by Lisa Hilton
In Le Mans, Berengaria lived mainly at the palace of the counts of Maine and took a close interest in its church, St Pierre, which was constantly at odds with the rival cathedral chapter of St Julien. In 1204—6, two of Berengaria’s servants, Martine and Luke, tried to exact a tax payment from one André, who claimed he owed the money not to St Pierre but to St Julien. In retaliation, the cathedral chapter excommunicated one of the servants. The next year, Berengaria ordered the seizure of André’s goods and imprisoned him in the tower of Le Mans. The chapter promptly placed the city under interdict, but St Pierre defied them and successfully petitioned the papal curia to be allowed to celebrate low Mass with the church doors closed and no bellringing. The feud continued in 1218, this time over money Berengaria allegedly owed to St Julien, as Ann Trindade recounts:
Several other canons, acting on the authority and instructions of the Chapter, had warned Queen Berengaria to see that the money that her servants had taken in contravention of the rights of the Chapter was returned. But she replied that she would not return the money because, as she said, this customary right was hers. They told her the Chapter was ready to grant a hearing to her representatives and those of the man she had imprisoned and pass judgement. She replied that she would have none of it and after she had been warned several times about this by the Chapter and still refused to do anything about it, the Chapter placed the church and the city under the interdict.12
Berengaria herself enjoyed special protection from the Pope during the interdict. In acknowledgement of her ‘devotion to the Holy Roman Church and to our own person, and because of the universal obligation of our pastoral office, which charges us to exercise our case and concern with special favour towards the orphan and the widow’.13 The interdict was eventually lifted in 1218 after which Berengaria, who had been living at Thorée, returned ceremonially to Le Mans. She finally handed over the money to St Julien in 1220. Given that the sum in question was five denarii of Tours, a paltry amount, the whole affair rings slightly of the bickerings of a suburban local council.
However, money was never far from Berengaria’s mind. In 1213, she had sent envoys to John to try to make arrangements for the transfer of funds from properties that were hers by right, but John enjoined her to keep silent and reassured her that arrangements were in hand. He finally promised 2,000 marks in arrears and 10,000 pounds in two instalments, but then wrote the next year to regretfully inform his ‘dearest sister’ that he couldn’t pay. In 1216, the Pope complained to the archbishop of Tours of the ‘frequent acts of injury and theft’ Berengaria had endured, but despite papal pressure it was left to John and Isabelle’s son Henry III to settle the debt to Berengaria, agreeing to pay her 4,500 pounds over five years. The negotiations were still dragging on in 1226, more than a quarter of a century after Richard I’s death.
One of the more blithely ridiculous claims to have been made about Berengaria is that, notwithstanding the view of many writers that she was the only English queen never to have set foot in England, ‘in fact she was a frequent visitor to the court of King John, as is attested to by the numerous safe-conducts given to her and her servants … In 1216 she toured England after the King had given her permission to travel wherever she pleased in the realm and in 1220 she was amongst the vast throng gathered to witness the translation of Becket’s bones.’14 Safe-conducts were issued for Berengaria and her servants in 1215, 1216, 1219 and 1220, but there is absolutely no evidence that she undertook a pleasant tour of England during the barons’ wars. Nor is there any confirmation that the conducts were even used, though they may have been intended to serve as passports through Aquitaine to Navarre, in the event that Berengaria was left so impoverished by her genial brother-in-law that she was obliged to return to her homeland.
Since John had well and truly cheated her, Berengaria was obliged to make the best of what resources she had. Her efforts to do so earned her a rather unpleasant reputation as ‘a persecutor of the Jews’.15 Le Mans had a significant Jewish community, and Berengaria, perhaps following Navarre’s liberal tradition towards the Jews, had employed the services of Jewish moneylenders during her marriage. A record exists of her use of revenues from the queen’s Cornish tin mines to pay a debt to an Italian Jew named Pontius Amaldi in 1199. But France was not Navarre and, as in England, Jews were liable to have their property confiscated without recompense, despite this being expressly forbidden in a papal bull of 1120. Berengaria was prepared to exploit their degraded legal status, rewarding her servant Martin with a house and vineyard taken from two Jews, Desiré and Copin, in 1208, a gift he sanctified by selling one acre of the land to pay for a memorial Mass for Richard I’s soul. Berengaria also profited from the sale of land by converted Jews and gave a former Jewish school building to her chapel. The signature of Adam de Perseigne on one such document, and her donations to the Dominican order, who made the conversion of Jews something of a speciality, may testify that she was interested in saving Jews as well as robbing them. Certainly Adam, her close friend and spiritual counsellor, disapproved of the ill-treatment of Jews, so his involvement suggests that at least some of Berengaria’s transactions were conducted with a degree of probity. Such activities in any case hardly amount to persecution, and indeed were not considered illegal by the powerful, but in the light of Berengaria’s readiness to plead her own vulnerable status as a widow to the Pope, they do seem somewhat hypocritical.
