Queens Consort (27 page)

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.

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 Angoulême 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 Angoulême 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 fiancé 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.