For all these Mediterranean links and connections, the Beaumonts
would achieve their greatest successes not in these old hunting-grounds
for the house of Brienne, but somewhere quite different: that is, in the
British Isles.^64 Thefigure who opened the door to all this was Louis’s
daughter, Isabella, who was arguably one of the outstanding women of
her time.^65 In 1279 or 1280, she became the second wife of John de
Vescy (sometimes spelt‘de Vesci’), lord of Alnwick in Northumberland.
John was a pre-eminent Anglo-Scottish baron, wielding land, influence
and authority on both sides of the border. Most importantly, he had
undergone a transformation. A former‘Montfortian’rebel against the
crown, he had become one of Edward I’s chief associates. Indeed, the
king was so close to John that the latter’s heart was later buried at
Blackfriars, along with that of Edward’s queen, Eleanor of Castile, and
of their son, Alfonso.^66 It is clear that Isabella and John’s marriage took
place with royal support and encouragement. Soon after the wedding,
the couple were granted a number of estates, both in northern and
southern England.^67 What is harder to understand is why Isabella, in
particular, was selected as the bride for John. In so far as there is a
standard explanation, then it is the Castilian ancestry that inked both
Isabella herself and the English queen, Eleanor.^68 Indeed, it is abun-
dantly clear that the two women were very close. Isabella served as one of
the queen’s favourite ladies-in-waiting until Eleanor’s premature death in
1290.^69 However, this analysis risks downplaying not only the pre-
existing connections of the house of Beaumont with Scotland, but also
King Edward’s own kinship with the house of Brienne. Stringer has
alternative viewpoint, see M. P. Lillich,The Queen of Sicily and Gothic Stained Glass in64 Mussy and Tonnerre(Philadelphia, 1998), Appendix 2.
For more on the back-drop to all of this, see M. Maclagan,‘The Ancestry of the English
Beaumonts’,inStudies in Genealogy and Family History in Tribute to Charles Evans on the
Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday, ed. L. Brook (Salt Lake City, 1989), 190–6.
(^65) There is a hymn of praise to her in L. E. Mitchell,Portraits of Medieval Women: Family,
Marriage and Politics in England, 1225– 1350 (Basingstoke, 2003), 93–104.
(^66) For an overview of the family’s history, see K. Stringer,‘Identities in Thirteenth-Century
England: Frontier Society in the Far North’,inSocial and Political Identities in Western
History, ed. C. Bjørn, A. Grant and K. Stringer (Copenhagen, 1994), 28–66; and his
‘Nobility and Identity in Medieval Britain and Ireland: The De Vescy Family,
c. 1120– 1314 ’,inBritain and Ireland, 900–1300: Insular Responses to European Change,
ed. B. Smith (Cambridge, 1999), 199–239.
(^67) See Calendar of the Charter Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, 6 vols.
(London, 1903–27), ii, 246; perhaps also theCalendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in
the Public Record Office: Edward I, 4 vols. (London, 1893–1901), ii, 474.
(^68) See, for example, Cockerill,Eleanor of Castile, 262, which notes that John promised to
pay Eleanor £550 in silver if his wife had no child–and in the event, of course, she
69 did not.
See Mitchell,Portraits of Medieval Women,93–6.
116 The Angevins and Athens (c. 1267–1311)