Isabelle d'Angouleme – History… the interesting bits!

Isabelle d’Angoulême: A Complicated Queen

22/01/202230/07/2023Sharon Bennett Connolly26 Comments

Why is Isabelle d’Angoulême so hard to love?

At first sight, it is easy to have sympathy for Isabelle of Angoulême. When I started researching her for Ladies of Magna Carta: Women of Influence in Thirteenth Century England, I was expecting to be able to go some way to redeeming her reputation. She was married at a very young age – she was no more than 12 and may have been as young as 10 – to ‘Bad’ King John, the man who would later be accused of murdering his own nephew and left a woman to starve in his dungeons.

Isabelle d’Angoulême was the only child of Audemar, Count of Angoulême and Alice de Courtenay. Her mother was the daughter Peter de Courtenay, lord of Montargis and Chateaurenard, and a cousin of king Philip II Augustus of France. Through her Courtenay family connections, Isabelle was related to the royal houses of Jerusalem, Hungary, Aragon and Castile. When John set his sights on her, Isabelle was betrothed to Hugh IX de Lusignan: 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, rather than married to him. The marriage between Isabelle and Hugh was intended to put to bed, literally, a long-running, bitter rivalry between the Lusignans and the counts of Angoulême. It would also unite neighbouring regions in Aquitaine, posing a threat to Angevin power in the region. This could have effectively cut Aquitaine in two, jeopardising the stability of the borders of Poitou and Gascony. John could not help but see the threat posed by the impending marriage and sought to put a stop to it. Count Audemar, it seems, was quite receptive to the suggestion that he abandon the Lusignan match if it meant that his daughter would become a queen.

In the early years of their marriage, John appears to have treated Isabelle more like a child than a wife, which she still was, and she was financially dependent on him. When she was not at court with the king, Isabelle spent time at Marlborough Castle or in the household of John’s first wife, Isabella of Gloucester, at Winchester. Isabella’s allowance was raised from £50 to £80 a year, to pay for the extra expenses incurred by housing the queen.

It appears that Isabelle was an unpopular queen, guilty by her association with the excesses and abuses of John’s regime. 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 the young queen. Contemporary sources reported that John spent his mornings in bed with the queen, when he should have been attending to the business of the country, casting Isabelle as some kind of temptress, irresistible to the king. The fact that Isabelle did not give birth to her first child until 1207, when she was in her late teens, puts the lie to these sources, suggesting that she and John did not consummate the marriage in the first few years. After 16 years together, the couple had 5 children; Henry III, Richard of Cornwall, Isabella, Joan and the youngest, Eleanor, who was born in 1215 or 1216.

While her movements were restricted and closely controlled during her marriage to John, the situation did not improve for Isabelle following John’s death in 1216. Their 9-year-old son Henry was now king, but Isabelle was excluded from playing a role in the regency government; her unpopularity in England and lack of political experience were major factors. Moreover, she had had limited contact with her children: they lived in separate households and Isabelle was not responsible for their supervision or education, which added to her isolation. Almost as soon as Henrys crowned, Isabelle started making arrangements to go home, to Angoulême, of which she was countess in her own right. In 1217 she left England.

Once in her own domains, Isabelle was to arrange the wedding of her daughter, Joan. Joan had been betrothed, at the age of 4, to Hugh X de Lusignan, Count of La Marche and the son of Hugh IX, the man who had been betrothed to Isabelle before John married her. In 1220 Isabelle shocked England, and probably the whole continent, when she scandalously married her daughter’s betrothed herself. Poor 9-year-old Joan’s erstwhile fiancé was now her stepfather! Worse was to come, however, when the little princess was not returned to her homeland, as might have been expected, but held hostage, by Isabelle and Hugh, to ensure Hugh’s continued control of her dower lands, and as a guarantee to the transfer of her mother’s dower, which the English government was withholding against the return of Joan.

Stalemate.

