A Capetian Queen as Street Demonstrator: Isabelle of Hainaut1

Aline G. Hornaday

The history of Philip II's three queens illustrates some perils of Capetian queenship in the light of these women's need to deal on a personal level with a brilliant, difficult, contradictory husband who was almost completely absorbed in the work of kingship. Philip's first wife, Isabelle of Hainaut, turned openly to their people for support. She thus took an almost unique step in the annals of queenship, a spectacular public action that resolved her difficulties with Philip in the most dramatic possible way.2 Such theatrical terms seem appropriate to Isabelle, because in their accounts of her open appeal for help and other turning-points in her life contemporary chroniclers so often present her to us as if on a stage, with crowds of people pressing around her. Because her histrionic public demonstration was so surprising and yet she managed it so well, this essay focuses on Isabelle's personality, her path to queenship and her solution to the problem of Philip.

Well-built, good-looking but balding early, a lover of women and good food who never could stick to diets his doctors prescribed, Philip had the hot temper that folk wisdom associates with his ruddy coloring.3 Contemporary chronicles present him as cynical, impulsive, wilful, and emotional, but equally wise, patient, persistent, and shrewd. He was a master intriguer and sower of discord. He was brave, yet sometimes fearful; vain, and subject to nerve storms that terrified his entourage. Above all, he was determined to get his own way. Spoiled and cosseted from infancy, this late-born, long-awaited heir of Louis VII was a true enfant terrible. As a child he did not hesitate to exhort his formidable senior Henry II of England to be a good king. As he matured, he came to detest his mother and her domineering brothers, also his half-brothers-in-law, until he broke free from their tutelage.

This precocious boy was crowned king at the age of fourteen, and soon after lost his ailing father.4 His personality presented his mother and his queens with serious private problems that affected their public performance of their duties, problems magnified by Philip's rapid journeys around his realm, often by himself, and his frequent military campaigns. For example, Isabelle and Philip seem often to have stayed separately at Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, since Philip (at Isabelle's request?) officially required the presence of a chaplain at the castle when either he or Isabelle was staying there alone, as well as when they were there together. They are known to have been apart late in 1186 when Philip went on to Orleans while she lingered at Étampes, and Philip was campaigning in Normandy in 1190 when she went into labor and died.5

Many historians have seen Isabelle as an abused child, whom death released so young from an intolerable life that she remained an unimportant nonentity among French queens.6 Marion F. Facinger summed up these opinions in 1968 when she called Isabelle's life "poignant," remarking that Philip "exploited her youth and vulnerability . . . Surrounded by the hostility of her in-laws, brutally treated by her husband, Isabelle can have regretted little leaving the honor of her position."7 But though in her last hours death probably released her from grueling physical agony, and she surely then believed that she was going to a better life, was not Isabelle's early death far more poignant than her life?

For rather than leaving her position of honor with little regret, when she had an opportunity to do so Isabelle instead eagerly sought to retain her status as queen of France, treasuring the French people's love for her. Dying, she necessarily left to others' care the precious son whose birth had given rise to immense rejoicing in Paris and who alone remained to her out of several pregnancies. While her difficulties with carrying children to term must have worried Isabelle as wife, mother and queen, and Philip certainly behaved very badly to her at times, yet she was no passive victim leading a joyless life consoled only by good works. Rather, she was a strong-minded young woman who acted courageously to achieve her own aims, found support among Philip's paternal relatives, and may have participated in literary amusements at court. In so doing, she won Philip's respect and even affection. Nor was she unimportant to French history, though with truly poignant irony, her death proved more significant than her life.

Her family background and early life helped to form Isabelle's steely will to succeed in an unexpected royal role fraught with difficulties. Though she descended from the senior male line of Flanders, her immediate ancestors had been relegated to the relatively modest county of Hainaut. Almost a century after their ouster, her father Count Baldwin V of Hainaut married Margaret, sister and eventual heiress of Count Philip of Flanders. Isabelle, their eldest child, was born in April 1170. In keeping with his ambition to play a significant role on the European stage, when she was barely one year old Baldwin betrothed Isabelle and her newborn brother to the high-ranking heir of Champagne and his sister, children of Queen Adele's brother Henry and Philip's half-sister Marie, thus both Philip's cousins and half-nephews. For the next eight years Isabelle lived within the kinship structure that enveloped these princely children, her status established as the future wife of a great French magnate and in-law of the French king. Perhaps her early betrothal and its attendant important role in Champagne and Hainaut gave her the confidence that sustained her when King Philip tested her severely. In any case, it ensured that she expected to live within a political marriage.

