♀Isabel of Angouleme

Isabel of Angouleme (died 4 June 1246) was Queen of England as the second wife of King John, and in her widowhood Countess of La Marche and Angoulême, a queen who went home to France after John’s death and married Hugues X le Brun, the son of the man she had been promised to before she married John. She was the twenty-fourth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Henry of England (1207–1272).

Queen of England

Isabel is said to have been born in 1188, the daughter and heiress of Ademar Taillefer, Count of Angoulême, by Alice of Courtenay, a granddaughter of King Louis VI of France. On 24 August 1200, at Bordeaux, she married King John, although she had already been promised to Hugues IX le Brun, Count of La Marche^W and lord of Lusignan. She was crowned queen on 8 October 1200. War with France followed when John refused to appear in 1202 before the French king to answer the grievance of the Lusignans, and by 1204 John had lost Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Touraine.

John died suddenly at Newark on 19 October 1216, in the middle of a civil war with his barons, and was buried at Worcester Cathedral. John and Isabel had five children. Their eldest son, Henry, was nine when his father died and came to the throne that same day as King Henry III.

Countess of La Marche

In 1217 Isabel went back to France to live in Angoulême, the city of her birth. She took back control of Cognac and fought long and violent disputes with Reginald de Pons over the castle of Merpins, and with Bartholomew le Puy. On 10 May 1220 she married Hugues X le Brun, also called Hugues de Lusignan^W, Count of La Marche and, by right of his wife, Count of Angoulême, the son and heir of her first betrothed by his first wife. They had five sons and four daughters, among them William de Valence, later lord of Pembroke, and Aymer, Bishop-elect of Winchester. In 1226 her son Henry gave up to his mother and stepfather his rights in Angoulême, Saintonge and the castles of Cognac and Merpins.

When Hugues went over to King Louis VIII of France in 1224, Louis promised Isabel 2,000 livres a year in place of the dower lands she had lost in England, and in 1230 Louis IX^W granted her a yearly pension of 5,000 livres in return for giving up the dower she claimed in England, Normandy and Anjou. In 1242 she and Hugues rebelled against the French crown, and the price of their pardon was the pensions they had been paid since 1224 and their claim to Saintes. Isabel was then implicated in a plot to poison King Louis IX and his brother Alphonse, Count of Poitiers^W.

Death

Isabel took refuge in Fontevrault Abbey^W, where she made a will and died on 4 June 1246. She was first buried in the abbey’s common graveyard, and in 1254, at the request of her son, King Henry III, her remains were moved to the choir of the abbey church.

Notes

Sources

Isabel’s parentage, her birth year, her betrothal, both marriages, her children, her life in France and her death and burial are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011), vol. I, ENGLAND 3, pp. 25–28, a printed genealogy of the medieval royal family and nobility that cites the chronicles, the French royal charters and the cartularies of Angoulême and La Marche. Henry’s birth and his grant of 1226 are from ENGLAND 4 of the same work. Burke’s Peerage (1869) agrees that she was the daughter and heiress of the Count of Angoulême, married Hugues of Lusignan after John’s death, and died in 1246 and was buried at Fontevraud.

Her seal

Richardson describes Isabel’s seal on a charter of March 1227, by which she released the King of France from all she could claim for her dower: it shows the queen standing and crowned, and still names her Queen of England and Duchess of Normandy and Aquitaine.