first child, Henry, who would be crowned Henry III in October 1216. Despite what appears to have been a strained personal relationship, John and Isabelle were able to fill the royal nursery with another son and three daughters before John’s death in 1216.
After Henry another son, Richard, was born in 1208 and later created earl of Cornwall. Of the daughters, Joan was born in 1210; she was first betrothed to Hugh X de Lusignan, but eventually married Alexander II, King of Scots. Isabella was born in 1214 and married Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Isabelle and John’s youngest daughter was Eleanor, who was around 1 year old when her father died in October 1216. Eleanor was married, firstly, to William (II) Marshal and, secondly, to Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, who was to cause her brother no end of trouble in the 1250s and 1260s. There is little indication of any closeness between Isabelle and her children who were raised in separate households; baby Eleanor was placed in the household of the bishop of Winchester, with her big brother, Henry, shortly after her birth. We cannot, however, say whether this was a choice made by Isabelle, or a decision forced on her by John. Although it has to be said that John was renowned for his great affection for all his children, so the former seems more likely, especially given Isabelle’s subsequent abandonment of her English family.
Gossip and rumours of the queen’s infidelity spread in Isabelle’s lifetime and afterwards. Matthew of Paris recalled a story from Roger of London, sent by John as ambassador to Morocco in 1211, that Isabelle ‘has often been found guilty of incest, witchcraft and adultery, so that the king, her husband has ordered those of her lovers who have been apprehended to be strangled with a rope in her own bed.’18 Another similar account tells of how John had one of Isabelle’s lovers strangled and the corpse suspended over his wife’s bed. Isabelle has also been accused of incest with her half-brother, Peter de Joigny. In 1233 a man died in Ireland, his name was Piers the Fair and he was known locally as ‘the son of the English Queen’; Isabelle is often referred to as Isabelle the Fair. However, these stories seem to have little foundation and belie the fact that John recognised all his children by Isabelle and continued to visit her regularly with their last child being born only a year before the king’s death. Such accusations of infidelity can be found to have been levelled against many queens, before and after, including Isabelle’s own mother-in-law, Eleanor of Aquitaine
John appears to have remained faithful to Isabelle during the early years of the marriage. No illegitimate children were born and, although there are gifts to women who may have been mistresses in the royal financial accounts, they do not appear until later in the marriage.19 One of John’s mistresses, Hugh de Neville’s wife, Joan de Cornhill, is said to have offered to pay the king a fine of 200 chickens, in order to spend a night with her husband, suggesting that she was not too enthusiastic for her role as the king’s mistress.20 After Henry’s birth, Isabelle lived for a time at Corfe Castle, the Canterbury Chronicle describing her as being ‘in custody’, which suggests some kind of house arrest; although it may also mean that she had a strong guard to protect her.21
John was not averse to using Isabelle when the situation required it. In 1214, she accompanied him to Poitou, where the king was able to establish his authority over her county of Angoulême. However, once back in England, as civil war loomed in the country in 1214, Isabelle was accompanied by a mercenary, Terric the Teuton, with an armed guard, via Freemantle and Reading to Berkhamsted. On the 30 October King John sent a coded letter to Terric:
The King sends greeting to Thierry the Teuton. Know that, by God’s grace, we are in good health and unharmed and we order you to restore, as soon as you can, the horse that you borrowed from Richard the Fleming. We shall shortly be coming to your part of the country, and we shall be thinking of you, about the hawk, and though it might be ten years since we last saw you, at our coming it shall seem no less than three days. Take good care of the custody that we have entrusted to you, letting us know regularly of the condition of this custody. Witnessed by myself (the King), at the Tower of London, 30 October.22
The ‘custody’ to which John refers is most likely the queen. and given the state of the country, this was more likely for the queen’s protection rather than any suggestion that she was under arrest.
During the crisis years of 1215 and 1216, Isabelle stayed mostly in the West Country, where it was relatively safe. When John died on the night of 18/19 October 1216, she was at Bristol, but on hearing the news of her husband’s death, immediately set out for Gloucester, where she was reunited with her 9-year-old son Henry. Henry was hastily crowned in Gloucester Cathedral on 28 October, by the papal legate, Guala Bicchieri, fearing that Louis may attempt to hold a coronation for himself in Westminster Abbey on the following Sunday.23 Henry being too small to bear the weight and size of the crown, a gold chaplet belonging to Isabelle was used.