During Isabelle's betrothal to young Henry of Champagne, her uncle of Flanders caught her father up in complex political machinations. If anyone exploited Isabelle's "youth and vulnerability" it was the childless count of Flanders, who involved her as a pawn in his intrigues. Using his own lands and Baldwin's daughter to further his schemes, Philip of Flanders offered Baldwin the prospect of inheriting Flanders in right of his wife, and in return demanded Baldwin's assent to his plan for dowering Isabelle with Artois to place her on the French throne. Probably in response to these projects, in March 1179 the count of Champagne forced a meeting upon Baldwin at which both fathers swore to honor their children's marriage contracts, according to Gislebert of Mons, Baldwin's chancellor, confidential ambassador at the Imperial court and biographer.8

But then Philip of Flanders, who by now had replaced Philip II's uncles of Champagne as the king's chief adviser, played his trump card of Artois at the French court to achieve Isabelle's marriage to the young French king. Baldwin at first wanted to keep faith with the count of Champagne, but he capitulated at the tempting prospect of reuniting Flanders with Hainaut and making his daughter queen of France. For his part, the king was won over by the attractive opportunity to counterbalance his mother's faction of Champagne by extending French jurisdiction into this rich northern territory. Isabelle's dowry was the means to that end: she would inherit Artois when Philip of Flanders died, though its lands and towns would return to Flanders should she, or any heir she might have, die childless (a standard escape clause). Her rich dower included the towns of St.-Omer, Aire, Arras, Beauquesne, Lens, the modern Vieil-Hesdin, and Bapaume, plus the homage of the counties of Boulogne, St.-Pol, Guines and Lille, the viscounty of Bethune and the seigniories of Lillers, Ardres and Richebourg.9

What would Philip's bride bring to the marriage beyond her dowry? Her father's biographer, Gislebert of Mons, knew her when she was a child. His chronicle draws attention to Isabelle's extremely religious, virtuous and tactfully straightforward nature, as do Andrew of Marchiennes and the Tournai chronicler Philippe Mouskes.10 Gislebert adds that she was well liked and pretty, without describing her features. Isabelle probably had her family's blue eyes and blond hair.11 Mouskes calls her "Queen Isabelle/Who had a noble form and lovely eyes," lending support to Gislebert's description of her as pretty.12 If her cousin and uncle by marriage Huon of Oisy indeed referred to Isabelle as "la roïne" in his satire Le tournoiement des dames, which celebrates contemporary court beauties, the implication is that he too thought she was pretty.13 Isabelle appears briefly in Richard of Semilli's similar tournoiement poem, in a context that portrays her as the king's enforcer rather than one of admiration for her beauty.14 Oddly, none of these writers comment on her exceptional height, probably about 5'8" to 5'9", though Mouskes' allusion to her "noble form" might suggest a commanding presence taller than many (if not most) medieval men.15 Other chroniclers agree on her piety and some mention her generosity, a trait she shared with her father. It is reasonable to suppose that Isabelle, like her two brothers the later emperors Baldwin and Henry of Byzantium, shared her father's insistent ambition and his taste for literary cultivation. According to Jacques of Guise, who summarized the work of earlier chroniclers contemporary with Isabelle's immediate family, Baldwin V was "quite expert in grammar and rhetoric and steeped in poetry; he knew Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy by heart as well as many other authors," adding that Baldwin was "strong in faith," generous, courtly, affable to inferiors, but formidable and harsh to perceived enemies.16

If, as her known words and actions suggest, Isabelle was ambitious, perhaps she originally wanted to succeed as a Capetian queen at least partly to advance her family's ambitions as well as her own. To achieve success in either goal, she needed to accomplish a Capetian queen's vital task of providing male heirs. And so far as her personal ambitions were concerned her dower, family situation and character would determine her position and her success. Inherited titles and land protected Capetian queens best, because a queen powerful in her own right could undo Capetian policy by removing her territory from the dynasty's control. But negotiated dower lands and family solidarity could create a faction to support lesser queens, a possibility even the most powerful king might fear.

And before the birth of her son consolidated her personal success, Isabelle's dower duly protected her, for most modern historians agree that at a crucial moment the desirability of retaining Artois helped to keep her in position as Philip's queen. This interpretation is the more plausible in that Philip considered the Low Countries so important to French policy that he later married his two children by Agnes of Meran into powerful clans in that region. As for family solidarity, Philip's paternal relatives gave her the support she might have hoped for from her own family. And at the crisis of her fortunes her strength of character and tact also protected her position, making it feasible for her to go over Philip's head for help and yet preserve his dignity.

