CHAPTER 7

ISABELLE OF ANGOULÊME

‘More Jezebel than Isabelle’

Eleanor of Aquitaine had given birth to John, her sixth child, in England in December 1166, when she was forty-two. Between the ages of about three and seven, he was raised at the abbey of Fontevrault along with his sister Joanna. Writers seeking to condemn Eleanor for her ‘bad parenting’ (and there are many), or to find a psycho-historical explanation for John’s unpleasant personality traits in adulthood, have focused on this period of relative isolation from his immediate family as a stick with which to beat his mother and a source of John’s ‘cruel, miserly, extortionate, duplicitous, treacherous, mendacious, suspicious, secretive, paranoid and lecherous’ character.¹ In both instances, they overstate the case. John’s period at Fontevrault corresponds to Eleanor’s absence in Poitou and Angoulême before the revolt of 1174, and represented ‘a provision of child care for him’.² Fontevrault had a long history of association with the Aquitaine ducal house, and it was also a place of close family associations for his father, whose aunt, the widowed Matilda of Anjou, had become abbess there, and whose cousin, another Matilda, the child of Geoffrey of Anjou’s sister Sibyl, was a nun at the abbey during the children’s stay. Fontevrault was well placed for them to receive visits from both parents, and may simply have been a practical solution to the conflicting demands of government and family.

Eleanor’s subsequent lack of contact with her younger son has also been blamed on her neglectfulness as a mother, which again seems unfair, as she was a prisoner until John reached his early twenties. Whatever their personal relationship, and despite the fact that Eleanor had come into conflict with John when he schemed to usurp his brother Richard’s power, her commitment to him after Richard’s death was unswerving. Her primary loyalty was to Aquitaine and the preservation of the Angevin lands, so when John inherited the crown her energies were directed at maintaining the duchy for him. Indeed, it became the focus of the last years of her life.

In 1176, Henry II had made John Count of Mortain in Normandy, and when Richard objected to John taking over Aquitaine in 1183 his father sent him instead to Ireland, where his eight-month stay proved a disaster. Henry had also hoped to create an appanage for his youngest son by marrying him to Isabella, the heiress to the Gloucester earldom, but the legality of the marriage was always dubious. Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury challenged the union on the grounds of consanguinity and demanded that John appear at an ecclesiastical court, but the archbishop died before the Pope had had time to rule on the interdict against the marriage. John and Isabella continued to live together despite Baldwin’s having forbidden them to cohabit, but when, on Richard’s death, John’s prospects changed so dramatically he began to consider a more advantageous dynastic match and to revive the idea of an annulment that he had been considering since 1196. His project had the support of the bishops of Saintes, Poitiers and Bordeaux, but the new Pope, Innocent III, objected to it. Nevertheless, in the absence of an appeal from John’s wife Isabella (it is suggested that John simply bought her off), and because of the uncertainty as to whether the ten-year marriage had been legal in the first place, John was able to wriggle free.

If the losses of prestige and territory the English sustained under John are to be attributed to a woman, it is more fruitful to look to his second marriage than at any maternal inadequacies of Eleanor of Aquitaine. John’s marriage to Isabelle, sole heiress to Ademar, Count of Angoulême, had its roots in the rivalry between the Angoulême dynasty and the Lusignans, another powerful Aquitaine house, over the territory of La Marche. The Lusignans had always been troublesome vassals until Richard developed a friendship with Hugh de Lusignan during the Third Crusade, after which he promoted the family at the expense of their rivals.

In 1200, Eleanor spent two months at the court of Castile, where she personally selected Princess Blanca from among her daughter Leonor’s children as the bride of Louis IX of France. By April she was back at Fontevrault, but any thoughts she may have had of resuming her retirement were put paid to by the revolt of the Lusignans, who were once again laying claim to La Marche. Philip of France used the dispute as an excuse to break the recently signed truce of Le Goulet and Arthur of Brittany allied himself with the Lusignans against John. Eleanor left Fontevrault with the intention of establishing herself defensively against Arthur in Poitiers. Twenty miles to the north of her capital, she paused for the night at Mirebeau. Hugh de Lusignan was not far away at Tours with Arthur, and the pair planned to take Mirebeau and kidnap Eleanor. Fortuitously, John was marching his forces to Chinon when he heard that Mirebeau was besieged. By the time he arrived, Eleanor, who had attempted to stall Arthur with negotiations, had been reduced to shutting herself up in the keep. On i August, in the only truly impressive battle of his life, John stormed Mirebeau, captured Arthur and Hugh de Lusignan while they were enjoying a breakfast of roast pigeon, and liberated his mother. John was perhaps more delighted to have captured Arthur than to have freed Eleanor - he certainly capitalised on it by murdering his nephew as soon as he decently could.

After the kidnapping episode, John agreed to hand over La Marche to Hugh de Lusignan and to reject Ademar’s claim. However, Ademar’s daughter was betrothed to Hugh, a development that would ally the rival claimants and allow Hugh, on his marriage, to annex the Angoulême lands. Either John did not know of the betrothal or it had not been agreed when he handed over La Marche in 1200, but once he learned of it, he was confronted with the prospect of a dangerous Lusignan power bloc with serious implications for the ruling structure in the south: the combined territories would cut off Aquitaine by alienating the land between Poitou and Gascony. The obvious solution was to prevent the wedding and, according to the chronicler Roger of Howden, it was Philip of France, Ademar’s overlord, who slyly suggested to John that he marry Isabelle himself.