Isabelle had received no mention in John’s will and was not given a place on the regency council, nor the custody of the young king. Excluded from her son’s government, Isabelle’s unpopularity in England and lack of political experience, led to her isolation. Furthermore, she had had limited contact with her children, given that they lived in separate households, and Isabelle was not responsible for their supervision or education, which probably gave her a sense that they did not need her. She also had difficulty securing her dower lands from the regency council. As a consequence, Isabelle decided to return to Angoulême in 1217.
Back in her homeland, with her first experience of independence in her life, Isabelle quickly established her authority over Angoulême. At first, she appeared to want to work with her son’s regency council to secure the region from the king of France and aggressive neighbours. Sometime in 1218 or 1219, she wrote to her son asking for the release of the income from her dower lands so that she may defend her own and her son’s interests from aggressors:
To our dearest son, Henry, by the grace of God illustrious king of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, count of Anjou, I Y[sable] by that same grace his humble mother, queen of England, greetings and prosperous outcome always to his wishes. Your love will know that we have often implored you to give us and our plans counsel and help, and you have done neither up to now. Thus it is that we implore you diligently again that you give us swift counsel, and do not appease us with words. For you should know that without your help and counsel we can not rule and defend our land. And if the truce of the king of France should be broken, there is much to be feared about the land in this region. And though there may be nothing to be feared from that king, there are however neighbours who should be feared like the aforesaid king of France. Whence it is necessary that you give such fruitful counsel without delay for your land and ours in this region that neither you nor we lose our land for lack of your counsel and help. We also pray you to act on our part so that we may have some part now of what our husband, your father, endowed us with. For you should know as truth that we are much in need and had our husband left us nothing, you should still help us by right with your goods, so we might defend our land, since your advantage and honour is involved. We send you lord Geoffrey of Boteville and lord Waleran, reporting many things to you through them that we cannot set forth in letters; and you may believe what they say on our part about your advantage and ours.24
In spite of Isabelle’s early protestations that she was seeking to look after Henry’s interests in the region as much as her own, her actions in 1220 served to convince the regency council otherwise. Isabelle shocked England, and probably the whole Continent in 1220 in a scandalous about-face, by marrying her daughter’s betrothed, Hugh X de Lusignan. Hugh X was the son of Hugh IX, Isabelle’s former betrothed, and was of a similar age to Isabelle herself, who was now in her early thirties. And poor 9-year-old Joan’s erstwhile betrothed was now her step-father! Moreover, Isabelle’s marriage to John in 1200 had been brought about to prevent that which Isabelle had just achieved, the union of the counties of La Marche and Angoulême and thus the creation of one semi-independent power in the middle of Aquitaine. Not ignorant of the way this would appear in England, Isabelle wrote again to Henry, justifying her actions and the reason de Lusignan set aside the daughter in favour of her mother:
To our dearest son Henry, by the grace of God king of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, count of Anjou, I[sabel] by that same grace queen of England, lady of Ireland, duchess of Normandy, Aquitaine, countess of Anjou and of Angoulême, greetings and maternal blessings. We make known to you that when the counts of La Marche and Angoulême died, lord Hugh of Lusignan remained alone and without heir in the region of Poitou, and his friends did not permit our daughter to be married to him, because she is so young; but they counselled him to take a wife from whom he might quickly have heirs, and it was suggested that he take a wife in France. If he had done so, all your land in Poitou and Gascony and ours would have been lost. But we, seeing the great danger that might emerge from such a marriage – and your counsellors would give us no counsel in this – took said H[ugh], count of La Marche, as our lord; and God knows that we did this more for your advantage than ours. Whence we aske you as a dear son that this please you, since it is of great utility to you and yours, and we diligently pray you to give him back his right, that is Niort, Exeter and Rockingham, and 3500 marks which your father, once our husband, endowed us with: and so, if it please you, act towards him who is so powerful. For he has good will to serve you faithfully with all his power, and we are certain and take in hand that he will serve you well if you restore his rights to him: and therefore we advise that you take appropriate counsel on the aforesaid. And when it please you, send for our daughter, your sister, since we do not hold her, and by sure messenger and letters patent, fetch her from us.25
Instead of sending Joan back to England, however, as Isabelle had promised, Joan went from being Hugh’s betrothed – to being his prisoner. She was held hostage to ensure Hugh’s continued control of her dower lands, and as a guarantee to the transfer of his new wife’s dower. England, on the other hand, was withholding Queen Isabelle’s dower against the return of Joan and her dower lands. Little Joan was finally returned to England towards the end of 1220, and in 1221 she was married to Alexander II, King of Scots. The marriage had been negotiated while Joan was still in her mother’s custody, with the proviso that her younger sister, Isabella, would be substituted as the bride if Joan was not returned to England in time for the wedding.
