Isabella of Gloucester

When King Henry II of England was looking for a wife for his younger son John, he was not as interested in pleasing John as he was in making an advantageous political and financial connection. If during this time John looked like Henry's favorite, it was only because all his other sons—including his oldest and heir, Henry the Young King because of all the power he had been given—and his wife had rebelled (unsuccessfully) against Henry.

Henry arranged betrothal to Isabella of Gloucester, but only after disinheriting her sisters so that all Gloucester lands would be hers on her father's death. This was in 1176, when John was nine and Isabella was only three or four years old. Both were great-grandchildren of Henry I, meaning the marriage was forbidden due to the laws of consanguinity. The wedding did not take place until 29 August 1189, at which John became Earl of Gloucester.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Baldwin, placed the Gloucester lands under interdict—meaning no one living there could partake in any Catholic services—due to the violation of consanguinity laws. An appeal to (antipope) Pope Clement III for a dispensation. This was granted, on the condition that the two abstained from sex. This explains why 10 years of marriage produced no children.

John pursued the consanguinity prohibition when it suited him—which it did after he became king. Wanting an heir, and not being interested in having them with Isabella, he annulled the marriage on the grounds of too-close blood ties. He put Isabella in "honorable confinement" at Winchester with an allowance for her comfort. John's lack of sensitivity to the feelings of others—and, after all, there is no sign that he cared for Isabella at all except for the political advantage—had a "task" for her. When John re-married, to a twelve-year-old Isabella of Angoulême, he lodged his new bride at Winchester in the care of his first wife, increasing her allowance from £50 to £80 pounds because she was hosting a queen. The second Isabella stayed with the first until a few weeks before she gave birth to the future King Henry III.

Eventually he found a new marriage for Isabella: in 1214, the Earl of Essex, Geoffrey de Mandeville paid to John 20,000 marks for the privilege to marry Isabella. He was a much younger man, but he died two years later. Unfortunately, because at the time of his death he had been rebelling against John, John confiscated all his lands, which included Isabella's Gloucester lands.

Now a poor widow, she married again a year later, to Hubert de Burgh who became the Chief Justiciar under John and John's son, Henry III. Sadly, she died only a month after marrying Hugh. She was interred in Canterbury Cathedral.

Now, about that second wife also called Isabella: let's learn more about her next.

John's Marriages

John, son of Henry II, having seized the throne of England after Richard the Lionheart's death, and subsequently having lost several possessions on the continent through war and treaties, decided to marry into a French noble family in order to regain some influence in France. His choice was Isabella of Angoulême in 1200. There were a couple issues about his decision that certainly raise modern eyebrows, and more than a few contemporary ones.

For one...well, we don't know enough about Isabella to know when she was born, but one estimate is 1188, making her 12 years of age. Still, she would be Countess of Angoulême in her own right when her father died (which he did, in 1202). Also, she was the niece through her mother of the current Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Peter II of Courtenay.

The other—well, one other—issue was that John already had a wife: Isabella, Countess of Gloucester. He managed to have that marriage annulled on the grounds that, as his cousin, he never should have married her in the first place, and in fact had failed to get the proper papal dispensation to do so, considering the current laws of consanguinity (they would change the same year that John would sign the Magna Carta, 1215). Fortunately for John, Isabella complied with there annulment, even though he kept the lands he had received through their marriage.

Back to the second Isabella: she had already been betrothed to Hugh IX le Brun, Count of Lusignan (and remember that Roman numeral; we will be coming back to it in the post after next). Her father decided that his daughter would be better off as a queen than as a Countess of Lusignan, so he agreed to the change in husbands for her. John might have made amends with the Lusignan's, but instead chose to treat them with contempt. This motivated an uprising by the Lusignan and their supporters which John had to suppress. Philip II of France also took the Lusignan snub as an excuse to confiscate the Angoulême lands.

So John's choice did not have all positive results, and rather than make inroads into France through marriage, he alienated a powerful family and lost more lands to Philip.

The second Isabella provided John with something the first one never could, however: heirs, including the next king, Henry III. Here's a good question, though: John was married to his first wife for 10 years. Why did they produce no heirs? The reason is simple: the couple was forbidden to have sexual intercourse. I'll explain that tomorrow.