Daughters
of
Chivalry
The Forgotten Children of Edward I
KELCEY WILSON-LEE
For my parents.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Family Tree
Maps
Introduction
I. Coronation
II. Betrothal
III. Family
IV. Vows
V. Growing Up
VI. Union
VII. Three Deaths
VIII. Alliance
IX. Ladies of War
X. Unconstrained
XI. Acquiescence and Insubordination
XII. Crisis
XIII. Homecoming
XIV. Companionship
XV. Opulence
XVI. The Storm Approaches
XVII. Death Returns
XVIII. Another Coronation
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
1. ‘I am Half Sick of Shadows’, said the Lady of Shalott (1915 (oil on canvas), Waterhouse, John William (1849–1917) / Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada / Gift of Mrs Phillip B. Jackson, 1971 / Bridgeman Images)
2. Effigy of Eleanor of Castile (© Dean and Chapter of Westminster)
3. Portrait of a king, possibly Edward I (akg-images / A.F.Kersting)
4. Royal ladies, travelling in a coach (Add 42130 f.181v Psalm 102 from the ‘Luttrell Psalter’, c.1325–35 (vellum), English School, (14th century) / British Library, London, UK / © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)
5. Caernarfon Castle (c.1833 (watercolour over graphite), Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) / British Museum, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)
6. The virtues Largesse and Debonereté (Wikimedia Commons)
7. St Anne (with a young Virgin Mary), St Katherine, St Margaret, and St Barbara (Alphonso Psalter / British Library, London, UK / © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)
8. King Arthur and Queen Guinevere (British Library, London, UK / © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)
9. Uta, Margravine of Meissen (VPC Travel Photo / Alamy Stock Photo)
10. Scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary (PHAS / contributor / Getty Images)
11. A lady hunting (Add MS 24686, f.13v Psalm, c.1284–1316 (vellum), English School, (14th century) / British Library, London, UK / © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)
12. The coronation of Queen Edith (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, MS Ee.3.59 fols. 28)
13. Genealogical table with pen portraits of Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, and Elizabeth (Harley MS 3860, f. 15r (vellum), English School, (14th century) / British Library, London, UK / © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)
14. Eleanor of Provence and Mary as nuns (© Dean and Chapter of Westminster)
15. The great hall at Winchester Cathedral (VisitBritain / Daniel Bosworth / Getty Images)
16. View of medieval London (Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo)
17. Gilbert de Clare (English School, (14th century) / Tewkesbury Abbey, Gloucestershire, UK / Bridgeman Images)
18. Margaret and her ladies at her wedding (MS. IV684. Royal Library of Belgium)
19. A heraldic clasp (The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore)
20. The Eleanor Cross at Waltham (engraving by Lemaitre from Angleterre, volume I by Leon Galibert and Clement Pelle, L’Univers pittoresque, published by Firmin Didot Freres, Paris, 1842 / Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy / De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images)
21. Scene from a medieval birthing chamber (Harley MS 2278, f. 13v ‘Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund’, 1434–39 (vellum), English School, (15th century) / British Library, London, UK / © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)
22. A map of Bar le Duc (Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Georg Braun, Cologne 1617 / Photo © Luigino Visconti / Bridgeman Images)
23. A medieval tournament (The Chronicles of Jean Froissart / Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo)
24. Elizabeth as Countess of Holland (MS. IV684. Royal Library of Belgium)
25. The Ridderzaal in The Hague (The Binnenhof in the Hague with a View of the Ridderzaal with Soldiers and other Figures in the Courtyard (oil on canvas), Augustus Wynantz / Private Collection / © Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts, New York / Bridgeman Images)
26. Ivory mirror case showing lovers playing chess (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)
27. Lady dressing (British Library, London, UK / © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)
28. Horse-trapper embroidered with the royal arms of England (akg-images / Jean-Claude Varga)
29. Crown of Blanche of Lancaster (© Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung, Ulrich Pfeuffer / Maria Scherf, München)
30. The Bermondsey Mazer (On loan from St Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey © Victoria and Albert Museum, London)
31. Lady’s gold seal (© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved)
32. View of Margaret’s castle at Tervuren (By Sailko [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons)
33. Funeral of a king (Ms 197 f.22v Funeral of a king, from Liber Regalis (vellum), English School, (14th century) / Museo de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain / Bridgeman Images)
34. Wedding of Edward II and Isabella of France (British Library, London, UK / © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)
35. The Nine Worthy Women (Thomas de Salluces, Le chevalier errant / Bibliothèque nationale de France)
Family Tree
Introduction
Close your eyes and think of a medieval princess. Do you see a woman clothed in vibrant silks and rich velvets, her head, hands, and waist girdled with gleaming gold and sparkling gemstones? Is she sitting at a table creaking under the weight of exotic foods, with precious wines spilling from silver vessels onto fine linens, against a backdrop of tapestries woven with romantic heroes and heroines, or in a painted hall, heraldic banners fluttering behind proclaiming her royal status and connections? Or is she riding a magnificent horse through a forest with a hunt? Or travelling from one luxurious palace to the next in a decorated carriage, stopping to preside over jousting tournaments from raised pavilions or to add lustre to the dais at major feasts and festivals? Despite the richness of her surroundings, in your mind is she ultimately a mere pawn to be traded for the political gain of her father? Are her concerns confined to the beauty of the trinkets that surround her? Is she acquiescent, a person whom the most important things happen to or for, rather than an actor in her own right?
