Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  Like her sisters, Eleanora learned to deploy her connections on behalf of faithful servants, subjects, and causes from her mother and grandmother, but in practising intercession she was also modelling herself on the behaviour of another important queen: the Blessed Virgin Mary. From the thirteenth century, throughout Western Europe, a growing cult positioned Mary, the mother of God, as the ultimate intercessor – the crowned queen who sat enthroned next to her son, ever-ready to offer counsel as he governed the Kingdom of Heaven. Hers was considered the voice that might most readily influence his judgments. The Virgin was the woman on whom all Christian women sought to model themselves – as practically impossible as it was for mere humans to emulate a virgin mother – but, as Queen of Heaven, she was an especially important role model for women like Eleanora. The royal daughters almost certainly heard poems from the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection composed (or at least guided in their composition) by their maternal uncle, the king of Castile, sung by minstrels visiting the English court from Castile. This extraordinary cycle of poems describing miracles attributed to the Virgin comprises more than four hundred songs that tell apocryphal stories from the life of Mary. The Cantigas would have been appropriate poems for the nieces of the Castilian king because they offered clear moral patterns for medieval women, while also highlighting the importance of intercession as a means for royal women to make an impact in the world. The piety they promoted included the forms of ritualized piety and the performance of good works practised by Eleanora and her sisters throughout their lives, parading before their father’s subjects on pilgrimage to shrines across the country – a simultaneous act of both genuine devotion and display, one of the public roles that royal women were expected to play.

  In April of the second year of her parents’ absence, a glimmer of hope shone on Eleanora’s prospects as queen-in-waiting of Aragon: the pro-French Pope who had issued the proclamation forbidding her marriage to Alfonso died, and there were hopes in England and Aragon that his successor might come from outside the French king’s orbit of influence. Later that year, in the small town of Oloron-Sainte-Marie, situated between Gascony and Aragon, Edward’s party met Alfonso’s and, amid feasts and jousting, devised a treaty to settle the question of who, between his cousins in the House of Anjou and King Alfonso, his prospective son-in-law, was the rightful King of Sicily. At the same time, the terms of dower and dowry for Eleanora’s marriage were confirmed by both parties, and Edward declared that, as soon as a new pope was chosen, he would send an embassy to procure ‘diligently . . . without fraud or other machinations’ a licence to contract the marriage between Alfonso and Eleanora, ‘our dearest first-born’. He promised that, within three months of securing this licence, he would send Eleanora to Aragon so the marriage might be consummated. How invigorating this news must have been to the princess who, after so many years of delay, might now have been within reach of marriage and the queenship she had long been practising.8

  But in the months that followed, the treaty agreed at Oloron foundered. Edward redoubled his efforts to settle the Sicilian succession, finally securing a workable treaty between the two families late in 1288. However, by this point the new Pope – the one who it was hoped would grant Eleanora’s marriage – was in post, and he immediately cancelled Edward’s treaty, arguing that it failed to protect papal interests. Furthermore, he then disastrously excommunicated Alfonso and, from that point on, although Edward and Alfonso remained in frequent contact over the continuing Sicilian crisis, nothing further is mentioned of Eleanora and Alfonso’s marriage. There was no way an English princess could wed a man who had been excommunicated, and nor was she free to make another match, since her ‘proxy’ marriage was legally binding. By late 1288, aged nineteen, dutiful Eleanora was still frozen in marital limbo.

