Authors: Lisa Hilton
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 m 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.
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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.’
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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 Isabella 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 1211. 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’.
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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.’
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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 lorweth, 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 Angoulême, 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 Angoulême was to be retained, and Isabelle pushed for the betrothal of her four-year-old daughter Joan to Hugh de Lusignan X, 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.