There is no doubt that stories of medieval princesses that have built an empire of fairy stories, Hollywood films, theme parks, and cheaply produced ball gowns, all offer a vision of maidenhood focused on passive virtue. Medieval castles promote visits to ‘princess towers’, reinforcing the link between royal women in history and their powerless fictional counterparts, locked inside or frozen in deathless sleep, condemned simply to wait – their eventual reward, marriage to a male saviour. It is a vision that real medieval princesses would not have recognized in their lives.
Between the end of the Middle Ages (which, depending on whom you ask, occurred in England in the quarter century or so before or after 1500) and the mid-nineteenth century, no one cared much about princesses. History was the preserve of Great Men: kings and bishops, conquerors and tyrants. And even the popular fictional heroines from the dawn of the novel – Fanny Burney’s Evelina, T
hackeray’s Becky Sharp, or Austen’s many wonderful women – were isolated from power, confined to the lower rungs of the county gentry or the middle classes. Then, in 1837, an eighteen-year-old girl raised in England became Queen Regnant, the first woman to rule her country since Queen Anne’s reign, more than one-hundred-and-twenty years earlier. The countless ways in which Victoria and her long reign shaped Britain, its society, and ultimately its empire have long captured public imagination. How her rule and the lives of her five princess daughters prompted a popular interest in royal women is also of immense significance. The first volume in a pioneering study of medieval women, Lives of the Queens of England, was published three years after Victoria came to the throne, written by Agnes Strickland, a poet who undertook research in partnership with her sister, Elizabeth. In the decade that followed, the historian Mary Anne Everett Green published Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies of Great Britain that for the first time gave a voice to medieval and early modern noblewomen. Her subsequent six-volume masterpiece Lives of the Princesses of England, from the Norman Conquest used her command of Latin and medieval French, and her access to original manuscripts, letters, and charters, to construct short biographies of every princess between the reigns of William the Conqueror and Victoria. It remains one of the outstanding achievements of nineteenth-century biography.
Across Europe at this time, as nations emerged from the Industrial Revolution, many of them developed an increasingly romanticized interest in their own histories and native mythologies, seeking connection to a pastoral, pre-industrialized past. In England, this led not only to a widespread interest in the lives of long-dead queens and princesses, but also in other aspects of the Middle Ages. Art and architecture began to feature distinctly medieval elements, such as the Gothic Revival Palace of Westminster and literary works such as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Idylls of the King, which converted the ancient myth of King Arthur and his court at Camelot into a national epic. And paintings and stained glass panels by the artists known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their followers depicted scenes from medieval romances and folktales – Guinevere and the Lady of the Lake, ‘Fair Rosamund’, and Isolde – that brought these old stories to new audiences that were hungry to understand what set England apart from other nations.
The romanticizing tendency of – mostly male – Victorian historians made it easy for genuine historical figures such as ‘Fair Rosamund’ Clifford and the royal women that Strickland and Green wrote about to be melded in popular imagination alongside fictional heroines. Together with the Guineveres and Isoldes of medieval romance, the passive princesses of the fairy tales compiled by the German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm – whose works were translated into nineteen separate English editions during Victoria’s reign – became so well known that they created an expectation that real princesses would conform to these models. It was a pattern perfectly constructed for the burgeoning Victorian middle class, for whom a wife kept at home, safe from the tawdry bustle of the city and the labour market, was a mark of success; they took these newly idealized visions of princesses found in poems and artworks – acquiescent, serene beauties – and held them up as prime examples of womanhood.
In many ways, we have failed to move on from the vision of the medieval past that we inherited from the Victorian era. Most of us, when we hear the word ‘princess’, still imagine a damsel trapped in a tower like the eponymous heroine of Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott’. Loosely based on the medieval Arthurian tale of Elaine of Astolat, Tennyson’s maiden lives ‘full royally apparelled’, sleeping on a velvet bed with a garland of pearls encircling her head. Despite the luxury of her chamber, all is not well: she lives alone in a tower encircled by a fence of thorny roses and, though the people passing hear her ‘chanting cheerly / Like an angel, singing clearly’, they never visit. Inside the tower, the Lady is entranced; forbidden by an unspoken curse from looking directly at the beauty of the world and Camelot, she must instead continually weave a tapestry depicting its glory through the dimmed reflection of a mirror. Finally, one day, Sir Lancelot rides by, his armour and horse trappings glittering in the bright sunlight ‘like one burning flame’, a ‘meteor, trailing light’. Overcome by the sight of his ‘coal-black curls’, the Lady escapes her tower and sets out in a boat towards Camelot, determined to find her knight. But the nameless curse cannot be evaded, and by the time her boat reaches the city she is no more than a beautiful corpse, which means that her virginity – first signalled by the roses that guarded her bower – has remained intact, despite her evident desire for Lancelot. The lesson is simple: it was the Lady’s rejection of the boundaries that had been set for her that spelled her doom. Her action could not go unpunished. Dozens of paintings of the Lady of Shalott (and the inspiration for her, Elaine of Astolat) survive from the late nineteenth century; she represented a perfect tragic heroine for the Victorians. Shades of her story are also present in the fairy tales of princesses that have come down to us from the Brothers Grimm: Rapunzel, trapped in a tower; Snow White, prized for her purity; and Sleeping Beauty, preserved beautifully in sleep.