Philip was barely fifteen on April 28, 1180 when the bishops of Laon and Senlis married him to the ten-year-old Isabelle at Bapaume in her dower lands. The newlyweds then went to Paris, where on Ascension Day (May 29) the archbishop of Sens crowned the little queen at St.-Denis and anointed Philip again.17 During the sunrise ceremony, as the new king and queen knelt before the altar, heads bent to receive the blessing, a shoving crowd of local people from all walks of life pressed up among the grandees in attendance in order to see the royal couple from close at hand. As he tried to beat back this unruly throng, an awkward usher hit three lamps above the altar with his rod and turned them over on the young couple's heads. Onlookers took the mishap in their turbulent double coronation as a good omen for the success of their marriage and the new direction it gave to French policy, a change which Isabelle literally embodied. And it is probable that this very religious child took her coronation seriously as a commitment to the French people that overrode all family obligations when they conflicted with her responsibilities as queen.

Young as she was, the new queen had spent more than eight years as the affianced bride of Philip's nephew (also his cousin). Thanks to Isabelle's long betrothal to the heir of Champagne, she knew the young king's relatives and surely realized that her marriage entailed their anger. But she seems to have been a good little girl who dutifully accepted her changed circumstances and resolved to do her best to cope with them worthily. Yet to deal with her new situation and meet her obligations successfully, Isabelle would have to survive at a court in which her marriage had doubly insulted her mother-in-law Adele of Champagne. Not only had this marriage summarily cancelled Isabelle's betrothal to Adele's nephew but Adele's royal son had rejected Adele's brothers as advisors in favor of Isabelle's uncle and father. The outraged queen-mother, an inadequate mother-in-law or mother-substitute in any case, broke with Philip before the marriage and fled to Champagne. Open warfare now erupted between her faction and Isabelle's family. This turn of events cannot have endeared Isabelle to her mother-in-law, even though Henry II of England soon succeeded in reconciling the queen-mother and her son.

Nor can Isabelle have liked Adele of Champagne's mockery of her family's speech. Before her marriage, while young Philip stood by smiling the queen-mother had lashed out before the court at Isabelle's cousin the trouvère Conon of Béthune, covertly expressing her anger over Philip's alliance with her enemies through her sarcastic derision of Conon's Picard speech.18 Adele spoke from the perspective of Champagne, whose speech and orthography differed from Picard-Francien dialect forms. Both were used in Paris, Picard-Francien most prominently in the vernacular sermons of Bishop Maurice of Sully. But probably at court the queen-mother's speech patterns prevailed.19 If Adele transmitted her scornful attitude to her partisans at court, their jeers must have distressed the ten-year-old queen. Yet having known the comital family of Champagne from infancy, Isabelle surely was prepared for Adele's haughty disdain for Picard speech. The child-queen must have suffered much more painfully when some French nobles belittled her as an upstart daughter of a lesser count, too low-ranking for a royal spouse.20 Although Gislebert of Mons says that Count Baldwin was already researching his Carolingian descent, only later would Hainaut propagandists counter French scorn by contending that Isabelle infused the Capetian dynasty with Carolingian blood. For the time being, Isabelle had to defend herself on her own merits.

As the child-queen coped with the first four difficult years of her marriage, she learned how best to apply her generosity and extreme piety in accomplishing the good works which won her the approval of churchmen like Bishop Henry of Senlis. Probably she matured early in the process, forging pluck and determination that served her well when the king's behavior tried her to the utmost. And rather than passively accepting the insults and intrigues of her opponents, Isabelle seems to have built her own group of supporters. Most prominent among them were her in-laws, the king's paternal uncle Count Robert I of Dreux and his sons (Bishop Philip of Beauvais, Henry, later Bishop of Orléans, and Count Robert II, who would marry her first cousin Yolande of Coucy in 1184).21 In all probability she also gained support from her relations Conon of Béthune and Huon of Oisy, important political figures and notable writers who helped to form a new courtly literature in northern France.22 Huon of Oisy was also a prominent adviser to her uncle Philip of Flanders.

The climax of Isabelle's ordeal came in 1184. As a by-product of balancing his mother's inimical power base in Champagne against the wavering loyalty and damaging intrigues of Isabelle's uncle and father, perhaps also stung by insinuations of her unequal rank, Philip II convoked his barons at Senlis to announce that he would divorce Isabelle, ostensibly because she could produce no heir. Philip's seemingly outrageous action might be understandable if the religiosissima queen had undermined her health by immoderate fasting too young, or had not yet reached menarche (generally occurring between fourteen and sixteen years of age at the time), or if he had already consummated their marriage with a resultant pregnancy and miscarriage for Isabelle. For an heir was as desirable for him now as it had been for his father before his birth, and if Isabelle could not provide one she would have to be expendable.

