hugh de Lusignan – History… the interesting bits!

Guest Post: Finding Isabelle, a Mother and a Queen by Terri Lewis

18/10/202515/10/2025Sharon Bennett ConnollyLeave a comment

When writing non-fiction biographies, you can tell the life of a person. You can say what happened to them, how they affected events and how they were perceived by others. But there are gaps. If you do not have the evidence, you cannot just make it up. If you are looking for reasons, you can offer different scenarios. It is hard to get to the heart of a person, though. You cannot put words in their mouths, or attribute feelings and emotions. Fiction can go where non fiction cannot tread. It can give you a vivid retelling of a fabulous story. It is not always historically accurate, there are some things we cannot know, but fiction can fill in the gaps. It can bring the past to life and give you a sense of the era that no other medium can.

And that is what Terri Lewis has achieved with remarkable skill in her novel if Isabelle d’Angoulême, Behold the Bird in Flight. And it is a pleasure to welcome Terri to History…the Interesting Bits to talk a little about her research behind her novel.

Finding Isabelle, a Mother and a Queen

by Terri Lewis

History...the Interesting Bits — *A birthing stool*

I was in high school when I first asked my history teacher, “Where are the women?” An unsatisfactory answer gave impetus to what became a need to find forgotten women. Eventually I became obsessed with Isabelle d’Angoulême, King John’s second wife, and decided to resurrect her by writing a novel.

There are a few documented facts about her life: Historians think she was about twelve years old when John abducted her from her French fiancé, took her to England, and crowned her queen. The chronicles, when they bothered to mention her, were not kind; Matthew Paris called her a “Jezebel” and “slut” who kept John in bed until noon, an assessment most likely reflecting John’s reputation, not the reality of his wife. Isabelle apparently didn’t receive the normal queen’s gold—a percentage of John’s income—or the rents from lands given to her at the time of their marriage; John kept the monies for himself. In “history,” I found only men – fighting, amassing money and enemies, riding off to conquer unknown lands, signing writs, allowing fairs, courting and dancing and always fighting. Isabelle’s life, like the lives of most medieval women, was mainly blank.

But. . . she bore John five children.

My research on medieval childbirth uncovered dire statistics: 20% to 33% of medieval women died from childbearing. The mortality rate per single birth was only slightly higher than in modern times, but multiple pregnancies compounded the risk. Birth control was forbidden by the all-powerful Church so basically a fertile woman had children until menopause or until she died. Because kings had to have sons, as did counts and dukes and other lords—a child to inherit land and carry on the family name. Daughters were less important. An only-child daughter could inherit a kingdom , but not for herself, for her husband. Girls who had brothers would serve as bargaining chips in marriages that formed diplomatic alliances or enlarged territory for their fathers.

In another statistic, infants were uncertain to live to inheritance. Nicholas Orme wrote, “It has been suggested that 25% of [medieval children] may have died in their first year, half as many (12.5%) between one and four, and a quarter as many (6%) between five and nine.” Danger was everywhere. A cut could become infected and penicillin was years in the future. Children fell into wells and down stone stairs, or into the fire that burned in the middle of the great hall, the main source of heat. Many died of illnesses for which bleeding or herbal concoctions were the only cure. Multiple pregnancies mitigated this danger. I note that Isabelle, in addition to the five children with John, had nine more children with her second husband. But two of her own daughters died in childbirth.

Isabelle wouldn’t have gone to a hospital. She’d have had a lying-in chamber removed from the main keep and furnished with a birthing stool, a midwife with practical experience but not a doctor because childbirth was a woman’s domain and doctors were men, and a room full of ladies-in-waiting who watched and prayed with her. If the birth was difficult, window shutters would be opened to release the new soul into life. If that failed, an arrow could be shot heavenward to waken God to the peril and ask for his help.

Since history decreed that Isabelle would live through childbirth, I decided to have her observe the suffering of her best friend. That scene became an important milestone in Isabelle’s growing up.

What kind of mother would Isabelle have been? I’d never read about a medieval mother. Women in 1200 who appeared in the chronicles were queens, royalty, or religious. Motherhood was important only for the child, preferable a boy, a gift to the father. The woman was just a bearing body.

