by Lisa Hilton
Preparations were made that summer for Eleanor’s marriage to Reginald IS, Count of Gueldres and Zutphen, and Philippa had the pleasure of welcoming her mother, Countess Jeanne, who was instrumental in negotiating the betrothal. Edward staged tournaments for the entertainment of his guests at Dartmouth, Stepney and Cheapside, where a wooden tower was built to accommodate the royal party and Edward and his retinue appeared in exciting ‘Tartar’ costumes, with fur cloaks and tall hats. Unfortunately the ‘sensible’ proportions of the Flemish ladies proved too much for the tower, which collapsed. Eleanor set off to join her bridegroom at Nijmegen after Christmas at Eltham, where Edward settled her dowry of 15,000 pounds and presented her with a gold cup and her trousseau. She had a green bed, six gold altar cloths, accoutrements for her private chapel, a furred robe, a wedding outfit of cloth-of-gold and crimson, Spanish leather shoes, sugar, rice, raisins, figs and pepper and an up-to-the-minute purple chariot with a waxed-cloth rain hood. In spite of these splendid celebrations and accoutrements Eleanor’s marriage was troubled. Her husband disliked her and, after she had given him two children, tried to get an annulment by claiming she had leprosy. She refuted this charge in some style by riding into court wearing the skimpiest of shifts to display her healthy body, and Reginald was obliged to return to her.
Between 1332 and 1337 Philippa’slife was dominated by babies and Scots. Edward had always resented the ‘shameful peace’ of the treaty of Northampton, and chose to ignore the alliance Isabella had forged through the marriage of his sister Joan with David of Scotland. David had become king, aged four, in 1329, and neither Edward nor his mother attended the children’s joint coronation at Scone Abbey in 1331 (Edward could hardly appear as he persisted in refusing to give back the Stone). Edward now began to question the treaty, suggesting that he had only agreed to it under duress, and that he had been too young to understand what was happening. He decided to support the campaign of Edward Balliol, the son of John Balliol, deposed by his grandfather Edward I as King in 1296, to regain the crown. Balliol and his English troops defeated the Scots at Duppin Moor in August 1332, and the next July Edward won a great victory at Halidon Hill. Balliol succeeded in having himself crowned as Joan and David fled to France, where they were received by Philip VI, remaining there until 1341.
Philippa accompanied Edward to Northumbria in 1332, staying at Bamburgh, twenty miles from the front, and, since Edward had moved the government temporarily to York, was able to remain in the north until the end of the following year. As Edward was besieging Berwick, Philippa found herself under attack by the Earl of Douglas in an attempt to draw the English King back. Edward coolly waited until Berwick fell before returning to rescue his wife. After Halidon, where Edward’s brother John of Eltham also commanded, Philippa began to make her way south for her next lying-in, and Joan was born at Woodstock in February 1334. Soon after the birth, Philippa returned north to York, but this time she took her three children with her. During the Berwick campaign mismanagement in their household had run up a debt of 500 pounds and she had been obliged to ask Edward to meet it. Edward was no miser, indeed he was extravagant when it came to display, but one has the sense, looking at the accounts of Philippa’s dealings, that he resented what he saw as dreary, petty expenses, mundane matters such as food and travel.
The royal family remained at York, with Philippa making excursions to visit Newcastle-on-Tyne and Carlisle before moving down to Norfolk for the summer. Philippa was always a great traveller, and Edward’s Scottish campaign was an opportunity for her to become more familiar with the north than her predecessors, whose progresses had been mainly confined to the south and west. Another son, William, was born at Hatfield, but he lived only a short time and was buried at York minster the following spring. A little girl, Blanche of the Tower, survived for only a few minutes after her birth, and these two losses were followed by that of Philippa’s father, Count William, in 1337. This period, then, was a very sad one, and the Count’s death additionally meant that funds from Hainault dried up and Philippa was burdened with money worries.