As it turned out, Philip had good cause to worry about Isabelle. Within four to five years, she experienced at least four pregnancies: her first child died shortly after birth, and she miscarried at least once. Her only surviving child Louis VIII, a sickly infant, may have been born somewhat prematurely (he never quite reached average height and died at only forty years of age), and her final pregnancy killed her.23Yet her disastrous reproductive history was not unusual for a medieval queen and did not in itself predict a tragic outcome. For example, in the next Capetian generation Blanche of Castile first produced a stillborn daughter, then had a son who died at the age of nine years, next had stillborn twin sons, and only after that gave birth to a surviving heir, Louis IX. Therefore some historians have suggested that Philip's real purpose was not to rid himself of a wife unlikely to bear viable children, but to menace Isabelle so as to sow discord between her father and uncle. Whatever his reasons, as she was still only fourteen, Robert of Dreux and others among Philip's important advisers counseled against his cynical ploy.

Gislebert tells how Isabelle now took charge of events as she faced this extreme threat to her position.24 Removing her fine outer garments like those visible on her seal portrait, she dashed out into the streets of Senlis dressed in her shift like a penitent. Walking barefoot through the streets from church to church, she knelt before the altars, weeping and praying loudly to God to forgive her sins and protect her from the king's evil counselors. Another chronicler adds that she carried tapers and dispensed alms generously with "devotion, humility and contrition."25 Isabelle was well known in Senlis, where the court often stayed and whose bishop sympathized with her. The friendly audience to her theatrical public appeal (poor people and lepers, says Gislebert) ran to the palace and rioted. Their angry shouts disrupted Philip's meeting.

One manuscript of the chronicle written by Isabelle's great-nephew Baldwin of Avesnes relates a conversation between king and queen that supposedly took place when "the horses were saddled, ready to take her home." Philip said "Lady, I want all to know that you are not leaving because of any misdeed on your part, but for nothing more than that it seems to me that I cannot have an heir from you. And if there is any baron in my realm whom you wish to take as your lord tell me and you shall have him, whatever it costs me." Isabelle rejoined  "Sire, it does not please God for a mortal man to lie in the bed in which you have lain." Her tears and this reply moved Philip to tell Isabelle "You have spoken well. You shall never leave here." 26 The French historian Georges Bordonove conflates Baldwin's account with Gislebert's, placing this confrontation on the palace steps when Philip approached Isabelle as he tried to quell the tumult she had raised.27

Philip's definitive biographer Alexander Cartellieri noted this tale, calling it "a pretty anecdote," without vouching for it.28 Indeed, if Gislebert is right that at this time Philip "neither shared [Isabelle's] bed nor performed his conjugal duties," Isabelle's remark can only be accurate if Philip had consummated their marriage but ceased to live with her. This proceeding would be in keeping with Plantagenet marriage practice, in which marriages with child brides were consummated when the girls had completed their twelfth year but regular conjugal relations were delayed until they reached their fifteenth year. And as Philip was a close friend to the contemporary Plantagenet princes, he may well have followed their example.29 The story has good authority, for as Isabelle's great-nephew, Baldwin of Avesnes had access to family lore which, even if apocryphal, probably echoed Philip and Isabelle's real attitudes. Certainly his account echoes current royal mores and tellingly captures Philip's cynical, contradictory character, and Isabelle's odd mixture of piety, forthrightness, and the tact with which she finessed Philip's touchy vanity and pride.

Whatever the royal couple may have said to each other, after this riot took place Isabelle remained Philip's queen, probably as much because he had temporarily divided the counts of Flanders and Hainaut from each other, and wanted to keep her dower, as because her determination to be his queen and his people's demonstration of love raised her value in his eyes. Nonetheless, Isabelle's exploit argues for her courage and force of character, and for considerable negotiating skill on her or her advisers' part. Medievalists will notice that she performed a variant of an ancient ritual of supplication and submission. For example, after Queen Constance's rebellion against King Robert I had been quelled, the thirteenth century historian Andrew of Fleury imagined her prostrate and tearful before her husband in a relatively private ritual, until he gave his "kind assent to her petitions."30 Isabelle skillfully made this private ritual into a public appeal to God that indirectly asked her audience for help. Experienced negotiators will notice that Isabelle presented herself as a penitent, by definition expiating faults, easing Philip's way out of the situation by casting him in the flattering role of a gracious king misled by evil counselors, who gains face when he regally acts on his own to forgive an inferior.