John was at the time engaged in negotiations for a marriage to a princess of Portugal. Such an alliance would have protected the southern borders of the Angevin territories in much the same way as Richard’s marriage to Berengaria of Navarre had done. But now he rushed into wedlock with Isabelle. His precipitousness attracted censure from Ralph of Diceto, who reported: ‘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 Isabella, 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.’

John’s haste is here seen as unseemly, unkingly, and, given that Diceto was writing later, the consequences of his marriage are implicitly foreshadowed in its hurried, thoughtless beginning. John’s carelessness for the feelings of the princess of Portugal at the time may have been the result of his preoccupation with making Isabelle his wife before Hugh de Lusignan got wind of the plan: on 5 July he was negotiating with Count Ademar and on 24 August he and Isabelle were married at Bordeaux. They were crowned together at Westminster on 8 October, then made a progress north, through Cumberland and Yorkshire, to meet the King of Scots, returning south to Guildford for Christmas and moving on to Canterbury for an Easter crown-wearing ceremony in March.

As Frank McLynn comments, ‘Almost everything about John’s union with Isabella has invited controversy: his motives, the murky circumstances of his engagement, the status of the marriage in canon law, the personality of the new queen and the reason for the excessive wrath of the Lusignans.’³ John’s motives have been attributed to no more than (a rather distasteful) lust, as chroniclers later remarked on his sexual enthralment to Isabelle. John was promiscuous, though certainly no more so than his father or his great-grandfather Henry I. His known mistresses included Hawise, the Countess of Aumale, and two women named Clementia and Suzanne. He had a bastard daughter, Joan, by Clementia, and other illegitimate children included Geoffrey, Osbert, Richard and Oliver, the latter two of whom were the sons of noblewomen. This was not particularly unusual, but within the accepted code of extramarital adventures it was considered bad form to target the wives and daughters of the aristocracy, and John’s impolitic pursuit of well-born women was given as a reason for his later alienation by his barons. It does seem, then, that John allowed sexual passion to overrule prudence, but in the case of his wife it was more probably realpolitik – the desire to circumvent the creation of a united territory of Lusignan, La Marche and Angoulême, and to claim the succession of Angoulême for himself -that drove him.

John was notorious for a lack of respect for the Church, but if he was prepared to risk the anger of Rome, in this instance it was likely to be for his own strategic advantage rather than for sexual satisfaction, which he could easily find elsewhere. Legally, the Angoulême match stood on unsteady ground, as no divorce from Isabella of Gloucester was formally obtained; John merely capitalised on the uncertain status of his first marriage. Isabelle’s age was another potential impediment to legitimacy, and her betrothal to Lusignan could also be seen as an obstacle in canon law. It was claimed that the bride had reached the legal age of twelve, but many contemporaries were doubtful of the truth of this. Isabelle’s mother, Alice de Courtenay, could not have married Ademar before 1184, as she had only that year been divorced from her previous husband, the Comte de Joigny, on the grounds of consanguinity. She is first recorded as Ademar’s wife in a document awarding a grant to the abbey of St-Armand-de-Boixe in 1191. According to these dates, Isabelle may have been as old as fifteen, but she could equally have been no more than nine.

The Lusignans’ disgust at the marriage points to her being at the younger end of this range. The betrothal to Hugh de Lusignan had been made with the support of King Richard, and the couple had exchanged the verba de praesenti which, in normal circumstances, was binding and could be broken only with a special dispensation, as had been granted in the case of Isabelle’s mother. Roger of Howden maintains that because Isabelle had not reached the age of consent in 1200, Hugh de Lusignan was prepared to wait to marry her in church. Marriages were often contracted while the parties were under age, but it was common for such unions not to be formalised or consummated until the age of consent had been reached. John’s sister Leonor, for example, had married Alfonso of Castile at eight but did not have intercourse with him until she was fifteen. So ‘the suspicion remains that [Hugh’s] bride was a pre-pubescent child in 1200 and that the King stepped in where . . . Isabelle’s betrothed husband believed it indecent to tread’.⁴The fact that Isabelle did not bear a child until 1207, and then did so almost annually until 1215, also suggests that she had not reached puberty at the time of her wedding. Hugh, then, had not only been cheated of his wife and his inheritance; he also had to endure having his own integrity exploited by John.

Given the controversy surrounding his marriage, it is unsurprising that John wished to legitimise Isabelle’s queenship as firmly as possible at her coronation. In a new addition to the coronation ordo, she was not only crowned but anointed ‘with the common consent and agreement of the archbishops, bishops, counts, barons, clergy and people of the whole of the realm’.⁵ Isabelle’s prestige was thus further enhanced, but her status was not entirely dependent on her position as John’s wife. She was more than the daughter of a provincial nobleman; indeed, the connection with her maternal ancestry arguably elevated her husband’s status. Her mother was a granddaughter of Louis VI and cousin to the reigning French King, Philip Augustus. The De Courtenays also had marriage ties with the royal houses of Hungary, Aragon and Castile and the comital dynasties of Hainault, Namur, Nevers and Forez. Through Alice’s brother Peter de Courtenay II, who in 1216 became the Emperor of Constantinople, the De Courtenay enjoyed links with the kings of Jerusalems and Cyprus and the counts of Champagne. Queen Isabelle had English relatives, too, in the Courtenays of Oxfordshire and Okehampton, and though the relationship was distant, it was strong enough for Isabelle’s son Henry III to address Robert Courtenay of Okehampton as ‘kinsman’ in a letter of 1217. Isabelle might not have been a king’s daughter like Berengaria of Navarre, but the antiquity and extent of her international family ties, as well as the strategic significance of Angoulême, made her if anything a more prestigious bride.

