Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  First came the new year celebrations, with the traditional gift-giving. The royal children in attendance – Margaret, Elizabeth, and Edward – each received a jewelled brooch in the shape of an eagle from their father, a golden clasp to pin together their mantles against the East Anglian winter wind. In return, Margaret presented the king with knives carved from ivory and ebony, with silver handles. On 3 January, and again 6 January, there were further festivities, as two companions of the princesses were married in the priory church of Holy Trinity in Ipswich, with each bride receiving a silver cup as her gift from the king and his daughters. During these celebrations, fresh caravans of prelates and noblemen and -women arrived in the city for a further celebration. They came from religious houses (the Abbots of Colchester and Bury St Edmunds, the Bishops of Norwich and London), from castles and manors throughout England (the Earl and Countess of Norfolk and those of Oxford, the Earl of Hereford, and the Countess of Cornwall), and from across Holland in the Low Countries. They were all there to celebrate a royal wedding: the marriage between fourteen-year-old Elizabeth and the new twelve-year-old Count of Holland, Johan I.1

  After Johan’s father had been killed the summer before, Edward had invited a delegation of wealthy Dutch townsmen and nobles to Bury St Edmunds – easily accessible from ships docking on the east coast – to discuss trade and a renewal of the alliance between Holland and England. The priority of the Dutch embassy was to reclaim their new count from English custody, but Edward – anxious that Holland might once again fall under the sway of France – was reluctant to send Johan back before his marriage to Elizabeth could be solemnized. The wedding date was therefore brought forward, despite minor infelicities such as Elizabeth’s dress being incomplete, as well as more significant challenges such as Johan being a full two years younger than the canonical age of fourteen at which males could marry. The royal coffers were much depleted from constant warfare; the Norwich monk Bartholomew Cotton records that the local populace was required to cover the cost of the event, which cannot have been popular. In return for their support, the common men and women of Ipswich and the surrounding villages may have been permitted to glimpse the bridal party or the king and his family, and they may at least have enjoyed the scores of entertainers who descended on the city – minstrels and fools, harpers and drummers, trumpeters and fiddlers – but they would not have had any opportunity to participate in the event they had financed. The friars of Ipswich did better out of the wedding – the king laid out a feast for them, at his expense, in return for their prayers for the newlyweds.2

  Those inside the dimly lit Romanesque church would have seen the teenage bride in a silken robe festooned with silver and gold buttons (Elizabeth’s twist on the silver-sequined buttons that her sister Eleanora had favoured); the dress must have been intricately embroidered, as its last-minute creation took thirty-five tailors four days and four nights to make, led by the princess’s personal tailor Henry, who spent eight days in London overseeing its preparation. While undoubtedly sumptuous, the robe was incomplete: a zone of pearls intended to circle the bride’s slim hips was not finished by the time a carriage drawn by five horses left London to swiftly carry the princess’s jewels to Ipswich. Its loss evidently caused Elizabeth great displeasure, as her father gave her twelve marks to soothe her disappointment. On her head, the new Countess of Holland wore the most splendid of her bridal jewels, a gold coronet studded with pearls, large rubies, and emeralds. It was another crown to add to the collection she had inherited from her mother which, along with the golden cup she received as a wedding gift from Margaret, would have reminded her of home and her family in her new life as consort of one of the princes of Europe. Another gift was the exquisitely illustrated psalter commissioned more than a decade before by her mother for Alphonso, the elder brother Elizabeth could not have remembered: ornamented with the arms of England impaling those of Holland, the manuscript was a wedding gift to Elizabeth from her father, who had ordered that the part-finished book be finally completed, in his daughter’s honour. An object of exquisite beauty, it is easy to imagine the young countess enthralled by the delicate marginal drawings of brightly feathered birds and elegant ladies hunting with hounds. Owning her own psalter would also offer Elizabeth regular opportunities for practising her reading skills, and it was therefore a gift of which her mother would have wholeheartedly approved.

