Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  For eight days following the ceremony, guests were entertained at lavish feasts put on by the French and English kings, and opulent gifts were exchanged. During these days and the period of travelling that followed, Margaret met her stepmother Marguerite for the first time. A decade after she had last laid eyes on her father, meeting his grieving widow and the sons in whose faces she could most likely perceive their shared lineage, may have emphasized to Margaret how distanced she was from her own family. Perhaps clinging to the familiar, the duchess spent time with her brother – it seems that the siblings laid down the foundation of a renewed friendship, as they continued to correspond on familiar terms, if infrequently, in the years that followed. Her private reaction to some of Edward’s more peculiar behaviours during the marriage celebrations – including his decision to send the luxurious wedding gifts from his new father-in-law to Piers back in England – is impossible to ascertain, but the bond of their shared past may have eased their reacquaintance, and the small Duchy of Brabant, for a time, kept a friend in the English king. Other guests at the wedding were more vocal in expressing a growing anxiety about the new king’s capacity to rule effectively: on 31 January, a group of English barons in attendance at Boulogne signed a charter that, among vague promises to deliver the people from oppression, warned Edward, on pain of excommunication, of the need to preserve the honour of the Crown. Though couched in protestations of loyalty to the new king, the agreement was a coded message that he should moderate his relationship with Piers.3

  When the wedding festivities had finally drawn to a close, Margaret and Jan joined a distinguished assortment of nobles who rode on poor winter roads to Wissant in a guard of honour to escort Edward and Isabella back to England for their joint coronation. Dozens of carts snaked north, carrying trunks full of the precious jewels and robes of kings, queens, princes, and dukes, not to mention the countless gold and silver vessels and yards of fine linens that comprised Princess Isabella’s trousseau. After an uneventful sea journey, the small fleet docked at Dover on 7 February. For Margaret, the scene may have conjured memories of the welcome party she and her siblings had made nineteen years before – bumping along the road from Langley in their freshly cushioned carriage – when their parents landed at Dover after three years in Gascony. The homecoming must have been bittersweet, given the inescapable knowledge that there could be no reunion with those she had been closest to in her childhood, in particular Eleanora and Joanna, the two sisters who for many years had been her constant companions. Margaret may have been emotional as she caught sight of the white cliffs from her ship, and the familiar surroundings and the sound of English chatter from the dockworkers once she had disembarked were further reminders that she was home. Her brother rushed ashore without ceremony, but when Margaret stepped foot on her native soil once again, she was met by her surviving sisters, Mary and Elizabeth.

  The nun and the countess had been summoned from their homes to be members of a select party of noble Englishwomen assigned to welcome Isabella, although the chance of a reunion with their sister Margaret may have enticed them to the port city in any event. Everyone hoped the new queen would form the same close bond with her husband’s family as her predecessor had done, but Elizabeth seems to have taken particular care to befriend Isabella. Perhaps she did so out of loyalty to her brother, but she also knew intimately from her years in Holland the anxieties that accompanied living as consort in a foreign court, recognizing more intuitively than most the need the young queen would have for allies at court.4

  As soon as Isabella arrived in England, it became clear to all that she would need friends, for, while the landing at Dover was intended as the first, grand introduction to her new life as Queen of England, she was upstaged from the start: on disembarking, her husband flew to Piers who stood waiting on shore, embracing and kissing him before the whole party, and utterly ignoring his bride, who was forced to present herself to the waiting English nobles unaccompanied. For Elizabeth, perhaps more than for any other witness, her brother’s behaviour will have portended danger; Edward’s reckless admiration for his friend was increasingly unconstrained, and increasingly reminiscent of Johan of Holland’s unthinking, and ultimately disastrous, promotion of the ‘traitor’ Borsselen. If she felt anxious and personally embarrassed at the way her brother treated his young wife, she soon learned the situation was even worse than she might have guessed. Her husband Humphrey had been among the signatories of the Boulogne agreement and had begun to formally position himself against Piers. Humphrey’s participation in this, and his subsequent efforts to chasten Edward into rethinking his partiality to Piers, is strong evidence of the nobility’s extreme concern at the king’s behaviour.

  There is no way to know definitively what part Elizabeth played in her husband’s plans to align with other lords against her brother’s favourite, but she is likely to have at least supported Humphrey’s position. Her experiences in Holland will have given her a unique awareness of the dangers inherent in a young ruler falling too closely under the influence of a favoured courtier, and she may well have voiced these concerns to Humphrey – particularly, perhaps, during the antagonistic aftermath of the tournament at Wallingford. Of her reaction to Piers being vested as Regent of England during her brother’s time on the continent, we can surmise that, at the very least, it closely matched the perspective set down by the contemporary author of a Life of Edward II: ‘What an astonishing thing, he who was lately an exile and outcast from England has now been made governor and keeper of the same land!’ It is easy to imagine that Elizabeth and her two surviving sisters would have felt aghast to see such power in the hands of a man who had been so clearly distrusted by their father. Yet they also knew their personal interests – and those of their orphaned nieces and nephews – remained best-served with their brother as an ally, and hesitated to confront him directly and risk being cast out of the inner circle. It seemed much better to try to influence his behaviour from the position of loyal support, which is precisely how the Boulogne agreement was phrased. Unfortunately, the new king’s unerring favouritism was not easily deterred.5