Isabelle wrote to her son, Henry III, to explain and justify why she had supplanted her own daughter as Hugh’s bride, claiming ‘…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…’

Ironically, Isabelle had now achieved that which King John had hoped to avoid; the union of La Marche and Angoulême, splitting Angevin Aquitaine down the Little Joan was finally returned to England towards the end of 1220, but the arguments over Isabelle’s English lands continued throughout the 1220s and beyond. Isabelle would not retire in peace and in 1224 she and Hugh betrayed Henry by allying themselves with the King of France. In exchange for a substantial pension, they supported a French invasion of Poitou (the lands in France belonging to the King of England, her son).

Hugh and Isabelle 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, though this was probably as much by necessity as self-interest. They did, after all, live in France and their relationship with England complicated things. 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 herself was implicated in a plot to poison King Louis IX of France and his brother, only to be foiled at the last minute; the poisoners claimed to have been sent by Isabelle. There is no evidence of Isabelle denying the accusation, but she never admitted her guilt, either.

Isabelle’s second marriage proved even more unstable than her first, shaken by Hugh’s frequent infidelities and threats of divorce. 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. Her difficult relationship with France added to Isabelle’s marital problems. In one instance, Isabelle was offended 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. 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.

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.

Tomb effigy of Isabelle d’Angoulême, Fontevraud Abbey

In 1244 the two royal cooks admitted the attempted poisoning of the French king, and that they had been paid by Isabelle. Before she could be arrested, Isabelle retired to Fontevraud Abbey, where she died on 4 June, 1246. The dowager queen of England was buried in the abbey’s churchyard. However, when Henry III visited his mother’s final resting place, he was shocked that she was buried outside the abbey and ordered that she be moved inside. She was finally laid to rest in the abbey church, beside Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

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. Married to King John whilst still a child, she was castigated as the cause for 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. That Isabelle apparently abandoned the children of her first husband within months of his death, and her supposed willingness to betray her son for her own ends would go some way to destroy the compassion one may have felt for her. However, we have to remember that nothing is ever black and white and we have to consider that Isabelle was balancing the interests of her two families – one French and one English – which were, unfortunately for Isabelle, irreconcilable due to the politics of the time.

One thing is for sure, Isabelle d’Angoulême is a fascinating character!

Images:

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Sources:

Rich Price, King John’s Letters Facebook group; Robert Bartlett England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075-1225; Dan Jones The Plantagenets; the Kings who Made England; The Plantagenet Chronicle Edited by Elizabeth Hallam; Maurice Ashley The Life and Times of King John; Roy Strong The Story of Britain; Oxford Companion to British History; Mike Ashley British Kings & Queens; David Williamson Brewer’s British Royalty; Ralph of Diceto, Images of History; Marc Morris, King John; David Crouch, William Marshal; Crouch and Holden, History of William Marshal; Crouch, David, ‘William Marshal [called the Marshal], fourth earl of Pembroke (c. 1146–1219)’, Oxforddnb.com; Flanagan, M.T., ‘Isabel de Clare, suo jure countess of Pembroke (1171×6–1220)’, Oxforddnb.com; Thomas Asbridge, The Greatest Knight; Chadwick, Elizabeth, ‘Clothing the Bones: Finding Mahelt Marshal’, livingthehistoryelizabethchadwick.blogspot.com; Stacey, Robert C., ‘Roger Bigod, fourth earl of Norfolk (c. 1212-1270)’, Oxforddnb.com; finerollshenry3.org.uk; Vincent, Nicholas, ‘William de Warenne, fifth earl of Surrey [Earl Warenne] (d. 1240)’, Oxforddnb.com.

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Out now: King John’s Right-Hand Lady: The Story of Nicholaa de la Haye

In a time when men fought and women stayed home, Nicholaa de la Haye held Lincoln Castle against all-comers, gaining prominence in the First Baron’s War, the civil war that followed the sealing of Magna Carta in 1215. A truly remarkable lady, Nicholaa was the first woman to be appointed sheriff in her own right. Her strength and tenacity saved England at one of the lowest points in its history. Nicholaa de la Haye is one woman in English history whose story needs to be told…

King John’s Right-Hand Lady: The Story of Nicholaa de la Haye is now available from Pen & Sword Books, bookshop.org and Amazon.