  By contrast, plans for Joanna’s marriage progressed steadily throughout the late 1280s. After the death of Hartman, the German prince to whom Joanna had been betrothed as a child, discussions began to wed her to one of her father’s wealthiest – and most problematic – magnates. Gilbert de Clare (known as ‘the Red’ because of his hair, though it also described his temperament), was Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, and one of the greatest of the famed Marcher lords of Wales, who were granted almost absolute power over the estates along England’s borders, providing a buffer to the wilder lands beyond. Gilbert had a complicated history with the royal family. Succeeding his father at the age of eighteen in 1263, when the barons of England were surging towards rebellion, Gilbert initially aligned himself with rebel leader Simon de Montfort against King Henry but then, during the course of the civil war, switched sides no less than five times, ultimately proving a crucial ally of the royal family and one whose military support was critical in defeating the rebels. Despite this, his reconciliation with Edward was strained, and their personal relationship remained uneasy. By the 1280s, however, the men once again shared an adversary, in the form of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the Welsh prince whose power stretched from Glamorgan in the south to Snowdonia in the north. Gilbert’s great wealth and ability to draw significant military forces from England and across Glamorgan meant that he could be a powerful ally in the war to conquer Wales. His relative independence from the Crown as one of the greatest Marcher lords also meant Edward would always struggle to keep him in line. Therefore, the king’s view that a marital alliance making Gilbert his own son might help control him was clearly insightful (and Gilbert, for his part, clearly saw the personal advantage in building a closer relationship to the king), and Joanna was available.

  In 1283 her marriage to Gilbert was agreed. She was eleven, while he was forty. But, before the earl could wed the king’s daughter, he needed to divorce his first wife. Back when he was only nine years old, Gilbert’s father had arranged for him to marry six-year-old Alice de Lusignan, daughter of King Henry III’s half-brother, in the hope that a close connection to the royal family might strengthen the Clare family’s position in England. Their two daughters were born to the couple just over a decade later, but by 1267, Alice and Gilbert were estranged, and in 1271 they formally separated. The cause of the dissolution of their marriage is unrecorded in formal documents, but rumours circulated that, while being held captive during the civil war, the countess had engaged in an adulterous affair with her cousin, Prince Edward. More than a dozen years later, when he became engaged to Joanna, Gilbert appealed to be released from his marriage, and in June 1285, he finally secured a settlement which granted Alice ample lands and manors, and set him free to marry again. During the years that Edward was in Gascony, Gilbert dutifully supported the royal cause, serving as captain on an expedition to put down a rebellion in Wales over the summer of 1287. Despite this service, he remained unable to restrain his aggressive impulses, at one point invading neighbouring Brecon estates belonging to the Earl of Hereford, a competing Marcher lord, with a small army. Gilbert also sent his messengers to Rome to request the dispensation he would need to marry Joanna (because she was a cousin of his first wife). Perhaps surprisingly, given that the match between the young princess and the magnate old enough to be her father was undoubtedly driven by political opportunism on both sides, Gilbert also played the romantic suitor, showering Joanna with silk tunics and a set of matching dresses made of the finest deep blue cloth imported from Tarsus in Turkey, for his bride-to-be and her two closest sisters, Eleanora and Margaret.9

  Joanna awaited the freedom her marriage would bring with some impatience. Having exhibited an independence of spirit from an early age, she had grown into a fiercely proud and stubborn young woman, and was known for her bold behaviour. In one instance, the princess quarrelled with Giles de Audenarde, the steward who governed the children’s household, and refused thereafter to deal with him; rather than receiving money from him to pay for her purchases, she instead ran up a long series of petty debts to various merchants. Concerned that Audenarde might complain of her behaviour to her father, Joanna sent two knights to Gascony to deliver her version
of the story to Edward, along with a letter in which she beseeched ‘dear sire, we beg you . . . to believe the things which they shall tell you by word of mouth from me.’ Joanna and Audenarde never reconciled but, from the description of the quarrel merely as ‘some contention’ between Joanna and Audenarde in the queen’s wardrobe book, Joanna’s parents seem to have shrugged off the teenager’s dramatic gesture, with the queen paying off her daughter’s debts upon their return home.10

  Joanna was clearly not afraid to challenge authority, even when it represented her own father, as Audenarde did in his role as steward of the children’s household. This trait became increasingly apparent as she grew to adulthood, and might be considered her defining characteristic. Perhaps surprisingly to some modern readers, young aristocratic women in the thirteenth century like Joanna were allowed – and even encouraged – to practise fierce defiance. Popular stories from the lives of the holy virgin martyrs made a virtue of their refusal to back down against powerful men who aimed to compel them into marriage or to renounce their beliefs. This acceptable defiance was, however, always closely circumscribed: the disobedience of the virgin saints only ever sought to protect their chastity and to defend their devotion to Christ. Yet it is hard to disentangle the women praised as saints from the theme of resistance, and Joanna may have found models for defiant womanhood in these popular devotional stories that emboldened her own actions and encouraged her feeling that she was in charge of her own destiny. She stood firm against those whom she should by all contemporary conventions have obeyed, confident that her position as daughter of the king granted her exceptional licence.11

