Authors: Douglas Boyd
Uneasy among the Occitan-speaking nobility of Poitou, John was greatly relieved that the Lusignan family was friendly after the recovery of the county of La Marche as the price of Eleanor’s release. Accepting their offer to mediate between him and the disaffected counts of Limoges and Angoulême, John enjoyed the lavish Poitevin hospitality of the family until his lust was aroused by the fresh young beauty of a girl living in the household. Isabella, the fourteen-year-old betrothed of his host Hugues IX, was the daughter of count Aymer of Angoulême.
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For once the loins and the brain were sending the same message, for her marriage to Hugues would unite two powerful and ambitious neighbouring families controlling another wedge of territory that could split the Angevin lands, this time by separating Poitou from Gascony, which is why it had been both Henry’s and Richard’s policy to play on the natural enmity of the two clans.
Discreetly sounding out her father, John found him delighted by the idea of his daughter sitting on the throne of England. He advised, however, that this would mean war with the Lusignans when they found out. John accepted the risk and the count devised an excuse to summon Isabella home. Sending Hugues de Lusignan and his equally proud and violent brother elsewhere on the business of their estates in Normandy and England, John took a circuitous route via Bordeaux and Agen back to Angoulême with Archbishop Hélie of Bordeaux in tow.
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Informed on 24 August by the archbishop of the changed plans for the morrow, on which she had been due to wed Hugues, Isabella was married to John in Angoulême Cathedral next day.
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There is no sign that the bridegroom did any work during the next forty-eight hours except for signing one charter, but some event obliged him to cut the honeymoon short, for he then hastened to put the stout
walls of Chinon between his bride and her disappointed suitor – to the embarrassment of his emissaries returning from Portugal with an agreement for the marriage to the Portuguese princess.
Eleanor had not attended the wedding. Possibly she was too weak to undertake the three-day journey. She may have taken pleasure in seeing the Lusignans repaid in their own coin, for she endowed John’s young bride with the cities of Niort and Saintes. Yet this gift compared poorly with her generosity to Berengaria of Navarre, which could be because she knew that John was stirring up a hornets’ nest. Once again the celibate chroniclers had a field day, imputing the entire business to Isabella for rousing the king’s lust, Matthew Paris referring to her as ‘an animal’.
To compensate Hugues de Lusignan, John gave him as wife one of his wards, a cousin of Isabella’s named Matilda. While accepting this offer, Hugues IX and his brother were biding their time for revenge. From Chinon, the honeymooners made a leisurely progress through Normandy, crossing to Portsmouth in October. After Isabella’s acceptance by the Great Council, John was recrowned and she was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 8 October at a ceremony for which no expense was stinted. Afterwards they went on a protracted tour of England to impress on his subjects that he was not a foreigner like Richard, who came to the country merely to milk it of taxes. At the Christmas court held at Guildford there were many who were taken in by John’s charm, his ability to speak English and his beautiful young wife.
Although Bishop Hugh of Lincoln had allegedly died muttering what sounded like a prophecy that the son of Louis would avenge his father’s memory against the children of the faithless wife who had left him, John had acted as a pall-bearer at the bishop’s funeral without a care in the world. At first, it seemed Hugh’s predictions had been wrong. The New Year of 1201 seemed to usher in a new age of peace between the Capetian and Plantagenet dynasties. At Easter in Canterbury John and Isabella revived the custom of crown-wearing, which Henry had put in abeyance.
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This was the calm before the storm.
Eleanor had been ill again, but seemed at last to have found a champion to replace Mercadier in the person of her cousin Amaury de Thouars, whom she attempted to reconcile with John by writing that he alone of all their Poitevin vassals had done her no wrong. Amaury urged him to deal swiftly with the complications caused by his marriage to Isabella of Angoulême. Instead, John ordered the constable of Normandy to seize Driencourt, one of the Lusignan castles
in the duchy, and gave him orders to harry the family at every turn and despoil them of all their possessions.
