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To carry the princess and her retinue of knights and ladies to Bordeaux, five ships were ordered by the direct method of furnishing a royal officer with a warrant to arrest five suitable vessels in “all ports and places” from the mouth of the Thames westward. The bride’s trousseau included robes of cloth of gold and Tripoli silk and a mantle of Indian silk lined in ermine and embroidered all over with leaves, doves, bears, and other devices worked in silver and gold. For another robe of crimson velvet, the elaborate embroidery fashionable at the time required thirteen days’ work by twenty men and nine women. For gifts, Isabella brought 119 chaplets made of silk entwined with pearls surmounted by a golden Agnus Dei standing on a green velvet band wrought with flowers and leaves. But these marvelous contrivances were never to be worn—or at least not as intended. At the water’s edge Isabella changed her mind and came home. Was it desire to jilt as she had been jilted? Or reluctance to assume a lower rank? Or perhaps memory of her sister’s death on an earlier marriage voyage to Bordeaux? Or was the whole affair a contrivance to acquire revenues and a new wardrobe?

Bérard d’Albret was said to be so wounded by the bride’s defection that he renounced his inheritance in favor of a younger brother and put on the corded robe of a Franciscan friar. According to other evidence, however, he married a Dame de St. Bazeille, received certain territories from the King of France in 1370, and adopted a shield with the strange device of a head of Midas supported by two lions—which suggests interests the reverse of Franciscan poverty.

Not at all put out by Isabella’s waywardness, her father continued to endow her with fiefs and revenues, manors, castles, priories, wardships, farms, and gifts of costly jewelry. Her expenditures continued to outrace his gifts. When she bought silver buckles on credit, let her servants’ wages fall into arrears, pawned her jewelry up to the value of 1,000 marks, the King complacently paid her debts, and in 1358, when she was 26, assigned her a regular income of another £1,000 a year, which was duly paid as long as he lived. Six years later he gave her the wardship of a rich minor, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, which Isabella sold back to the Earl’s mother for another £1,000 a year, with the stiff proviso that if quarterly payments were late by so much as a single day, the penalty would be double payment for that quarter.

At what point during Enguerrand de Coucy’s five-year sojourn in England Isabella first became interested in him is nowhere told, but concerning her choice of him the chronicler Ranulph Higden stated forthrightly that “only for love she wished to be betrothed.” It may be that after all her years of single independence she really did fall in love or, at her father’s suggestion, was willing enough, even pleased, to marry a young attractive rich French lord of ancient lineage and great estates. Edward was clearly pleased by the match and may have been its instigator. Holding a great foothold in France on the borders of Picardy, he would naturally wish to put the hinterland of Calais in allied hands and nullify, in case of renewed hostilities, a strong French opponent. He still thought in terms of wooing the allegiance of great French nobles, the more so because disputes continued to arise over the transfer of French territories. Whether to win over Enguerrand, or because he had taken a personal liking to him, Edward had already in 1363 restored him to full possession of the lands in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland inherited from his great-grandmother.

How Enguerrand felt about his marriage is a blank. Since his sovereign and his prospective father-in-law were now at peace, no conflict of loyalty was involved. The comradeship of chivalry still held nobles together in a trans-national bond that closed over as soon as the temporary enmity of war was terminated. The material advantages of the match, in freeing him