Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  After the men were called up, the estates were resettled in a manner that displays a mix of emotional and practical response. Since Joanna’s eldest child and heir, Gilbert, was only sixteen at the time of his mother’s death, he was unable to perform the homage required to possess the great Clare estates. The Clare lands therefore required a custodian. The king granted Joanna’s ever-impoverished sister, Mary, possession of two manors from the estate for the duration of her nephew’s minority, an influx of cash over five years that was clearly intended to help the nun pay off her spiralling debts and learn to live within more constrained means. Edward may also have hoped the transfer would encourage Mary to often remember her sister in prayer; as a virgin dedicated to Christ, Mary’s prayers would have been seen to have special value in speeding her sister’s soul to heaven. Ralph, Joanna’s widower – by this time freed from the siege at Ayr Castle – was entrusted with many of the remaining lands, including all those in Glamorgan, whose men he had captained at Carlisle. Ralph was probably chosen as a trustworthy guardian of his stepson’s estate: since his own children would not inherit the Clare estate unless all of Gilbert’s children were dead, and as he had been stepfather to young Gilbert from the age of five, he was perhaps more likely than other noblemen to guard the estate without seeking to exploit its long-term potential for short-term gain. But his continued possession of parts of the country’s largest estate served another purpose for King Edward: Ralph, who had no significant patrimony of his own, needed money to buy a new estate, or else the king’s own grandchildren (Joanna’s Monthermer children) would be cast into obscurity. Though Ralph had been granted the Earldom of Atholl the year before, King Edward now sought to restore that title and associated lands to the son of the previous earl, who swore fealty in Scotland to the English Crown. A deal was struck in which Ralph surrendered his Scottish earldom for five thousand pounds cash, paid by its new holder, plus an estimated additional five thousand from the Clare estate during Gilbert’s minority. The king directed the custodians of the castles at Cardiff, Caerphilly, Newport and Caerleon, Usk, Neath, Llantrissant, and Kenfig to release them to Ralph’s men, and forgave his son-in-law any outstanding debts owed by Joanna or Gilbert. Together, these sums were intended to provide Ralph with enough money to purchase a new estate that would produce an income of one thousand marks, or about six hundred and seventy pounds, which he could pass to his and Joanna’s children. These negotiations were among the last that King Edward led.7

  Late in June, while her father enriched her pockets with her late sister’s manors, Mary was staying at Northampton Castle with Marguerite and her children. The castle was a favourite of the queen, well-defended with its curtain walls and forbidding keep, and nestled along a meandering river in a landscape that hid little from view. The fortress had also been enhanced by Edward’s parents with a comfortable queen’s suite that included lower and upper chambers and a private chapel, and therefore amply accommodated Marguerite as well as the royal nursery. Mary’s visit was probably timed to coincide with that of her brother Prince Edward, who arrived around 16 June as he lingered in the south after Joanna’s funeral, seemingly dreading his return northwards to Carlisle and the disappointed father whose banishment of Gaveston remained bitter to the prince. Mary’s appearance at Northampton offered her brother opportunities for reassurance as well as a chance to discuss the loss of their sister. Her death was not to be the last grief they shared that summer.