On 14 May John and Isabella left England, but his ship had to put into the Isle of Wight while hers continued to Normandy. Staying at Château Gaillard shortly afterwards,
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they were invited to Paris and spent four weeks in June and July at the palace on the Ile de la Cité as guests of Philip,
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who politely moved out to Fontainebleau for the duration of their stay, to avoid embarrassing them by his excommunicate status. Paradoxically it was on this occasion that both monarchs pledged 2½ per cent of all their revenues for the year to the relief of the Holy Land.
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It was true that the Lusignans had appealed to their mutual overlord over John’s kidnapping of Isabella, but Philip was biding his time and stipulated only that the matter should be placed before a council of the magnates of France at some unspecified future date.
Shortly afterwards at Chinon, John and Isabella were joined by Berengaria, to whom he had refused so far to pay any of the money from her dower estates, having tried to persuade her to come to England earlier in the year to settle the issue. She had wisely preferred to stay in France, hoping that the backing of the archbishop of Bordeaux at Chinon and the proximity of Eleanor, who had arranged her marriage in the first place, would win her suit. She was proven right when John settled on her an annual pension of 1,000 silver marks and the possession of Bayeux and two castles in Anjou.
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The generosity was not for love of his widowed sister-in-law, but as a preliminary to an alliance with her brother Sancho VII of Navarre, who had upset the Church by campaigning in North Africa in the service of the Almohads, during which time he had lost the provinces of Alava and Guipúzcoa to Castile.
Alliances were changing in the north of France too. On the death of Constance of Brittany at the end of August, Arthur aligned himself openly with Philip, of whom he was still a ward. John’s heavy-handedness with the Lusignans was playing into his enemies’ hands: Aymar of Limoges and Raymond of Toulouse took the Lusignan side. Autumn came, and John made the surprising decision to challenge Hugues le Brun and his family to trial by combat, in which each side would be represented by champions. The reply from the other side was another appeal to Philip, who summoned John to appear before a council. Throughout the winter, John prevaricated.
If Eleanor thought she would end her days in peace, she was wrong; one of her bitterest moments was yet to come. She spent Christmas at
Fontevraud, far from John’s and Isabella’s court at Caen, while Philip held in check the Lusignans, Toulouse, Limoges and Arthur. In March 1202, his patience paid off. His mistress Agnès de Méranie having died while John and Isabella were in Paris, Rome legitimised his bastards by her and lifted his excommunica-tion.
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At the end of Lent, on 28 April he summoned John to Paris, this time not as a friend but as a vassal who had failed to do homage for Normandy after Richard’s death, and for the injury he had done Hugues de Lusignan. To John’s reply that no king could be treated in this way, Philip retorted quite properly that he had not been summoned as king of England, but as duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, in which capacities he owed a vassal’s obedience.
Invoking the custom that dukes of Normandy had no obligation to treat with their suzerain anywhere except on the borders of the duchy, John agreed to a meeting there but never arrived at the rendezvous. Having taken his measure during their connivance at the time of Richard’s captivity and during the month John and Isabella spent on the Ile de la Cité, Philip knew Henry’s youngest son was not of the stuff that had made his father ruler of an empire; nor was he a master of the arts of war like Richard. Testing the ground as he went, Philip invaded Normandy to within a short ride of Rouen itself and celebrated his victorious advance by knighting Arthur, accepting his homage as duke of Brittany and count of Maine and Anjou – and betrothing him to his newly legitimised daughter, the Princess Marie.
All this rather went to Arthur’s head. In the heat of the moment, that immature prince set out with only 200 knights to Tours,
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hoping there to link up with reinforcements from Brittany. The Lusignans arrived with the news that Eleanor had left Fontevraud, heading south for the security of her palace inside Poitiers’ city walls, but had to take refuge when two-thirds of the way there in the border town of Mirebeau. Ignoring the fail-safe compact she had made with John, Arthur considered that her forced consent would enable him to add ‘count of Poitou and duke of Aquitaine’ to the string of titles conferred by Philip. The Frankish knights with him counselled caution, but the Lusignans wanted to get their hands on Eleanor so that they could hold her hostage. Without her long experience of politics and warfare, they argued, John would be swiftly driven from French soil.
