Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  Their years abroad did not bring the success Edward had hoped for. Most of the Crusade’s leaders, including his kingly French uncle, died before arriving in the Holy Land, and the army was thus too small to stand a chance at re-establishing a Christian kingdom of Jerusalem. Either way, with the responsibility of kingship thrust upon him by his father’s death, Edward was forced to return home. However, of their three children, only six-year-old Henry and his five-year-old sister Eleanora awaited their parents on shore when the royal fleet docked at Dover late in the summer of 1274; John, their eldest son and heir, had died two years previously.

  The queen had given birth to three more children during their years away, two of whom survived. There was a daughter three years younger than Eleanora: Joanna, called ‘of Acre’ in recognition of her birth at the port city that was the only surviving vestige of a Christian kingdom in the Holy Land, and also a son, Alphonso, named in honour of his Castilian grandfather. Born in Gascony during the homeward journey, Alphonso was only eight months old when he arrived in England with his parents. His sister Joanna had been left in the care of her maternal grandmother, Jeanne de Dammartin, dowager queen of Castile. Queen Jeanne, who now lived as a widow in the northern French county of Ponthieu, which she held by her own right, persuaded her homeward-bound crusader daughter to leave the toddler princess with her for company. Alone of her siblings, therefore, Joanna’s earliest memories were of France rather than England, and her unique early experiences abroad may account for some of the exceptional independence that she would demonstrate in later life.

  This is the forgotten story of Eleanora and Joanna, and of their three sisters who would be born after their father became king – Margaret, Mary, and Elizabeth. Thirteen years separated the births of the eldest and youngest royal daughters – an age gap that ensured the women had distinct experiences and that the relationships that forged their adult personalities and priorities were distinct. What they shared with each other and their brothers were the ways in which their childhoods and – to a remarkable extent – their adult lives were shaped by their father’s ambition to build an empire. This is a chronicle of the high Middle Ages with a difference: it is the story of what happened just off-centre from the king around whom court coalesced, among his own children; the story of how these royal women lived and learned how to have an impact on their world; the story of five real princesses in the age of chivalry. And, like all chronicles of a reign, it begins with a coronation.1

  I

  Coronation

  1274

  LONDON, GUILDFORD

  The capital was adorned like Camelot, with yards of cloth billowing down and providing splashes of riotous colour against the grime of ancient buildings. A fanfare welcomed Edward I, known as ‘Longshanks’ for his great height, and his wife, the Castilian princess Eleanor, as they triumphantly entered London for their coronation. The date was 18 August 1274. Edward and Eleanor had been abroad on Crusade for four years, and their arrival in London was the culmination of a grand, sixteen-day ceremonial progression inland from their landing site at Dover. According to the chronicler Thomas Wykes, ‘neither tongue nor pen would suffice to describe the ornament of the city and its citizens, arrayed without regard for expenditure in honour of the king’s majesty’. Through the tangle of narrow city streets, the king and his entourage wound slowly westwards, maximizing their visibility to the throngs of Londoners who were seeking a glimpse of their new monarch. The parade ended at the royal palace at Westminster to the west of the city, before the great abbey church, which had been rebuilt at tremendous expense in the fashionable French Gothic style by Edward’s father, and where Edward and Eleanor were to be crowned the following day. More than a generation had passed since the last coronation – of Edward’s mother Eleanor of Provence, in 1236 – and the crowning of the returning crusader king promised to be a joyous spectacle.1

  The preparations for the coronation had begun the previous winter. Kitchens had been erected on the outskirts of the sprawling palace to prepare a coronation feast for thousands. Across the country, orders were placed for provisions, with sheriffs from twelve counties charged with supplying extraordinary numbers of animals for the roast meats. Over twenty thousand capons and hens, five hundred oxen and the same number of sheep and swine for roasting on the day were sought from as far away as Somerset and Gloucestershire, while over three hundred bacon pigs had already been required at Windsor by Easter for slaughter and salting. Bishops, abbots, and priors throughout England were required to provide as many swans, peacocks, cranes, rabbits, and kid goats as they could capture from their estates. Immense quantities of fish, including lampreys, eels, pike, and salmon, were also secured: special laws were brought in to keep prices down for the king’s buyers by explicitly forbidding fishmongers from buying stock in bulk in an effort to profit from the exceptional demand. Alongside these provisions, new stables and lodges – many of them temporary constructions – were built to house the hundreds of knights who would journey to see their new king crowned.2