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On the one side is Empress Matilda, or Maud. The sole surviving legitimate child of Henry I, she is fighting for her birthright and that of her children. On the other side is her cousin, Queen Matilda, supporting her husband, King Stephen, and fighting to see her own son inherit the English crown. Both women are granddaughters of St Margaret, Queen of Scotland and descendants of Alfred the Great of Wessex. Women of the Anarchy demonstrates how these women, unable to wield a sword, were prime movers in this time of conflict and lawlessness. It show how their strengths, weaknesses, and personal ambitions swung the fortunes of war one way – and then the other.

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Defenders of the Norman Crown: The Rise and Fall of the Warenne Earls of Surrey tells the fascinating story of the Warenne dynasty, of the successes and failures of one of the most powerful families in England, from its origins in Normandy, through the Conquest, Magna Carta, the wars and marriages that led to its ultimate demise in the reign of Edward III. Defenders of the Norman Crown: Rise and Fall of the Warenne Earls of Surrey is now available from Pen & Sword Books, Amazon in the UK and US, and Bookshop.org.

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Magna Carta’s Family Ties

04/12/202112/07/2023Sharon Bennett Connolly9 Comments

As I have been pursuing the various strands of research into the female personalities in medieval England, I have been struck, time and again, by how closely related the nobility were, through blood and marriage. Just look at the women who surround the Magna Carta story. Each of the women I wrote of had at least one familial connection to another great noble family; some had a number of links to several families. It is a tangled and complicated web, but I will try and give you a brief overview here.

As you may have noticed, my favourite medieval woman is Nicholaa de la Haye, castellan of Lincoln Castle; she successfully defended the castle through at least 3 sieges, the last 2 when she was a widow in her 60s. Nicholaa was related to King John’s half-brother, William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury, through her son, Richard, whose daughter Idonea was married at a young age to William (II), Longespée’s son by his wife, Ela of Salisbury. It was as a result of this connection that William (I) Longespée claimed Lincoln Castle and the shrievalty of Lincolnshire following the Second Battle of Lincoln in May 1217. Longespée claimed that as they were his daughter-in-law’s inheritance, it was his right to administer them. Idonea’s father, Richard, had died sometime in the previous 12 months, leaving Idonea as his sole heir. Longespée appears to have conveniently forgotten – or ignored – the fact that the castle of Lincoln was Nicholaa’s by hereditary right – and Nicholaa was still very much alive!

Coat of arms of William Longespée, 3rd Earl of Salisbury

Despite Nicholaa’s stalwart defence of Lincoln Castle during a 10-week siege, Longespée was granted the position of sheriff just 4 days after the battle, and promptly seized the castle. Nicholaa’s refusal to accept this saw her presenting herself to the royal court and requesting she be reinstated. A compromise was reached whereby Longespée remained as sheriff of Lincolnshire, but Nicholaa was reinstated as castellan of Lincoln Castle, and given control of the city of Lincoln itself. Longespée was by no means satisfied and continued to scheme to gain control of the castle; Nicholaa doggedly held on and only retired from her position as castellan of Lincoln in 1226, 3 months after Longespée’s death.

Ela of Salisbury provided at least two further familial connections among my Ladies of Magna Carta. Through her grandfather, Patrick of Salisbury, Ela was a cousin of William Marshal and his five daughters. Marshal was the son of Patrick of Salisbury’s sister, Sybilla. Patrick himself had married, as his second wife, Ela de Talvas, who was the widow of William de Warenne, 3rd Earl of Warenne and Surrey. From her first marriage, Ela de Talvas was the mother of the heiress, Isabel de Warenne, Countess of Surrey in her own right and wife to, first, William of Blois, youngest son of King Stephen and secondly, Hamelin Plantagenet, illegitimate half-brother of King Henry II. Isabel de Warenne, therefore, was aunt to Ela of Salisbury, Richard the Lionheart and King John.

Isabel de Warenne’s own aunt, Ada de Warenne, was married to the son and heir of King David I of Scotland, Henry, Earl of Huntingdon. Ada was the mother of two Scottish kings, Malcom IV the Maiden and William I the Lion. She was, therefore, the grandmother of the Scottish princesses, Margaret and Isabella, the only two women, other than the queen, Isabelle d’Angoulême, who can be clearly identified in a clause of Magna Carta. Margaret and Isabella had been handed over to King John as hostages following the 1209 Treaty of Norham, agreed between their father, William the Lion, and King John. John was supposed to find suitable husbands for the teenage girls; it had been implied that they would be married to John’s sons, Henry and Richard, but no marriages had ever materialised. Clause 59 of Magna Carta stipulated that John would find spouses for the princesses or send them home.