The primary consequence of the marriage was another Lusignan rebellion - one that would eventually lead to massive Angevin losses. Hugh and his brother Ralph of Eu took their grievance to the French King and Philip Augustus, as he had planned all along, espoused their cause as an excuse to declare John’s lands forfeit. Isabelle had crossed to Normandy with John in May 1201 and, after a visit to the duplicitous Philip in Paris in July, had joined the Dowager Queen Berengaria at Chinon. The royal couple kept Christmas at Caen where, according to Roger of Wendover, John seemed oblivious of the worsening military situation and spent his time feasting and lying in bed late with his wife. Count Ademar of Angoulême died the next year, 1202, and Isabelle remained in the Angevin south, possibly with her mother, who was given a pension of over fifty livres a month in 1203 and governed the province until John took over comital duties in 1204, whereupon she retired to La Ferte. Isabelle was not at Falaise when John received Arthur there in his last court appearance in January 1203. It has been claimed that she was besieged at Chinon by Aimery de Thouars in the February of either 1201 or 1203. Since Aimery did not rebel until 1202, the later date is more plausible; it also tallies with Isabelle spending time with her bereaved mother in Angoulême. She was in England in December 1203, and may have passed through Chinon en route to join John. The History of William the Marshal recounts that John was desperately worried when he arrived at Le Mans to find the road to Chinon cut off, and that the Queen had to be rescued by a band of mercenaries headed by Peter de Preaux. This incident has been used to castigate John for his excessive love for Isabelle: after she was recovered he was accused of caring more for her bed than for the defeat of his enemies, and this charge, whether accurate or not, is likelier to refer to 1203, since in January 1201 the couple were still in England.

The King and Queen returned to England the following December and kept Christmas at Canterbury. In March Richard’s pride and joy, the supposedly impregnable fortress of Château Gaillard, fell to Philip of France, and a month later, Eleanor of Aquitaine was dead. Mirebeau had been Eleanor’s last great adventure. Afterwards she had returned to Fontevrault, this time for good. At the abbey she heard the news of Arthur’s death, John’s losses in Normandy and the storming of Richard’s beloved castle. Perhaps all this did not grieve her as greatly as might be expected, because by the spring of 1204 she had sunk into exhausted senility. Having been admitted to the order of Fontevrault in 1202, she died in her nun’s habit on 1 April 1204 and was buried in the crypt. Nothing of her activities save for her imprisonment had made her exceptional in England, though the legacy of Aquitaine continued to dominate English politics until the fifteenth century. Her ambitions and love for Aquitaine were the focus of her life, so it is as a very European, rather than simply an English queen, that she ought rightly to be remembered.

There were now two living queens of England, and their conflicting economic needs had a direct effect on the events of the following years, leading to the loss of Normandy and a drastic weakening of the English position in the Angevin territories. In 1201, Berengaria had met John at Chinon to discuss her dower arrangements, which were further complicated by his marriage to Isabelle. After Eleanor’s death in 1204, her assigned lands should in theory have been available to Berengaria, but the Angevin castles that were hers by right were now under threat from Philip. In any case, John had no interest in Berengaria’s future. To Isabelle, he committed land in Saintes and Niort in Poitou, Saumur, La Flêche, Beaufort-en-Vallée, Bauge and Château de Loir in Anjou, the last of which had been promised to Berengaria as early as 1191. On Eleanor’s death, John also pledged her English and Norman inheritance - which included the towns of Exeter and Chichester, manors in Devon, Ilchester, Wilton, Malmesbury and two in Wiltshire, Queenhithe Dock, Waltham, the honour of Berkhamsted, Rockingham and the county of Rutland and Falaise, Domfront, and Bonneville-sur-Tocque – to Isabelle. Again, the Norman lands were technically Berengaria’s property.

Berengaria’s dower intersects interestingly with John’s policies at two points during this time. Despite the claims that the Navarrese alliance had ceased to function effectively, Berengaria’s brother Sancho had signed two treaties of support for John, in 1201 and 1202. With the expansion of the Castilians into the Basque country in 1199-1200, the King of Navarre was dependent on a Gascon port to provide access to the sea and in 1204 the town of Bordeaux swore allegiance to him, presumably with John’s approval. This not only demonstrates a continued interdependence between Navarre and Aquitaine, but perhaps explains why John did not attempt to relieve himself of his obligations to Berengaria by pressing Sancho for the return of her two castles at Rocabruna and St Jean Pied-de-Port.

John’s cavalier attitude to Berengaria’s rights was to prove costly to his cause in Normandy. In the months after Eleanor’s death, Philip Augustus had begun a round-up of Norman cities. Falaise and Caen fell, then Rouen on 24 June. Eventually the whole of Normandy, with the exception of the Channel Islands, was captured by France. Various theories have been put forward to explain the undermining of the English crown in the province. Paris was overtaking provincial capitals like Rouen and Chartres as a centre for intellectual and economic activity, and some Norman lords felt that the interest of the English kings in Normandy and its traditions was diminishing.⁶ The Normans were also resentful about the ongoing costs of the wars between the English and French kings, and they were still bitterly paying off both Richard’s crusading debts and his ransom. In these arguments, John’s loss of Normandy is cast not as a personal failure but as bowing to a process of historical inevitability. Nevertheless, according to Frank McLynn, ‘It is very difficult to see how any overarching historical process can excuse or mitigate John’s egregious stupidity in farming out large sectors of Norman administration to mercenary captains.’⁷

This ‘egregious stupidity’ might well extend to John’s treatment of his sister-in-law since, in 1204, as a consequence of John’s favouritism of Isabelle, Berengaria was left with no choice but to go over to the enemy. Blanca of Champagne had already been obliged to appeal to the protection of Philip as her overlord during the regency she held for her young son. Now Berengaria, who had been lingering at her sister’s court, felt compelled to do the same. Having exploited John’s marriage to fan the quarrel with the Lusignans for his own purposes, Philip made use of it again and offered himself as the protector of the destitute English Dowager Queen. In August 1204 Berengaria acknowledged Philip as her overlord and in exchange for 1,000 marks and the rights to the battered city of Le Mans gave up to him her assigned properties of Falaise, Domfront and Bonneville-sur-Toque, removing them even further from the possibility of eventual recovery by John.