  On the morning of 25 February, Margaret, Mary, and Elizabeth were once more inside the vast abbey church at Westminster. With them were Marguerite and their youngest half-siblings, their Clare nieces and nephew, and Joanna of Bar, as well as Isabella’s French relatives and the assembled nobility of England, positioned at the front of crowds so thick that the very fabric of the church was strained: at some point during the day, a wall near the high altar collapsed under the pressure of the crowd, crushing a knightly spectator who had come to glimpse his king anointed and crowned. Outside, workmen had been building for weeks, constructing more than a dozen temporary dining halls among the palace courtyards and abbey green, where the crowds would feast after the ceremony. Forty ovens blazed while preparing courses of lampreys and beef, boar and fish, to be washed down by one thousand tuns of fine wine that had been imported from Bordeaux – red, white, and spiced – which would flow from a specially built fountain installed in the central courtyard.6

  Inside, after more than a week of delays, the Bishop of Winchester stood before the great altar and shrine of Edward the Confessor, awaiting the arrival of a procession bearing the ancient royal regalia of England. Elizabeth’s husband Humphrey was near the head of the parade, carrying the royal sceptre that signified the king’s authority, while other magnates followed, parading the gilt spurs, royal rod, and ceremonial swords including Curtana – the sword that Gilbert de Clare had carried at Edward I’s coronation, causing the king’s brother such anguish that he skipped that ceremony. Other lords carried the robes that would be draped over Edward and Isabella as they were crowned. According to a contemporary account, Humphrey and his peers were dressed uniformly in robes of cloth-of-gold as they processed, declaring their status as leading lords of the realm. Elizabeth most likely also wore cloth-of-gold, in affirmation of her status. All was in order as the spectacle unfurled. However, w
hen Piers Gaveston came into view, walking immediately in front of the king and queen dressed in purple silk peppered with pearls, ‘so decorated [that] he more resembled the god Mars than a mortal’, she and the whole assembly of nobles were mortified. Instantly, the abbey quivered with the collective rage of noblemen and -women, incensed at the unabashed impudence of the royal favourite to wear to the coronation a colour preserved by tradition exclusively for the king. Worse, as he approached the altar, onlookers saw that Piers – a Gascon of only middling nobility – carried the crown of England, the most sacred piece of royal regalia and the very symbol of monarchy itself, on a cushion.

  When Edward and Isabella arrived before the high altar, flanked by the opulent tombs of his parents, the pair offered gold to the abbey as a gift of thanks, and the ceremony of kingship began. Already angered at Piers’ brazen entrance, the assembled nobles were stunned to witness the recently exiled foreign favourite awarded the prized duty of fastening the new king’s right spur (the left one was affixed by the bride’s uncle, a prince of France). Their resentment swelled even further when, after the king had given his oath and been anointed and enthroned, with long lines of nobles kneeling to perform their homage, Piers grasped Curtana, before processing out of the church. It was an honour almost too great to bear for the nobles whose superior lineage and usual ceremonial precedence was being overlooked – at least one earl had to be restrained by his peers from challenging Piers inside the church itself – but further insult was heaped upon injury at the coronation banquet. The royal party processed to the great aisled hall of the palace, where, to mark his coronation, Edward stood on a dais and knighted several young noblemen, including his nephew, Gilbert de Clare. The feast should have followed immediately, but the kitchens were thrown into chaos by the scale of their task and purported mismanagement by Piers, who had been assigned to oversee the event, and the food was long-delayed. As the guests grumbled from the hard wooden benches before still-empty trestle tables, they had ample time to cast their eyes over the rich new tapestries the king had ordered to hang from the walls, on which the royal arms of England were woven alongside those, not of his bride, but of Piers. The king was oblivious both to the anger of the magnates seated before him, and also to his new queen, whom he reportedly spent the feast ignoring while chatting merrily with Piers, to the consternation and rage of her watching uncles and brother. The guests ate late that night – the food arrived in the great hall cold and so poorly prepared as to have been basically inedible, long after sunset. When the nobles found time that evening and the next day to talk about the event, their almost uniform reaction was one of outrage. The French princes returned home aghast at the lack of courtesy shown to Isabella, and in a session of Parliament that began two days after the coronation, the English earls formulated a list of grievances against Piers that came to include a charge of treason, for alienating the king from his lords and rightful counsellors. Far from heeding the warning the earls had issued after his wedding in Boulogne, ‘the mad folly of the King of England’ gave Piers an ever-increasing and more dangerous level of influence; many of the most powerful lords decided in the days following the coronation that enough was enough.7