With their help, Arthur broke into the walled town of Mirebeau, where Eleanor retreated to the citadel with a handful of knights and men-at-arms. When Arthur came to its gate to parley, he seemed to find nothing wrong in besieging his own grandmother, at one point offering to let her proceed in peace, providing she recognised his
‘right’ to Aquitaine. In despair that a descendant of hers had sunk so low, Eleanor dragged out the negotiations, playing for time in the expectation of help from Chinon and/or from John, to whom she had dispatched messengers.
He was recruiting new forces 100 miles away near Le Mans to make up for the feeble support he had received from England. For once he acted with a speed and effectiveness that would not have disgraced Henry or Richard in the same situation. Riding day and night, he covered the 80 miles in two days, to arrive at Mirebeau before dawn on 1 August
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at the head of a band of mercenaries from Chinon, together with Guillaume de Braose, Guillaume des Roches and others who, well knowing John’s vicious streak, had made it a condition of their support that he should not condemn to death any of Arthur’s supporters captured in the town, to many of whom they were related.
Arthur’s men had meanwhile forced the citizens to wall up the damaged gates of the town to prevent any surprise sortie by Eleanor’s party, leaving only one gate through which men and supplies were brought in. In the belief that a relieving force could not arrive for days, it had been left open and unguarded all night. Through it, the mercenaries from Chinon stole silently into Mirebeau and began killing in the half-light of dawn. The sleeping Bretons and Franks and the Lusignan men were cut down half-awake. Guy de Lusignan, interrupted halfway through the breakfast of roast pigeon he was sharing with Arthur, was among those who managed to mount and head for the gate, only to have his horse killed under him in the street and be taken prisoner. In the close-quarter fighting, John severed the sword hand of a knight confronting him.
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Arthur and Eleanor of Brittany were taken prisoner by Guillaume de Braose, who would pay dearly for his knowledge of what ensued.
After releasing his mother from the citadel and promising that Arthur would come to no harm, John ignored feudal practice by insisting that all the prisoners be handed over to him against an undertaking to share the ransoms with those who had taken them. He then ordered 250 captured knights to be chained to farm carts regardless of their status and driven through the countryside facing rearwards all the way to his castles in Normandy, where they were hidden away and moved from time to time so that would-be rescuers could not know who was held in which fortress.
Isabella’s former intended, Hugues le Brun, was incarcerated in fetters at Caen, and Arthur held similarly in irons at Falaise Castle, 15 miles away, which had been emptied of every other prisoner. His sister Eleanor was among those shipped to England. Her exact
whereabouts a mystery for years to contemporaries, she was held prisoner at Bristol Castle for four decades until dying there.
Many of the men transported with her were blinded, castrated or otherwise mutilated or starved to death in flagrant breach of John’s undertakings before the assault. His thirst for revenge alienated many who had helped him take Mirebeau and were related to the maltreated prisoners. In despair of getting John to abide by the rules they had agreed before the raid, Guillaume des Roches and Amaury de Thouars changed sides yet again and swore allegiance to Philip for the duration of Arthur’s imprisonment, subsequently capturing Angers in his name.
Eleanor, meanwhile, had returned to Fontevraud and, feeling her strength going at last, sought the protection of the Peace of God by taking the veil. However, the military advantage after Mirebeau went unexploited by John, who had no evident strategy in mind even after Philip, looting and setting fire to Tours, withdrew his forces. The Lusignans were ransomed after swearing fealty to John and surrendering what remained of their castles on their territory, but broke their word immediately.
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John and Isabella spent a leisurely Christmas at Caen, he apparently so obsessed with his young wife that he did not rise before midday. In England his agents were raising taxes high and low; the
Liberate
Roll recorded writs authorising payments from the Exchequer that amounted to the staggering sum of £14,733 6
s
8
d
sent to Normandy between 17 October 1202 and 8 October 1203.
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The confusion of the royal finances may be guessed at from the
rotulus redemptionis
record that some of the Norman barons had not yet fully paid their share of Richard’s ransom.
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