Since what dower rights Berengaria had managed to claw back were usufructuary — that is, only for her lifetime — she needed money to acquire land if she was to fulfil the project that dominated the last years of her life. Her plan was to found a house for the Cistercians, an order closely linked with her natal family and from whom she sought anniversary Masses for Richard and her sister Blanca after the latter’s death in 1223. Berengaria bought land from the hospital of Coeffet and a vineyard from Fontevrault to fund her foundation of Nôtre Dame de la Pieté-Dieu at Epau. Louis VIII of France granted her forty-six acres of woodland with seven meadows and two gardens on the River Huisine, where she erected two water mills for the monks. Louis and his mother, Blanche of Castile, visited Epau to confirm the gift to their ‘dearest relative and kinswoman’ in 1230. That year, the first monks arrived and the abbey was confirmed by the Pope and consecrated by Bishop Geoffrey de Laval in January 1231. Sadly Berengaria did not live to see her abbey sanctified, as she died the preceding December. She was buried at the abbey, in the choir, and, after being moved in the nineteenth century, her bones have now been restored to the chapter house.
Berengaria is one of England’s least-known medieval queens and often considered one of the saddest, dwarfed by both her husband and her motherin-law. Her marriage could not be called successful, yet it offered her an opportunity for experience and adventure which far exceeded the limitations of many women of her class, and her interactions with her powerful relatives specifically affected the alignment of power in Europe. As Lady of Le Mans she continued to exercise authority and succeeded largely by her own efforts in raising an impressive monument to her memory. She was tenacious and, in a quiet way, refused to be dominated by the much larger characters of the Angevin rulers who became her marital family The glory of the Third Crusade is Richard’s, but it is worth recalling that had it not been for his last-minute wedding to Berengaria, it might never have happened at all.
CHAPTER 7
I SABELIE OF ANGOULÊME
‘More Jezebel than Isabelle’
Eleanor of Aquitaine had given birth to John, her sixth child, in England in December 1166, when she was forty-two. Between the ages of about three and seven, he was raised at the abbey of Fontevrault along with his sister Joanna. Writers seeking to condemn Eleanor for her ‘bad parenting’ (and there are many), or to find a psycho-historical explanation for John’s unpleasant personality traits in adulthood, have focused on this period of relative isolation from his immediate family as a stick with which to beat his mother and a source of John’s ‘cruel, miserly,
extortionate, duplicitous, treacherous, mendacious, suspicious, secretive, paranoid and lecherous’ character.1 In both instances, they overstate the case. John’s period at Fontevrault corresponds to Eleanor’s absence in Poitou and Angoulême before the revolt of 1174, and represented ‘a provision of child care for him’.2 Fontevrault had a long history of association with the Aquitaine ducal house, and it was also a place of close family associations for his father, whose aunt, the widowed Matilda of Anjou, had become abbess there, and whose cousin, another Matilda, the child of Geoffrey of Anjou’s sister Sibyl, was a nun at the abbey during the children’s stay. Fontevrault was well placed for them to receive visits from both parents, and may simply have been a practical solution to the conflicting demands of government and family.
Eleanor’s subsequent lack of contact with her younger son has also been blamed on her neglectfulness as a mother, which again seems unfair, as she was a prisoner until John reached his early twenties. Whatever their personal relationship, and despite the fact that Eleanor had come into conflict with John when he schemed to usurp his brother Richard’s power, her commitment to him after Richard’s death was unswerving. Her primary loyalty was to Aquitaine and the preservation of the Angevin lands, so when John inherited the crown her energies were directed at maintaining the duchy for him. Indeed, it became the focus of the last years of her life.