  The pageant reached its climax the following day, the Sunday after the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, when the young royal couple walked from Westminster Palace to the abbey through a newly erected covered walkway that criss-crossed the square separating the two. In London, the conduit at Cheapside, which normally channelled fresh water into the city, ran with wine to slake the thirst of revellers on the hot summer day. Back at Westminster, amid the fluttering heraldic banners and golden robes that glinted in the sun, tensions ran high as leading nobles and churchmen clashed over the rights to perform ceremonial roles in the coronation. The king’s own brother Edmund – known as Crouchback, or ‘crossed-back’, for his participation in the Crusade, an activity already commonly associated with knights wearing cross-embroidered tunics – seems to have either boycotted the ceremony itself or been prohibited from attending, after he was refused the right he claimed to carry Curtana, the great sword of state said to have belonged to the legendary hero Tristan. Instead, the sword was carried before the king by one of his most troublesome subjects (and his future son-in-law), Gilbert, the Earl of Gloucester. The Archbishop of York was also aggrieved. His request to preside at the coronation had been denied, as punishment for the indiscretion of publicly carrying his archiepiscopal crozier, or staff of office, outside of his own province – a clear and deliberate attempt to claim precedence over his rival the Archbishop of Canterbury, who conducted the ceremony alone.3

  Waiting for the new young king inside the abbey were the retinues of the chief lords of his realm, his mother the dowager queen Eleanor of Provence, and his two sisters, Margaret and Beatrice, along with their husbands, the King of Scotland and the Duke of Brittany. Before this assembly, Edward spoke the traditional vows sworn by all English kings and added one of his own: to restore royal authority to what it had been prior to the wars that had blighted his father’s reign. His reign would consciously hark back to heroic kings of the past – to Richard the Lionheart, to King Arthur, even to the legendary biblical heroes of the Old Testament – and from its beginning, Edward was intent on projecting greatness. He wore robes of rich silk and, by his side, Eleanor shone with jewels as she was crowned queen. They emerged anointed with chrism – the perfumed holy oil used for consecrating buildings, ordaining priests, and crowning monarchs. During the feast that followed, the King of Scotland and six of the leading English earls presented themselves to Edward on horseback, each with as many as one hundred knights, before each dismounted and set his horse free, a prize for anyone bold enough to catch it. Though this account was likely embellished in the telling, such a flamboyant gesture is illustrative both of the extravagance of the coronation itself and of the important role that chivalric motifs – here, largesse, or noble generosity – played in presenting a new king to his subjects.4

  Three small children were also present at the celebrations, clothed in new robes made especially for the occasion: the new king’s eldest children, H
enry and Eleanora, and their cousin, John, a younger son of the Duke of Brittany. Nothing is recorded of their experience of this theatre of chivalry. Had they been older, they might have been able to absorb lessons about public display and the performance of regality, but the dizzying spectacle of such an immense gathering and the excitement of close proximity to their usually distant parents must have been overwhelming, and rather exhausting, for children between the ages of five and seven. They were accustomed to living relatively quietly, travelling regularly between royal residences at Guildford, Kempton, and Windsor, with a household consisting of their nurses, some orphaned noble children who lived under the guardianship of the king, and roughly two dozen servants – tailors, cooks, stewards, and pages.

