Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  For Eleanora, the match with the count may have felt like more of a mixed blessing. She undoubtedly understood the importance of wifehood and motherhood to her own success as a royal woman – she could hardly have failed to internalize these messages, omnipresent in medieval culture, from the direct example of her own mother, prodigiously fertile and beloved by the king. Turning twenty-four that summer, she may have considered that her childbearing years were dwindling – this might be her last opportunity to succeed as a fertile consort. Count Henri must also have been sufficiently amiable during the months he was resident at court for her to pledge her life to him. He was, however, only a count, and a minor one at that; the small and rather unremarkable county of Bar was no replacement for Aragon, the rich and exotic kingdom that Eleanora had been promised for so many years. Barring the death of her brother Edward, she would never be a queen if she married Henri, and even her younger sister Margaret would, as Duchess of Brabant, outrank her. Surely there might yet be opportunities to make a union more worthy of her own position?

  If these doubts ever crept into her mind, they were quickly cast aside, and the marriage plans progressed with such rapidity that Eleanora must have been enthusiastic about keeping the matter moving. Ultimately, Edward’s most dutiful daughter may have embraced a marriage that had somewhat anticlimactic personal resonance because the link she would forge with Henri was of unambiguous benefit to England, to her father, and to her family’s position in Western Europe. For the same fears about France’s imperial expansionist ambitions that brought Henri first to England were also increasingly concerning Edward. His trusted counsellor the Bishop of Durham Anthony Bek, who had led the original delegation to Aragon to negotiate Eleanora’s betrothal to Alfonso, had cautioned Edward of the need to shore up alliances across the Low Countries and Germany, and this was undoubtedly on the king’s mind during the months that he entertained the young count whose lands bordered the ever-growing French empire. Eleanora, the daughter who had from early adolescence shown a keen interest in statecraft and the role her marriage might play in securing England’s border regions now embraced the potential to unite with a man willing to put his military might in service to the English cause. She would become the Countess of Bar and build there a lasting ally for England. And as Henri and his subjects spoke French, she would have no need to learn another tongue.

  As England’s aristocracy were being summoned to Bristol for the wedding in the early weeks of September, the bride’s youngest siblings Elizabeth, now aged eleven, and Edward, aged nine, headed west from their summer tour of the royal palaces surrounding London. Eleven days before the wedding, they called in at Amesbury to collect Mary, before travelling onwards to Bristol to reconvene with their father, Eleanora, Margaret and Jan. The children were frequently in each other’s company during this period: in January, Joanna had visited Elizabeth and Edward at Langley – her home during the years their parents were in Gascony; after a year in the Welsh Marches, the visit must have felt comfortingly familiar to Joanna, since she and her travelling entourage came back again in May to meet up with her siblings at Mortlake, doubling the household’s usual consumption of wine. One weekend in June, Mary and a large suite of her attendants from Amesbury had visited Elizabeth and Edward while they were in residence at Kennington Palace, just south of London; the following week, Jan arrived with thirty horses and twenty-four grooms on the way to a tournament in Fulham and stayed for nearly a week, to the exasperation of the children’s accountant, who was forced to secure food and wages for the many grooms, and fodder for their horses. Arriving at Bristol for Eleanora’s wedding, Mary took the opportunity to complain to her father that her allowance of one hundred pounds a year to furnish her chamber and table was insufficient. The fourteen-year-old nun was accustomed to living richly – despite the seeming incongruity between such luxury and her religious habit – and she was feeling the pinch after her grandmother’s death meant that the dowager’s income was no longer subsidizing her own. The king, when his daughters complained about something that could be fixed by throwing money at the problem, seems readily to have acceded: he issued a decree to double the income of his ‘dearest daughter’ from the treasury to two hundred pounds each year, ‘to sustain her chamber’.5