  Three days after the wedding, the young Count of Holland and his visiting noblemen, knights, and burgesses, requested the English king to arbitrate on their behalf in a disagreement with the Duke of Brabant, another of his sons-in-law. Edward was well-practised at arbitrating between European houses – he had spent much of the previous decade striving to build accord between France and Aragon, to enable Eleanora’s marriage and the renewal of a united crusade – but the significance of his arbitration in this instance underlines the role played by Margaret and Elizabeth in international diplomacy. It was the two English sisters who provided a link between the opposing Brabaçon and Dutch camps, and it was the occasion of Elizabeth’s marriage that offered the opportunity for reconciliation. Later the same day, the royal party left Ipswich, travelling back along the Orwell to Harwich, where a squadron of six oar-propelled galleys was docked, including the vessels of the visiting Dutch nobles and some of the grandest ships in the royal fleet. At the bustling port in Harwich, where wool from Joanna’s Gloucestershire estates left England to be spun into cloth in her sisters’ provinces of Brabant and Holland, the king not only oversaw the transfer of Elizabeth’s trousseau aboard one of her new husband’s ships, but also the magnificent trousseau of her sister Margaret. Aged twenty-one, the duchess had finally bowed to pressure from both the English and Brabaçon courts and, possibly in recognition of the much more active role her sister Eleanora was playing in supporting their father’s war, was joining her husband in Brabant.3

  The luxury of Margaret’s trousseau was even more extravagant than those of her sisters, reflecting the importance of projecting England’s wealth and sophistication at the ducal court, and perhaps also a sense of guilt on the part of her father, who was aware that he was forcing his child away, to her great unhappiness. The account of the king’s goldsmith which lists the precious objects accompanying Margaret to her new home takes up a full folio page, in a minute and tightly packed script. Dozens of items of silver and silver-gilt are recorded among the inventory of her chamber and chapel goods: chalices, plates, and more than a hundred salt cellars; a censer for her chapel in the shape of a ship; alms dishes and candelabra; pitchers, cups, and large bowls for washing her hands and face. Her jewel caskets were full to bursting with more than three dozen gold clasps; ten rings; a golden zone and many made of silver; headdresses with interchangeable ornaments made of gold and pearls in the shapes of birds and the heraldic leopards of England; and a solid gold seal so the duchess could issue her own charters. More jewels had been made for Margaret and brought from London to Ipswich for her approval, but they were dismissed as insufficiently grand to please her and were returned unpurchased. She also took copper pans and cooking pots, and a new carriage, its interior trimmed in silken cushions, its chains and harness gilded. In total, the goods Margaret carried to her new life in Brabant cost thousands of pounds to procure. All this equipment, plus riding horses and transport carts, were packed aboard the Swan of Yarmouth, one of the king’s largest galleys, and escorted across the sea by the Dutch royal ships in a fleet remembered as ‘inestimably ornamented’ in an early-fourteenth-century chronicle from Holland. The retinue chosen to sail with Margaret included the Earl of Hereford and Essex who had accompanied Eleanora to Bar, priests, and more than a dozen of the king’s knights, clerks and commissioners, though only one of her men would be allowed to remain with the princess for any length of time. Margaret’s lady Matilda de Statelyng and Isabella de Vescy, a close friend and lady of the princesses’ late mother, are the only women recorded as travelling with the party.4

  As the date for their depa
rture approached, Elizabeth balked at the idea of leaving. She could easily have reasoned that Margaret had managed to stay in England for more than six years after her own marriage; she might have thrown back in her father’s face the anxieties about young brides her mother and grandmother had expressed, when Eleanora’s first marriage had been performed by proxy back in 1282. Her reason for refusing to travel to Holland is not recorded, but the reaction of her father is – already under intense pressure from his magnates about the never-ending wars, Edward was incandescent at the insubordination and wilful conduct of his youngest child, and what followed is the only known example of a violent flash of the monarch’s temper towards one of his daughters. A note in the king’s wardrobe book from the time records payment to Adam, the king’s goldsmith ‘for a great ruby and a great emerald bought to set into a certain coronet of the Countess of Holland, the king’s daughter, in place of two stones which were lost when the king threw the coronet into the fire’. It seems that, in a fit of anger, the king tore Elizabeth’s bridal coronet from her head and threw it into a fire so hot that, by the time he calmed down and retrieved the crown, two of its principal jewels had been lost. Regretting the violence of his action, he ordered the jewels to be replaced and guiltily, he also agreed that Elizabeth might remain a while longer in England and travel to Holland with his expeditionary force later that year. Elizabeth, therefore, had managed to buy herself some more time as an independent princess – she now had the freedom of being a married adult, but was still within the orbit of home. And so, rather than escorting his new wife to his dominions, Johan took with him only a small embassy assigned by her father, which was given the job of checking that the annual value of the dower lands assigned to the countess was as agreed.5

