Overview
Title social-statusQueen of England, Countess of Angoulême and La MarcheDate of Birthby 1188Date of Death1245Biography
(See also Genealogical Table(s):
2.4.2.)
Isabel, daughter and heiress of Audemar/Ademer,(1) count of Angoulême, was the second wife of King John of England, whom she married in 1200. They had five children: Henry III, who married Eleanor of Provence; Richard of Cornwall who married first Isabel Marshall, then Sanchia of Provence, and became king of the Romans; Joanna, who married king Alexander II of Scotland; Isabella, who married emperor Frederick II; and Eleanor, who married first William Marshal, count of Pembroke, then Simon de Montfort, count of Leicester.
There were rumors of Isabel's adultery and John's philandering reported by Matthew Paris, CM 2.560-63, who called Isabel "incestuous and depraved"; his judgments have been questioned by H.G. Richardson (op.cit. 310-11). Isabel was never named regent for her husband or her son, who was 9 when his father died in 1216, though she was formally crowned in England, a ceremony that Richardson suggests meant John intended to share power with her (308-09).
Having no clear role in England after her son's death, Isabel returned to Angoulême to rule her own land and in 1220 she married Hugh X of Lusignan, count of La Marche, to whose father she had been betrothed before she married John, and who was by then betrothed to her daughter Joanna. Though she had not asked permission of the king or his advisors on her remarriage, Isabel insisted on receiving the income from her English dower lands, and she got it in exchange for sending Joanna back to England to marry the king of Scotland. Isabel and Hugh had nine children, several of whom Henry eventually welcomed and supported at his court, though their parents were as likely to support the French king as the English.(2) Isabel died in Fontevrault, and was buried there, as her first mother-in-law, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had been; her son Henry's heart was also placed there in 1291, well after his death.