I decided that Isabelle learned from her own mother, Alice de Courtney, the granddaughter of Louis le Gros of France. Alice would have been familiar with expectations for noble daughters. And she was married three times. I tried to imagine the experience of being handed to various husbands like a package—the decisions being made by fathers and kings. Perhaps she had grounded herself in her new household with a new husband by following the rules. The first “courtesy book” setting forth standards of behavior— Liber Urbani or the book of civilized man— appeared in England late in the 12th century. Written in Latin, the long poem contained general advice such as honor your parents, hold your tongue, don’t mount your horse in the great hall, and such gems as “when you pick up food with a spoon, do not shovel it on board with your thumb.”

I needed to imagine a relationship between Isabelle and her mother. When I was twelve, my mother was the center of everything; I’d come home from school and stand in the kitchen to tell stories about my friends or things the teacher said. But Isi’s mother wouldn’t be in the kitchen. She was a countess; she’d have cooks and laundresses and maids. I couldn’t imagine that she was anything to Isabelle but a rule-maker. And Isabelle’s position required rules. When she was of age, she would be married – handed off in essence – to another count. The marriage would presumably involve a castle and her husband would go off to war or crusade or to visit a king, and Isabelle would be required to manage the vast operation of the castle while he was gone. Even when he was home, she would oversee household tasks, her belt laden with keys to various chests of fabric or spices, to rooms holding barrels of wine and other supplies. So I made her mother strict, set Isabelle chafing against her, then allowed her to escape, grow up a bit, marry John, and have her children.

Two boys first. Then three girls. Today one can find numerous mothers writing how overpowering love when their baby was laid on their breast changed their lives. But as queen of an itinerant court, Isabelle lived on the road with John who visited barons, trying to bring them to heel. So breastfeeding was impractical. It also acted as a form of contraception and Isabelle’s job was to conceive as often as possible and give John heirs. This meant that her babies would be handed over at birth to a wet-nurse, a hired woman who’d breast feed them as if her own. So the first attachment of mother to child was cut off and understandably, wet nurses often developed close relationships with their charges, particularly as children were generally breastfed for longer than they are today – boys often up to the age of two.

At age seven, the boys would have sent to other noble castles for education. Perhaps the idea was that those other educators would have less attachment to the children and thus they would supply a strict upbringing without coddling. Isabelle’s girls would have remained with her as the kingdom fell deeper into chaos. The Barons were revolting, the Pope had excommunicated John, the French were threatening to invade and conquer. With a growing sense that the throne would be gone before her ten-year-old son Henry could assume it, Isabelle would have known the French would kill him along with the rest of her children, leaving no pretenders. How best to save them? I’ll leave that inside the novel and just say she managed as best she could. History has condemned her ultimate decision, but I understand how she came to it.

About the book:

Romantic and stubborn, eleven-year-old Isi plans to marry for love and be mistress of her own castle. But life in 1198 is full of threat and a series of tragic events teaches her growing up is hard. When Isi falls for Hugh, a French nobleman, he consents to marry her, but only for her dowry. She longs for more. Hoping a jealous man will fall in love, she flirts with a king. The flirtation backfires: King John abducts and marries her. Now trapped in cold, warring England with a malicious husband, Isi must hide her yearning for Hugh and find her own power. If she fails, she won’t live to return to her beloved. Inspired by real historical figures—Isabelle d’Angoulême, Hugh de Lusignan, and King John of Magna Carta fame—Behold the Bird in Flight is set in a period that valued women only for their dowries and childbearing. Isabelle’s story has been mainly erased by men, but the medieval chronicles suggest a woman who developed her own power and wielded it. And as the woman behind the throne, who’s to say she didn’t influence history?

About the Author:

Terri Lewis fell in love with medieval history in college. Not the dates or wars, but the mysterious daily lives of the people. Finally two sentences in a book bought at Windsor Castle led her to write her debut novel, Behold the Bird in Flight, A Novel of an Abducted Queen.

Published in Denver Quarterly, Blue Mesa Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review among others, and accepted to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, she has worked with Laura van den Berg, Jill McCorkle, and Rebecca Makkai. Shortlisted for LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, she won the 2025 Miami University Press Novella Prize. She reviews for The Washington Independent Review of Books.

Before she was an author, she had career as a ballet dancer in Denver and Germany, ran a dance company in Arkansas, earned a B.A. in history and education, and an M.A. in theater, not necessarily in that order. She lives with her husband and two lively dogs in Denver, Colorado.

Where to find Terri:

Website: Substack: Instagram: terri.lewis1: Facebook: terri lewis author

Buy the book at Amazon.com (in $), Amazon.co.uk (in £), and Amazon.Fr (in €)

My Books:

Signed, dedicated copies of all my books are available through my online bookshop.

