The Two Isabellas of King John

Kristen McQuinn

• Publisher: Pen and Sword History
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781526761651
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

King John of England was married to two women: Isabella of Gloucester and Isabelle of Angoulême. The two women were central to shaping John and his reign, each in her own way molding the king and each other over their lives. Little is known about Isabella of Gloucester and she has largely become an historical footnote; Isabelle of Angoulême has a reputation as a witch and poisoner. However, both were products of their time, victims and pawns of the powerful men whose voices overwrote the experiences of women. By examining these two very different women through a modern feminist lens, The Two Isabellas offers new insight into one of England’s lesser-known queens and a different interpretation of one of its least popular kings. In The Two Isabellas of King John, Kristen McQuinn offers new and intriguing insights into two of England’s important yet little understood queen-consorts, the wives of King John. Taking a feminist light, McQuinn brightly shines it on both England’s least well-known consort, Isabella of Gloucester, his first wife, and one of its least popular, Isabelle of Angoulême, his child bride.

Chapter 1

Introduction

So much of history is written for us. It is written by battles and disease and death. It is mostly written by men. The women of history are frequently lost in the shadows and forgotten. Many women, like Isabella of Gloucester, remain unknown figures, even when they were married to royalty. Others, like Isabelle of Angoulême, have their histories imposed upon them – by men, by society, by the distance of time.

But what these women have left behind goes beyond what we know or what is written. Their impact, while often unseen and unheard in their time, is nevertheless long-lasting and subtle. They created kings and nations through marriage, through childbirth, through their support or their antagonism. Their voices, heard or silenced, are the hidden force behind the thrones of kings.

Between 1135 and 1153, England was torn asunder by civil war and crises of succession. During this time, the only surviving legitimate child of Henry I, Matilda, fought her cousin, Stephen of Blois, for the throne. Noblemen chose sides, changed sides, turned their coats, and the country suffered. So great and widespread was the wretchedness of the people that the Peterborough chronicler famously wrote that Christ and His saints were sleeping. This time was known as The Anarchy.

After The Anarchy, Henry, Duke of Normandy and future Henry II, the son of Matilda, emerged victorious, having been named as Stephen’s heir and eventually succeeding Stephen to the throne in a peaceful transfer of power. Thus begins the Plantagenet dynasty, also called the Angevin empire. From the Plantagenets, we have Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, the power couple of the twelfth century; their son the warrior-king, Richard the Lionheart; and his younger brother, John ‘Lackland’, the eventual King John I. Many of us know King John primarily from Robin Hood tales but lack an understanding of the real man behind the stories. Buried further still are the stories and roles of his wives, the women behind the throne – Isabella of Gloucester and Isabelle of Angoulême. The role of these women has been largely overlooked, marginalised, and lost to historical record. However, the role women and especially queens have played throughout history cannot be overstated. Through queens, policies have been implemented, churches and colleges founded, and citizens given solace. And also through queens, kings are formed. No less is true for John and his wives, and their influence upon him has been just as profound.

Bringing these women out of the mists of history highlights the roles they played in their own time as well as bringing to the fore the notion that many of their contemporary issues remain relevant today. The strength of women has carried history and kings forward, often at the expense of their own reputations, happiness, or choice. Writing about medieval women is often a tremendous challenge, sometimes surprisingly so. There are several reasons for this, but largely it boils down to a couple of main issues. The historical record tends to favour heavily the public realms – politics, religion, warfare – and avoids the private realms, to where the vast majority of women have been relegated.1 Records, not surprisingly, favour events that are more exciting or of greater social significance than the private lives of the citizenry, even of royals, and almost always favour the nobility and ruling classes. This general lack of personal documentation is partly why the letters of the fifteenth century Paston family are so widely studied; they give an unprecedented glimpse into the daily life of a non-noble medieval family.

Additionally, medieval convention considered reading and writing to be separate skills; if a person could read, it did not necessarily follow that they could also write. Even kings had scribes to whom they commonly dictated their correspondence. Compounding the convention separating reading from writing, ‘authorship usually was restricted to those who held social authority, particularly the university-trained male clergy. Women, furthermore, except for some nuns, were excluded from learning Latin, the lingua franca of intellectual life’.2 It was rare for women, even many nuns, to be well educated in Latin or writing. Since women throughout history were usually viewed as second-class citizens, few chroniclers bothered recording the details of their lives, adding to the further erasure of women in history.