In 1176, Henry II had made John Count of Mortain in Normandy, and when Richard objected to John taking over Aquitaine in 1183 his father sent him instead to Ireland, where his eight-month stay proved a disaster. Henry had also hoped to create an appanage for his youngest son by marrying him to Isabella, the heiress to the Gloucester earldom, but the legality of the marriage was always dubious. Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury challenged the union on the grounds of consanguinity and demanded that John appear at an ecclesiastical court, but the archbishop died before the Pope had had time to rule on the interdict against the marriage. John and Isabella continued to live together despite Baldwin’s having forbidden them to cohabit, but when, on Richard’s death, John’s prospects changed so dramatically he began to consider a more advantageous dynastic match and to revive the idea of an annulment that he had been considering since 1196. His project had the support of the bishops of Saintes, Poitiers and Bordeaux, but the new Pope, Innocent III, objected to it. Nevertheless, in the absence of an appeal from John’s wife Isabella (it is suggested that John simply bought her off), and because of the uncertainty as to whether the ten-year marriage had been legal in the first place, John was able to wriggle free.
If the losses of prestige and territory the English sustained under John are to be attributed to a woman, it is more fruitful to look to his second marriage than at any maternal inadequacies of Eleanor of Aquitaine. John’s marriage to Isabelle, sole heiress to Ademar, Count of Angoulême, had its roots in the rivalry between the Angoulême dynasty and the Lusignans, another powerful Aquitaine house, over the territory of La Marche. The Lusignans had always been troublesome vassals until Richard developed a friendship with Hugh de Lusignan during the Third Crusade, after which he promoted the family at the expense of their rivals.
In 1200, Eleanor spent two months at the court of Castile, where she personally selected Princess Blanca from among her daughter Leonor’s children as the bride of Louis IX of France. By April she was back at Fontevrault, but any thoughts she may have had of resuming her retirement were put paid to by the revolt of the Lusignans, who were once again laying claim to La Marche. Philip of France used the dispute as an excuse to break the recently signed truce of Le Goulet and Arthur of Brittany allied himself with the Lusignans against John. Eleanor left Fontevrault with the intention of establishing herself defensively against Arthur in Poitiers. Twenty miles to the north of her capital, she paused for the night at Mirebeau. Hugh de Lusignan was not far away at Tours with Arthur, and the pair planned to take Mirebeau and kidnap Eleanor. Fortuitously, John was marching his forces to Chinon when he heard that Mirebeau was besieged. By the time he arrived, Eleanor, who had attempted to stall Arthur with negotiations, had been reduced to shutting herself up in the keep. On 1 August, in the only truly impressive battle of his life, John stormed Mirebeau, captured Arthur and Hugh de Lusignan while they were enjoying a breakfast of roast pigeon, and liberated his mother. John was perhaps more delighted to have captured Arthur than to have freed Eleanor — he certainly capitalised on it by murdering his nephew as soon as he decently could.
After the kidnapping episode, John agreed to hand over La Marche to Hugh de Lusignan and to reject Ademar’s claim. However, Ademar’s daughter was betrothed to Hugh, a development that would ally the rival claimants and allow Hugh, on his marriage, to annex the Angoulême lands. Either John did not know of the betrothal or it had not been agreed when he handed over La Marche in 1200, but once he learned of it, he was confronted with the prospect of a dangerous Lusignan power bloc with serious implications for the ruling structure in the south: the combined territories would cut off Aquitaine by alienating the land between Poitou and Gascony. The obvious solution was to prevent the wedding and, according to the chronicler Roger of Howden, it was Philip of France, Ademar’s overlord, who slyly suggested to John that he marry Isabelle himself.
John was at the time engaged in negotiations for a marriage to a princess of Portugal. Such an alliance would have protected the southern borders of the Angevin territories in much the same way as Richard’s marriage to Berengaria of Navarre had done. But now he rushed into wedlock with Isabelle. His precipitousness attracted censure from Ralph of Diceto, who reported: ‘Lord John, King of England, having in mind to marry a daughter of the King of the Portuguese … sent from Rouen some great notables to bring her back to him. But he married Isabella, only daughter and heir of the Count of Angoulême, and he did this while they were on the journey, without having warned them, taking much less care for their safety than was worthy of the Royal Majesty.’
