Richard & John: Kings at War (55 page)

There was yet another twist in the complex skein John was now weaving. At Le Goulet John had told Philip he was thinking of taking a wife, and had sent envoys to the court of Portugal. His thinking was obvious: Richard had done very well politically out of his marriage to Berengaria, but the changed situation in Spain now (with Castile, Aragon and Navarre at war) made a Spanish marriage much less attractive. But a Portuguese union held some of the advantages of Richard’s brilliant diplomacy in 1198, potentially menacing Philip in regions where he thought himself secure. To Lisbon, then, his envoys sped in the early summer of 1200, before the fateful meeting between John and Ademar. The negotiations reached an advanced stage, with an exchange of ambassadors.
¹¹⁴
Suddenly everything changed: the Portuguese marriage was off, and John was to marry Isabella of Angoulême. The about-face was so rapid that John’s emissaries, still bargaining earnestly in Lisbon, were left out on a limb.
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Historians have struggled to make sense of the rapid sequence of events. Some accuse John of having had the Angoulême match in mind even while parleying with Philip at Le Goulet, and see the embassy sent to Lisbon as a blind, designed to hoodwink the French king.
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But this makes no sense if it was Philip himself who suggested the match with Isabella. The overwhelming likelihood is that John was serious in his quest for a Portuguese bride and abandoned it only when he faced potential disaster in the form of the Lusignan-La Marche-Angoulême axis, at which point he abruptly changed tack and married Isabella. There was clearly something rushed about the entire episode. On 5 July John was holding preliminary talks with Ademar of Angoulême; on 24 August he married his daughter in Bordeaux.
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At the beginning of October the newly-weds crossed to England, where they were crowned together at Westminster on the 8th. Isabella accompanied her husband to the meeting with the Scottish king at Lincoln, then, in the new year to the Scottish border, returning via Cumberland and York to a ‘second coronation’ at Canterbury at Easter (25 March 1201).
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Almost everything about John’s union with Isabella has invited controversy: his motives; the murky circumstances of the engagement; the status of the marriage in canon law; the balancing of competing political goals; the personality of the new queen; and the reason for the excessive wrath of the Lusignans.
¹¹⁹
Some historians have alleged that concupiscence marched together with
raison d’état
- in a word, that John lusted after his young bride - but there are substantial difficulties with this notion, as will shortly appear. Politically, John alienated the Lusignans, but he must have known this would happen and he may anyway have regarded them as unreliable allies. In any case, many of his advisers endorsed his decision to break with the Lusignans - William Marshal for one, who loathed them for the murder of his uncle earl Patrick and their humiliation of him when they took him prisoner in those far-off days.
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Moreover, for a brief period after the marriage, John was at last able to bring Angoulême under effective Angevin control. By the normal rules of expediency and self-interest the marriage made sense, for Isabella’s kinship links bound her and John to most of the ruling families of Christendom; her mother was a member of the Courtenay family - a crusading sept - and was descended from the kings of France.
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Isabella herself was, like most medieval queens, a plaything and puppet of powerful males - her father and her husband - but she was every bit as controversial as her own wedding. She had a difficult role to play - and if she was as young as some scholars allege - an impossible one, not least in that she was merely the third queen of England to come onto the stage, with Eleanor of Aquitaine and Berengaria already ensconced as dowagers.
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Oddly enough, it turns out that Lusignan rage and canon law are organically connected in the case of Isabella. Naturally, the Lusignans were angry that John had double-crossed them and snatched Isabella as a bride from under their very noses, particularly since Hugh of Lusignan may have initially condoned the release of Isabella from her betrothal with him on the understanding that John would grant him clear title to the country of La Marche - an expectation John predictably confounded, thus adding a second double-cross to his initial breach of all known feudal custom. In his usual way, he then stoked up the anger of his enemies by gratuitously promising his wife the lordships of Saintes and Niort, two of the richest in Poitou and thus a natural magnet for the Lusignans.