  While Elizabeth had won a reprieve, her elder sister’s independence in England was drawing rapidly to a close. Nearly seven years after she had married Jan, and almost two since he had returned to Brabant as duke without her, Margaret could no longer avoid her responsibility as a royal woman and consort of a foreign prince. She was to return to Harwich and the fleet, and depart eastwards across the sea with her new brother-in-law. Her father undoubtedly felt his child’s reluctance, and in his parting gift to her of a gold ring set inside a golden pyx, or small jewel casket, it is tempting to perceive a touch of sorrow, as Margaret and Jan sailed away from the shores of England. With his daughter travelling across winter seas, the king took special precautions and placed extra crew on the Swan of Yarmouth: two pilots were aboard to steer the vessel, which was manned by more than fifty rowers, sailors, and deck-hands, and a lantern was hung by its prow at night to ensure none of the other ships in the small fleet crashed into her. In all, the crossing took three days and landed on the shore of the count’s province of Zeeland. From there, the English party accompanying Margaret travelled on to Brussels, where they arrived in early February.6

  Back in England, Elizabeth and Prince Edward headed southwards towards Windsor, while their father continued north, bound for Walsingham. He was at Castle Acre at the end of January when an almost unimaginable rumour reached his ears: that his second daughter Joanna, the Countess of Gloucester and Hertford, was romantically involved with a common man whom she planned to marry. Edward initially refused to believe that his daughter, wilful though she had always been, would dare to ignore the feudal vows she had pledged and remarry without his express consent. But he acted swiftly to safeguard his rights against this unexpected episode of filial intransigence, dispatching his men with orders to take all Joanna’s properties and goods throughout England and Wales into the king’s hands ‘for certain reasons immediately on sight hereof’. A sense of Edward’s fury can still be felt through the centuries in the clause in the letter that warned the royal messenger to carry out his lord’s wishes ‘as he loves himself and his things and wishes to escape the king’s wrath.’ Much was at stake – Joanna’s estate was too large and gave its lord too much power for the countess to bestow the Earldom of Gloucester upon an unknown man, despite whatever ill-conceived notion of romance she may have entertained. In that moment, her father must have cursed the licentiousness and poor decision-making for which widows were popularly known. Despite his anger, however, Edward remained largely in the dark as to the truth behind the rumour, so sent his con-fessor to Glamorgan to seek out his daughter and discover her true intentions.7

  However, the countess and her paramour – guiltier even than her father might have guessed – had already fled her Welsh dominion, seeking a refuge and the advice of her friend, the recently widowed Countess of Pembroke. Joanna arrived at Goodrich Castle, just over the English border, in early February. Not yet realizing that her father had confiscated her whole estate, she nevertheless anticipated his fierce displeasure and summoned her children from Bristol. Meanwhile, Joanna’s loyal constable at Tonbridge Castle in Kent refused to cede its command to the king’s bailiffs, battling down the fortress in a defensive posture and sending Edward into ever greater fits of apoplexy. Lest Joanna’s faithful servants at other sites follow his lead, the king ordered that all the lands and goods of the constable, and all the other defenders of Tonbridge Castle, be confiscated.8