A letter in the Madox collection concerning a debt of queens-gold on the estate of one Sir Richard de Cressiwil shows that Philippa tried to balance the prosecution of her own rights with the display of charity that was one of the obligations of queenship. She asked that the executors pause so that ‘we and our Council may be able to be advised which of the said writs are to be put into execution for our profit and which of them to cease for the relief of our people, to save our conscience’. Yet she was also keen to manage her lands efficiently in order to obtain the funds she needed, and in 1337, and again a decade later, she was involved in a number of lawsuits: ‘Many a case was fought on her behalf against certain bold poachers who had broken into her parks, felled her trees, fished in her fisheries, hunted her deer, carried away royal goods and wreck of sea, conies [rabbits], pheasants and partridges from her warrens, depastured her grass and crops and assaulted her servants.5 Philipp a’s willingness to go to law made her unpopular, and people vented their feelings on her lands and goods. A particular source of resentment was purveyance, whereby her household representatives were sent out to obtain provisions for the Queen as she moved between her residences. Such goods were meant to be paid for, at ‘cost’ price, but even these debts often went unsettled for years. In April 1348, two carts carrying provisions for the Queen, forty pounds-worth of wine and twelve horses, were impounded and held for so long that the wine spoiled and the horses starved. Richard Hegham, appointed to purvey oats and hay for her stables at Nottingham, was the victim of a vicious assault. Philippa’s promptness in collecting her rents even led to the disgruntled vicar of Lincoln, John le Tailleur, publishing a sarcastic libel against ‘the horror and scandal’ of the King’s ‘dearest consort’, for which he was sent to prison.
Why was Philippa constantly short of money? There were two contributory factors. The first was the vast debts Edward III was running up to finance the first phase of what later became known as the Hundred Years War; the second was the dispute over her rights, and those of her sisters, to Hainault. Philippa followed the example of Eleanor of Castile in keeping her connections with her native country relatively discreet. Unlike Eleanor of Provence, she did not attract criticism for her promotion of foreigners, indeed her household has been described as old-fashioned and offered few opportunities for ambitious courtiers to make their fortunes. Most of Philippa’s Hainault servants had left after her wedding, but Wantelet de Maunay, who had been her page at Valenciennes, stayed to become her carver, and later, anglicised as Sir Walter Manny, was admitted to the order of the Garter. Among the Queen’s ladies, Emma Priour, the wife ofPhilippa’s valet, Amiciua de Gaveston, Mabel Fitz-Waryne, Elena de Maule and Joan de Carne were Hainaulters, and were later given grants of land for their long service. However, Philippa did resemble Eleanor of Provence in that she made use of the connections of her natal family on the international stage. The most important of these was Louis of Bavaria, King of the Germans and since 1328 Holy Roman Emperor, who had married her sister Margaret in 1324.
Edward’s interest in pursuing the Scottish campaign was diverted in 1337 when Philip VI confiscated Gascony The duchy, which has been wonderfully described as the Jarndyce and Jarndyce of the fourteenth century, was the inevitable pressure point for yet another outbreak of hostilities after Philip’s disputed succession to the French crown in 1328. Under the newly established Salic law, the crown could not be transmitted through a female claimant, but Edward felt his own rights, as the son of the last surviving child of Philip IV, were superior to those of a mere cousin. In October 1337, he declared war on France. The states that made up the Low Countries were concerned about encroachments from the aggressive French King and united in an alliance with England against France. Two features of this alliance were Edward’s receipt of the honour of vicar of the Holy Roman Empire from his brother-in-law and the betrothal of four-year-old Princess Joan to Frederick, heir to Duke Otho o
f Austria.
In July 1338, Edward and Philippa set off for Antwerp. Anxious to make a splendid impression, Edward provided over 500 pounds-worth of ‘saddles, silver vases, purses, silk and jewels’ for the expedition, as well as the poignant provision of a ‘pallet for the Lady Joan the King’s daughter on her passage to foreign parts in a ship’. Their arrival in Flanders was not auspicious. Their host was so anxious to prepare a grand feast that the overtaxed kitchens caught fire, the house burned down and the royal family was obliged to retreat to the nearby abbey of St Michael, where Philippa stayed to await the birth of another child (Lionel, born on 29 November) while Edward set off for the crowning ceremony in Cologne.