While Tennyson’s Lady was inspired by real medieval romances, his telling of her tale was a very partial vision of the past, selected to suit the tastes of the world that popularized it. Other female icons of the Middle Ages were considerably more active in the ways in which they sought to control their lives, and at the time many were praised for it. There were the virgin-martyrs, many of whom were thought to be scholarly princesses – Agatha, Katherine, Margaret, and Lucy – who fearlessly defied their fathers, and even kings, who sought to control their bodies and minds. Though stories from these saints’ lives are largely fictitious, they were held aloft in the medieval period as exemplars for young noblewomen. Highly sympathetic portrayals of secular women living outside the strictures of conventional morality also abounded in romantic fiction and courtly poetry – famous heroines such as Guinevere and Isolde who threw caution to the wind engaging in forbidden affairs, as well as lesser-known maidens and princesses who married virtuous-but-poor knights, enriching and empowering them through their love. For noblewomen, there were also numerous historic examples of powerful queens and formidable and cunning consorts, such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Blanche of Castile, whose own considerable contributions to medieval culture and history have only recently begun to receive the attention they deserve.
These medieval narratives have largely been forgotten because they did not fit with the values of the intervening age. The women who grew up surrounded by the original narratives were not normally even referred to as ‘princesses’ until the sixteenth century, but rather ‘ladies’ or ‘daughters of the king’ – and they had a much more fluid relationship with power, influence, and action than it suited most Victorian storytellers to recall. Undeniably, their world was brutally patriarchal, and the odds were stacked against any woman who wanted to exercise autonomy, even among the most privileged. Contemporary society divided itself into those who were labourers, priests, and warriors, seemingly leaving noblewomen without any social role to play. It was a world in which the doers were overwhelmingly male. But feudalism – the medieval governing system by which land was ultimately owned by lords, with the use of it offered out for services rendered to them by vassals – necessitated a rigid social hierarchy. For women from the social elite, there was the chance that their status could trump their gender. The most successful among them learned to work within or even use the cultural frameworks of feudalism and chivalry – the social and moral code that governed the behaviour of aristocrats – to achieve considerable influence at the courts of their fathers, brothers, and husbands.
Indeed, it might surprise readers to learn that the medieval princess may have been more than the finely dressed ornament of popular imagination. She might have been a commander of castle garrisons under attack from hostile forces, and a seasoned war traveller. She might have been a diplomat savvy at negotiating international trade agreements, a s
pecialist at using soft power to avert the threat of military confrontation. She may have wielded absolute power over vast estates, scandalized court by secretly marrying an unknown paramour, or disrupted the vows of other unions. Through her patronage of literature and music, her role as a devoted mother and educator to her children, and her own scholarship, she might have helped shape the age in which she lived. And through the cunning manipulation of powerful men and cultural conventions, she may have gained significant power and freedoms to forge her own path in life.
What follows is the story of five medieval princesses, sisters who used their connections and their knowledge of courtly culture to gain and wield considerable power and influence. History has until now utterly overlooked these women and the part they played in shaping England’s story. And yet, far from being the passive maidens of fiction, these real-life princesses sought active participation in their own destinies, cultivating authority and deploying financial and political resources to achieve their aims. Occasionally they even defied their father the king, but more commonly they used the power and resources that they were able to muster to promote the interests of England and their family. In so doing, they affirmed their allegiance to their kingly father or brother, whose connection guaranteed their exceptional lives. But through their promotion of English interests, the sisters also stuck a claim that they were playing an important role in the family business, a business to which they would devote their lives, and a role which required them to have privileged access to decision-making. Despite or perhaps because of their wilful personalities and bold actions, they maintained their influence at court for as long as the king held power.
In the middle of November 1272, Henry III, king of England for fifty-six years, died after a long illness. His eldest son, Edward, succeeded him immediately, though he was not crowned until 1274. Two years before his father’s death, Edward and his Castilian wife Eleanor had sailed from England to join a united European army led by King Louis IX of France (Edward’s uncle), bound on Crusade. Their three small children, four-year-old John, two-year-old Henry, and the infant princess Eleanora, were left back in England. The children lived in a small household, first under the guardianship of their father’s respected and powerful uncle, Richard, Earl of Cornwall and, after his death, under the protection of their queenly grandmother, Eleanor of Provence.
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