  Margaret, meanwhile, was growing into a wholly different young woman from her older sisters. Instead of Eleanora’s active embrace of her royal duty or Joanna’s rebellious streak, she was engaged in perfecting the art of female nobility, perhaps encouraged by the example of Edeline Papyot or the other aristocratic women who frequented Langley in the years her parents were away. Margaret spent her adolescence modelling herself on the idealized image of a fashionable courtly lady, highly accomplished in embroidery, weaving, and hunting. Wardrobe accounts record that spindles, silks of many colours and thicknesses, and gold thread were constantly being procured for her use – in one case, her squire Thomas was sent to purchase two hundred ounces of gold thread ‘for the making of garlands and treasures’. Margaret also, along with all her siblings, was a keen hunter – the king’s huntsman Philip spent a month just before Christmas in 1286 at Langley, bringing twenty hounds with him. He was often back again during the following years, each time bringing with him packs of dogs, including berceletts, small hunting dogs like modern beagles, that belonged to Queen Eleanor. As Prince Edward was only a toddler, he was not Philip’s primary pupil; rather his teenage sisters would have gone on most of the hunts he organized. The queen evidently wished, despite her absence, to ensure her daughters continued developing their skills and a love of hunting with hounds that she shared – and they seem to have embraced the tradition.12

  As Margaret was consciously cultivating a courtly identity, her young fiancé was developing his chivalric persona. Jan spent his years in England nurturing his skills in tournament arts such as jousting, in hunting with falcons, in entertaining parties of important noblemen, giving them expensive gifts and gambling with dice, and in patronizing music. His desire to become a model knight was undoubtedly influenced by his father, who was perhaps the most famous jouster of his generation across Northern Europe, but it may also have been inspired by the clear efforts his fiancée was making to project ideal medieval womanhood. His devotion to the art of the hunt was remarkable even for the age. The earliest seal that survives for Jan shows that his public identity was synonymous with the sophisticated pastime of hunting: he is depicted as a young man on horseback, with a hooded falcon perched on his hand and another flying next to the horse, while a dog runs alongside. Margaret, meanwhile, focused not only on being beautifully dressed and skilled with a needle, but also on cultivating the ‘feminine virtues’ of Courtesy – evidently lacking in her sister Joanna – and Meekness – not necessarily compatible with Eleanora’s active diplomatic interventions and manoeuvring on behalf of friends. If she could perfect these virtues and project an aura of ideal womanhood, Margaret could grow to wield significant cultural influence in Brabant, but, as she entered adolescence, the pressure to mature into the ideal woman must have felt acute.13

  For Elizabeth, the years her parents were away would have nearly erased them entirely from her memory. She, alone of all the royal children, had lived in her parents’ itinerant household for her first two-and-a-half years, and she was closer as a young child to her parents than any of their other children. Later, the warmth and strength of love that the adult Elizabeth showed her father suggests that some sliver of memory of an early parental bond remained. Before the king and queen left England, perhaps in consideration that travel was risky, they arranged her marriage to the son of the Count of Holland. Elizabeth was not yet three when the embassy finalized the agreement. The betrothal was another echo of the tragedy of Alphonso’s death: Elizabeth’s young fiancé, even younger than her, was the baby brother of Margaret, the intended bride of Prince Alphonso, for whom the glorious, unfinished psalter had been commissioned.14