Philippa said goodbye to little Joan at Herenthals. Her daughter was to travel with Lord John de Montgomery and her governess, Lady Isabella de la Mote. Philippa was in correspondence with her sister Margaret, the Empress, who would superintend the journey to Austria, where Joan was to be educated at her fiancé’s court. Despite Philippa’s frequent letters, Margaret was a negligent guardian and it was reported that Joan sometimes did not even have enough to eat. Philippa was so concerned that she eventually asked Edward to write to Montgomery and have him remove Joan from the imperial household. No sooner had Joan arrived at the ducal court than Otho died, leaving his own son and Joan in the care of his pro-French brother. At this point, the business was given up and Joan was returned to her parents, setting off in April 1340 with two chariots and twelve horses, for which Philippa had to pay out £132 IOS and rejoining her mother at Ghent. Philippa had remained between Antwerp and Cologne for this period, and had given birth to another son, John of Ghent (Gaunt) in December 1339. Her children Edward and Isabella had sailed from England to join their parents, an anxious crossing as the French had been raiding the English coast. The convoy was indeed attacked on one occasion, but the children’s escort of 800 men succeeded in keeping the French at bay.
By 1340, the alliance between Edward and the Low Countries was beginning to disintegrate. Although the English King had borrowed heavily from his Italian bankers, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, to subsidise his supporters, funds were running short. Edward’s ‘great crown’ was at the pawn shop, and Philippa’s was pledged for 5,500 florins to Anthony Bache, a merchant of Cologne. By the time she returned to England, the King’s payments to her household were over 7,000 pounds in arrears. Another worry was the French invasion of Hainault in 1340. In June, the English overpowered the French fleet in a naval battle off Sluys, but Edward was frustrated by Philip’s refusal to engage on land. After an inconclusive siege at Tournai, a nine-months truce was agreed and Edward was free to go home to his family.
Edward was never a faithful husband to Philippa, but then, infidelities were expected of kings. They were nevertheless a close couple, and Edward was happy to display the unity and contentment of his family life. On his arrival back at the Tower in 1341, Edward gave a party for the children, with music by one of his own minstrels, Godelan. Predictably, the result of too much paternal spoiling was a visit from the royal physician, Master Philip. A picture of the daily life of Edward’s children is to be found in the accounts for Isabella and Joan, who shared a household after Joan’s return from her unsuccessful betrothal. She had two maids, Isabella, the elder sister, had three, and they each had a lady-in-waiting, Alexia de la Mote for Isabella and Lonota de Werthyngpole for Joan, as well as a chaplain apiece. Both girls were given a penny a day to offer in church. They had a joint waiting staff, and a minstrel, Gerard de Gay, who received a present of a winter coat in 1339, as did Isabella’s valet, Thomas de Bastenthwaite. Whatever Philippa’s money worries, she was determined that her daughters live in befitting style, sending them green robes edged with fur from Ghent and authorising the making of new clothes and scarlet stockings for Church feasts, as well as party dresses for a tournament, which took eighteen men nine days to sew with eleven ounces of gold leaf. The girls slept together in a bed hung with green silk and velvet and ate off silver plate. Philippa also bought gold thread and silk for Joan, who enjoyed needlework. Outdoor entertainments included trips to ‘the gardens’ across the river, for which the girls personally rewarded John the bargeman and his sailors. It sounds a charming existence, and soon there were more children to share it. Edmund was born in 1341, and Lionel was betrothed to Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster in her own right, who joined the royal nursery to be brought up with her toddling husband. Philippa gave birth to anotherprincess, Mary, in 1343 at Waltham, followed by Margaret in 1346, soon after her husband had embarked for France with young Edward, now created Prince of Wales, and a huge invasion force.
The size of this army does much tohighlight the uncertainty of medieval battle estimates, for though Edward was said to have set off with over 30,000 men, by the time he had taken Caen and pitched camp near a windmill at Crécy in August, a good number of them appear to have been mislaid, as there were only 8,000 to 12,000 left to face the forces of the French and their Genoese mercenaries. Crécy was the first in a series of legendary victories which assured Edward’s reputation as the ideal medieval king and quietened, if they did not entirely silence, the disconcerted mutterings of a Parliament overburdened by the cost of war. The unwieldy, laden French destriers were undone by what Froissart records as a ‘snow’ of arrows from Edward’s Welsh longbowmen and, despite the disparity in numbers, many of the French nobility were killed. Edward oversaw the battle from the ‘little windmill hill’6 but his sixteen-year-old son won his spurs that day as a commander of one of the three battle divisions.
