Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  Even when royal women were married young, most such unions would not normally be consummated until several years later. The number of contemporary manuscript copies of Mirror for Princes by Thomas Aquinas suggests that the text was in wide circulation during the later medieval period. In this treatise, Aquinas expounds on why women in particular should be safeguarded from premature sexual activity: even where a young woman had reached the age of menarche (her first period), conception at a young age would result in unhealthy or weak offspring and could harm her chances for successful delivery later on. (He also cautioned that early sexual experiences could lead to lechery and lasciviousness in later life.) Therefore, consummation should be delayed until a woman had reached eighteen, and a man twenty-one.

  Aquinas’s advice was largely heeded by the medieval English aristocracy, and only very rarely were children born to noblewomen under the age of fifteen. Mary de Bohun, the wife of Henry IV, bore a stillborn boy at the age of twelve but did not cohabit with her husband for several years afterwards; it was not until she was eighteen that she bore the future Henry V, who was followed in the subsequent eight years by five more healthy children. Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, nearly died giving birth to him aged thirteen, and the injuries she sustained during delivery left her unable to have any further children. In both cases, the early consummation of these women’s unions ensured that the particularly desirable marriages for their husbands – both women were great heiresses – could not be subsequently revoked. There is some evidence, too, to suggest that Edward I’s queen, Eleanor, may have given birth to a premature baby who died immediately, around seven months after their marriage, when she was only thirteen. No further children were born to the couple until she was nineteen, but her astonishing childbearing record later in life – she went on to bear fifteen children – indicates that the queen did not struggle with infertility. The pattern, instead, would suggest that the marriage was immediately consummated to ensure that it could not be annulled, and that, though Eleanor fell pregnant at once, the couple did not engage in regular sexual congress until she was eighteen. Her daughters waited even longer – the average age at which they gave birth for the first time was twenty-two, and only one, Joanna, had a baby before she was twenty.7

  On 15 February 1282, twelve-year-old Eleanora, long accustomed to travelling freely around the countryside, was staying, as she often did, with her grandmother in Guildford – her early childhood home, and the location of the nursery she had shared with her brother Henry and their cousin John of Brittany – when she sat down with a royal scribe to dictate the most important letter of her early life. The girl who described herself as ‘Eleanora, eldest daughter of the illustrious King of England’ had reached the age of consent to be married. Now she sought publicly to affirm by open letter her willingness to wed Alfonso, Crown Prince of Aragon, ‘a man of glory’. In the letter, she gave her own and her parents’ consent to two of her father’s emissaries to act ‘in our place and our name on the matter of the betrothal and marriage’, and to agree the terms for dower and dowry. ‘As we have no seal of our own’, the letter concluded – with the smallest flash of an adolescent’s annoyance shining across the centuries – ‘we have requested and affixed the seals of the most serene Lady Eleanor, by grace of God, Queen of England, our grandmother, and of the most venerable fathers in Christ, Lords Roger of London and John of Rochester, bishops.’8

  The letter is unique among the papers pertaining to the marriages of medieval royal daughters – Eleanora’s sisters were all silent throughout the process of arranging their matches, and only their brother (their father’s eventual heir, Edward II) would issue similar letters when negotiating his own marriage.9 Eleanora’s early independence seems to have engendered a precocious confidence in her. Far from being a passive pawn of her father’s diplomatic ambitions, she plainly wished to play an active role in the arrangements for her marriage. She did not merely acquiesce to her father’s wishes; she embraced the idea that she might become Queen of Aragon, the embodiment of the link between two nations. This should not surprise us. If the marriages of princesses were normally arranged for them, so were those of princes; like any royal child in the circumstances, Eleanora recognized that the marriage planned for her was prestigious and would place her at the centre of power and influence at a rival court, and that, in turn, would enable her to support the international ambitions of her family. If Eleanora demonstrated a greater propensity than her sisters to be so personally involved in sculpting her future, it may be that her parents encouraged their eldest daughter, who remained second in line to the English throne, to develop a keen interest in international diplomacy as well as a familiarity with statecraft. According to the Italian writer Francesco da Barberino, a contemporary of Eleanora’s, noblewomen should be educated because: ‘If it happens that she inherits lands she will be better able to rule them’; the king and queen were, it seems, educating their daughter and possible successor about the mechanisms through which she might rule.10

  Accompanying Eleanora’s letter was another from the king, which officially empowered his secretaries to negotiate the terms of his daughter’s marriage. A sense of the importance placed upon these negotiations can be gleaned by considering the rank of those assigned to carry out the work: the courtier and the bishop assigned to lead the delegation were accompanied by three other important members of the king’s household, including one of his companions on the Crusade and the Constable of the Tower of London. This elite party was expected to be abroad for up to a year, during which they were to display to foreign courts the wealth and cosmopolitan finesse of the English court, and Edward borrowed nearly a thousand pounds from Italian and English merchants to ensure that they would be able to do so. The embassy was a success, and by late summer in 1282 the terms were agreed. For her dower, Eleanora was granted towns in the Huesca region of Aragon, among them the ancient Frankish capital of Jaca, as well as – extraordinary to the modern reader – ‘the Jews and Muslims living within them now and in the future’ as her personal possessions; her dowry was agreed at forty thousand livres Tournois. At the feast of the Assumption, a member of the English embassy stood in Eleanora’s place opposite her young bridegroom Alfonso as proxy, and before two Spanish bishops affirmed by the necessary words the princess’s desire to wed the Spanish prince. Eleanora was now officially bound to the Prince of Aragon and destined to become a queen.11