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Yet there was an ‘overplus’ in Lusignan anger that suggests some other factor may have been at work, and the probability is that it was John’s utterly ruthless lack of squeamishness or regard for the proprieties that so disgusted them. John had not just exhibited a kind of Angevin repetition compulsion by having major problems with his wife, as Henry and Richard had done; he managed to go one better by having problems with both wives. Whereas degrees of consanguinity vitiated the earlier match with Isabella of Gloucester, with Isabella of Angoulême the obstacle to happiness was that canon law laid down a clear age of consent for sexual congress, namely twelve for girls.
¹²⁴
The suspicion arises that Isabella may have been under the age of consent when John married her, but certainty on this point is difficult, for the chroniclers estimate her age as anywhere between nine and fifteen, with twelve being the favoured option. Henry II’s daughter Eleanor had been married to the king of Castile at eight, but the marriage was not consummated until she was fifteen. What enraged the Lusignans was that John had been prepared to marry an under-age girl, where count Hugh had shown more sensitivity towards her. Since it is hinted in many dark corners that John’s sexual tastes ran to perversion, it seems that paedophilia may possibly be added to his many crimes. At the very least he was a cradle-snatcher.
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From the Lusignan point of view, John had added perversion to treachery and double-cross. Roger of Howden relates that Isabella was betrothed to Hugh of Lusignan in Richard’s lifetime, and that the Lionheart approved of the match. Marriage vows were exchanged by proxy, according to the medieval
verba de presenti
formula, whereby it was accepted that a couple was legally married, but the marriage had not yet been consummated.
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Hugh of Lusignan did not wish to consummate until his bride was legally of age, which provided John with a legal loophole but he did not bother to obtain a divorce on these grounds for Isabella but rushed into the marriage as if possessed. The haste of the marriage has led even sober scholars to speculate that he was besotted with Isabella, but if she was not even twelve, John’s passion seems abnormal, to say the least. Nicholas Vincent has argued that, since she did not give birth to her first child until October 1207, she may indeed have been around nine years old at the time of her wedding.
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This would make Matthew Paris’s story of John’s lust for his wife in 1203, which kept him in bed when he should have been in the field waging war against the French, even more disturbing - if true.
¹²⁸
Once again historical interpretation is vitiated by lack of hard evidence; the charitable (for John) version might be to assume that Coggleshall’s estimate that Isabella was twelve in 1200 is the correct one, which would make John’s lust for her at fifteen more natural. The fact that Isabella did not conceive until around Christmas 1206 does not necessarily mean that sexual relations between her and John had only just begun. But the consensus seems to be that, once launched on sexual life, Isabella enjoyed it. Matthew Paris, always a hostile witness to both John and Isabella, said that the queen was a shrewish, adulterous, incestuous woman who practised the black arts - ‘more Jezabel than Isabella’ was his famous description.
¹²⁹
Although Paris’s view of Isabella is usually dismissed as nonsense, both in her particular case and because all medieval royals were routinely described as lecherous and dissipated, there may be fire behind the smoke. Nicholas Vincent has pointed out that she had several kinsmen in England who could have been her lovers, and the main suspect was her French half-brother Peter de Joigny.
¹³⁰

John remained married to Isabella for the rest of his reign, and it has sometimes been assumed from her relative absence from the historical record that the marriage must have been, if not strong, at least serene. This seems doubtful. The only direct evidence of discord is Gervase of Canterbury’s statement that John imprisoned her at Devizes in 1209, but even this has been disputed on the ground that the Latin word used to describe the alleged jailing (
includitur
) could mean house arrest or even ‘confinement’ before a birth.
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And it is certainly true that Isabella attracted wild rumours and outlandish gossip, such as the absurd story that she was raped at Marlborough and her younger son murdered.
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Yet it is clear that John continued his extramarital escapades, whether or not he was sexually besotted with Isabella. In 1204, when one of his mistresses wanted to go to bed with her husband instead, an angry John fined her 200 chickens for the privilege. There must be something in the story, for the wronged husband Hugh de Neville showed he had a grievance by appearing in rebellion later.
¹³³
John’s taste for cruelty and semi-psychotic caprice also appears in his treatment of the first Isabella, his discarded wife. To keep Isabella of Angoulême in her place, he seems to have kept his first wife in a style as lavish as the queen’s and even on occasion forced the two women to be under the same roof, to provide him with some sick enjoyment.