Out now: Scotland’s Medieval Queens

Scotland’s history is dramatic, violent and bloody. Being England’s northern neighbour has never been easy. Scotland’s queens have had to deal with war, murder, imprisonment, political rivalries and open betrayal. They have loved and lost, raised kings and queens, ruled and died for Scotland. From St Margaret, who became one of the patron saints of Scotland, to Elizabeth de Burgh and the dramatic story of the Scottish Wars of Independence, to the love story and tragedy of Joan Beaufort, to Margaret of Denmark and the dawn of the Renaissance, Scotland’s Medieval Queens have seen it all. This is the story of Scotland through their eyes.

‘Scotland’s Medieval Queens gives a thorough grounding in the history of the women who ruled Scotland at the side of its kings, often in the shadows, but just as interesting in their lives beyond the spotlight. It’s not a subject that has been widely covered, and Sharon is a pioneer in bringing that information into accessible history.’ Elizabeth Chadwick (New York Times bestselling author)

Available now from Amazon and Pen and Sword Books

Also by Sharon Bennett Connolly:

Heroines of the Tudor World tells the stories of the most remarkable women from European history in the time of the Tudor dynasty, 1485-1603. These are the women who ruled, the women who founded dynasties, the women who fought for religious freedom, their families and love. Heroines of the Tudor World is now available for pre-order from Amberley Publishing and Amazon UK. Women of the Anarchy demonstrates how Empress Matilda and Matilda of Boulogne, unable to wield a sword themselves, were prime movers in this time of conflict and lawlessness. It shows how their strengths, weaknesses, and personal ambitions swung the fortunes of war one way – and then the other. Available from Bookshop.org, Amberley Publishing and Amazon UK. King John’s Right-Hand Lady: The Story of Nicholaa de la Haye is the story of a truly remarkable lady, the hereditary constable of Lincoln Castle and the first woman in England to be appointed sheriff in her own right. Available from all good bookshops Pen & Sword Books, bookshop.org and Amazon.

Defenders of the Norman Crown: The Rise and Fall of the Warenne Earls of Surrey tells the fascinating story of the Warenne dynasty, from its origins in Normandy, through the Conquest, Magna Carta, the wars and marriages that led to its ultimate demise in the reign of Edward III. Available from Pen & Sword Books, Amazon in the UK and US, and Bookshop.org. Ladies of Magna Carta: Women of Influence in Thirteenth Century England looks into the relationships of the various noble families of the 13th century, and how they were affected by the Barons’ Wars, Magna Carta and its aftermath; the bonds that were formed and those that were broken. It is now available in paperback and hardback from Pen & Sword, Amazon, and Bookshop.org. Heroines of the Medieval World tells the stories of some of the most remarkable women from Medieval history, from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Julian of Norwich. Available now from Amberley Publishing and Amazon, and Bookshop.org. Silk and the Sword: The Women of the Norman Conquest traces the fortunes of the women who had a significant role to play in the momentous events of 1066. Available now from Amazon, Amberley Publishing, and Bookshop.org.

Alternate Endings: An anthology of historical fiction short stories including Long Live the King… which is my take what might have happened had King John not died in October 1216. Available in paperback and kindle from Amazon.

Podcast:

Have a listen to the A Slice of Medieval podcast, which I co-host with Historical fiction novelist Derek Birks. Derek and I welcome guests, such as Bernard Cornwell and Elizabeth Chadwick, and discuss a wide range of topics in medieval history, from significant events to the personalities involved.

Every episode is also now available on YouTube.

Don’t forget! Signed and dedicated copies of all my books are available through my online bookshop.

For forthcoming online and in-person talks, please check out my Events Page.

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Isabelle d’Angoulême: A Complicated Queen

22/01/202217/04/2025Sharon Bennett Connolly33 Comments

Why is Isabelle d’Angoulême so hard to love?

At first sight, it is easy to have sympathy for Isabelle of Angoulême. When I started researching her for Ladies of Magna Carta: Women of Influence in Thirteenth Century England, I was expecting to be able to go some way to redeeming her reputation. She was married at a very young age – she was no more than 12 and may have been as young as 10 – to ‘Bad’ King John, the man who would later be accused of murdering his own nephew and left a woman to starve in his dungeons.