If Berengaria had been cheated, so was Isabelle. The rents of the Queen’s dower went straight to the King, who spent lavishly on magnificent clothes and jewels for himself, as well as reputedly appropriating others’ ornaments if they caught his fancy. Though he did present Isabelle with robes and valuable cloth and gifts of wine and fish, financially, he treated her like a child. Of course, in the early years of their marriage she may well have been a child, and perhaps it was her tender age that gave John the bizarre idea that instead of having her own household, as was customary, the Queen might as well lodge with his first wife, Isabella of Gloucester who, until the birth of Isabelle’s first son, Henry, in October 1207, was maintained in her own household at Winchester at the cost of eighty pounds a year. The first wife removed to Sherborne before the second gave birth in Winchester, and her allowance was reduced to fifty pounds. Had the thirty pounds’ difference been for the Queen’s upkeep? Between 1205 and 1206, at least, this was certainly the case. When Isabelle was not living with her husband’s ex, she spent long periods at Marlborough, at the home of Hugh de Neville, whose wife was one of John’s mistresses. (Lady de Neville was perhaps less than enthusiastic about her role as the royal lover, as she supposedly offered to pay a forfeit of 200 chickens to spend a night with her longsuffering husband.) After Henry was born, Isabelle lived for a time at Corfe Castle, but The Canterbury Chronicle refers to her as being ‘in custody’, which is an odd way to describe a new household, if that is what it was. In November 1207, John also declared that the queens-gold tax was to be paid not to Isabelle, but to the King’s exchequer, making it probable that he, not she, had the benefit of it.

This treatment casts doubt on the chroniclers’ accusations that John’s reign was weakened by his extravagant uxoriousness. After Henry, he and Isabelle went on to have four more children, Richard, the first Earl of Cornwall (born 1209), Joan (1210), who married King Alexander of Scotland in 1221, Isabella (1214), who married Frederick, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1235 and Eleanor (1215), whose first husband was William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. The close succession of these births indicates that the marriage was functional, if not harmonious.

The scarcity of references to Isabelle in the chronicles has also been interpreted as evidence of a lack of discord, but there may be a more sinister interpretation of that. Isabelle is mentioned in only one of John’s charters, a grant to Chichester in 1204,in marked contrast to the King’s other religious grants, such as that to Beaulieu Abbey in 1205, in which the souls of John’s relatives Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Young King and Richard I are invoked, as well as his ancestors and heirs – a list that pointedly leaves out the Queen. Nor did Isabelle issue any charters in her own name. Though Berengaria had made only one as queen, the loan agreement in Rome on her return from the crusade, she had never actually lived in England. Eleanor of Aquitaine, of course, had issued many. Isabelle’s lack of financial independence explains this to some extent, but it is also possible that John deprived her of her liberty as well as her income. During a stay at Devizes, The Canterbury Chronicle describes Isabelle as ‘includitur’, enclosed or confined, but given that this was at the time Richard was born, there is nothing exceptional about its choice of words: confinement, a queen’s ‘taking her chamber’ before a birth, was an established and increasingly ceremonial custom. The Chronicle’s earlier description of her residence at Corfe is, however, aberrant. Was the Queen of England living under some sort of house arrest after bearing her first child? And if so, why?

During her first pregnancy, Isabelle had requested that her half-brother from her mother’s earlier marriage, Pierre de Joigny, join her in England. Pierre and John were on good terms, even though Pierre’s overlord was Philip of France. Since we know that Pierre had envoys at John’s court in 1209, joined John in Poitou in 1214, was permitted to cross to England the next year and granted a pension of 200 pounds and returned to France only when the war was over, it has been concluded that, despite his French allegiance, Pierre had fought for his sister’s husband. How does his loyalty to John, and John’s favourable treatment of him, tally with the rumour that Pierre and Isabelle were having an incestuous relationship? In 1233, a man named Piers the Fair died in County Cavan, Ireland, and a local chronicle recorded that he was known as ‘the son of the English Queen’. Piers, like Peter, is an anglicisation of Pierre. There is every reason to dismiss this story as nonsense from beginning to end, but it was not the only whisper of scandal that Isabelle attracted.

Isabelle was reputedly a beautiful girl, as was her mother – Alice had attracted the notice of both William the Marshal and the Young King at a tournament in Joigny in 1180 – and the fact that the mysterious Piers was ‘fair’ suggests that mere inherited good looks may have been twisted into ‘evidence’ that he was connected with Isabelle. The Queen’s sexual allure was also exploited as part of the narrative of the failure of John’s kingship. Matthew Paris, writing mid-century, recalls the account of Roger of London, whom John sent as an ambassador to the ruler of Morocco in 1121 . According to Roger, 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’.⁸ John could have been involved in establishing contacts in North Africa, but this particular embassy, and the story as a whole, are widely dismissed as a scandalous fabrication. Yet there are further allusions to her captivity.