  When king and queen finally arrived back at Dover in the autumn of 1289, the seven-year-old Elizabeth, who grew up knowing she would be Countess of Holland and a stand-in for the alliance that her dead brother was meant to secure, must have been unrecognizable to her parents. More used to nursemaids and servants, she and her five-year-old brother Edward may have lingered shyly on the fringes of the party, but Eleanora, by this time twenty years old, Joanna, seventeen, and Margaret, fourteen, would have waited eagerly for the sight of their parents. Ten-year-old Mary remained at Amesbury in the company of their grandmother, but the five children who made up the welcoming party travelled to the coast for a fortnight, in a carriage fitted out with new scarlet silk mattresses and golden cushions trimmed in green silk to dampen the jostling. No records survive to attest the family members’ feelings on their reunion, but given that all six of their children were alive, healthy, and rapidly blossoming, Edward and Eleanor must have been greatly relieved. This homecoming was certainly in stark contrast to their arrival home twelve years earlier, when they returned after the Crusade to a dead father, with one son also dead, and another one dying.15

  VI

  Union

  1290

  WINCHESTER, WESTMINSTER

  In the royal apartments at Winchester Castle on 20 April, ten days before her wedding to Gilbert and three days shy of her eighteenth birthday, Joanna counted the number of servants in her household, as well as in the households of her two sisters, Eleanora and Margaret. To her fury, she realized that they both had larger households than she did and, by extension, the appearance of superior influence or closer association with their royal parents. The teenager did not contain her displeasure; rather, she immediately demanded additional yeomen, so that her household would appear every bit as prestigious as those of her sisters. Eager to appease his hot-tempered daughter, and perhaps conscious that meeting her demands would soon be another man’s problem, her father acquiesced, promptly hiring two pages to join Joanna’s household for a fixed term of nine days, with their employment ceasing the day she married.1

  In the whirlwind leading up to Joanna’s wedding, it is not clear how she first noticed the discrepancy between the size of her retinue and those of her sisters, but, as she prepared to wed a noble Englishman rather than a foreign ruler like her younger sister Margaret, she may have been primed to perceive slights. The papal permission that enabled Joanna’s marriage to Earl Gilbert came through near the end of 1289, not long after her parents had arrived back in England from Gascony. Soon after their return it had become apparent that the queen was steadily declining in health: while on the continent in 1287, she had contracted ‘quartan fever’, a variant of malaria in which fever
appeared intermittently, lasting three days and then disappearing. This pattern of ill health would recur periodically over the next few years, gradually weakening a body that had given birth to sixteen children. Eleanor’s condition had sufficiently deteriorated by early 1290 that she was preparing a chapel for the burial of her heart at the Dominican priory in London and had taken steps towards commissioning a tomb. Presumably wishing to see her children as settled as possible while she was alive, she and Edward decided to expedite Joanna’s wedding to Gilbert, as well as Margaret’s to Jan of Brabant.2

  Throughout the late winter and early spring of 1290, the final legal guarantees were put in place to provide for Joanna and any future children she might bear, while also instituting safeguards to secure the first and second places in the line of succession for little Prince Edward and the still-unmarried Eleanora. (Under primogeniture, the estate of a lord who died without sons was divided equally between his daughters; the king was therefore seeking to prevent his estate – and the kingdom – from fracturing.) Gilbert surrendered the entirety of his family’s estates in England, Wales, and Ireland to the king, who re-granted those in Ireland to him alone. The estates in England and Wales were instead settled jointly on Gilbert and Joanna, and her heirs, even if by a subsequent husband. This was an extraordinary gesture of faith by Gilbert – effectively disinheriting his two daughters in the hope of producing a son by Joanna. But it was not the only test of loyalty that Edward demanded of his prospective son-in-law: on 17 April Gilbert travelled to Amesbury. The king and queen, and their five children who were still residing within the royal household, were at the priory visiting Mary and the dowager queen – one of several visits they made to Amesbury after their arrival back in England. The Archbishop of Canterbury, five other bishops, and eight noblemen, had also travelled to Amesbury to witness Gilbert’s pledge to honour the king’s chosen path for the succession of the English crown. Before this august assembly, Gilbert swore an oath to support the rule of Prince Edward (now six years old) and his heirs, or, if the prince should die without heirs, to support Eleanora as rightful Queen of England. This pledge was the final guarantee Edward required of his most powerful and least predictable magnate before sanctioning the marriage that would place him, in right of his wife, third in line to the throne of England. On the same day, perhaps in some way to confirm her proximity to the throne, Eleanora received from her mother a gold headdress and zone, a girdle that encircled the hips over a gown, made by the queen’s goldsmith.3