Queens Consort (28 page)

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 Angoulême 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 Angoulême 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.

PART THREE

PLANTAGENET QUEENS

THE PLANTAGENETS

CHAPTER 8

ELEANOR OF PROVENCE

‘How high does the arrogance of woman rise if it is not restrained?’

E
leanor of Provence was the second daughter of Count RaymondBerengar, who had ruled Provence as a vassal of the Emperor Frederick II since 1219, and Beatrice of Savoy Eleanor’s sisters Marguerite (born 1221), Sanchia (1228) and Beatrice (1231) were all to become queens, and each of their marriages was to be influential in shaping the direction of English policy abroad. In 1234, Marguerite joined the French monarchy as the bride of Louis IX, and it was this alliance that encouraged Henry III of England to consider Eleanor as a wife. Their union provides an exceptionally strong example of the significance of women in the dynastic strategies of Europe’s royal houses as well as of the importance a queen’s natal family could achieve in the politics of her adopted country.

On attaining his majority in 1227, Henry was anxious to begin the recovery of the Angevin lands lost under his father, John, and since the French crown would naturally oppose any such attempt, a marriage with Eleanor had the potential to counter the influence of her sister’s. Both the French and English kings were interested in securing the support of the house of Savoy, which was powerful in the east and south of France. Raymond-Berengar was neither particularly rich nor likely to be able to leave his daughters any great territorial claims, and both Marguerite and Eleanor were selected as royal wives as much for their maternal family’s connections as for their status as the Count’s daughters.

Henry was keen enough to marry Eleanor to dissolve a previous arrangement with Joan, the heiress to the small but strategically placed county of Ponthieu on the Norman border. This agreement had progressed so far that in April 1235 Henry had written to her father asking for Joan to come to England, and had planned her coronation for the next month. The French King — or more specifically his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s granddaughter Blanche of Castile — strongly objected to the match, and
by invoking a promise made by Joan s father that he would forfeit his lands if he married his eldest daughter without the King’s permission, they were able to stop the marriage at the last minute. Henry’s acceptance of their interference suggests that he was glad to have an excuse to renege on his pledge.

Apparently, Joan did not much mind being jilted by the King of England, and released Henry from his engagement. By October, Henry’s envoys Richard le Gras and John of Gatesden were in Provence to inspect the new lady (who, like nearly all girls of her class, was complacently pronounced to be beautiful), while John FitzPhilip and Robert de Mucegros were charged with the negotiation of her dowry, which was settled at 10,000 marks. Eleanor’s dower arrangements were more complicated — Isabelle of Angoulême was still living, and if Henry were to die before the new Queen and the Dowager Queen it would be difficult to provide for both of them — but the portion was provisionally fixed at fourteen English towns including Gloucester, Cambridge and Bath. With the business arrangements settled, in November the twelve-year-old Eleanor was married by proxy, with Robert de Mucegros standing in for the King at the castle of Tarascon, and, after travelling via Vienne, Dover and Canterbury, where her marriage was consummated, she was crowned at Westminster on 20 January 1236.

In just a few months, Eleanor’s world had changed completely. It is not possible to extrapolate her ‘real’ feelings from the sources, but the fact that, nearly fifty years later she joined forces with her daughter-in-law Eleanor of Castile, who was married at fourteen, to persuade Edward I that his thirteen-year-old daughter was not yet ready for matrimony, suggests she herself may have found the transition difficult. Eleanor’s subsequent and often ill-advised dependence on her Savoyard relatives may also have stemmed from a sense of personal isolation at the time of her marriage. Unlike many royal brides raised with the expectation of their future role, often in the country of which they would become queen, Eleanor had had to adjust to both marriage and queenship in a very short space of time. She was to display great ambition and a highly protective love for her children, but also a strong tendency to control, which was interpreted as ‘arrogance’ by her critics but which may well have had its source in self-preservation, in a need for the reassurance that came from feeling she was mistress of her own environment. She also demonstrated a certain impatience with what she saw as the provincial insularity of English politics, which compared so unfavourably with her own sophisticated, cosmopolitan background.

The Provençal court was culturally, if not financially rich, and Eleanor’s father was a patron of troubadour literature. Eleanor herself spoke Occitan, French and the Norman French of Henry’s court, as well as having some grasp of Latin, and though the north-south divide in European culture, which had been exaggerated even in Eleanor of Aquitaine’s time, was now still less pronounced, it may still have seemed very marked to a young girl spending her first freezing winter far from home. Much like Eleanor of Aquitaine, Eleanor of Provence was a daughter of the south, ‘a milieu of music, dancing, tournaments, knights-errant and fair damsels in distress, while Henry’s dominions to the north symbolised sobriety and joylessness, the world of … stubborn and irreducible facts, the boring domain of penny-pinching accountants, nit-picking lawyers and pedantic administrators’.
¹
Eleanor’s later career proved she could pick a nit as well as the next man, but Henry’s initial treatment of his young wife suggests that he was eager to make the contrasts between old and new homes less jarring.