Serving Isabella of France: from Queen Consort to Dowager Queen
Serving Isabella of France 169 Chapter 7 Serving Isabella of France: From Queen Consort to Dowager Queen Caroline Dunn In 1358, the dowager queen of England was dying. She was in her mid-sixties and had lived a more eventful life than many queens. Brought up at the French court and married to Edward II of England at the age of twelve, life took a dramatic turn for Isabella when she and her lover, Roger Mortimer, staged a coup against the king and placed her young son on the throne while she served as effective queen-regent of England between 1327 and 1330.1 Her remaining decades were quieter, but Isabella was by no means as permanently secluded (or imprisoned) as earlier chroniclers alleged.2 On her deathbed at Hertford castle on 22 August 1358, Isabella was attended by Joan of Bar, countess of Surrey, who had been her longstanding attendant and confidante for most of the years since Isabella’s arrival in England. The former queen was prob- ably also surrounded by all or most of the eight ladies and damsels known to have been in her service the previous January: Agnes Paumart, Isabella de St. Pol, Joan de Corby, Marie Whithors, Katherine Bronart, Matilda Bret, Margaret Bedyk, and Agnes Anget. Although the number of attendants was not signifi- cantly lower than the thirteen ladies and damsels who earned livery for waiting upon the young queen in 1311, their degrees of status, as we will see, were not comparable. Although Isabella’s life is well documented and her role as queen has been assessed by both scholarly works and popular biographies, the identities, duties, and experiences of her household attendants have been little explored.
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