  The prince could not delay rejoining his father forever, despite his good excuse of spending time with his stepmother and siblings but, after her brother’s departure, Mary remained with Marguerite and her young children. The queen’s eldest son, Thomas, had just celebrated his seventh birthday and was soon to move into a new phase of his education, taught by noblemen and male scholars focused on forging a future lord steeped in the culture of chivalry, with military training paramount, rather than the women in his family who had provided his earliest lessons in reading and arithmetic. His brother, Edmund, not yet six, would soon follow, while their baby sister, Eleanor, who had only just turned one, was probably expected to remain within the royal nursery for several more years, before gradually joining court, as her elder half-sisters had done. But the lives of the youngest royal children were about to be upended: in the first days of July, a messenger arrived from the north, with the news (already several days old) that the king’s acute illness had returned and that his men feared his end was near. On learning this news, Mary, Marguerite, and the two young princes set out from Northampton on the fifth, on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and Dover. The party progressed at a pace that must have challenged the children, bumping along inside a carriage or riding pillion with their nurses over long days in which they covered over forty miles. They stopped first before the great shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury, especially revered by the royal family, in part out of lingering guilt at the role their forefather Henry II had played in the archbishop’s murder. They then moved on to Dover Priory and the shrine of Thomas Hale, the elderly monk killed by French sailors during a brief invasion in 1295. After making offerings and desperate, pleading prayers, the royal women turned back. It was only on the return journey that another messenger finally caught up with them. Their prayers had been too late: King Edward was dead, having expired on the seventh, as his daughter and wife sped south. Fiercely determined to the last, he had died at Burgh by Sands, a few miles north-west of Carlisle, during one last attempt to reach Scotland, in a futile effort to quash rumours that he was already dead.8

  The king’s household and his treasury kept his death secret until Prince Edward had arrived in Carlisle to receive the homage of the realm’s principal magnates on 18 July – and Mary only learned the news so soon after the event because she was with her stepmother when the messenger sent to inform the queen arrived. Marguerite was distraught, and most likely exhausted from their now-futile pilgrimage. Unable to continue riding at the gruelling pace they had maintained for more than a week, she ordered that her sons should quickly return to Northampton Castle – she may have felt anxious about their safety following their father’s death. The queen continued to travel more slowly in the same direction, but her stepdaughter Mary turned instead south-west, making her own way back to Amesbury, where she arrived as late as 25 July.

  No record survives of the reactions of the king’s other daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, to the news of their father’s death, which likely only reached them in late July. The emotional blow would have been greatest for Elizabeth, who had spent most time as an adult in the company of her father and his second wife. After her return from Holland in 1300, Elizabeth seems to have considered court her primary home, even after her marriage to Humphrey de Bohun: the only lengthy periods in which she lived apart from her father were the months of confinement around the birth of her or Marguerite’s children, and the few campaigns in Scotland that the women did not accompany. The death of her father would have truly devastated Elizabeth, but for Margaret, the more affecting loss had occurred many years earlier, when she stood with the king at Ipswich before her departure to Brabant and he gifted her a gold ring for remembrance. Though she had visited the English court at Ghent during the failed campaign in 1297 and continued to trade messages with her family back in England, Margaret had not been present with her other siblings to plan and worry during their father’s decline. She had not come to love the stepmother who shared her name, or the young siblings whose future seemed suddenly in jeopardy. She had not witnessed the great feasts, or the fights between their father and the brother whom she last saw when he was aged twelve, had not sheltered through cold winters with the English armies in Scotland when horses died for lack of fodder, or shared the fear with her sisters as their husbands rode into battle under the banner of their own dynasty. By 1307 Margaret had long been on the periphery of her family’s emotional existence, isolated considerably more than she could have anticipated after Eleanora’s early death and Elizabeth’s departure
from Holland.

  What she nevertheless shared with her surviving sisters on the death of their father, was the threat of diminished status. Each woman had enjoyed special privileges well into adulthood that derived from her filial bond – as ‘daughters of the king’, Elizabeth, Mary, and Margaret had received exceptional loans and grants of lands, titles, and wardships from a father willing to prioritize the comfort of his children. Under their brother, despite the clear efforts his sisters made to cultivate strong relationships with him, these advantages could not be guaranteed, especially as Prince Edward had already, in seeking to enrich his favourite friends, demonstrated a clear disregard for his family. While their father lived, each woman could rely on gaining an audience with the king and on interceding successfully on behalf of friends, abbesses, and merchants of Holland or Brabant, or rewarding faithful servants by requesting grants of royal office. This special access made the king’s daughters even more influential than they would have been by right of their noble husbands’ statuses – and for Mary, it was the sole guarantor of her exceptional freedoms. Another important element of Mary and Elizabeth’s influence with the king was the friendship they formed with Queen Marguerite, who appears often in charters and letters joining in the requests for clemency or for advancement made by her stepdaughters. The court of Prince Edward included no analogous female presence, and although the prince was betrothed to marry Marguerite’s young niece, Isabella of France, she was only twelve and unlikely any time soon to supplant in her husband’s affections the young gallants whose opinions shaped his judgments. And history did not favour lasting influence for the sisters of English kings: their father’s own sisters had died shortly after his succession to the throne, and while King Edward initially remained close to the brothers-in-law, nieces, and nephews left by his two sisters, the Scottish branch died out and the relationship with his sister’s family in Brittany soured during the war with France in the 1290s.