  The bride herself remained in England. In his preliminary negotiations, her father had requested that, ‘if possible’, his daughter’s arrival in Aragon should be delayed until November 1283, by which time she would be fourteen. If that was not possible, they were to secure at least one year’s delay, because ‘the queen, her mother, and our dearest mother, will not sustain that she travel before then out of concern for the girl’. Eleanor of Castile and her mother-in-law, Eleanor of Provence, did not always agree, but both women had married and travelled to live in the foreign households of their husbands at young ages, and they were united in seeking to protect Eleanora and her sisters from the same fate. Recognizing, perhaps, the role of mothers in guiding such matters, the Aragonese deployed their own queen (and Alfonso’s mother) to plead for a shorter delay, but these pleas were rebuffed. For a time, a diplomatic impasse over the right to rule Sicily also threatened the match. This contention pitted Edward’s uncle Charles, King of Sicily, against a movement seeking to place Pedro of Aragon, Eleanora’s prospective father-in-law, on the throne. As the crisis progressed, both sides endeavoured to win Edward to their side, and the English king – caught between his allegiance to his uncle and the possibility of extending his son-in-law’s kingdom – spent much of the next decade embroiled in efforts to settle the matter. Throughout, Eleanora, though legally bound closer than ever to Alfonso, would remain in England.12

  Sometime early in 1282, the royal family had learned that Eleanora’s sister Joanna would also have no need to travel abroad for a wedding. Her betrothed, Princ
e Hartman, had drowned in the Rhine at Christmas time the previous year, when a boat in which he was travelling sank. His father wrote to Edward, expressing his sorrow and continued hopes for their alliance, but no suggestion was made that Hartman’s brother, Rudolf, might fill his brother’s place. The two sisters spent a great deal of time together and with their mother in these years, perfecting their educations and practising to one day become queens.13

  III

  Family

  1282–4

  RHUDDLAN, CAERNARFON

  The king’s second eldest daughter, Joanna, was a traveller from birth, born half a world away from England while her parents were on Crusade, and raised at her grandmother’s court in Ponthieu. The northern French county was centred around Abbeville, a port city that controlled the ships carrying woad seaward, down the River Somme from Amiens to the Low Countries where the pungent dyestuff would be used to colour that region’s famous tapestries a deep blue. While in Ponthieu, Joanna seems to have had early tuition in religion and mathematics from a Spanish cleric within the dowager queen’s household, and she also had a native governess, Edeline Papyot, who was responsible for educating her in the arts expected of a thirteenth-century princess – reading and recitation, embroidery and music, riding, falconry, and chess. In 1278, when Joanna’s betrothal to Prince Hartman seemed secure, she travelled to England, taking Edeline with her.1

  On her arrival, aged six, she initially joined her younger siblings Alphonso and Margaret in the royal nursery at Windsor, and in 1279 they were joined by a little sister, Mary. But Joanna was soon travelling around England in the same manner as her older sister Eleanora, attending at her mother’s court and going places on her own. In the summer of 1282, aged ten, she travelled with Eleanora and the queen to the frontier of Wales, where her father was engaged in his war against the last independent Welsh princes, the brothers Llywelyn and Dafydd ap Gruffydd. As the English forces marched west across the principality of Gwynedd, the king consolidated his gains through an extraordinarily ambitious and expensive campaign of building works. If power could be made manifest in medieval Europe, it did so in the form of castles. Already an elaborate construction programme had begun across northern Wales and by 1282 there were English castles at Flint, Denbigh, and Rhuddlan, the formidable might of England evident in the thickness of the walls.

  With the war far from won, the queen and her daughters took up residence in the frontier castle of Rhuddlan. There, in the barely completed castle – its gardens newly planted to the queen’s specifications and its fishpond freshly stocked – Eleanor gave birth to her final daughter, Elizabeth. To celebrate the successful birth, the king summoned dozens of minstrels from across Britain, who travelled to Rhuddlan to entertain the royal family. If Joanna had ever perceived a hint of danger in being so close to an active battlefront, the arrival of scores of musicians singing songs of romance may have allayed her fears. She seems to have enjoyed her time in the dramatic hilly landscape of the north Welsh coastal region, since she returned again to Rhuddlan a year later – in the late summer of 1283, by which time Llywelyn and Dafydd were both dead, the princess and her household were in residence at the castle, requiring a delivery of wheat to make their bread.2