Unfortunately, this is true even for queens and women married to future monarchs. Isabella of Gloucester is almost entirely absent from the historical record, despite her marriage of ten years to John. Isabelle of Angoulême has more written about her; however, much of it was recorded by men who hated her and so her record must be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Even their names are sometimes in dispute. Isabella of Gloucester has been documented in her time variously as Isabel, Isabella, Isabelle, Hawise, and Avice. Hawise, at least, may be an understandable mistake made by the chronicler Roger of Howden, who first referred to her as Hawise, for that actually was her mother’s name.3 Thanks to the extensive research of previous scholars, particularly Richard Price, it has been determined that the Close Rolls of John’s reign refer to her as Countess Isabella and Isabella, daughter of Count William. Similarly, Isabelle of Angoulême has been called Isabelle, Isabel, Ysabel, and Isabella, depending on which chronicle one consults. For the purposes of this text, I shall refer to the lady of Gloucester as Isabella and the lady of Angoulême as Isabelle.

In popular culture, the Tudors reign supreme, if you will pardon the pun. People are drawn to the images of the glittering court, the garb, the political intrigue, and the sexual scandals. However, the Plantagenets, who lived and ruled from Henry II in 1154 to Richard III in 1485, made the Tudors look like rank amateurs in terms of sex scandals, political machinations, and in-fighting. Of course, the Plantagenet women are not as well documented as their men, unless they did something the chroniclers found particularly titillating. Despite that, we can piece together a decent understanding of their lives by examining the lives of other women of similar rank and the various literature of their time.

Chapter 2

Childhood and Education

Isabella of Gloucester and Isabelle of Angoulême were the first and second wife, respectively, of King John, the youngest and much favoured son of King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Very little history is known about these women other than the strategic advantage their marriages served to the royal dynasty in England. Isabella of Gloucester was the daughter of a nobleman, William FitzRobert, the second Earl of Gloucester. Her marriage to King John in 1189 granted him rights over her substantial property as he was positioning himself as heir to Richard I ‘The Lionheart’. Isabelle of Angoulême was the only child of Aymer of Angoulême and the great-granddaughter of King Louis VI of France, whose vast land holdings in France also made her an attractive asset. Isabella and Isabelle are among the lost women of history. Significantly, their value in the historical record is reduced to their ability to produce heirs, so there is very little direct evidence of the formative lives of these two queens of England.

When we think of kings and queens today, we tend to assume that a great deal is known about them. They did, after all, rule over nations, wage wars, and create treaties that have, in some cases, lasted for centuries and influenced more modern policies. They were important people, so naturally we think their lives have been chronicled in detail. We have numerous and thorough records of men and women from the age of Antiquity, so a person could be forgiven in thinking the same holds true for the medieval period.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case, especially for children. There are many reasons why we might not have much information about a person. Destruction of records during wars or fires, loss or degradation of the written record, or even political reasons could prevent information about a person from being recorded. Under certain circumstances, the recording of women’s lives was viewed as generally unimportant, even if the woman in question was a noblewoman or married to a king.

The issue of missing information is compounded when related to children. Children very rarely left written records of their own, and adult references to children are often absent as well. The assumption is often that the duties and obligations towards children were so well known that no one bothered writing them down, viewing them as normal daily life.1 So how do we know what the childhoods of Isabella and Isabelle were like? Given the lack of records about their formative years, studying the childhoods of other women of similar rank is necessary to form an understanding of what these two women’s lives were like. It is through this somewhat murky lens that we need to focus our attention.