  The king’s anger was no doubt exacerbated by the stress of planning for war; while he sought the truth about Joanna, he was also finalizing plans to travel to Flanders and attack the French from the north with his allies, while at the same time sending a separate force of English knights to take back Gascony in the south. Royal letters sent late that winter detailed these plans, as well as the king’s efforts to cement his alliances around the marriages of his children: though Elizabeth remained in England, an English embassy travelled with Count Johan to examine the proposed dower estate and report back on its acceptability, and a potential union was proposed between Prince Edward of Caernarfon and one of the daughters of the Count of Flanders. Among the letters sent by the king in early 1297 was a warm response to a request from his cousin, Amadeus V, Count of Savoy, for Joanna’s hand in marriage. The date that Amadeus first considered an approach is not mentioned, but the negotiations seem to have been exceedingly quick, with the king gladly assenting to the match, pleased with the solution to his predicament and hopeful that the count might open a further front on France’s south-eastern border with Savoy. Without having had a chance to consult his daughter, the king launched straight into his expectations regarding the lands and rents to be assigned to the countess as her dower, should she outlive Amadeus. This was by far the hastiest agreement of any relating to the many proposed betrothals of Edward’s children, and because it concerned the remarriage of a widow – and one of the first lords of England – its rashness was, in fact, the least appropriate. Embroiled in wars all around him, with his barons on the brink of revolt at his ongoing demands for military service and new taxes, the king appeared to welcome a resolution to the problems posed by Joanna’s action. And, as his plans progressed, news of them spread westwards to Goodrich, where Joanna soon realized that the time had come when she would need to confront her father before he went any further in arranging her marriage to Amadeus. For she knew what the king did not: she was already remarried.9

  Among the squires in the retinue of the late Earl of Gloucester was a man in his mid-twenties named Ralph de Monthermer, whose origins and parentage are unknown. After Gilbert’s death, he remained within the household of the countess, along with many of the earl’s men. At some point during the year 1296, they fell in love. Ralph must have been driven nearly insane with desire for the great lady he served to even contemplate eloping with her and risking the wrath of the king. Though his adoration and longing for Joanna was undoubtedly affected and perhaps enhanced by her status, the risk that Ralph was putting himself in was too high to characterize him as a simple fortune hunter. Whether he seduced Joanna or she seduced him is not recorded, though it is difficult to imagine the boldness required for an unknown squire to seduce the daughter of his king. Ralph seems to have been a man of exceptional personal c
harisma and, according to a contemporary source, was ‘elegantly formed’. Joanna must have been hopelessly enamoured with him to propose – as the almost infinitely more powerful partner, she must have been the one to do so – that the two marry in secret. Like the heroine Felice in Guy of Warwick, an almost exactly contemporary romance whose eponymous hero is the son of a steward but full of chivalric virtue, Joanna’s pride would not countenance marrying a mere squire. According to the chronicler William Rishanger, Joanna arranged for Ralph to first be knighted (her request to her father explaining that Ralph had distinguished himself in her service); his new title better suited the romance narrative in which the pair seem to have cast themselves. The lovers were subsequently wed in secret sometime around January 1297, saying per verba de praesenti, or ‘by words in the present tense’, the vows that solemnized their union. No priests or witnesses were needed to legitimate a medieval marriage if both parties were unrelated and free from encumbrances. Declaring, ‘I, Joanna, Countess of Gloucester and Hereford, daughter of the king, take you, Sir Ralph de Monthermer, as my husband’, was all she needed to bind him, legally and indissolubly, to her.10

  As simple as these words might have been to utter, Joanna’s secret remarriage was a gesture of breathtaking bravado. She was risking everything she had; her actions contravened her vow to the king not to remarry without his consent, they disregarded whatever plans she must have expected her father would make for a second diplomatic marriage, and they threatened him with humiliation on an international stage – Edward would have to revoke his offer to Amadeus and admit he could not control his daughter. Unavoidably, Joanna knew she would eventually face the king’s wrath, and yet she followed through, willing to endure the possibility that she would lose her estate. Her actions were possibly more calculated – by choosing a lower-born man she felt she could control she would avoid being subordinate to another noble husband; however, this would require forgiveness from her father, which she could not guarantee. She may, too, have been determined to avoid the fate that seemed to claim her sisters, one-by-one: exiled from England through royal duty, to live in the realm of a foreign husband, far from home and friends. If Joanna was determined to beat the system that had sent Eleanora and now Margaret away, and that would in time also push Elizabeth out of England, she would need to break the rules that conventionally governed remarriage.