Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  As the daughter of a king who had been constantly at war, Eleanora would have known intuitively that women who sought to rule were heavily disadvantaged in a society which still required its kings to be warriors, ready to defend their position on the battlefield, clad in heavy chain-mail, and wielding a sword. This was not a hypothetical requirement, but a very practical one. During the baronial revolt of the 1260s, Eleanora’s grandfather Henry III had been captured on the field at the Battle of Lewes and forced into a settlement with his enemies that effectively ceded control of the kingdom and offered his heir Prince Edward as a hostage. Edward had fled his jailors in a daring escape – while out hunting under the watch of a guard, he had teasingly tested how fast each horse could ride before mounting the only fresh steed, digging in his heels and absconding into the forest. The prince out-rode his pursuers’ tired horses and was soon leading an army that succeeded in defeating – and killing – Simon de Montfort and the other rebel barons, restoring royal power.

  Another disadvantage faced by a medieval woman seeking to rule as sovereign queen – a challenge she would have shared with Tudor queens like Elizabeth I – was the common perception that her marriage would automatically make her husband King of England and force a potentially explosive shift in the country’s power structures. Married women were legally forbidden to own land: any estates held by an heiress passed to her husband on their marriage and were from then on entirely under his command. Throughout Matilda’s bid for the crown, she insisted that she acted as a feme sole, a ‘woman acting alone’, but this did not allay the fear that her husband Geoffrey might seek to exploit his proximity to the throne for the benefit of his own realm, the great county of Anjou, or even to become the true power behind the throne.

  Henry III, capitalizing on similar fears that England might be lost to foreign rule, imprisoned his cousin Eleanor of Brittany, his only serious potential rival to the throne, for her entire adult life. Her brother Arthur had almost certainly been murdered by King John, Henry’s father, because he and his sister had a stronger claim to the throne, being the children of John’s older brother. Eleanor escaped her brother’s fate, but could never be free. As a child, she had been betrothed to a French prince, who on marrying her might have claimed the right to rule England. Instead, she was kept under close guard in apartments at royal castles throughout the country, comfortable but secure from rescue by her loyal supporters or her French fiancé.

  Henry’s granddaughter Eleanora knew, therefore, that she had little hope of becoming a ruling Queen of England. Her infant brother Alphonso would grow up to be a warrior and she would not; his marriage would bring lands and money into the English royal estate, while hers would take them from it. She might have been her father’s eldest child – his primogenita – but she was not his heir. She remained, however, heir to Alphonso, the mewling baby who was now the focus of her own household, and she had the strong advantage over him of having already lived through the most dangerous early years of life. In the years that followed, Eleanora spent her time getting to know the parents who had been gone so long, and learning about their plans for her future.

  II

  Betrothal

  1278–82

  GLASTONBURY, GUILDFORD

  Daylight was fading on the Tuesday following Easter in 1278, while eight-year-old Eleanora, her parents, and a group of monks, looked on as stone slabs were moved aside from the floor of the Lady Chapel in the great abbey church at Glastonbury. Soon the only light was that which flickered from candles, glinting off the gilded moons and sunbursts painted on the chapel walls, casting shadows deep into recesses from where sculpted figures watched silently over the scene. Slowly, two coffins decorated with heraldic images came into view. Once the earth that had covered them had been cleared, the lids of the coffins were pried open, revealing, in one, a crowned skeleton described as ‘beautiful’ by one of the monks present, the chronicler Adam of Damerham. In the other coffin were the bones of a very tall man, whose death wound on the left side of his skull remained visible, near the crown that had slid off his head after burial. In the dying light, another tall man, who might well have felt a sense of connection to the bones which had been thus disturbed, stood over the coffins: Edward, King of England, was looking at the remains of his greatest predecessor, King Arthur, and his queen, Guinevere.

  Eleanora’s father was in the middle of his first campaign to conquer Wales, and was beginning to recognize that stories of the fabled king might be used to support his own ambition to rule over all of Britain. Edward’s interest in Arthur may have begun while he was away during the Crusades, when he commissioned the romance Meliadus about the hero Tristan’s father, from Rustichello da Pisa, an Italian writer best known for co-authoring Marco Polo’s Travels. The Arthurian legend was perfectly constructed for chivalric society, a ‘magic mirror’ in which the historical past was enriched by sorcery, softened by contemporary religious piety, and populated by virtuous warriors, against a backdrop of imperial majesty. Edward and Queen Eleanor had travelled with their daughter to Glastonbury, a place which blended in the imagination throughout the medieval period with the mysterious Isle of Avalon, where Arthur was conveyed after being mortally wounded in battle. They were there to see the bodies that had been discovered in the churchyard almost a century before, and which had been reburied in the Lady Chapel, the only structure that survived the disastrous fire that swept away the old church and monastic buildings in 1184. By the 1270s, restoration work on the church had progressed to the point where a new vaulted choir in the Gothic style was nearly complete, and, as King Edward gazed on these almost holy relics of British kingship, he determined that they would not simply be reinterred as they had been found. The following day, therefore, with great ceremony, Edward and Eleanor wrapped the ancient monarchs’ bones in precious burial cloths and replaced them inside their coffins, which were sealed with molten lead to protect the bones from grave robbers and reburied before the high altar, the most prestigious burial site in the church and a site usually reserved for the shrines of saints.