  Once again, only Joanna missed her sister’s wedding. For more than a year, the countess had been resident just across the Bristol Channel at the castle of Caerphilly in Glamorgan, the Clares’ most spectacular Welsh residence. Her two-year-old son Gilbert seems still to have been living with his mother at this time; they were joined by a baby sister named Eleanor in November 1292. One of the children was sick that autumn, and after returning from attending the king at Berwick to see Robert Bruce resign his claim to the Scottish throne, their father was either worried about his child’s ill-health or used the excuse to put off returning to London. The child recovered, and by the following year, little Gilbert and his younger sister were established within a separate children’s household in residence at Usk Castle, twenty miles north-east of Caerphilly.6

  By the late summer of 1293, Joanna was pregnant again, though her condition would not have kept her from attending the wedding of her closest sister. What did intervene, however, was a rebellion that broke out on some of the Clare estates around Kilkenny in Ireland: her husband was determined to assemble a force of knights to sail west and take back control. The earl was once again in the king’s good graces, following his arrest and the temporary confiscation of Glamorgan the year before, when he had refused Edward’s command to cease his ongoing private war with the Earl of Hereford, lord of neighbouring Brecon. The king issued Gilbert with an exorbitant fine of ten thousand marks, but it was never paid, and within months Glamorgan was back in Gilbert’s control. Edward had been pressured to forgive his son-in-law by other magnates, who argued that Gilbert had only been exercising those freedoms traditionally associated with Marcher lordship, but he also softened his stance in recognition that he would in effect be depriving his daughter and grandson of their inheritance; even at the point of confiscating Glamorgan, the charter clarifies that Joanna, ‘daughter of the king’, is not to be disinherited, and that the judgment was only to be in effect for the term of Gilbert’s life.7

  If Joanna’s own feelings about the dispute between her husband and father were in doubt, they were clarified when she opted to join Gilbert on his campaign in Ireland, despite the dangers inherent in travelling and the fact that she would need to leave her young children in England. She was, after all, the daughter of Eleanor of Castile, who had twice left her small children at home to accompany her husband overseas. Her mother’s example could not have been far from her mind as, together with her principal ladies, as well as chaplains and harpists, she accompanied the earl and his knights and sailed in June, intending to stay three years, and missing her sister’s wedding.8

  The wedding and feast they missed must have been sumptuous: the king ordered his Keeper of the Forest of Dean (just north of the River Severn) to provide thirty bucks – non-native fallow deer, introduced to England by the Romans and again later by the Normans for hunting – as well as four harts, fully mature males from the larger red deer species. There was some debate about which prelate should perform the ceremony: Archbishop Peckham of Canterbury had died in the previous spring, and his successor was away in Rome being confirmed by the Pope; meanwhile the Archbishop of York was in disgrace with King Edward, for having excommunicated a court favourite. Ultimately, the Archbishop of Dublin was prevailed upon to travel across the Irish Sea and solemnize the marriage at St Augustine’s Abbey, preserved today as Bristol Cathedral, on 20 September.9

  In the months that followed their wedding, Henri went back to his province, while Eleanora prepared to leave England and join him. Her father assembled a magnificent retinue to accompany her on her journey, led by the Bishop of London, the Earl of Hereford and Essex, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, and more than a dozen knights, including Sir Eustace de Hache (whose loya
lty to Eleanora had been proven almost a decade before, when he refused to leave his post protecting her, even though it cost him part of his estate). Sir Eustace was one of four knights specially appointed to ensure that the lands assigned to the new countess’s dower produced the extraordinary sum promised by the count – a reminder of the rushed nature of the wedding the previous autumn. On 17 March 1294, Edward presented a vacant benefice to Henri’s brother Theobald, who had remained in England, a testimony to the king’s high regard for his new son-in-law. One week later, however, sickness assailed the family, striking down both the nine-year-old Prince Edward and his visiting nineteen-year-old sister Margaret with fever, just after the feast of the Annunciation of the Virgin. For more than two weeks, the pair languished; this was surely a torturous time for the king, as he was forced to confront once again the memory of Alphonso’s death a decade before, at nearly the same age as Prince Edward was then. Finally, their fevers broke – a surviving letter from a member of the royal household conveys what must have been extraordinary relief: ‘thank God’, the children were recovering. Given the seriousness of their sickness, the delay in Eleanora’s departure from Dover may have been caused by the threat of her brother dying. If Prince Edward had followed his elder brothers to an early grave, Eleanora would instantly have risen to become heir to the throne – and the baby growing inside her might have become a future king of England.10