Crécy was also the occasion on which Edward adopted his only French motto, the famous ‘Honi soil qui mal y pense’. The sources and use of this motto, and its associated chivalric order, the Garter, give an insight into Edward’s skill at blending the arts and their relationship with the peacetime ethos of the tournament to encourage the coherent mentality among his magnates that was one of the great achievements of his reign. The origin of the order of the Garter is a matter of both legend and scholarly dispute, but it must be understood as ‘an integral part of Edward’s Norman campaign from its inception, not merely a retrospective (that is, postCrecy) commemoration of its success.7 As has been noted ‘Edward shared his wife’s pleasure in romances. An order for 1335 shows 100 marks being paid to a nun, Isabella de Lancaster, ‘for a book of romances purchased for the King’s use, ‘8 Philippa’s New Year gift to her husband in 1333 was a silver cup, ewer and basin, the ewer decorated with figures of Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, King Arthur and Lancelot, a combination indicating the easy familiarity of Edward and his household with the vocabulary and characters of romance and chanson de geste. The use of romance figures as exemplars for conduct plays chimed with the ornate ‘ludi costumes worn for court festivities. Those for the family Christmas spent at Guildford after Crécy featured swan, peacock and dragon headdresses with matching wings, and at various times lions, elephants, a Saracen’s head, griffons and even flower pots were on show. The exact significance of these costumes is uncertain, but their elaborate theatricality links them to the themes of disguises and mottos displayed in tournaments. Edward’s sense of costume as a unifying device of loyalty had been seen in the aketon jackets devised for the Mortimer coup; now, with the order of the Garter, he was able to give fuller expression to his romance-driven ideal of knighthood.
The device of the garter was first used by the twenty-four companion knights in April 1349 (since Queen Philippa is found offering cloth-of-gold at the tomb of Hugh de Courtenay, one of the original member so in September that year, 1349 is the most likely date for the order’s foundation, though the College of St George at Windsor was established in 1348, and dating is further confused by Froissart’s conflation of the ‘Round Table’ tournament at Windsor in 1344 with the Garter ceremonies). The year is significant in that it casts doubt on one legend of the order’s origin: Edward’s relationship with Catherine Montague, Countess of Salisbury. Two Continental sources, The Hainault Chronicle and that of
Jean le Bel, claim that Edward had seen the Countess in 1341 while on campaign in Scotland, invited the Salisburys to a tournament in 1342 and then, when she resisted his advances, raped her, causing a bitter quarrel with the Earl. The Garter legend glosses the story politely by suggesting that the Countess’s garter slipped while she danced with the King at Eltham, provoking the bon mot that became the order’s motto. The tale has been definitively dismissed as no more than an attempt to blacken Edward’s character during the French campaigns, but its persistence is notable in that it links sexual misconduct with political illegitimacy — in this case, Edward’s claim to France. It might be considered, though, that Edward’s choice of ‘Honi soit’ as an announcement of the purity of his motivations in the conquest of France did have some relation to sexual misdemeanours, not his own, but his mother’s. Edward chose to deliver his political message, uniquely, in French. ‘Shame on he who thinks evil of it’ is an assertion of his rights to France in spite of Isabella’s adultery, a resonance to which he and his romance-steeped courtiers, whose sensibilities had been educated into romance symbolism well before the foundation of the Garter, would have been highly alert. In this respect, it is notable that Queen Isabella herself was never admitted as a Lady companion of the Garter, though Philippa, her daughters Isabella and Mary and all subsequent medieval queens were to be received.
During Edward’s absence on the Crécy campaign, six-year-old Lionel had been installed as Guardian of the Realm under the supervision of Philippa and her council. King David of Scotland had sneaked back into his country five years before and, taking advantage of Edward’s absence, he sacked York with the encouragement of his ally the King of France. Philippa immediately set off for Durham, where she ordered a muster of English troops and received a challenge from David. According to Holinshed, the Queen rode among her men on a white horse, the same colour as her husband’s at Crécy, to rally the men, then returned to Durham to await news of the battle ofNeville’s Cross. The Scots were thoroughly routed, and David was captured by John Copeland, but despite Philippa’s demands — Copeland had displeased her by carrying off her prisoner’ — he refused to surrender the defeated Scots King to anyone but Edward himself. Philippa wrote to Edward at Calais, and the King summoned Copeland, knighted him and gave him a large grant of lands, after which he was persuaded to give up his hostage. (One wonders, given Philippa’s reputation for being close with money, whether Copeland feared she might demur in the matter of David’s ransom.) Philippa took charge of David at York, and he was received at the Tower of London bY Lionel, perching solemnly on his father’s throne.