  The entire sequence was a piece of extraordinary theatricality – from the original ‘discovery’ of the grave in the churchyard (at a time when the abbey most desperately needed income from a thriving pilgrimage trade) to the carefully concocted heraldic devices that decorated the ‘ancient’ coffins (even though such devices only came into use in the twelfth century). Someone, almost certainly the monks of Glastonbury Abbey, aimed to provide physical evidence for what had previously only been a local legend, turning the increasingly popular Arthurian stories into a reliable income stream that would support the abbey’s rebuilding works. It cannot be known whether Edward and Eleanor, or their daughter Eleanora, were in on the ruse. But the royal couple embraced the opportunity to write themselves into the story of Arthur and his glittering court, and at this and other occasions later that year, their eldest daughter had many opportunities to witness and practise the solemnity with which her parents carried out these ritual performances, thus forging her understanding of the role that majesty and memory might play in legitimizing power.

  By the spring of 1278, Eleanora, then eight years old, had left the royal nursery. Her brother Alphonso was four, and he had been joined in the children’s household by two younger sisters (Margaret, aged three, and the infant Berengaria, who would die later that spring). Another princess, who was born around the start of that year, did not live long enough for her name to be recorded. But their sister, Joanna of Acre, was still absent from the royal nursery. Joanna was just three years Eleanora’s junior, but she had lived at the court of their maternal grandmother in Ponthieu in northern France since their parents’ return from the Crusade. As a result, there were no close siblings to accompany Eleanora when she broke away from the nursery to form an independent household. Following the customs of the court, she, too, now perambulated the countryside: seeing, and being seen, by subjects across England at royal estates and religious sites, and frequen
tly visiting her parents or her father’s mother, to whom she remained close. Eleanora’s new household included over a dozen personal servants – she had a chamberlain, various grooms and cooks, female attendants to keep her company, and many sumpterers whose task it was to transport all the equipment and furnishings necessary for this group from castle to palace to hunting lodge and back, in a never-ending parade.

  The books of the Royal Wardrobe that survive from the time detail the entire expenditure of the royal household at this period – including food and clothing, payments to servants, alms offered at shrines, and expenses related to their constant travel. They also tell us that Eleanora joined her parents over Easter and during their stay in Glastonbury. It was an opportune time for the princess to begin wrestling with the frequently contradictory role played by royal women and to learn the art of queenship from her mother. Eleanor, a Castilian princess, had married the heir to the throne of England at the age of twelve; Eleanora, her English daughter, was by this time already betrothed to Alfonso, the heir to Castile’s great rival, the kingdom of Aragon.1

  There was nothing unique about Eleanora’s marriage partner being chosen before she could even know what marriage was. From a modern viewpoint, the idea of negotiating the marriage of such young children seems both absurd and cruel, but to think this is to misunderstand both the purpose and process of a dynastic match. Marriages between the children of medieval monarchs rarely had anything to do with romance. The marriage of every royal child – both female and male – was a political opportunity of the highest order, a rare and limited chance to cement an alliance of critical importance by forging a lasting bond of blood. The marriage of daughters, and most particularly daughters such as Eleanora who might one day inherit the throne, was a choice to be made with the utmost consideration, as each marriage would bring a foreign ruler into the very heart of the English royal family. The matches Edward sought for his children conformed to a long-lasting pattern for medieval English royalty, whose spouses most commonly came from the wealthier Iberian kingdoms, the various provinces that make up modern-day France, and the prosperous mercantile counties of the Low Countries, with occasional forays into Germany in the hopes of forging a connection with the Holy Roman Emperor. The fathers of these brides and bridegrooms were those considered by the English king to be his peers, men able to be of use – whether economically or militarily – to England. Any number of dangers, from illness to battle wounds, falls from horses, and house fires, could easily kill a medieval man in his prime, and kings like Edward frequently died long before their children had reached maturity. He had already barely survived an attempted assassination while in the Holy Land, and though the heavily romanticized version of this story in which Queen Eleanor saved her husband by devotedly sucking out the poison from his wound is apocryphal, the tale does highlight the precariousness of life on the throne. Edward’s own marriage to Eleanor had been arranged when he was still a child. As his father Henry had explained, ‘friendship between princes can be obtained in no more fitting manner than by the link of conjugal troth’. Kings like Edward were therefore keen to make use of the diplomatic opportunities afforded by their children’s marriages while they were still alive.2