  Once Prince Edward and Margaret were convalescing, the king accompanied Eleanora to Dover, where she had previously seen him off on and welcomed him home from his continental voyages. Now it was her turn to undertake a journey. The dangers of childbirth also awaited her in the months to come, and though Eleanora was young and Edward was still fit and robust at fifty-three, father and daughter may have wondered if this would be their final goodbye. On 14 April, Eleanora and her companions set sail. After two weeks they reached the city of Bar, nestled among high, steep gorges overlooking the quiet Ornain River, where Henri had arranged a tournament in her honour. Arriving in the small city, the English party paraded through the gates in the city walls and across an ancient wooden bridge (which would be replaced seventeen years later by the picturesque stone Pont Notre-Dame that stands today). Many of Eleanora’s attendants may have lodged in the great Benedictine priory, the massive Romanesque church that dominated the lower part of the city and which had recently been enhanced with an intricate new Gothic choir. If the eyes of the citizens of Bar were focused on their new, pregnant countess as she paraded past, hers would have remained fixed on the great towers of the medieval castle, perched atop a promontory which overlooked the narrow valley. It is easy to wonder whether, at the first sight of her new home, Eleanora recalled that the castle was a key part of her dower estate – this was to be her castle.

  The welcome tournament took place on 3 May, probably on the high, flat ground behind the castle. Among those who answered the invitation to participate was a familiar face: the Duke of Brabant, Margaret’s father-in-law, whose dashing figure Eleanora would have remembered from her sister’s wedding festivities four years before. The duke, in his early forties, was in prime health, a famed warrior after his astonishing victory at the Battle of Worringen six years earlier, and a jousting hero, who was said to have triumphed at more than seventy tournaments across northern Europe. According to the chronicler Jean de Thielrode, the duke arrived in Bar with a retinue of one hundred and ten knights. At the hour of vespers, the evening prayer shortly before sunset, the duke was persuaded to enter the lists, don his armour, and mount his horse. In the fading spring light, his horse twice thundered past that of a French knight named Pierre de Bausner, but on the third pass, their lances hit one another with such force, that both men were thrown to the ground. The duke suffered a grave injury to his arm and was taken from the field, having summoned the strength to pardon Pierre, who had offered his own life in forfeit. Within hours, the duke was dead, presumably having bled to death from the wound. For the spectators at the tournament, the gruesome death of the renowned warrior – a man whom the chroniclers called the ‘flower of chivalry, the ornament of the universe, the joy of the world’ – must have been an upsetting and abrupt end to the glorious pageantry of the day. For a pregnant Eleanora, watching the tragic unfolding of festivities that were intended to inaugurate her life in Bar from the stands, it would have been gut-wrenching.11