The two girls were eventually wed to English noblemen, though not until the 1220s. In 1221 Margaret married Hubert de Burgh, Henry III’s Justiciar and widower of another of my Ladies of Magna Carta, Isabella of Gloucester, who also had the dubious honour of having been the first wife of King John. Princess Isabella was married, in 1225, to Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, who was 14 years her junior. The marriage was not a happy one. A third Scottish princess, Marjorie, who was several years younger than her two sisters and not part of the conditions of the Treaty of Norham, also married into the English nobility. She became the wife of Gilbert Marshal, 4th Earl of Pembroke, third son of the great William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke and regent for Henry III.

Hubert de Burgh from Matthew Paris’s Historia Anglorum

Roger Bigod was himself the son of Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, and Matilda Marshal, eldest daughter of William Marshal. Marshal was the man who had led the army that relieved Nicholaa de la Haye and the siege of Lincoln Castle in May 1220. Matilda married, as her second husband, William de Warenne, 5th Earl of Warenne and Surrey and only son of Isabel and Hamelin, mentioned earlier. Matilda’s sister, Isabel, was married to Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester; he was the nephew of the same Isabella of Gloucester who had been wife to King John, Geoffrey de Mandeville and Hubert de Burgh. Isabel Marshal then married, as her second husband, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III and youngest son of King John. Another sister, Eva, married William (V) de Braose, grandson of William (IV) de Braose and Matilda, the poor woman who was imprisoned by King John and starved to death, alongside her eldest son, in his dungeons in 1210. It was Eva’s husband who was hanged by Llywelyn, Prince of Gwynedd, after he was found in Llywelyn’s bedroom with Llywelyn’s wife, Joan, Lady of Wales and illegitimate daughter of King John.

Which brings us neatly to the royal family. John’s eldest legitimate daughter, also named Joan, was betrothed as a child to Hugh X de Lusignan, Count of La Marche. The marriage never materialised, however, as Joan’s mother, Isabelle d’Angoulême, decided to marry Count Hugh in her daughter’s stead, causing a rather juicy scandal in the process! Joan was not without a suitor for long and within a year of her mother’s marriage she was married to Alexander II, King of Scots and brother of those same Scottish princesses who were included in Magna Carta’s clause 59. Of Joan’s sisters, Isabella was married to Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and Eleanor, only a baby at the time of her father’s death, was married to William (II) Marshal, eldest son and heir of the great William Marshal, at the age of 9. Eleanor was a widow before her 16th birthday, dramatically taking a vow of perpetual chastity in front of the Archbishop of Canterbury shortly after her husband’s death.

Arms of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke

As her second husband, Eleanor married Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, despite that pesky vow of chastity, which was to prove costly to Simon when he had to travel to Rome to seek a papal dispensation to have it annulled. Simon de Montfort was to continue the fight for reform that had been enshrined in Magna Carta, but would meet his end at the Battle of Evesham in 1265. Simon and Eleanor’s daughter, also named Eleanor, would marry Llywelyn, Prince of Wales, grandson of Llywelyn, Prince of Gwynedd. Eleanor died in childbirth in June 1282, while Llywelyn was defeated and killed by Edward I’s forces in December, the same year. Their only daughter, Gwenllian, was placed in a convent in Lincolnshire before she was 18 months old and would never leave it, dying there in 1337.

Another perpetual royal prisoner was Gwenllian’s distant cousin, Eleanor of Brittany, a granddaughter of Henry II, niece of King John and first cousin of Henry III. Her royal blood meant that she would never be afforded the protection enshrined in clause 39 of Magna Carta and inspired by the gruesome death of Matilda de Braose, that:

“No man shall be taken, imprisoned, outlawed, banished or in any way destroyed, nor will we proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.”

There are many more familial links between the Ladies of Magna Carta. I could go on…

But I’m guessing that your heads are spinning and this is more than enough … for now.