  The household that accompanied the eleven-year-old Joanna back to Rhuddlan probably included most of those who appear three years later in wardrobe records that list a dozen servants chosen by the queen to look after her daughter. These men and women made up what Joanna called her familia (literally, her ‘family’) – it was an appropriate term for the collection of servants among whom the princess lived her day-to-day life. While we tend to think of families as bound by blood, Joanna’s familia were an even more constant presence in her life than her sisters or parents; travelling with her everywhere she went, they were witness to and confidant in more of her sorrows, frustrations, and joys than even her own blood relations. Their roles included making her food and clothing, maintaining and transporting the personal furnishings that moved with her, and protecting the household, its people, and goods from banditry, as they all moved slowly and unceasingly across the countryside. Like all noble households in medieval England, Joanna’s was overwhelmingly staffed with male servants and, with the exception of Edeline (who would remain with Joanna until her marriage), the princess would have relied on visits to her sisters or mother for most of her interactions with other women.3

  The most senior members of the princess’s household were her private tailor and personal cook (both of whom were named Robert), and, below them, was Reginald, the keeper of Joanna’s costly bed and table linens. These fabrics travelled with the princess, furnishing her chamber in castles across the country, and therefore a sumpterer (or transporter) named Hugh was required to pack and move them, as well as an outrider, whose job it was to ride ahead of the main procession and forewarn the permanent staff at each house of the princess’s impending arrival, so they could clean and provision the accommodation appropriately. A carter called James was responsible for transporting the heavy goods that made up Joanna’s own personal suite of furniture, the wardrobe of silken gowns, gold embroidered robes, and furred capes crafted by the tailor, and the cooking vessels, silver serving dishes, and costly spices like cloves and cumin that equipped her kitchen and table.4

  The shape of her household roughly mirrored the familia of Joanna’s sisters Eleanora and Margaret, though the eldest sister always retained more servants and more ladies, whether in deference to her seniority in age or proximity to the throne. Eight-year-old Margaret’s nurse Cecily Cleware, who had looked after the princess from soon after her birth and had previously been nurse to Eleanora, remained her principal companion. Peter Burdet, ‘squire of the king’s daughters’, nominally resided with Eleanora and seems to have overseen the older girls’ collective expenses, while royal wards, together with the children of their parents’ aristocratic servants, kept the princesses company. Alphonso had his own separate household at the age of nine, while four-year-old Mary lived within the royal nursery without the company of her little sister Elizabeth, whom, alone of all her children, the queen had insisted on keeping with her since birth.5

  In March 1284, Joanna was back in Wales, and further into Gwynedd than had been possible two years earlier. She and her household had travelled once again with Eleanora and their mother, who was heavily pregnant for the sixteenth time but still holding tight to Elizabeth, who was aged almost two. The party moved west along a road that skirted the coast past Conwy, the mist falling down from the hills around Snowdon like a frozen cascade. As the ocean narrowed to a strait, Joanna saw a half-finished castle rise out of the muddy tidal waters before her. The royal party had arrived at Caernarfon, which means ‘River Fort’ – the most important site in Edward’s new Welsh principality, perched at the tip of a peninsula guarding the River Seiont, as it empties into the narrow Menai Strait that separates Wales from the Isle of Anglesey beyond. The castle Edward was building there would become one of the most splendid fortresses to ever adorn the British landscape, the last in a series of lavish, fortified palaces and walled towns that Edward constructed in the heart of the conquered principality.

  The king’s new castles were placed at sites where they would make an impact: war had barely finished when Conwy Castle began to rise above the demolished remains of Aberconwy Abbey, the traditional burial site of Welsh princes; Harlech Castle soon commandeered a rocky hill that was central to the legend of the Welsh princess Branwen. Caernarfon – first established as a Roman fort and linked by local legend to the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great – had long been associated with the idea of an imperial and unified Britain, and Edward now sought to capitalize on this, by making it the centre of his Welsh dominion. The great Welsh romance cycle The Mabinogion includes the story of a dream in which a Roman emperor of Britain foresees a great walled city overlooking a river flowing into the sea opposite an island; alongside the city is a castle with many towers of different colours and a hall with an
ivory throne, incised with golden eagles.6

  At Caernarfon, Edward could recreate this dream in stone and mortar – and, by doing so, firmly link himself to a mythic king who had ruled over the whole of Britain. As part of his subjugation of Wales, Edward also continued to promote his connection to that most famous of legendary rulers, King Arthur: among the royal regalia he captured from the Welsh princes after their defeat was Arthur’s reputed crown, an object that conferred the same sacral authority on Welsh princes that the Stone of Scone did on Scottish kings. Now that the silver circlet belonged to Edward, he directed his son Alphonso to present it, along with other gold belonging to the defeated Prince Llywelyn, to the English royal shrine of Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey, thereby symbolically crowning his saintly predecessor and namesake with the regalia of Wales.7