Gislebert of Mons' comments suggest that after surviving this crisis, Isabelle began to place her own welfare and her duty as queen above her obligations to forward the success of her family. Not surprisingly, since the count of Flanders flouted Philip's threat to divorce her and renewed his intrigues later that year, once more pulling along the satellite count of Hainaut. But behind the scenes, the young couple had reached an understanding. Perhaps Philip made it clear that as she wanted to be his queen, and his people loved her, he would keep her and even cherish her if she helped him to further his interpretation of the best interests of their kingdom. At any rate, Isabelle staged a dramatic scene with her father and his knights. Weeping copiously, she begged Baldwin to have pity on her and uphold Philip against the count of Flanders' cunning ploys, so that the king and people of France would hold her more dear. Gislebert of Mons implies that Philip and Isabelle faced Baldwin together, persuading him to ally himself definitively with Philip.31 Taken together with his statement that Baldwin's knights were present, Gislebert's implication suggests that the incident took place while Baldwin took formal leave before the court, forcing him to declare his loyalty before witnesses.

After she took this action on Philip's behalf, echoed curiously in Richard of Semilli's "tournoiement" poem where she carries out the king's command, Philip advanced the girl who had been a pawn to queenship as he understood it. Such treatment on his part fits the character of the man who advised his grandson Saint Louis to recompense his subordinates only according to whatever services they had rendered, and to remember that a king must know how to refuse requests as well as grant them.32 If this interpretation of Philip's attitude to Isabelle is correct, he will have established conjugal relations with her once she had proved her political usefulness to him. For their daughter's birth and death reported by Alberic de Troisfontaines most plausibly dates to late1185 or sometime in 1186.

Possibly this or another pregnancy weakened Isabelle too much for her to travel with Philip at his customary rapid pace. For in January 1187, he wrote her a letter in which he pleasantly chided her for delaying in Étampes while he was at Orléans, directing her to join him there to take advantage of the town's better air and good food, and adding that her presence would shed luster on Orléans. This letter is preserved in a Latin copy in a collection of Philip's correspondence with Isabelle's uncle of Flanders, and probably owes its survival to her relationship with the latter. Since Philip never learned Latin, and it is unlikely that Isabelle could read it, his letter presumably was dictated to a scribe who put it in official format to be retranslated for her, or was translated from an original vernacular text when the letters were copied, in order to conform to Philip's official correspondence with the count of Flanders.33 In any case its fondly teasing tone suggests that once having accepted Isabelle as wife and queen, the unpredictable Philip began indeed to hold her in affection. Such a relationship would make it plausible that she acted in partnership with him whenever it was appropriate for her to do so, as she did vis-à-vis her father.

Evidently Isabelle came to Orléans at Philip's urging. For (perhaps owing to the town's good air and food) she at last produced the hoped-for Capetian son and heir, the future Louis VIII, on September 3, 1187.34 Philip's panegyrist, Guillaume le Breton, claimed that Isabelle had first felt her son move through divine intercession as she knelt in prayer among her entourage before the high altar at Chartres.35 A solar eclipse the day after the prince's birth added to the miraculous atmosphere surrounding it. Parisians celebrated for a whole week, while people sang with joy in the streets.36 Now Isabelle had consolidated her position as queen. No longer vulnerable to repudiation or factional attack, she knew for certain that Philip and the French people held her dear.37

Though still only seventeen, Isabelle had proved herself to be brave and adroit, clearly assessing her own position and having the nerve to maneuver successfully in her own interest between her demanding, and sometimes brutally unfeeling, royal husband and her ambitious father. Isabelle of Hainaut is among the very few queens and princesses who have dared to appeal publicly for help. She showed that a Capetian queen could successfully wield this ultimate weapon if she used its double-edged blade skillfully. Yet the outcome depended on the king's reaction. Had Philip's vanity been injured or had his fiery temper exploded, Isabelle might well have dragged out her life in a remote castle, like her successor Ingeborg. But unlike Ingeborg (who knew no French), she could communicate her problems eloquently to an audience. Too, she knew Philip well enough to handle him adroitly and avoid an outburst of his formidable rage.