¹³⁴
On the other hand, there is no such mystery about John’s marriage as attaches to the union of Richard and Berengaria. He and Isabella clearly enjoyed normal marital relations, and he sired five legitimate children on her in the years 1207-15. The real problem in the marriage seems to have been that John routinely demeaned and disparaged his wife by not allowing her the sorts of privileges enjoyed by Eleanor of Aquitaine or even Berengaria. The suspicion arises that John, always meanminded and avaricious, refused to pay her normal expenses once he had begotten a male heir.
¹³⁵

The official records certainly bear this out, for we see a marked difference in the way Isabella was treated. John played true to form by double-crossing his wife almost instantly. Having angered the Lusignans even more by promising the richest lordships in Poitou (those of Saintes and Niort) to Isabella as a wedding present, he then blatantly failed to make good on his promise. His method was to farm out the lordships nominally assigned to the queen to powerful local magnates and then pocket the rents himself.
¹³⁶
The contrast between Isabella’s position and that of Eleanor, who had real power and real ownership of her dower estates, could scarcely be clearer. Yet Isabella had an even more poignant financial grievance, relating to the so-called Queen’s Gold - monies traditionally paid to the royal consort from the taxes, levies and fines on transactions with Jews and other bankers.
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Whereas Eleanor of Aquitaine always received this income, neither Berengaria nor Isabella did, even though custom ordained that a king could waive a fine but never the taxable percentage of it due as Queen’s Gold.
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What is worse, it is likely that John did in fact levy the money but simply pocketed it himself or - another favourite scam - wrote it off against his personal debts. What is clear is that John kept Isabella in a lamentable state of financial subjection, dependent for everything on his handouts. She received no income from her dower lands or from the Queen’s Gold and did not even enjoy Angoulême in her own right. And whereas Eleanor of Aquitaine had brought a huge household of kinsfolk and clients to England, John prevented this is Isabella’s case, imposing his own placemen in her household and preventing her from bringing over fellow natives of Angoulême.
¹³⁹
It is not surprising that in her later years Isabella, who survived John by a full three decades, evinced no fond feelings whatever for her royal husband. John, though, made her a scapegoat for his own failings. It is a known characteristic of the authoritarian personality that such an individual can never acknowledge his own mistakes; errors must always be someone else’s fault or the result of a ‘conspiracy’. When John lost Normandy to Philip of France in the years immediately after his marriage, it was entirely predictable that he blamed his wife for an outcome that was purely the result of his own weakness.
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13

IT WAS SOME TIME before the backlash from the Lusignans manifested itself, so that John must sometimes have wondered if, against all the odds, he had got away with his latest double-cross. Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose political antennae were always much sharper, knew better. At 78 very tired after her latest political mission - a journey to Spain to fetch her grandchild Blanche of Castile for the marriage with Philip Augustus’s son - she retired to her favourite anchorage, the abbey of Fontevraud in Anjou. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, she identified Aimeri of Thouars as a key player in the dispute between the houses of Angoulême and Lusignan and invited him to Fontevraud. Aimeri’s past was chequered and he was the classical political trimmer: having originally supported John in the spring of 1199, he veered away later in the year into the camp of Arthur and Constance of Britanny, doubtless nudged in that direction by the fact that his brother Guy became Constance’s third husband then, but also virtually propelled thither by John’s inexplicable action in first making him seneschal of Anjou and Touraine and then rescinding the offer.
¹
In February 1201 Eleanor entertained Aimeri at the abbey, and extracted from him a solemn promise that he would remain faithful to John; Aimeri confirmed the pledge in writing to John, in a letter warning him of looming trouble on the continent.
²
John seems to have paid no attention. The Lusignans seem to have been waiting to see if John was prepared to offer any compensation for the affront to their honour, but it was not the new king’s way to be gracious in victory. Even one of his defenders concludes ruefully that John liked ‘to kick a man when he was down’.
³
He responded to Eleanor’s warning by sending his officials to take over La Marche, actually turning the knife in the wound.