  Back in England, the news of the old duke’s death came with a summons for his son and heir, Jan II, to return to Brabant. Margaret was by this time nineteen years old and, having been married for four years, was well into what should have been her prime childbearing years. She was also, after Eleanora had departed for Bar, the only royal woman normally resident at court, though her eleven-year-old sister Elizabeth, who normally lived in the household of her brother Edward, visited occasionally. Now that Jan had succeeded as duke, the pressure on Margaret to produce an heir to secure the duchy’s future was amplified, and there was no obvious argument for her to remain in England rather than to take up residence with her husband in Bar. In Canterbury that autumn, her robes were mended by her long-serving tailor Roger, and orders were placed with a London saddler for a new saddle and saddle-cloth. The king’s goldsmith, Adam, was paid three hundred pounds to make new pieces of jewellery for the duchess, which must have been intended to form part of her trousseau and, by November, ships were being prepared at Dover to transport her to Brabant. Jan’s departure was delayed by an outbreak of rebellion in Wales – he and his men had joined the king on campaign – and by the preparations for a joint military venture that would see Brabant and England united against France, but in June 1295 he sailed from Harwich in three ships provisioned for ‘the dearest son of the king’ by his father-in-law. Curiously, Margaret remained at home. A delay may have been intended to allow Jan to settle back in Brabant before he welcomed his wife; furthermore, Margaret’s trousseau – which lacked a natural champion after her mother’s death – may not have been fully compiled. However, as the months after Jan’s departure turned into years and still Margaret resolutely remained in England with little further evidence to suggest she was preparing to move to Brabant, it is clear that her resistance must have had a broader cause. She had no reason to doubt the status of her marriage: her match was prestigious – the most prestigious achieved by any of her sisters. She also knew her husband well; this was not a case of a princess fearing to fall into the clutches of an unknown man.12

  Like all daughters of kings, Margaret could hardly have been ignorant of the expectations placed on her role in a dynastic marriage, which included for many princesses the challenge of leaving home to spend the rest of one’s life in a foreign land. These women had been raised to follow in their mothers’ footsteps as diplomatic brides – it was a commonly understood aspect of their position. Perhaps the most popular chivalric romance of the age was a story whose central plot focused on a young princess travelling across the sea to marry a king; in Tristan and Isolde, the Cornish knight Tristan and Irish princess Isolde mistakenly drink a love potion and fall helplessly in love while he is escorting her to marry his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall. The romance was ubiquitous in the late thirteenth century, with its scenes depicted on countless tapestries, ivory caskets, and combs, such as those that would have furnished Margaret’s chambers – and its central morals about duty and loyalty would have been familiar to Margaret. She would have recognized the expectation encapsulated in Tristan’s words to Isolde, as she sails away from Ireland and all she has ever known, to marry a foreign king,

  You must take heart! You had much rather be a great Queen in a strange land than humble and obscure at home. Honour and ease abroad, and shame in your father’s kingdom have a very different flavour!

  Margaret’s reasons for refusing to accompany Jan to Brabant are unrecorded, but if Tristan’s words represent a common fear among princesses travelling abroad for marriage, they also hint at what may have been behind Margaret’s reluctance. Brabant was a ‘strange land’
to the English princess, so much stranger than even Bar must have seemed to Eleanora, because Brabant was Dutch-speaking.13

  The Brabaçon court poet dedicated a verse chronicle of the old duke’s famous victory at the Battle of Worringen to Margaret in 1294, shortly before the tragic tournament. The dedication of literary works aimed at teaching recently married princesses about the glorious history of their new countries was not uncommon in the later Middle Ages. When Margaret’s mother, Eleanor of Castile, had arrived as a young bride in England, she received an illustrated copy of an Anglo-Norman Life of Saint Edward the Confessor from her father-in-law, the original text of which had been presented to her mother-in-law in the early years of her own queenship. The manuscript, which survives in the collection of the University of Cambridge, expounds the life of the pious king in whose honour Eleanor’s husband had been named, undoubtedly intending to impress the Spanish princess and fill her with pride in her husband’s saintly royal predecessor. The Dutch chronicle, presented to Margaret forty years later, similarly sought to excite pride and admiration in the young princess for the illustrious life of her husband’s father, and to reinforce the honour inherent in her association with the House of Brabant. Its opening, however, also shows how intimidating it might have been for a young woman to move to a country whose language she did not speak. Addressing itself to ‘Lady Margaret of England’, the poet offers that ‘since she cannot understand Dutch, therefore I send her the gift of a Dutch poem, by which she may learn the language.’ The copy of the manuscript given to Margaret has been lost, and if she pored over it, practising the Dutch language by repeatedly reciting the elegiac descriptions of her father-in-law’s famous victory, or sought out tuition in the language of her future subjects, any such efforts are hidden from history.14