John’s haste is here seen as unseemly, unkingly, and, given that Diceto was writing later, the consequences of his marriage are implicitly foreshadowed in its hurried, thoughtless beginning. John’s carelessness for the feelings of the princess of Portugal at the time may have been the result of his preoccupation with making Isabelle his wife before Hugh de Lusignan got wind of the plan: on 5 July he was negotiating with Count Ademar and on 24 August he and Isabelle were married at Bordeaux. They were crowned together at Westminster on 8 October, then made a progress north, through Cumberland and Yorkshire, to meet the King of Scots, returning south to Guildford for Christmas and moving on to Canterbury for an Easter crown-wearing ceremony in March.
As Frank McLynn comments, ‘Almost everything about John’s union with Isabella has invited controversy: his motives, the murky circumstances of his engagement, the status of the marriage in canon law, the personality of the new queen and the reason for the excessive wrath of the Lusignans.’3 John’s motives have been attributed to no more than (a rather distasteful) lust, as chroniclers later remarked on his sexual enthralment to Isabelle. John was promiscuous, though certainly no more so than his father or his great-grandfather Henry I. His known mistresses included Hawise, the Countess of Aumale, and two women named Clementia and Suzanne. He had a bastard daughter, Joan, by Clementia, and other illegitimate children included Geoffrey, Osbert, Richard and Oliver, the latter two of whom were the sons of noblewomen. This was not particularly unusual, but within the accepted code of extramarital adventures it was considered bad form to target the wives and daughters of the aristocracy, and John’s impolitic pursuit of well-born women was given as a reason for his later alienation by his barons. It does seem, then, that John allowed sexual passion to overrule prudence, but in the case of his wife it was more probably realpolitik — the desire to circumvent the creation of a united territory of Lusignan, La Marche and Angoulême, and to claim the succession of Angoulême for himself — that drove him.
John was notorious for a lack of respect for the Church, but if he wa
s prepared to risk the anger of Rome, in this instance it was likely to be for his own strategic advantage rather than for sexual satisfaction, which he could easily find elsewhere. Legally, the Angoulême match stood on unsteady ground, as no divorce from Isabella of Gloucester was formally obtained; John merely capitalised on the uncertain status of his first marriage. Isabelle’s age was another potential impediment to legitimacy, and her betrothal to Lusignan could also be seen as an obstacle in canon law. It was claimed that the bride had reached the legal age of twelve, but many contemporaries were doubtful of the truth of this. Isabelle’s mother, Alice de Courtenay, could not have married Ademar before 1184, as she had only that year been divorced from her previous husband, the Comte de Joigny, on the grounds of consanguinity. She is first recorded as Ademar’s wife in a document awarding a grant to the abbey of St-Armand-de-Boixe in 1191. According to these dates, Isabelle may have been as old as fifteen, but she could equally have been no more than nine.
The Lusignans’ disgust at the marriage points to her being at the younger end of this range. The betrothal to Hugh de Lusignan had been made with the support of King Richard, and the couple had exchanged the verba de praesenti which, in normal circumstances, was binding and could be broken only with a special dispensation, as had been granted in the case of Isabelle’s mother. Roger of Howden maintains that because Isabelle had not reached the age of consent in 1200, Hugh de Lusignan was prepared to wait to marry her in church. Marriages were often contracted while the parties were under age, but it was common for such unions not to be formalised or consummated until the age of consent had been reached. John’s sister Leonor, for example, had married Alfonso of Castile at eight but did not have intercourse with him until she was fifteen. So ‘the suspicion remains that [Hugh’s] bride was a pre-pubescent child in 1200 and that the King stepped in where … Isabelle’s betrothed husband believed it indecent to tread’.4 The fact that Isabelle did not bear a child until 1207, and then did so almost annually until 1215, also suggests that she had not reached puberty at the time of her wedding. Hugh, then, had not only been cheated of his wife and his inheritance; he also had to endure having his own integrity exploited by John.