Isabelle reigned for two years and a half after the future Louis VIII was born and placed in good care.38 She has been called a cultivated patroness of poets, who presided over Courts of Love, perhaps an inference from Andrew the Chaplain's completion of De Amore about 1186 while serving in Philip's chancellery (whose files preserved its manuscript), and from Isabelle's own connections with the outstanding poets of her day.39 Far different in its overall tone from the piety of the court presided over by Philip's parents, Andrew's guide to courtly love sketches a milieu in which great lords steeped themselves in poetry, serious statesmen wrote frisky love poems, great ladies amused themselves with courts of love and clerical bureaucrats praised earthly amours as eagerly as divine love. But as so often in Philip's case, this picture conflicts with other facts. Philip was the only contemporary ruler who discouraged audience support for entertainers (though after Isabelle's death he pensioned the trouvère Gace Brulé -- another contradiction); he gave largesse only sparingly, and carried on a lifelong campaign against swearing.40 But Philip may have relied on Isabelle's generosity to recompense poets and entertainers with fine garments according to contemporary custom; he certainly allowed her to give freely to churches and poor people. Despite their sober court, if Isabelle shared her family's tastes, she probably enjoyed her social and cultural prerogatives as much as her religious duties and the generous charities for which chroniclers praised her, and that Cartellieri stressed in his one-sided picture of her "joyless existence."

This graceful, adroit and well-loved young queen died in childbed between March 13 and 15, 1190, shortly before her twentieth birthday. Parisians grieved intensely when the bells of Notre Dame notified them that she had died; as the news spread, people of all ranks mourned the magnitude of their loss.41 Philip received the news of her death on March 16 or 17, 60 miles from Paris at Nonancourt in Normandy, where he was campaigning against Richard I of England. He hastily concluded a truce with Richard and left for Paris. There he confirmed the placement of her tomb and memorial altar.42 It seems likely that he returned briefly to Paris in the middle of a campaign not only to organize Isabelle's memorials, but also to make arrangements for the care of his little two-and-a-half-year-old son and to initiate the transfer of Isabelle's dower (completed in 1191). Adele of Champagne may have begun to supervise her grandson's upbringing at this time; when Philip went on crusade shortly thereafter, he formally placed the boy in her care. In any case, since on March 25 Philip was at Dreux, about 10 miles east of Nonancourt, he quickly returned to Normandy.

From the nearby Capetian royal residence (today the Palais de Justice), Isabelle must have closely followed the progress of construction on the newly rebuilt Parisian cathedral of Notre-Dame. She had given Notre-Dame rich gifts of vestments for appropriate rituals at the high altar, near which she asked to lie in the center of the choir beside her stillborn daughter. Bishop Maurice of Sully celebrated her funeral mass there, and the cathedral chapter voted to celebrate her anniversary there in perpetuity.43 Her twin sons, who outlived her for only a few hours, were buried with her in a black marble tomb beside that of Philip's close friend Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of Henry II of England. Their tombs remained visible at Notre-Dame until 1699, when Louis XIV's renovations replaced their memorial stones with a decorative pavement. By then, Isabelle's original marker had been replaced with another, probably during the sixteenth century.44

Because until at least the thirteenth century seal matrix and body were seen as one, "two incarnations of a single person . . . [which] accompanied the body on its voyage into eternity," a queen's silver seal matrix was made expressly to be put in Isabelle's coffin.45 This matrix identified her remains in 1858, when the choir entombments were excavated and the coffins opened. Excavators found no trace of the epitaph for her daughter quoted by Alberic de Troisfontaines.46 Instead, three small coffins surrounded that of Isabelle. One held her daughter's infant bones; another held "debris" of the bones of her twin sons; the third held the bones of a child about ten years old, probably Louis VIII's eldest son (who died at the age of nine).47

Philip commemorated Isabelle generously. He endowed three prebends in her memory, two at the cathedral of Notre-Dame at Paris and one at the cathedral of Senlis (piquant, given Isabelle's demonstration at Senlis in 1184). As late as 1208, eighteen years after she died, he assigned a 30-livre annual income to each canon of Notre-Dame de Melun, to be paid on Isabelle's anniversary.48 Her dependents continued to turn to him for help: in 1201 he assigned a yearly life income to Isabelle's former chaplain. Philip's institution of so many memorial altars with prebends for Isabelle suggests that he wished his people to remember her as well as to ensure prayers for her soul. But even a great king could not secure that remembrance. When Germain Brice published his four-volume guidebook to the city of Paris in 1752, all he knew about her tomb was that when in 1726-1727 work had begun on remodeling a crypt below the choir to serve as a sepulcher for the archbishops of Paris, several ancient tombs were discovered of unknown although distinguished persons, among whom was a "queen of England."49 Later her great-great-nephew John II, count of Holland and Hainaut, and his wife commemorated Isabelle on their tomb in the choir of the Franciscan church in Valenciennes with her statuette and shield as a queen, but this memorial too failed to survive.50

