Isabella of Angouleme

Drunk Friday (or early Saturday whatever) and have I told you about Isabella of Angouleme? I don’t think I have. Really not a great person but I have a soft spot for her anyway so let’s try this with no references giddy up.

-Married Bad King John when she was like 12 years old but didn’t have her first child until like 7 years later so it’s unlikely that they consummated the marriage immediately, despite the nasty shit chroniclers wrote about John

-Originally betrothed to Hugh IX of Lusignan, which you should remember for later

-Didn’t have a lot of power during John’s reign but did give him 5 children, including the future Henry III of England, Richard of Cornwall who built Tintagel Castle and worked to amplify the connections between the site and the mythical King Arthur, and daughters who became queen of Scotland, Holy Roman Empress, and the Countess of Pembroke respectively so like. Yay.

-After John died she hustled to get Henry on the throne, and since John had lost the fucking crown in the fucking river it was her coronet on Henry’s head when he was annointed king

-The barons refused to give her an official position in her son’s court or any influence so she hitched up her skirt and went back to Angouleme, a place my auto-correct really hates, to be Countess, and eventually married

-Wait for it

-Hugh X of Lusignan. Who you may recognize as being after Hugh IX? Because he was her original fiance’s son. Also Hugh X was betrothed to Isabella’s daughter at the time. But she arranged for Joan to marry the king of Scotland instead. And then, like, held her hostage for awhile. It’s fine, it all worked out.

-So she’s Countess and married to a new dude (without the permission of her son’s council, which she’s kind of supposed to have, being dowager queen and queen mother of England and all) and then she has like 9? More children?

-Then she, like, foments a rebellion because Blanche of Castile was mean to her and sometime I’ll tell you about Blanche because YIKES

-And then she tries to assassinate the king of France.

-Which. Okay.

-It’s debatable, whether she does this or not. Historians get all tied up over whether we can prove this is true. But you know me, and you should know by now that I just love the stories that we tell each other – people, I mean – and what THOSE can tell us about people of the past. And Isabella’s contemporaries, this was a story they told each other, that she was crazy enough and powerful enough to plot the assassination of the king of fucking France. To hire cooks who were supposed to poison his food but got caught and confessed. And then a chronicler recorded that story as though it was true and we call folks like him ‘chroniclers’ now but in his time he was a historian okay? Everything is filtered. Everything. And that’s one of the things I love about history because we want to believe we’re better now because we insist on evidence but even the evidence is filtered! It’s all stories! I forgot what I was saying.

-Oh yeah. So Isabella’s contemporaries believed that she was fully capable of planning and executing the assassination of the king of France, which is actually super unusual for the time? The last dowager queen of England who was accused of anything similar was Aelfthryth, in the 10th century, when she was accused of murdering Edward the Martyr. So like. Clearly people saw Isabella as very powerful and very scary, so even if it’s a lie it’s a lie that tells us something. Even lies have meaning.

-Regardless, Isabella realized that her position was precarious and retreated to Fontevraud Abbey, where she eventually died. She probably didn’t become a nun, just lived out a genteel retirement, which after 14 children and some attempted murder she kind of earned. Like I said, she wasn’t a great person! She was greedy and nasty and a little nuts. Or, I mean, OR, she knew she needed land to survive and she took what she wanted and tried to fuck up anybody who stood in her way.

Depends on the story you tell.