  As his daughters were coming to terms with their father’s death and the impact it would have on their lives, his body made its way slowly south. From mid-August until late October, the king’s body rested inside Waltham Abbey in Essex, almost overlooked by the serene gaze of a statue at the crossroads depicting his first wife, whose own remains had stopped there overnight seventeen years before. On 27 October, before his widow and six of his surviving children – including Mary and Elizabeth – King Edward was interred in a tomb next to his father near the centre of Westminster Abbey, after a funeral ceremony led by his old friend Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham. For Elizabeth, the ceremony would have conjured memories of her mother’s funeral, and her eyes probably flicked more than once to the golden queen who lay atop the tall chest opposite her father’s grave. But this funeral also held an important distinction from that of their mother; with Edward’s burial, they mourned not only the loss of their father, but of the central figure around which their lives had revolved.

  None of the children who saw the king to his grave had been alive when their father was crowned in the same space thirty-five years earlier, but each had lived their entire life surrounded by the aura of Edward’s kingship. To his contemporaries – subjects, magnates, and family members – the dead king was close to an ideal ruler, a man whose mastery of chivalric virtues might be compared with that of King Arthur – courageous and strong, loyal to his followers, and faithful to the Church. He had cultivated this image throughout his reign, performing the role of a king as he understood it from the many examples provided to him by romance and epic poetry, by saints’ lives and the Old Testament, and constructing at every opportunity tangible parallels with an ancient, united Britain, from the reburial of Arthur and the construction of Caernarfon Castle, to the Round Table at Winchester and the vows proclaimed at his Feast of the Swans. His daughters, having grown up inhabiting roles within this performance – at which their mother, Eleanor of Castile, had also particularly excelled – had long been adept at performing the part of ‘daughters of the King of England’, presiding in splendid gowns and jewels at major spectacles, piously offering prayers and votives at important shrines, frequently by their father’s side. Their public identity – and very likely their self-concept – was constantly being forged and reinforced as children of the monarch, through their participation in the rituals of kingship. After King Edward’s funeral, they would need to learn to play new parts.

  XVIII

  Another Coronation

  1308

  BOULOGNE, WESTMINSTER

  Near the middle of January 1308, Margaret, Duchess of Brabant left Brussels with a large retinue, bound for the ancient port city of Boulogne-sur-Mer on the French coast. With her was Jan, her husband of seventeen years, and likely also her seven-year-old son, the future duke. On their arrival in Boulogne, Margaret and Jan were installed in a house within the city walls, while the bulk of her household joined the growing crowds in the brilliantly coloured tented encampment that was fast springing up outside the city. Despite her age of thirty-three and the many years she had spent living among European courtiers, the duchess can hardly have failed to feel a growing sense of excitement when, on 23 January, news arrived that the English king had at last landed at nearby Wissant and would be in Boulogne the following day. For the first time in eight years, Margaret was to see a member of her own family – her brother, Edward. If she was disappointed that her surviving sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, had not joined the English delegation accompanying their brother to be married, she at least had the promise of seeing them at Edward’s coronation at Westminster the following month. After more than a decade abroad, Margaret was finally going home – but first, Boulogne and the royal wedding. In the eleven years since she had departed England for Brabant, the twelve-year-old little brother she remembered had become a man, who was now to be king. He had travelled to be married to a French princess, further strengthening the always-uneasy peace that had existed between England and France since their father married Marguerite in 1299 – a peace that Margaret must especially have prized, located as Brabant was, so close to French territory and influence.