In 1214, a mercenary named Terric the Teuton accompanied Isabelle with an armed guard and twelve horses from the coast at Freemantle, via Reading, to Berkhamsted. In December the Queen was moved to Gloucester, then Winchester in May 1215, Marlborough and Bristol in 1216.On 30 October King John wrote to Terric: ‘We shall shortly be coming to the place where you are . . . Keep your charges carefully. Let us know frequently about the state of your charge.’⁹

These assertions and whispers - Isabelle’s ‘imprisonment’, the incest rumour, the Paris story and Terric’s custody of the Queen -have been used to manufacture a story of adultery and cruelty that sits well with the legend of ‘Bad King John’ and his suitably wicked Queen. The last of these, Isabella’s movements under armed guard, is easily explained by events, though it serves also as a reminder of how a queen’s unique position as a foreigner and sexual intimate of the king could be turned against her to provide a plausible, personality-driven narrative for broader events.

In 1206, a truce was agreed with France for two years, Philip retaining his Norman gains and John the troubled Angevin territories in the south. John’s illegitimate daughter Joan had been married to the Prince of north Wales, Llewellyn ap Iorweth, the same year, and John received homage from the Welsh princes at Woodstock in 1209, but when a revolt broke out in 1210, Joan was sent to negotiate a peace. In 1212, Llewellyn abandoned the treaty agreed by his wife and allied himself with Philip of France. Amid a general atmosphere of unrest and fear, it was rumoured that Isabelle had been raped at Marlborough and the heir apparent, Henry, was taken away from his mother for his own protection. By 1213, Philip was planning an invasion. On 2 February John and Isabelle, accompanied by their son Richard of Cornwall and John’s niece Eleanor of Brittany, sailed from Portsmouth, arriving at La Rochelle on the fifteenth. By 15 March they were at Angouleme, and then travelled through Limousin, reaching Angers on 17 June. In the intervening period, negotiations had been reopened with the Lusignans. Queen Isabelle’s former fiancé, Hugh de Lusignan, had married her cousin Matilda, the daughter of her father’s elder brother Wulgrim, who had died in 1181.As the child of an older brother, Matilda’s claim to the Angoulême inheritance was arguably better than Isabelle’s own, and she was not prepared to cede her rights at this point. John and Isabelle needed to come to terms with the Lusignans if Angouleme was to be retained, and Isabelle pushed for the betrothal of her four-year-old daughter Joan to Hugh X de Lusignan, Hugh and Matilda’s son. The arrangement was agreed at Parthenay on 25 May. This seemed like a brilliant piece of diplomacy, and John entered Angers as a conqueror, but he had failed to consider the reaction of the Poitevin magnates, who now refused to come out and fight for him.

Since his Norman losses had begun to mount up in 1204, John had concentrated his energies on building up a series of alliances with which he could outwit Philip. His strategy in 1214 was to draw the French King to the south while his nephew Otto of Germany (the son of his sister Matilda and Henry of Bavaria) and their ally Ferand of Flanders surprised the French with their main force in the north. Things began to go wrong when, after two skirmishes with Philip, it became apparent that the southern magnates were simply no longer prepared to deliver their obligations to John. At Bouvines on 27 July Otto and Ferand were roundly defeated while John sulked in Aquitaine. Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Maine and Touraine were swiftly mopped up. The loss of the loyalty of the Poitevin magnates had cost John his empire.

John and Isabelle returned to England in October, and it was at this point that she was collected from the coast by Terric the Teuton. The picture of the adulterous, imprisoned Queen now begins to look very different. The fears aroused at the time of the Welsh rebellion, and the conditions in England, reeling from the defeat of a campaign it had taken ten years and huge amounts of money to wage, made it natural that John would wish Isabelle to be protected. Until Bouvines, John and Isabelle had travelled together, sufficiently harmoniously for her to give birth to another child the following year. This is not to say that John had necessarily treated her well. Her ‘custody’ at Corfe in 1208 may have been due to the King’s indifference to his wife’s comfort after he had done his duty and sired an heir, and he had continued to be flagrantly unfaithful to her. In 1212, the accounts show a chaplet of roses purchased for a woman who was a ‘friend’ of the King, and Susan, a servant to either the same ‘friend’ or her sister, had been provided with a dress in 1213, suggesting that John was having at least one adulterous affair. But his unkindness is not proof of Isabelle’s infidelity. The Matthew Paris tale is, as has been noted, viewed as a scurrilous fiction, and contrasts with Roger of Wendover’s view that John was too much in love with his wife, but what these contradictory stories have in common is that they seek to smear Isabelle. After the failure at Bouvines, the likely reason for blackening Isabelle’s reputation becomes clearer.

William the Conqueror: his queen, Matilda of Flanders, was not flattered by his proposal. She could not know that she was to become the consort of a legendary king.

The White Ship disaster which claimed Henry I’s heir had profound dynastic implications for the English crown.

‘Good Queen Maud’ was popular with the people, but the court mocked her for her frumpy dress sense.

A great general and a great diplomat, Matilda was invaluable to King Stephen in his struggle to retain the crown.

The magnificent mausoleum of the Angevin Empire at Fontevrault.

The most famous woman of her age, Eleanor of Aquitaine ended her scandalous career as a nun at Fontevrault.

Three English queens made the thrilling, perilous journey to the Holy Land.

Neglected and cheated of her rights, Richard I’s queen, Berengaria of Navarre, has been overshadowed by the Lionheart legend.