Isabelle's ten-year reign eerily rehearsed the dramas of Philip's subsequent marital history. Both she and his third wife Agnes of Meran were below royal rank, and came from ambitious families intent on building principalities. Their marriages to him were real relationships and both died bearing his children. His plan to divorce Isabelle is not paralleled in his marriage to Agnes, though many of his contemporaries would have been glad to see Agnes dismissed, but was matched when he rejected and tried hard to divorce his equal in rank, the Danish royal princess Ingeborg. Ingeborg successfully thwarted his efforts and outlived him to enjoy royal honors as queen dowager of France, but never achieved a true marriage with him in spite of their formal reconciliation.

Their uncanonical marriage prevented Philip from memorializing Agnes as he had Isabelle. Instead, he founded (or perhaps refounded) an abbey for more than one hundred nuns at Corentin-lès-Mantes expressly to bury her with honors in its church. The friendly bishop of the diocese overlooked the canonical difficulty and approved Philip's solution of his wish to commemorate Agnes.51 The king never ceased striving to regularize their children's status, and eventually persuaded Pope Innocent III to legitimize them after Agnes' death.

It perhaps indicates a certain competitive spirit on the part of Philip's second wife Ingeborg that she, like Isabelle, gave generously to Notre-Dame de Paris and wished for a memorial there. First she herself gave the cathedral rich gifts. Then in her eventual settlement with Philip, in exchange for releasing her dowry, Ingeborg extracted the funds from him to endow five prebends for chaplains to celebrate masses for her in perpetuity at Notre-Dame. In her own will she also left funds for masses in her memory at Notre-Dame.52

After Philip died, Isabelle's youngest sister Sybil, the Lady of Beaujeu, retailed to Stephen of Bourbon a sick cardinal's vision of Saint Denis repaying Philip's religious zeal by rescuing his soul from demons carrying it off to Hell.53 Sybil, mentioned elsewhere in Stephen's Anecdotes, perhaps belonged to his circle; her prominent role at court as Louis VIII's aunt is reflected in the pages of Philippe Mouskes' chronicle. That she related this anecdote, and that Baldwin of Avesnes repeated Isabelle's conversation with Philip at Senlis, suggests that her family enjoyed preserving unusual stories about their royal relations. That Isabelle's sister relished portraying him in danger of eternal punishment implies that her family felt ambivalent toward Philip, perhaps because of his treatment of her, and also because at his request Isabelle had subjected her father to a humiliating scene in front of his subordinates instead of supporting Baldwin's alliance with her uncle the count of Flanders, who had arranged her marriage. Though it might tell against this notion that Isabelle's brother Emperor Baldwin II of Byzantium sold Philip a uniquely large fragment of the True Cross when he and his brother Henry disposed of Byzantine relics to their kinsmen and friends, Philip's relations with his brothers-in-law were far from uniformly friendly.54

Historians have speculated a good deal about Philip's relationships with his wives. Some have concluded that he must have had great charm for them, since Isabelle and Ingeborg both fought hard to stay married to him, and Agnes of Meran married him bigamously against stiff clerical opposition. Cartellieri proposed that Philip loved only Agnes, for whom he braved a papal interdict on his kingdom.55 But this obstinacy may have been at least in part simple expediency, since to repudiate Agnes would only confirm Ingeborg's queenship, which Philip refused to admit. At any rate, clearly both Isabelle and Agnes mattered to him. Yet notions that he was romantically in love with either woman seem inappropriate to a self-willed, hard man whose primary attention was fixed on his kingdom and the business of strengthening and governing it, whose relations with his mother were deeply troubled, whose unpredictable whims were stiffened by any opposition, and whose ferocious outbursts of temper frightened everyone around him. Indeed in the first years of their marriage the Plantagenet princes seem to have been at least equally important personally to Philip as Isabelle, who was still a child.

We cannot now discern Philip's deepest feelings for either Isabelle or Agnes, though his hatred for Ingeborg is not in doubt. A component of his revulsion from Ingeborg may have been a superficial physical likeness between the Scandinavian princess, tongue-tied because she knew no French, and the tall, blonde and very articulate Isabelle, possibly making Ingeborg appear to him like Isabelle's caricature. But whatever his feelings for them, his actions show that if Philip allowed them any place in his life at all, he kept his queens firmly subordinate to him as wives and mothers, confining their activities to enforcing his wishes and giving them no opportunity to interfere in statecraft or decision-making as his mother had done. We can also see that Isabelle of Hainaut found an unusual solution to the problem he posed, which won from him a measure of respect and even affection, and an honored place at his side.