  After the coronation, however, they did not remain at court to become better acquainted with their parents, returning instead to live with their grandmother at her dower house that abutted the walls of Guildford Castle. Rebuilt and enlarged following a fire fifteen years before, the complex there was ideally suited to house the royal nursery. Separate chamber blocks had been built off its central aisled hall, not only for the old king and queen but also for Edward and his young bride. This latter suite of rooms – warmed by fireplaces and wainscoting, lit by large glass windows, and painted green and white throughout – probably housed young Henry and Eleanora. Here the royal children were indulged with sweets made from sugars flavoured with rose and violet, with exotic foods such as pomegranates, quinces, prized cailowe pears, and almonds – a favourite of Eleanora, for whom they were often specially purchased – and with unusual spices including sandalwood and peony seeds. Regular orders were made for milk, but also for beer and ‘new wine’, for the children and their nurses to drink, as water was not considered safe for drinking. They were kept warm in winter with furred robes fastened with silver buttons and silken cords, caps trimmed with peacock feathers, and gloves that bore the arms of England sewn into the thumb. But alongside this luxury, the children were also educated in the special perils faced by the rich: a prominent mural in the hall at Guildford illustrated the parable of Dives and Lazarus, in which the wealthy Dives is condemned to hell for refusing to give charity to the poor.5

  On their return to Guildford after the coronation, the children no doubt expected to fall back into their usual habits, perhaps with the addition of regular visits to their parents in London. But after only a few weeks, young Henry fell ill. Despite the superior diet that saw the children of the aristocracy grow taller than many of their undernourished base-born contemporaries, medieval medicine offered few proven treatments for acute or recurring illness, and roughly one-third of noble children died before their fifth birthdays. It seems that boys were in slightly more danger than girls (though whether this was because they were more prone to sickness or to injury in the hazard-strewn interiors and landscape of medieval England is unclear). Contemporary belief certainly held that boys were particularly in danger of sickness, as evidenced by the comment attributed to the eleven-year-old Henry III – ‘I am a boy and thus easily fall ill’. Edward and Eleanor’s first son, John, had died aged five three years earlier, while their parents were still on Crusade. But young girls could also be in danger: his older sisters, Katherine and Joan, had died even younger.6

  Little Henry seems to have always been sickly. Frequent references in the surviving children’s household accounts confirm that medicines (most particularly diaboriginat, which was probably a medicinal draught made from the herb borage) were purchased on his behalf, and that the boy was frequently measured so that candles the same height as him could be offered at prominent shrines to win the goodwill of saints and priests who might pray for his good health. The autumn before his parents’ return from Crusade, a group of three holy widows had been paid to pray in vigil for the prince; now, as his condition worsened, thirteen such women were retained for the same purpose, while two royal physicians were summoned to treat the sickly child, who died towards the end of October 1274. But, though the king and queen were only a short distance away from their dying son’s bedside, they did not travel to Guildford. Perhaps they expected the boy to rally once again, or perhaps they did not wish to disturb the calm intimacy of his final days with the disruption that would unavoidably accompany a royal visit.

  Henry’s body was transferred to Westminster to be interred alongside his older siblings, but his heart was removed before his body left Guildford and was buried locally in the Franciscan priory that his grieving grandmother had established to house it. This was common practice among the English aristocracy at the time – burying a part of the body at multiple sites ensured that more than one set of clerics would then pray for the deceased’s soul. Henry though, was the first of his siblings to be memorialized in this way, which was perhaps evidence of the especially close relationship the dowager queen had developed with her grandchildren. Despite this, Eleanora and her cousin John did not remain at Guildford after Henry’s death. Instead, their household was reorganized around her infant brother, Alphonso, not yet a year old and now heir to the English throne.