Isabelle of Angoulême may have gone to war with the English, but she never forgot her royal status.

Eleanor of Provence’s partnership with Henry III was successful, but she never learned to understand the English.

Eleanor of Castile was immortalised as a beloved queen, but despised for her rapacity in her own lifetime.

Piers Gaveston was the third party in the doomed marriage of Isabella of France and Edward II.

Prolific and placid, Philippa of Hainault juggled parlous finances and an unruly family.

Mother to two English queens, Isabeau of Bavaria’s story epitomises the suspicion and fear provoked by foreign consorts.

A hidden painting provides a clue to the mystery of Richard II’s marriages.

Richard II mourned so deeply for Anne of Bohemia that he had her favourite palace destroyed.

In Paris’s report, Robert of London claims that John found Isabelle ‘hateful’ to him because he blamed her for the collapse of his attempts to regain his Continental power. This would make sense after 1214. Roger of Wendover’s accusation that John preferred to make love to Isabelle than war on France depicts the King as emasculated, weakened by sexual desire. The chroniclers have played the old game of chercher la femme and found a source for John’s failure in his relationship with Isabelle. As her ‘foreignness’ and her sexual intimacy with the King are perverted into the cause of national disaster, she becomes the sorceress who invites strangers to her bed and drains the King’s virility. If John personally blamed Isabelle for her involvement in the Lusignan betrothal, this would account for an estrangement from a wife for whom he had never appeared to care deeply on anything but a physical level, while the conditions in England which pertained as a consequence of his Continental failure would require him to make some provision for her safety.

The historian Paul Strohm stresses that in considering the narrative context of historical texts the reader must be alert to the fact that perception, ideology and belief are as important as what actually took place; that texts are ‘finally composed within history, if not within a sense of what did happen, at least within a sense of . . . what commonly held interpretative structures permitted [people] to believe’.¹⁰ Thus the treatment of Isabelle’s reputation, her casting as incestuous, adulterous, even a witch, demonstrates the vulnerability of queens to a model where their unique source of power, their intimate relationship with the king, could be used to convey anxiety and provide motivation for the inadequacies of the king himself. Sexual deviance, as would prove the case with Edward II in the next century, was a powerful focus for such anxious commentary.

There is no real evidence that Isabelle of Angoule me was an adulterous queen, but her reputation as a seductress was coloured by what she did next. When John returned to England in October 1214, he met tremendous discontent among his magnates, who convened at Bury St Edmunds to try to force him to sign a charter guaranteeing their rights with regard to the crown. In a laughably hypocritical gesture, given his history with the papacy and his well-known abuses of the English Church, John promptly took the Cross, and unsurprisingly the Pope then found in his favour against the barons. On 3 May 1215, the now openly rebellious magnates (who included the cuckolded Hugh de Neville) announced that they had revoked their homage to the King and attempted to besiege the castle of Northampton. They moved on to Bedford and by 17 May were in London. John withdrew to Winchester, where Isabelle was staying with her guard. The Tower of London was still held for the King, but by early June Northampton and Lincoln had fallen to the rebels, and on 10 June John was obliged to meet their leaders near Staines. Five days later, John formally accepted the treaty which became famous as Magna Carta, at Runnymede between Staines and Windsor. On 19 June the magnates renewed their allegiance and a committee of twenty-five was established to ensure that the new agreement was enforced.

The provisions of the charter give some sense of the abuses the barons felt themselves to have been victim to for years. The crown was forbidden to make wrongful dispossession, to take over deceased persons’ property and interfere in Church placements without writs being prepared by a sheriff and read in a court of assize. Royal exploitation of the law, such as denying trial, taking money to influence suits, profit from writs and depriving men of their rights where they had not broken the law, were forbidden. Magna Carta is obviously one of the most significant constitutional documents in history, but in 1215, John had no intention of abiding by it. He appealed to the Pope, who obligingly declared it to be eternally invalid and threatened to excommunicate anyone who attempted to uphold it.

John’s rejection of Magna Carta initiated the conflict known as the first barons’ war. The magnates were desperate to find a leader who could overthrow John and become the next king. Henry, John’s eldest son, was still a child, and a long, potentially contentious regency could not save the country. Instead, as in the case of Henry II, a maternal claim was invoked as a solution to civil war. The magnates elected Louis of France, the son of Philip Augustus, who had an entitlement to the English crown in right of his wife, Blanche of Castile. Blanche, who was the daughter of John’s elder sister Leonor and her husband Alfonso of Castile, had been chosen by her grandmother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, as Louis’s bride in 1200. An embassy was sent to Louis, and meanwhile pandemonium raged in England. Ireland, Scotland and Wales seized the opportunity to rebel. John marched his troops from a muster at Dover to Rochester, then northwards via St Albans, Northampton, York and Newcastle to Berwick. The level of destruction wrought by the King’s forces had not been seen since William the Conqueror’s infamous harrying of the north. In January 1216, John swung his army back south for an equally destructive return, and though two bands of troops were sent from France, Prince Louis himself did not appear. John was back at Dover by the end of April, and on 21 May the French ships were sighted off the coast.