The arguments over Isabelle’s English lands continued and they were confiscated, for a short time, in 1221. In 1224, however, they were confiscated for good when Hugh de Lusignan allied himself with the French king, Louis VIII. In exchange for a substantial pension, Hugh and Isabelle supported a French invasion of Poitou (the lands in France belonging to the king of England, her son). They were reconciled with Henry in 1226 and Isabelle met her first-born son for the first time in more than twelve years in 1230, when Henry mounted a futile expedition to Brittany and Poitou. Isabelle and Hugh, however, continued to play the kings of France and England against each other, always looking for the advantage. In 1242, for example, when Henry III invaded Poitou, Hugh X initially gave support to his English stepson, only to change sides once more, precipitating the collapse of Henry’s campaign.
Isabelle’s second marriage proved even more unstable than her first, shaken by Hugh’s frequent infidelities and threats of divorce. Despite the rocky relationship, Isabelle and Hugh had nine children together, including Aymer de Lusignan and William de Valence. Many of his Lusignan half-siblings would later cause problems for Henry III, having come to England to seek patronage and advancement from their royal half-brother. Moreover, Isabelle enjoyed greater personal authority within her second marriage; where she had issued no charters whilst married to King John, as Hugh de Lusignan’s wife, the couple issued numerous joint charters. Isabelle’s relationship with France was rocky. In one instance, she was slighted by the queen of France when she was not offered a chair to sit in the queen’s presence, regardless of the fact she herself was a crowned and anointed queen.26 Following this insult, in 1241, Isabelle castigated Hugh de Lusignan for supporting a French candidate to the county of Poitou, ahead of her son, Henry III. In retaliation, Isabelle stripped Lusignan Castle of its furnishings and refused to allow her husband into her castle at Angoulême for three days. This goes some way to explain Hugh’s initial support for the expedition of Henry III of 1242.27 According to a French writer, William de Nangis, Isabelle was implicated in a plot to poison King Louis IX of France and his brother in 1244 only to be foiled at the last minute; the poisoners claimed to have been sent by Isabelle.28 There is no evidence of Isabelle denying the accusation, but she never admitted her guilt, either.
In her final years, Isabelle retired to the great Plantagenet abbey at Fontevrault, where she was veiled as a nun before she died on 4 June 1246. She was buried there alongside her first husband’s brother, Richard I, and parents, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Hugh de Lusignan died in the summer of 1249. Regardless of their rocky relationship since Isabelle’s desertion of him in 1217, Henry III celebrated his mother’s life, with royal gifts to the canons of Ivychurch in Wiltshire, an endowment of chantry chapels at Malmesbury and Westminster and a feast for the poor scholars of Oxford and Cambridge.29
As contemporaries described her as ‘more Jezebel than Isabel’, accused her of ‘sorcery and witchcraft’, Isabelle of Angouleme’s reputation as a heartless mother and habitual schemer seems set to remain.30 Married to King John whilst still a child, she was castigated as the cause of the loss of the majority of John’s Continental possessions and the subsequent strife and civil war; one could easily sympathise with her lack of love for England.
The accusations of adultery appear to be unfounded; John’s jealousy and paranoia meant Isabelle was so well guarded that she was virtually his prisoner, an affair would have been practically impossible. That Isabelle abandoned the children of her first husband within months of his death, and her apparent willingness to betray her son for her own ends goes some way to destroy the compassion one may have felt for her. In the chronicles, when she is mentioned, Isabelle comes across as a harsh, unlovable character, with little to recommend her. She stands out as a woman with an impressive ruthless streak, when protecting her interests, even against her own son. Having said that, however, she was unfairly blamed for the loss of Normandy and the trials in England which led to Magna Carta. Despite her powerlessness in her first marriage, the union made her the scapegoat for England’s woes. In her time in England, Isabelle appears to have been very much a pawn, treated as a child for the most part in the early years of her marriage and given little freedom or control in the latter years. One can almost excuse the expressions of independence when she returned to Angoulême, as necessary to the survival of Angoulême itself, even at the expense of her English children.