  As a royal daughter in the thirteenth century, Eleanora would not have expected to inherit her father’s kingdom; even if Alphonso followed their other siblings to an early grave, there would probably be other brothers. By the time of Edward’s accession, the right of primogeniture – the system of inheritance that would govern the descent of noble estates in England until the late twentieth century – was becoming formally established. Under this system, the entirety of a man’s estate at his death passed intact to his eldest surviving son without the option to share it between multiple surviving sons. Primogeniture is not the most advantageous system for descendants as a group, since the majority will be utterly excluded from inheritance. It is, however, advantageous to rulers, who can focus their energy on a small number of lords leading great estates rather than on a larger body of lesser nobles that becomes larger and poorer with each successive generation. Primogeniture was not native to England: prior to the Norman Conquest, an estate was commonly divided between the landowner’s sons or was held in a form of joint ownership by them, without preference for the eldest. But, in the centuries after the Conquest, feudalism tied land ownership ever more closely to military service conducted on behalf of a lord, and partitioning estates became increasingly problematic: when a lord died, someone had to take his place within the king’s army, requiring an expensive warhorse, armour and weaponry, and years of training. Should his estate be divided, none of his sons might have the means to afford these knightly trappings. As a result, over time, repeatedly dividing estates would impede the ability of the king to mount an army. The Norman kings of England favoured primogeniture, and they were strong enough rulers to force the practice on their new subjects.

  For women, however, the new system was not markedly different from what had come before. Domesday Book makes reference to a small number of women who held land directly from the king, implying limited instances of female landownership under the Anglo-Saxons. But, in practice, women in Anglo-Saxon England inherited only when they had no living brothers. Where women did inherit, estates were commonly divided equally among sisters and – unlike in France, say, where Salic law excluded women from inheriting at all – this continued in Edward’s reign, and beyond.

  The celebrations that had long accompanied the birth of a male heir were heightened after the adoption of primogeniture, because the arrival of a healthy boy ensured stability for the estate in the next generation. When the citizens of London reconciled with Henry III in July 1266, following their support for Simon de Montfort during the baronial revolt of the preceding years, they marked the occasion by declaring a holiday and organizing a procession in honour of the birth of the king’s first grandson and heir: Eleanora’s oldest brother, John. Birth notices for first-born sons of the king are common in chronicle sources that often overlooked the arrival of younger princes and princesses. Thus, for example, the Winchester annalist recorded the 1266 birth a
nd 1271 death of Prince John, but was silent on the short lives of the prince’s elder sisters or younger brother, whose births did not offer the same promises of stable succession. Messengers bringing news of the successful birth of a son were often better rewarded than those bringing news of the safe delivery of daughters: King Edward, for instance, would later give forty marks to the messenger who brought him the news of a grandson (the son of his daughter Joanna), some eight times the amount he gave the messenger who brought news of a granddaughter. The status of noblewomen was also often elevated by the successful delivery of a healthy boy, as Eleanor of Castile learned following the birth of her second son, when her household was granted the same Christmas robes as her mother-in-law, the queen.7

  The extra excitement surrounding the births of princes was hardly surprising: the birth of a prince in medieval England was of prime importance not only to his parents, but to the nation. If female heirs were considered problematic under primogeniture – often dividing estates and, almost without exception, transferring lands permanently to another family – then leaving a female heir to a kingdom in the absence of sons could lead to civil war. Only one woman during the medieval period tried to succeed her father to the crown of England: Matilda, widow of the Holy Roman Emperor, wife of the Count of Anjou, and the only surviving child of Henry I. In addition to Matilda, Henry had one legitimate son – the pampered William Adelin – as well as nearly two dozen illegitimate children. But William drowned, along with two of his half-siblings, when the fastest vessel in the king’s fleet, the White Ship, foundered after crashing into rocks on the way back to England from Normandy. A possible cause of the accident was that the crew and most of the passengers had been drinking heavily, and pressured the captain to attempt to overtake the king’s own ship that had set out from Barfleur hours earlier. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the ageing king married again, to the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Low Countries count, but though the pair were constantly together, no children were forthcoming, and Henry recalled his daughter, Matilda, to England. At Christmas in 1126, the king asked his leading nobles to pledge their support for Matilda’s succession. When her cousin Stephen of Blois seized the throne in the immediate aftermath of the king’s death, Matilda’s adherents declared war. But, even after capturing Stephen, Matilda was never crowned; she was chased away from a planned coronation at Westminster Abbey by a crowd of angry Londoners who were loyal to Stephen. The lengthy power struggle between the rivals is remembered, tellingly, as The Anarchy. Even after Stephen’s death Matilda was unable to claim the throne for herself, merely becoming the conduit through which it passed to her son, Henry II.