This essay seeks to replace Isabelle's mournful, passive historical image with a portrait that does justice to her courage in action, her desire to worthily fulfill her regal role, and her generosity. But can she be said to have been in any real sense an important historical figure? Her most memorable act, her public appeal at Senlis, found no imitators among Capetian queens. It may, however, have suggested to Philip the necessity of imprisoning and closely watching her successor Ingeborg, thus setting a pattern for Capetian dealings with future queens who might be tempted to independent action on Isabelle's model. If so, Isabelle's success in advancing her own interests with bitter irony drastically reduced her successors' freedom of political maneuver.

Isabelle's death had additional malign results. Though she gave Philip Augustus his much-needed heir, her sudden disappearance left him free for unlucky marital ventures that marred French relations with the Papacy and almost denied the sacraments to the French people. As for her son, by the time the fragile and sickly Louis VIII was three years old, he had suffered the loss of his mother and her replacement by his domineering grandmother during his emotionally distant father's absence on Crusade. That upheaval in his life was soon followed by the strange spectacle of Philip's abrupt dismissal of a new spouse. By the time Louis was six, Philip had presented his son with a thick-skinned stepmother whose marriage and presence at court drew a short-lived Papal interdict on France. But this parental figure soon disappeared in her turn, dying young in childbirth like his mother. Afterwards, Philip's mistress from Louis' own inheritance of Artois gave birth to another, illegitimate half-brother. His grandmother, his two half-siblings by Agnes, his illegitimate half-brother, and Isabelle's youngest sister Sybil formed an extended family around Louis and his formidable father. Perhaps his grandmother and aunt mattered most to him, for Agnes' children, on whose legitimization Philip spent so much time and effort, may have inspired more jealousy than love in Philip's only legitimate son. One hopes that the  "good care" established for him at his birth ensured some stability and continuity in the royal heir's life. For such a childhood cannot have failed to affect the character and attitudes of the future Louis VIII, probably not for the better.

Beyond whatever emotional effects her death had on her son, Philippe Mouskes hinted that Isabelle transmitted to the Capetian house hereditary traits of treachery and greed native to the  "lineage of Flanders and Hainaut." In the context of Louis VIII's death as he returned from his last Albigensian crusade, Mouskes compared his looks to those of his Hainaut uncles. Mouskes saw the princes of Hainaut as "perfidious gamekeepers" who took their prey wherever they found it, just as they seized Byzantium's imperial crown from the very emperors they had sworn to protect.56 Mouskes seems to suggest that his maternal inheritance impelled Louis VIII to treacherous action against many who might look to him for protection, as he put the south of France to the sword to stamp out heresy in the region, or invaded England to poach on another's preserves. Yet one can reply to this suggestion that Isabelle's great piety and generous well-doing were a lasting part of her heritage, fulfilled in the sanctity of her grandchildren Saint Louis IX and his sister Saint Isabelle.

Isabelle of Hainaut successfully performed her essential function of prolonging the direct Capetian royal line, which endured for another one hundred and thirty-eight years after her death. Had she lived, she might also have presided over a cultivated court worthy of an exceptional king, and reared her son (and perhaps other children as well) in a stable household. But her death paved the way for the tragi-comedy of a new queen's marriage, coronation and imprisonment within the space of two days, for the equivocal court Philip Augustus set up under the auspices of Agnes de Meran (who remained for contemporaries his mistress rather than his wife), and for the bachelor court that he kept after Agnes's death, still rejecting his legitimate queen Ingeborg and consoling himself with at least one mistress. Thus a social void at the monarchy's center remained unfilled for many years, while real misfortune dogged Isabelle's husband and child and the French people whom she wished so much to serve. Surely the true poignancy of her life lies not in any sadness of some of its events, but in its end before she could fulfill her earnest wish to become a fitting queen consort and partner for a remarkable king and a benefactor to his people.

1. An early version of this paper was presented on May 8, 1998, at the 33rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, at a session organized by John Carmi Parsons entitled "Capetian Women: Reviewing Claire Richter Sherman and Marion Facinger." The session aimed to amplify Sherman and Facinger’s work at greater length than Facinger in particular could allot to individual Capetian queens. My thanks are due to Patricia Terry, Ph.D. for advice on Old French translation, James D. Connor, M.D., for help on skeletal measurement, and Prof. Kathryn Ringrose for counsel on medieval women's reproductive cycle. All errors of substance or style are mine alone.