Heiress of Angoulême whose marriage to King John in 1200 provoked the war in which he lost Normandy. Mother of Henry III, she went home as a widow, married Hugh X of Lusignan and led a revolt against Louis IX.
Isabella of Angoulême was the heiress of the county of Angoulême in western France and the second wife of King John of England, who married her in 1200 when she was about twelve. She was already betrothed to Hugh IX of Lusignan, and the Lusignan appeal to John's overlord, Philip II of France, gave Philip the legal pretext to declare John's French lands forfeit, beginning the war in which John lost Normandy.
She was the mother of Henry III, Richard of Cornwall, Joan, queen of Scots, and Isabella, wife of the emperor Frederick II. Widowed in 1216, she went home to Angoulême, married the son of her former fiancé, Hugh X of Lusignan, and bore him nine children, several of whom later made careers at the English court. Her last years were spent in a failed rebellion against Louis IX and in retreat at Fontevraud.
Isabella was the only child of Aymer Taillefer, Count of Angoulême, and Alice of Courtenay, a granddaughter of Louis VI of France. Angoulême lay between Poitou and Gascony on the road between the northern and southern halves of the Angevin lands, and its counts had repeatedly rebelled against their Angevin overlords. Her betrothal to Hugh IX of Lusignan, head of the most powerful family in Poitou, promised to join the two lordships into a bloc that could defy the king.
King John broke that combination by marrying her himself. The wedding took place at Bordeaux on 24 August 1200, and she was crowned queen at Westminster in October. Chroniclers portrayed the marriage as the act of an infatuated king, but it kept Angoulême in John's hands at a stroke.
The chroniclers who wrote about Isabella were hostile to John and, by extension, to her. Roger of Wendover told how in 1203, while Philip II took Normandy castle by castle, John lay in bed with his young wife until dinnertime, and Matthew Paris called her more Jezebel than Isabel. These stories explained John's failures to monastic readers, and they reveal more about how chroniclers blamed royal women than about Isabella herself.
Her own conduct after 1216 shows a forceful and ambitious politician. She left her children in England to secure her inheritance, married the man intended for her daughter, pressed Henry III's council for her dower, and in 1241, by a contemporary report, drove her husband into rebellion after the French court slighted her. French chroniclers accused her of plotting to poison Louis IX in 1244; the charge was never proven.
John's war with Philip II followed directly from the marriage. The Lusignans appealed to Philip as John's feudal lord, John ignored the summons to answer them, and in 1202 Philip's court declared his French fiefs forfeit; by 1204 Normandy, Anjou and Maine were lost. Isabella's political role as queen was slight. Her eldest son, Henry, was born at Winchester in October 1207, followed by Richard, Joan, Isabella and Eleanor.
John died in October 1216 in the middle of the baronial war, with Prince Louis of France in London, and Isabella's nine-year-old son was crowned at Gloucester with a simple gold circlet because the regalia were beyond reach. Within a year she left for Angoulême, leaving the children to the regency of William Marshal.
In 1220 Isabella married Hugh X of Lusignan, the son of her former fiancé, who had been betrothed to her daughter Joan. The English council protested and withheld her dower, and the couple kept Joan in their custody while the dispute lasted. Isabella and Hugh had nine children, among them William de Valence and Aymer de Valence, later bishop of Winchester, who went to England in 1247 to make their fortunes at the court of their half-brother Henry III.
When Louis IX installed his brother Alphonse as count of Poitou in 1241, Isabella and Hugh led a coalition of southern lords against the French crown, with Henry III's support. The rising collapsed after Louis defeated Henry's army at Taillebourg and Saintes in July 1242; Hugh submitted, and Isabella withdrew to Fontevraud.
Isabella died at Fontevraud on 4 June 1246. She had asked to be buried as a penitent in the abbey churchyard, but her son Henry III, visiting in 1254, had her body moved into the church beside the tombs of Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Richard the Lionheart, where her painted effigy still lies.