Concept of Childhood

An issue to consider when contemplating the childhood education of medieval noblewomen is the concept of childhood itself. How has the concept of childhood changed in the intervening centuries? Did medieval society even have a concept of childhood? How would the location of one’s upbringing influence their views on the roles they hold in adulthood? The medieval notion of childhood may have been quite different from what we currently tend to think. It is tempting to assume that medieval society had similar views on childhood as modern society, but in fact, the concept of childhood varies greatly across time and cultures. As Willem Frijhoff notes, ‘childhood is as much a fact of a biological and psychological nature as it is a cultural notion that through the centuries has been the object of ever-changing perceptions and definitions, images, approaches and emotions’.2 There is a widespread notion, both in popular culture and in some academic circles, that medieval society viewed children as essentially small adults for whom childhood was merely a short timeframe to get past so as to proceed with the activities of adult life. This perception is sometimes supported because of the ‘existence of child monks and nuns, called oblates, [which] would seem to support the viewpoint of children as miniature adults, and bely a psychological appreciation of children’.3 Oblates were common throughout Europe from the Anglo-Saxon era forward, with some chronicles recording oblates as young as 3 in some monasteries.4 However, there is other evidence which suggests that these young oblates were not treated as small adults but were understood to be children and were treated as such. For example, Asser, the biographer of King Alfred the Great, noted that oblates were too young to choose to do good or evil, which actually aligns with some modern scholarship as well. Children who cannot yet think about good or evil are too young to make a lifelong commitment to a religious life, which Asser seems to have been noting. In fact, this sentiment fits with some modern schools of thought, where it is irksome to hear a child labeled with the religion of their parents, such as Catholic child, Muslim child, and so forth. ‘Such phrases,’ states Richard Dawkins, ‘can be heard used of children too young to talk, let alone to hold religious opinions’.5 While Alfred the Great and Asser lived about 150 years before the Norman Conquest, the thought of children as small adults was not one that was prevalent in the Middle Ages.

The way in which childhood is viewed throughout the centuries is fluid, based on a multitude of factors. Adding to the burden of discovering a true medieval concept of childhood is the fact that the children themselves are virtually mute voices in the historical record. Contributing to the lack of children’s voices in documented history is the notion of ‘childhood amnesia’,6 wherein children forget the details of their younger selves’ experiences; not until adolescence do most children begin to reflect on themselves and who they are, creating themselves in the process and becoming in their way agents of history.7 So-called childhood amnesia is undoubtedly a large part of the reason why so few records from children themselves exist, as well as the fact that most children are not self-reflective in the necessary way to leave a written record of their thoughts. Our Isabellas appear to have been no different in this and did not leave any written account of their childhood.

Moreover, many early societies may not have viewed children as independent people with an existence outside the realm of what adults oversaw. Uncovering definitions of childhood varies with culture and ages are often broken into socially influenced ranges. For example, in the Middle Ages stages of life were often divided into ‘childhood until the age of 10, youth until 20, and so on, until death at age 80 or 100’.8 Other examples of the stages of life show that some societies, such as sixteenth-century Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius, ranged later, with youth described as age 25 to 35, at which point a person could enter political office.9 A society in which one’s majority was reached at a younger age would likely impact the way childhood was viewed and represented. At various points in history, including the Middle Ages, childhood and adolescence were periods when a person transitioned out of dependence upon parents or guardians and into a more independent adulthood, often upon the event of leaving a home to go to work.10 Twelfth-century Cluniac orders determined adolescence to be at age 15 for boys, and puberty in girls that would signal her physical readiness to bear a man heirs would have been a determining factor in her adulthood. With that mindset, ‘sexual maturation stood as a proxy for true age in this society’.11

The legal definition of childhood is similarly complex. In the Middle Ages, the definition of childhood was rooted in the law, and varied depending on a person’s age, social rank, and sex. For example, for much of the period covered in this book, a boy could make a legally recognised will and marry at age 14 and generally could inherit at 21, but girls could make a legal will and marry at 12 and were considered to have reached their majority at 12 if she was married and 14 if she was not.12 How society dealt with child criminals would be different based on age, sex, and social class as well.

How people, parents in particular, viewed children has varied over time. Some schools of historical research claim that medieval parents were not attached to their children because there were so many ways for a young child to die. Many children died before they even reached adolescence, whether by illness, injury, or some other reason. ‘Protecting themselves from a life of grief, parents could and would care for their children but without emotional involvement. Consequently, after the very first years of physical care directed at the pure survival of the child, education itself remained loose, amorphous, and largely unspoken’.13 The idea that medieval parents did not love their children persists in part because of a paper published in the 1960s by Philippe Ariès, who claimed that there was no place for childhood in the medieval world.14 His thesis was supported by a chronicle from the fifteenth century which states, ‘The want of affection in the English is strongly manifested towards their children, for after having them at home until they reach the age of seven or nine, they board them out to service in the homes of other people.’15

Because of the dearth of documentation about children in the historical record, ideas such as this have per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Childhood and Education
• Chapter 3 The Role of Women and Queens
• Chapter 4 John Plantagenet and Married Life
• Chapter 5 Life After John
• Chapter 6 Changing Roles
• Chapter 7 Representation in Literature
• A Final Word
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• PlatesSection