  Margaret and Jan were at the English court at least as late as 5 March, two days after the king had called a Parliamentary recess, in an effort to buy time to address the charges his lords were making against Piers. They therefore witnessed not only the embarrassing and uncourtly behaviour of her brother – behaviour which must have shocked a couple as dedicated as they were to upholding normative chivalric virtues – but also the violence of the English nobles’ reaction against it. In the days that followed, she said farewell to her three siblings, as well as the princely half-brothers she had just met, and departed back across the sea for Brabant. Though she lived for decades more, Margaret would never return to England, nor see any of her family again. Perhaps she was relieved to be set apart from the tumult that followed her brother’s coronation. Certainly, she had access via diplomatic messengers to the anxiety and ever-present threat of civil war or deposition that characterized the English court during Edward’s reign, and in 1311 her brother even imposed Piers Gaveston on Margaret and Jan’s hospitality during one of his periods of exile. The problems in England during these years may have been among the factors that persuaded Jan in 1312 to enact the Charter of Kortenberg, in which he established a ruling council of nobles and townsmen for Brabant to monitor his rule – an early, and seemingly voluntary, limit on his powers. Although Margaret’s name is not appended to the charter, her influence may have helped shape it, and she might have recognized in it a safeguard for Brabant, and for her own son and descendants against the difficulties faced by England under her brother. Perhaps she never went back home because she came to understand that the England of her youth – the court and culture of her father’s reign – had been supplanted.

  Mary also departed court in the weeks after the coronation, returning to her priory at Amesbury. After the consecutive deaths of her sister and father, she seems to have found solace from grief in the quiet, ordered life at Amesbury during this period, and only travelled to court to greet Isabella at Dover and for the coronation. Mary, like Margaret, was lucky in being able to step away from the politics of the English court at a time when civil war threatened. Their youngest sister was less fortunate; married to one of the leading English nobles, Elizabeth could not escape the outcome of their brother’s poor judgment, though a period of residency in Humphrey’s March lands in Wales suggests she tried. For her, the years that followed Edward’s coronation must have been exceedingly painful, a sharp reminder of her time in Holland and that for royal women like her, family relationships were inextricably bound to high politics. Humphrey, too, became increasingly disillusioned, and by the autumn of 1310 refused to accompany the king on campaign to Scotland out of hatred for Piers – a remarkable act of defiance for the Constable of England. He was also among those earls who condemned Piers to death at Warwick two years later, threatening to permanently rupture Elizabeth’s relationship with her brother. Her budding friendships with Joanna’s daughters – Margaret, married to Piers, and Eleanor, whose husband was among Piers’ rare defenders – were also compromised. And Marguerite, Elizabeth’s closest friend, retired to the life of a dowager at Marlborough, among rumours that she was conspiring with the French king.

  When Parliament gathered again near the end of April 1308, the English lords came armed for battle and demanded once more that Piers be banished. Edward’s favourite had not helped himself by bestowing on each earl a nickname so boldly insulting it is hard to see how even the king did not occasionally take offence: Gilbert de Clare, the king’s own nephew, was ‘a cuckold’s bird’, a clear reference to the illicit liaison between his mother and Ralph de Monthermer a decade earlier. The fact that the king tolerated Piers casting such aspersions against his own sister – the sister who had risen to his defence in his time of greatest need – indicates the degree to which his influence was unchecked. Yet, even though his own honour as well as his mother’s was being publicly impugned by Piers, young Gilbert de Clare, either restricted by his minority or anxious not to alienate his connection to the throne, struggled to oppose his uncle and brother-in-law directly, and declared himself neutral on the question of Piers’ treason. Elizabeth’s husband, Humphrey de Bohun, was less cowed – he was among those who openly called Piers a traitor and, by the spring of 1308, his wife must have longed for the stability and assurance that she had lost with her father. If she did, it was a sentiment that was widely shared.8

  A number of popular songs lamenting the death of the old king survive from late 1307 and early 1308. ‘Jerusalem, you have lost the flower of chivalry’, opined one Norman-French song probably sung among the upper strata of society. The songs also record the hopeful expectation of the English people that his son might prove a worthy heir: ‘The young Edward of England is anointed and crowned king / May God grant that he follow such couns
el, that the country be governed, and so to keep the crown’, and, in an English elegy:

  Nou is Edward of Carnarvan

  King of Engelond al aplyht,

  Got lete him ner be worse man

  Then is fader, ne lasse of myth . . .

  Eight months into his reign, the English nobility were deeply concerned that young Edward was turning out to be an unworthy successor to his father – one who kept rash counsel and appeared potentially unfit to govern – and already his crown was in danger of being lost. A contemporary cleric wrote that ‘very evil are the times in England now; and there are many who fear that worse times are still in store for us.’9