Runnymede and Lincoln Fair: A Story of the Great Charter

by John G. Edgar

CHAPTER XV
ISABEL OF ANGOULÊME

IT was not, as has been mentioned, under the very happiest auspices that King John, in the autumn of 1200, celebrated his marriage with Isabel of Angoulême, at Bordeaux, when he was rather more than double her age, and with a reputation and temper decidedly the worse for the wear.

Isabel, however, had just the kind of imagination to be dazzled by the brilliancy of her position as wife of a man on whose head had been placed, not only the crown of England, but the coronal of golden roses which formed the ducal diadem of Normandy, and who, moreover, was heir to the provinces over which the old Counts of Anjou and the old Dukes of Guienne had reigned with power and authority. At first, therefore, she was highly gratified with the fortunate accident which had thrown her in King John’s way, and substituted him, as a husband, in the place of the Count de la Marche; and, after the royal pair came to England, matters went pleasantly enough for years, so far as could be judged by appearances, and Isabel became the mother of two sons and three daughters—Henry, the eldest of her children, being a native of Winchester, where he first saw the light in 1207, while his father was pursued by the enmity of the Pope, and threatened by the hostility of the French king and the Anglo-Norman barons.

So far life went smoothly enough, to all appearance, with the King and Queen of England. But ere long their domestic affairs assumed a much less satisfactory aspect. In fact, Isabel did not find her position quite the bed of roses she had probably anticipated when she consented, for the sake of a crown, to give the Count de la Marche the slip. With a temper which became worse under the influence of trials and reverses, John not only proved a very disagreeable companion to the young lady whom he had carried off, so much to the mortification of the Continental magnate to whom she was betrothed, but he involved himself with women of various ranks, whose memories are still preserved in chronicle or tradition—from Constance, Countess of Chester, to the miller’s wife of Charlton, whose frailty is annually commemorated by the Horn Fair, at the Feast of St. Luke—in a series of vagrant amours, which, besides being of a scandalous kind, could not fail to wound the queen’s vanity and alienate her regard. Moreover, the splendour which had tempted her was fast disappearing. The coronal of Normandy was gone; the crown of England was in great danger of following. It really must have seemed that the glory was departing from the House of Plantagenet; and, after many musings and reflections, Isabel, doubtless, began to think very pensively of the sacrifice she had made to unite her fate with one who showed so little respect for her feelings. Unfortunately, she was not a woman to act with much discretion and dignity in very trying circumstances; and the serious domestic quarrels of John and Isabel gave rise to rumours and stories which were far from raising the king’s character for humanity, or the queen’s reputation as a wife, in the opinion of the world. “His queen,” says the chronicler, speaking of John, “hates him, and is hated by him, she being an evil-minded woman, often found guilty of crimes, upon which the king seized her paramours, and had them strangled with a rope on her bed.”

It is to be hoped, for Isabel’s sake, that this story was merely the invention of an enemy. But little doubt can be entertained that the domestic quarrels were serious. Indeed, during the year when John submitted to Rome, matters reached such a stage between the royal pair, that the queen, then twenty-seven years of age, was consigned to the castle of Gloucester, and there kept, by command of her husband, in safe custody as a captive. A reconciliation, however, did take place, and there was some prospect of a better state of feeling in future. But when the scandal about John and Maude, the daughter of Robert Fitzwalter, reached the queen’s ears, the matrimonial feud was renewed; and Isabel, almost frantic with jealous rage, declined to see her husband’s face. Subsequently, however, a second reconciliation was brought about; and, after some correspondence, a meeting between the king and queen had been appointed to take place, when the sudden seizure of London by the confederate barons threw all John’s plans into confusion, and forced him not only to postpone his visit to Isabel till a more convenient season, but to take measures for her security, lest she and her son, Prince Henry, should fall into the hands of the barons, and be used as instruments to complete his ruin.

It was at Savernake that Isabel was residing while the barons assembled at Stamford, and marched, by Brackley, and Northampton, and Bedford, to London. Only vague and indistinct intelligence as to their movements reached her in her retreat; and, buoyed up by the king’s confident assurance that he would crush any attempts at insurrection, she delighted her soul with visions of reigning as a queen in reality, and occupied her time with repairing the palace of Savernake, and appears to have meditated housekeeping on a very extensive scale, since she added kitchens with fires for roasting oxen whole. It was not pleasant to be disturbed in the midst of such projects by news that her husband’s crown was at stake; and, when Isabel had been conveyed home after her fright and her escape, and sufficiently restored to be informed that a knight and squire sent by the king were awaiting an audience to deliver a message, she felt instinctively that something was wrong; she wrung her hands, and exclaimed to her ladies—

“My heart misgives me; I fear me they bring tidings of woe.”

But, at the same time, her impatience to know all made her anxious to receive them without delay; and, having arrayed herself so as to appear to the best advantage—for her vanity as woman was quite as strong as her ambition as queen—she ordered them to be conducted to her presence.

It was in a spacious chamber, royally adorned after the fashion of the age, and magnificent, according to the ideas of that generation, that Isabel of Angoulême, seated on an elevated chair resembling a throne, with two of her ladies behind her, received the knight and the squire. Her taste was displayed in her dress, which was such as to set off her natural charms. She wore a green robe, lined with sarcenet, and girdled round the waist with a belt sparkling with precious stones, and a collar of gold round her neck, which was graceful as the swan’s, and her hair, not concealed, as that of ladies then usually was, with kerchief or veil, but inclosed in a caul of golden network, and ornamented with an elegant chaplet. Her bearing was majestic in the extreme, and as she sat formally waiting their coming, she looked every inch a queen. But no sooner did Collingham approach, and bend his knee, than she stared as if she had seen a ghost, and fluttered perceptibly.

“William de Collingham!” said she, after a pause, during which she seemed to examine her boots, which were curiously embroidered in circles round the ankles, “I deem that you were in exile or——”