Isabelle d’Angoulême was the only child of Audemar, Count of Angoulême and Alice de Courtenay. Her mother was the daughter Peter de Courtenay, lord of Montargis and Chateaurenard, and a cousin of king Philip II Augustus of France. Through her Courtenay family connections, Isabelle was related to the royal houses of Jerusalem, Hungary, Aragon and Castile. When John set his sights on her, Isabelle was betrothed to Hugh IX de Lusignan: the chronicler Roger of Howden maintained that Isabelle had not yet reached the age of consent, which was why she was still only betrothed to Hugh, rather than married to him. The marriage between Isabelle and Hugh was intended to put to bed, literally, a long-running, bitter rivalry between the Lusignans and the counts of Angoulême. It would also unite neighbouring regions in Aquitaine, posing a threat to Angevin power in the region. This could have effectively cut Aquitaine in two, jeopardising the stability of the borders of Poitou and Gascony. John could not help but see the threat posed by the impending marriage and sought to put a stop to it. Count Audemar, it seems, was quite receptive to the suggestion that he abandon the Lusignan match if it meant that his daughter would become a queen.

In the early years of their marriage, John appears to have treated Isabelle more like a child than a wife, which she still was, and she was financially dependent on him. When she was not at court with the king, Isabelle spent time at Marlborough Castle or in the household of John’s first wife, Isabella of Gloucester, at Winchester. Isabella’s allowance was raised from £50 to £80 a year, to pay for the extra expenses incurred by housing the queen.

It appears that Isabelle was an unpopular queen, guilty by her association with the excesses and abuses of John’s regime. It was in this light that John’s marriage to Isabelle was seen as the start of England’s woes, with some of the blame falling unfairly on the young queen. Contemporary sources reported that John spent his mornings in bed with the queen, when he should have been attending to the business of the country, casting Isabelle as some kind of temptress, irresistible to the king. The fact that Isabelle did not give birth to her first child until 1207, when she was in her late teens, puts the lie to these sources, suggesting that she and John did not consummate the marriage in the first few years. After 16 years together, the couple had 5 children; Henry III, Richard of Cornwall, Isabella, Joan and the youngest, Eleanor, who was born in 1215 or 1216.

While her movements were restricted and closely controlled during her marriage to John, the situation did not improve for Isabelle following John’s death in 1216. Their 9-year-old son Henry was now king, but Isabelle was excluded from playing a role in the regency government; her unpopularity in England and lack of political experience were major factors. Moreover, she had had limited contact with her children: they lived in separate households and Isabelle was not responsible for their supervision or education, which added to her isolation. Almost as soon as Henrys crowned, Isabelle started making arrangements to go home, to Angoulême, of which she was countess in her own right. In 1217 she left England.

Once in her own domains, Isabelle was to arrange the wedding of her daughter, Joan. Joan had been betrothed, at the age of 4, to Hugh X de Lusignan, Count of La Marche and the son of Hugh IX, the man who had been betrothed to Isabelle before John married her. In 1220 Isabelle shocked England, and probably the whole continent, when she scandalously married her daughter’s betrothed herself. Poor 9-year-old Joan’s erstwhile fiancé was now her stepfather! Worse was to come, however, when the little princess was not returned to her homeland, as might have been expected, but held hostage, by Isabelle and Hugh, to ensure Hugh’s continued control of her dower lands, and as a guarantee to the transfer of her mother’s dower, which the English government was withholding against the return of Joan.

Stalemate.

Isabelle wrote to her son, Henry III, to explain and justify why she had supplanted her own daughter as Hugh’s bride, claiming ‘…lord Hugh of Lusignan remained alone and without heir in the region of Poitou, and his friends did not permit our daughter to be married to him, because she is so young; but they counselled him to take a wife from whom he might quickly have heirs, and it was suggested that he take a wife in France. If he had done so, all your land in Poitou and Gascony and ours would have been lost. But we, seeing the great danger that might emerge from such a marriage – and your counsellors would give us no counsel in this – took said H[ugh], count of La Marche, as our lord; and God knows that we did this more for your advantage than ours…’

Ironically, Isabelle had now achieved that which King John had hoped to avoid; the union of La Marche and Angoulême, splitting Angevin Aquitaine down the Little Joan was finally returned to England towards the end of 1220, but the arguments over Isabelle’s English lands continued throughout the 1220s and beyond. Isabelle would not retire in peace and in 1224 she and Hugh betrayed Henry by allying themselves with the King of France. In exchange for a substantial pension, they supported a French invasion of Poitou (the lands in France belonging to the King of England, her son).