By the summer, the whole country was at war. Louis had entered London in June, and an army of Scots rebels joined him at Canterbury in September. The King hurried eastwards, reaching Lincoln on 28 September, but there is a strange and much-disputed gap in his movements at this time. At the greatest crisis of his life, he took time off to plunder a few abbeys. On 12 October, John’s party was caught by high tides or quicksand in the Wash and, according to legend, the crown and royal regalia were lost. Although he was already suffering from dysentery and needed to be carried in a litter, John consoled himself with a feast of peaches and cider, which did nothing to improve his health. Reaching the castle of the bishop of Lincoln at Newark, he accepted that his illness was fatal, named his son Henry as his heir, extracted an oath of allegiance to him and appointed William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, as regent and Guardian of the Realm. As John lay dying on 19 October, his household was reportedly more concerned with plundering than with mourning.

Isabelle was at Bristol when the news of her husband’s death arrived. Magna Carta was reissued in the city and nine-year-old Henry was proclaimed King. Now that John was dead, there was no need for Louis, who had been defeated after a token battle with William Marshal at Lincoln on 20 May and had withdrawn to France 10,000 marks the richer for renouncing his claim to the throne. Isabelle had little chance of a place on her son’s regency council which, under the guidance of Marshal, the bishop of Winchester and the papal legate, set the pattern for future royal minorities, with the exception of Edward III. Henry was already living in the household of the bishop, and his sister Eleanor joined him there after her father’s death. Joan and Richard of Cornwall were given into the charge of Peter de Maulay and Philip Mark. Isabelle’s plans seem to have been in place as soon as she was widowed. She made three grants for the salvation of John’s soul - of the tithes of the mills at Berkhamsted, a confirmation of John’s Chichester gift and a fair at Exeter for the monastery of St Nicholas, but thereafter she did not mention John in any of her acts for the rest of her life. Whether she had no interest in a political role in England or recognised that she was unlikely to achieve one, she was determined to go home.

Isabelle might well have been married when she was a child, she had been humiliated by her husband, slandered and kept in a state of demeaning dependence. She made it very clear that she did not care for England, and even her children were not enough to keep her there, but she was not prepared to leave without finally asserting her rights. She demanded that both her dower settlements, of 1200 and 1204, be honoured, insisted on being compensated for the loss of her French dower with properties in Devon and Aylesbury and claimed her interest in Saintes and Niort, even though she had agreed on Saintes as the dowry for her daughter Joan’s marriage to Hugh X de Lusignan. That her complaints were vociferous may be inferred from the regency council’s provision of a separate lodging for her in 1217, on the diplomatic grounds that those at Exeter Castle were unsuitable to her status. When Isabella left for Angoule me that year, she took with her only six-year-old Joan. Henry was King and his brother Richard, as the next in line, had to remain in England, but Isabelle could easily have taken her baby daughters Eleanor and Isabella. Eleanor of Aquitaine has been criticised as a neglectful mother, but her daughter-in-law was far more callous. She simply abandoned four of her children, and Joan saw her mother again only as a result of the Lusignan connection.

Isabelle had had quite enough of being pushed around and was now ready to go to extremes in her pursuit of power. Early in 1220, she married Hugh de Lusignan, her daughter’s fiance and the son of the man to whom she had once been betrothed. Not only was this a shocking way for a mother to behave towards her child, it was scandalously uncanonical: she had exchanged the verba de praesenti with the senior Hugh, which made her marriage to his son incestuous. Perhaps she was attracted to marriage with a man closer to her own age. Hugh was in his early thirties, while she herself could have been as young as twenty-five, and they had nine children in fifteen years, which suggests a degree of mutual enthusiasm. However, there was also a practical reason for her decision. Her cousin Matilda, now her mother-in-law, refused to give up her rights to Angoulême until 1233, and Isabelle required a strong ally to help her to retain her claims on the county. Her need of Hugh was greater than her daughter’s, and Joan’s feelings were hardly a factor.

Initially, Isabelle was concerned to paint her marriage as a sacrifice necessary to her son’s interests. In a letter to Henry she explained that Hugh’s friends had persuaded him against marrying Joan, who was too young, and instead to take a French wife. If he had done so, Isabelle writes, all Henry’s lands in Poitou and Gascony would have been at risk, and ‘therefore, seeing the great peril that might accrue if the marriage should take place . . . ourselves married the said Hugh . . . and God knows we did this for your benefit rather than our own’.

In England, the regency council feebly demanded the return of Joan and her dowry, but Isabelle refused, as she was not willing to give up her claim to Saintes. If the council had presumed that meek, malleable Isabelle, who had tolerated living with her husband’s ex-wife and in the household of his lover, would act as a pro-English ambassadress in Angoulême, Isabelle had other ideas -and she had the English over a barrel. The alliance with Hugh had created precisely the situation John had hoped to avoid by marrying her in the first place. In 1221, the council confiscated her English dower lands, but Isabelle promptly threatened to make an alliance with the French and in 1222 the council restored the properties. She sought to expand her influence by invading Cognac, which the English had lost back in the 1180s. In her territorial disputes, Isabelle showed that she had learned something from the only political duty with which John had entrusted her. During the barons’ war, she had had custody of the brother of Roger de Lacy, whose son John had been one of the rebel signatories to Magna Carta. When a local magnate named Bartholomew de Puy attempted to oppose her, she took him and his two sons hostage until they gave in to her demands. The bishop of Saintes was so disgusted by her unchivalrous behaviour that he excommunicated her.

Isabelle has been accused of using Joan as a hostage, too, but her reasons for keeping her daughter were no more mercenary than the council’s wish to recover her. Joan’s awkward position was resolved at a meeting between Henry III and Alexander, King of Scots in June 1220. As ever, the Scots were causing trouble and a marriage was proposed between Joan and Alexander. Having secured her own position, Isabelle now permitted Joan to leave, and the Princess sailed from La Rochelle to rejoin her siblings. She became Queen of Scotland in 1221 and was nicknamed Joan Makepeace for her part in yet another Anglo-Scottish peace agreement. Eventually, then, Joan made a more prestigious marriage than the one prefigured by the betrothal her mother had arranged and broken, though in her personal opinion, becoming a queen was poor compensation for life at the rather rough-and-ready Scottish court.