  Crossing the English Channel in the dead of winter made for an unpredictable journey, and Edward of Caernarfon, the not-yet-anointed King of England, was late to arrive for his wedding to the twelve-year-old Princess Isabella. He sailed from Dover on the twenty-second after a week awaiting the right winds. The company of lords that travelled with him included his brother-in-law, Humphrey de Bohun, and his niece’s husband, John de Warenne. They had been among the first to be shocked when the new king had unexpectedly and controversially delivered the regency of England to Piers Gaveston in his absence. Among Edward’s first acts after his father’s death had been to recall Piers from exile and to elevate him to the prestigious Earldom of Cornwall, a noble title normally held by a junior member of the royal family. The earldom had been intended by his father to pass to one of Marguerite’s sons, the new king’s young half-brothers, and the dowager queen was mortified to find her son’s estate so carelessly given away. Compounding this insensitivity, within one week of his father’s funeral, Edward further secured his favourite’s position by bringing Piers within the royal family itself, by arranging for him to marry the fourteen-year-old, recently orphaned Margaret de Clare (Joanna’s second-eldest daughter) at Berkhamsted Castle in Hertfordshire, which was also gifted to the groom. By giving away his niece, despite the plans her mother had already made for her marriage to the heir of Ulster (her younger sister, Elizabeth, was substituted in that match), Edward ensured that Piers’ heirs would have royal blood – a notion that scandalized the nobility and would have horrified his father.1

  Elizabeth attended the wedding at Berkhamsted, where she took the opportunity to appeal to her brother for his help in her continuing battle to access her promised dower from the County of Holland. Many of her nieces and nephews accompanied their aunt to Margaret and Piers’ wedding, and they were likely also present at the tournament that followed it at Wallingford, s
taged by Edward to celebrate his friend’s ennoblement and entry into the heart of the royal family; Piers led a band of mostly obscure young knights to victory over the more established earls including Humphrey de Bohun, further fuelling their dislike of him. If, however, late in 1307, Elizabeth had concerns about linking her young niece Margaret’s fate to that of Piers Gaveston, neither she nor her husband appear to have voiced them. That autumn, Edward was confident enough in the unquestioning loyalty of his ‘dearest sisters’ Elizabeth and Mary to reconfirm their right to own all the lands they had held during their father’s life, and Humphrey was among the new king’s closest circle of advisors.2

  When Edward and his entourage arrived at Boulogne, they settled into lodgings near Notre Dame, the enormous church that for centuries dominated the city. Named for a miraculous statue of the Virgin Mary that had purportedly been discovered floating mysteriously offshore on an unmanned boat in the seventh century, the medieval church would be pulled down after the French Revolution and reconstructed as a neoclassical basilica. All that survives from the medieval period is an unusually long Romanesque crypt with stout pillars holding up a low ceiling shaped by round archways, but above this heavy underground space had been a delicate Gothic nave and choir with soaring stained-glass windows that cast bright, jewel-coloured light onto those within. On 25 January, that light would have reflected off dozens of gem-encrusted crowns and golden headdresses, as a magnificent assemblage of royalty and nobles from across Europe gathered in their embroidered silks and sumptuous velvet cloaks to witness the union between the royal families of England and France. Aside from the groom, the company included four additional kings: Philippe le Bel, the bride’s father and King of France; her eldest brother Louis, already King of Navarre through his deceased mother; Charles II of Sicily, a cousin of both bride and groom; and Albert von Habsburg, King of the Romans and brother of the ill-fated Prince Hartman, to whom Joanna had been betrothed in childhood. There were also three queens (including Marguerite, the groom’s stepmother, who was also aunt to the bride), and scores of dukes and duchesses such as Jan and Margaret, counts and countesses from France and Germany, English earls, and assorted political allies and distant cousins drawn from noble families across the continent.