Hugh and Isabelle were reconciled with Henry in 1226 and Isabelle met her first-born son for the first time in more than twelve years in 1230, when Henry mounted a futile expedition to Brittany and Poitou. Isabelle and Hugh, however, continued to play the kings of France and England against each other, always looking for the advantage, though this was probably as much by necessity as self-interest. They did, after all, live in France and their relationship with England complicated things. In 1242, for example, when Henry III invaded Poitou, Hugh X initially gave support to his English stepson, only to change sides once more, precipitating the collapse of Henry’s campaign. Isabelle herself was implicated in a plot to poison King Louis IX of France and his brother, only to be foiled at the last minute; the poisoners claimed to have been sent by Isabelle. There is no evidence of Isabelle denying the accusation, but she never admitted her guilt, either.

Isabelle’s second marriage proved even more unstable than her first, shaken by Hugh’s frequent infidelities and threats of divorce. Isabelle enjoyed greater personal authority within her second marriage; where she had issued no charters whilst married to King John, as Hugh de Lusignan’s wife, the couple issued numerous joint charters. Her difficult relationship with France added to Isabelle’s marital problems. In one instance, Isabelle was offended by the queen of France when she was not offered a chair to sit, in the queen’s presence, regardless of the fact she herself was a crowned and anointed queen. Following this insult, in 1241, Isabelle castigated Hugh de Lusignan for supporting a French candidate to the county of Poitou, ahead of her son, Henry III. In retaliation, Isabelle stripped Lusignan Castle of its furnishings and refused to allow her husband into her castle at Angoulême for three days.

Despite the rocky relationship, Isabelle and Hugh had nine children together, including Aymer de Lusignan and William de Valence. Many of his Lusignan half-siblings would later cause problems for Henry III, having come to England to seek patronage and advancement from their royal half-brother.

Tomb effigy of Isabelle d’Angoulême, Fontevraud Abbey

In 1244 the two royal cooks admitted the attempted poisoning of the French king, and that they had been paid by Isabelle. Before she could be arrested, Isabelle retired to Fontevraud Abbey, where she died on 4 June, 1246. The dowager queen of England was buried in the abbey’s churchyard. However, when Henry III visited his mother’s final resting place, he was shocked that she was buried outside the abbey and ordered that she be moved inside. She was finally laid to rest in the abbey church, beside Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

As contemporaries described her as ‘more Jezebel than Isabel’, accused her of ‘sorcery and witchcraft’, Isabelle of Angouleme’s reputation as a heartless mother and habitual schemer seems set to remain. Married to King John whilst still a child, she was castigated as the cause for the loss of the majority of John’s continental possessions and the subsequent strife and civil war; one could easily sympathise with her lack of love for England. That Isabelle apparently abandoned the children of her first husband within months of his death, and her supposed willingness to betray her son for her own ends would go some way to destroy the compassion one may have felt for her. However, we have to remember that nothing is ever black and white and we have to consider that Isabelle was balancing the interests of her two families – one French and one English – which were, unfortunately for Isabelle, irreconcilable due to the politics of the time.

One thing is for sure, Isabelle d’Angoulême is a fascinating character!

Images:

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Sources:

Rich Price, King John’s Letters Facebook group; Robert Bartlett England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075-1225; Dan Jones The Plantagenets; the Kings who Made England; The Plantagenet Chronicle Edited by Elizabeth Hallam; Maurice Ashley The Life and Times of King John; Roy Strong The Story of Britain; Oxford Companion to British History; Mike Ashley British Kings & Queens; David Williamson Brewer’s British Royalty; Ralph of Diceto, Images of History; Marc Morris, King John; David Crouch, William Marshal; Crouch and Holden, History of William Marshal; Crouch, David, ‘William Marshal [called the Marshal], fourth earl of Pembroke (c. 1146–1219)’, Oxforddnb.com; Flanagan, M.T., ‘Isabel de Clare, suo jure countess of Pembroke (1171×6–1220)’, Oxforddnb.com; Thomas Asbridge, The Greatest Knight; Chadwick, Elizabeth, ‘Clothing the Bones: Finding Mahelt Marshal’, livingthehistoryelizabethchadwick.blogspot.com; Stacey, Robert C., ‘Roger Bigod, fourth earl of Norfolk (c. 1212-1270)’, Oxforddnb.com; finerollshenry3.org.uk; Vincent, Nicholas, ‘William de Warenne, fifth earl of Surrey [Earl Warenne] (d. 1240)’, Oxforddnb.com.

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