Isabelle knew the value of her own status as Dowager Queen of England and styled herself thus until the end of her life, using the royal seal that gave her full list of titles: Queen of England, Lady of Ireland, Duchess of Normandy and Aquitaine and Countess of Anjou. Her regal prestige was stamped into the coinage of Angoule me from 1224. But that was as far as her loyalty to England went. She repeatedly complained to the regency council about their lack of military support for her Angoule me projects and a debt of 3,500 marks she asserted John should have bequeathed to her. Continually frustrated, in 1224 she called England’s bluff and defected to France. Philip Augustus died in 1223 and his son, the erstwhile champion of the English barons, was now Louis VIII. Hugh de Lusignan had sworn his allegiance to his stepson Henry of England, but when Louis invaded Poitou in 1224 he accepted the French King as his overlord. Louis made Isabelle an offer of 2,000 Paris livres in exchange for relinquishing her dower lands in England, the revenues of Langeais and dower rights in Saumur. Anxiously, the English made a counter offer, but she refused it. In 1226 she took Louis’s gold and, although her son planned a meeting with her when he projected a French campaign, Hugh renewed his fealty to Louis in May of that year. When Louis was succeeded by his son with Blanche of Castile, Louis IX, Hugh and Isabelle perpetuated the alliance, for which they received a vast pension of 5,000 livres in 1230.

Isabelle was now at war with both her English sons. Not only was she an ally of Henry II’s enemy (which gave the lie to her original justification to Henry for her marriage to Hugh) but Richard of Cornwall was fighting her husband for control of his territories. She did, however, retain some loyalty to Richard, who was perhaps her favourite child, and it resulted in difficulties in her hitherto successful relationship with Hugh. By 1230, Hugh and Isabelle had succeeded in creating a more centralised government and a powerful mini-state in what had once been the heartland of the Angevin empire. But their control was resented and from that year some of their vassals began to declare for Henry of England. Isabelle’s allegiance also began to show signs of wavering again. In 1231 she gave control of her reconfiscated English dower holdings to Richard and in 1241 she quarrelled with King Louis.

Two reasons are given for Isabelle’s anger. Louis held an oath-swearing at Poitiers, which she attended, but she was deeply offended at the affront to her dignity when the French Queen, the Countess of Chartres and the Countess’s sister were given seats, while the Queen of England and Countess of Angoulême was expected to stand. Moreover, Louis announced that he was handing the comital title of Poitiers to his brother Alfonse, even though he had granted it to Richard of Cornwall in 1225. Isabelle’s reaction was to remove her furniture and hangings from Hugh’s seat at Lusignan and repair to her own castle at Angoulême, signifying that she felt he was somehow to blame for the proceedings. As her proxy at the oath-swearing, Hugh had allowed her to be insulted and her son deprived of his title. She declared she would leave her husband, or at least banish him from her bed, and when this threat failed to galvanise him she rounded up a coalition of barons to rebel against the French. Henry III was campaigning against Louis in Gascony and Hugh now declared his support for the English King in an attempt to pacify his wife.

The two sides met in the second battle of Taillebourg, where the English suffered such terrible losses that Henry himself was saved only when Richard of Cornwall sent a pilgrim’s staff to the French camp across the River Charente and arranged a parley, which concluded with Henry being permitted to withdraw to Saintes. Hugh, terrified by the consequences of his disloyalty now that it seemed Louis had the upper hand, changed sides yet again and deserted. Within a week of the English defeat at Taillebourg, he and Isabelle tried to make peace with Louis, but it came at the price of their pension and the abandonment of Isabelle’s claim to Saintes. They were also obliged to pay for the maintenance of French garrisons in three of their most important castles. Hugh’s cowardly conduct provoked contempt among both the English and the French, and Isabelle had to face the fact that twenty years of military and diplomatic effort in building up her territories in Poitou had been wasted. She had not been capable of exploiting the situation her first marriage had prevented, and had ended up allowing the French to expand further into the south, just as the English had feared. She was reported to be so furious that she tried to stab herself.

Isabelle did not die of rage, but she did not live long after Taillebourg. She retreated to Fontevrault, where she passed away in May 1246, and where her effigy remains. One exceptional artefact commemorating her defiance still exists. Alice of Angoulême’s first husband had a son by a previous marriage, Jean de Montmirail. Jean, who had served as a knight under King Philip Augustus, entered the Cistercian monastery at Longpont, Picardy some time before 1217. By the 1230s he was being venerated as a saint. A coffer containing his bones, two feet long and six inches deep, and decorated with the badges of Hugh de Lusignan, Alfonse of Poitiers and Louis IX, was made at Limoges shortly after Taillebourg. Given the exceptional richness of Isabelle of Angoulême’s cognatic connections, the gift of the coffer to the King suggests that she was involved in the peace negotiations between her husband and the crown, making use of her stepbrother’s bones as a particularly appropriate relic. Those connections did not die with Isabelle. While her queenship had been dominated by the passionate tyrannies of her first husband, the children of her second marriage were to play a revolutionary part in the reign of her son Henry III. Isabelle had not been well treated by the throne of England. It might have been of some comfort to her to know that her Lusignan sons were to be a thorn in its side for many years to come.