  In addition to planning Eleanora’s marriage, her parents also initiated plans to wed their younger children to the heirs of rulers with whom England was seeking alliance. Early in 1278, little Margaret was formally betrothed to Jan, the heir of the wealthy Duke of Brabant – a famous jouster whose feats of prowess delighted crowds at tournaments across northern Europe. Although the princess and her fiancé were only three years old at the time, the machinery of their union was already fully developed: the betrothal required written confirmation from Jan’s father, mother, and brother, as well as from diverse Brabaçon nobles and the mayors of all the principal cities of the duchy. Equivalent guarantees on the side of the English must also have been sent to Brussels. The terms of the agreement underlined the fact that dynastic marriages such as this were unions of families, not merely of individuals – explicitly stating that, should either child die before the marriage could take place, a younger sibling was to be substituted and the match proceed. The Brabaçon drew up a lengthy summary of the castles, villages, farms, rents, forests, and even windmills at dozens of sites across the duchy that would, decades in the future, be assigned to the duchess Margaret to provide her dower, or widow’s portion, after Jan’s death (when the bulk of the estate would pass to their heir). The dower estate negotiated for Margaret was estimated to earn an annual income in excess of 3,100 livres Tournois (or nearly 800 pounds sterling), enough to provide an income for twenty knightly households at that time. In return for this future security, Edward was required to provide his daughter’s dowry. These normally took the form of cash paid in instalments by the bride’s family to the groom’s, though great heiresses could also bring large estates to their husbands as dowry (as did Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose immensely wealthy Duchy of Aquitaine tempted not one but two kings to marry her). Margaret’s own mother, Eleanor of Castile, brought no dowry, but her marriage had brought assurances from the Castilian court that they would cease to press their claim against England for the Duchy of Gascony, so providing security against a potentially crippling financial risk to the English crown.3

  The financial burden of dynastic marriages was so substantial that the English monarchs of the twelfth century offloaded the huge cost associated with their daughters’ marriages onto their subjects by imposing special taxes that were unpopular enough for Clause 15 of Magna Carta to take specific aim at them:

  We will not concede to anyone to levy aid from his free men, except to ransom himself, to make his eldest son a knight and to marry his eldest daughter one time, and for these exceptions the aid must be reasonable.*

  Edward was therefore only able to raise a tax to support the dowry of one of his daughters; to secure Margaret’s marriage he was forced to either find the dowry of fifty thousand livres Tournois himself – or to borrow it from money lenders. The first twenty thousand was payable immediately and three subsequent instalments of ten thousand had to be settled before the marriage took place. It was an immense sum – the equivalent of over six million pounds in today’s money; it was also roughly one-third of Edward’s annual income, an outlay that even the king would find difficult to fund from his own resources.4

  The king and queen also made plans for the marriage of their second-eldest daughter Joanna, who remained in the shadows at her grandmother’s court in Ponthieu. Probably in deference to Joanna’s proximity to the throne of England, the union her parents hoped to arrange was just as grand as that promised to Eleanora – its fulfilment would see Joanna enthroned as queen or even empress. In 1276, an English embassy arrived at the court of Rudolf I, Count of Habsburg in the south-western German Duchy of Swabia. Rudolf had three years earlier been elected King of the Romans by the other German princes, in effect making him heir to the Holy Roman Emperor, and Edward saw the advantage in uniting his daughter with so powerful a prince. The embassy was therefore charged with negotiating a marriage between Joanna and thirteen-year-old Prince Hartman, Rudolf’s second son. In addition to agreeing on the matters of dower and dowry, the ambassadors were asked to obtain assurances that, should Rudolf succeed as Holy Roman Emperor, he would nominate Hartman to become King of the Romans – and thus, Joanna might one day be Holy Roman Empress. By May 1278, the formalities were agreed: a dowry of ten thousand marks sterling (or nearly seven thousand pounds) was arranged, while the castles, towns, and valleys that would provide eleven thousand silver marks for Joanna’s dower were confirmed by Rudolf, Hartman, and his elder brother Albert. The wedding itself was to take place soon afterwards in England. In June, six-year-old Joanna was recalled from Ponthieu and preparations began to welcome Hartman to London, where he would live while his bride grew to maturity. By November, however, Edward was forced to write again to Rudolf, asking when Hartman would arrive in England. The following spring he l
earned that unrest within Germany deprived Rudolf of the guard necessary to secure his son’s transit to England; Edward accordingly arranged safe conduct and a military escort for his prospective son-in-law through the lands of his ally the Count of Guelders, and provided an English fleet to transport him to England from Dordrecht in Holland, and yet still he did not come.5

  Though royal children were frequently betrothed during their early childhood, the marriages themselves were usually delayed, and the notion that medieval princesses like Eleanora, Joanna, and Margaret were child-brides can be swiftly discounted. Canon law, which governed marriage, decreed the minimum age at which women and men could be married as twelve and fourteen respectively, and further set down that any underage marriages must be ratified once the children had matured to ensure that their marriage was a free choice. There was no need for post-facto ratifications in the cases of Eleanora and her younger sisters, who were, on average, almost eighteen when they first married. And nor were the sisters particularly exceptional in this regard: if their ages at first marriage are compared with those of the royal daughters who came after them, up to and including the sisters of Henry VIII in the early sixteenth century, the average age for first marriage was nearly seventeen. Far from being child-brides, they were, in fact, the same age as young women who can legally marry in Britain today. In fact, only one princess in the medieval period, Blanche of Lancaster, was married below canonical age – in the early fifteenth century, when her father Henry IV was searching desperately for allies to secure his position as a usurper, she was, at the age of ten, married to another German prince with imperial ambitions.6