Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  Whatever her motive, Joanna knew that her actions, while bold, were not wholly without precedent, for she would have known well the story of her great-aunt, another English princess who had married a man of her choosing in secret. Eleanor, sister to Henry III, was married at a young age to an English nobleman, before being widowed in 1231 at the age of only sixteen. Soon after, the princess pledged before the Archbishop of Canterbury to remain piously celibate, wearing a ring similar to those worn by nuns as a token of her vow. However, at the age of twenty-two, she met the French-born Simon de Montfort, and, according to her brother the king, was willingly ‘basely and clandestinely defiled’ by him. Wanting to avoid scandal when he learned of their affair, Henry arranged for a secret wedding to be performed by his own chaplain at a small altar within his chamber. But the union was problematic from the start, with some objecting to a princess marrying a man so far beneath her rank, and others declaring it illegitimate, on account of Eleanor’s vow of celibacy. Though her husband eventually acquired papal recognition for their marriage (by, it was rumoured, bribing the officials in Rome), it was easy for their enemies to portray the marriage as tainted, and Simon’s subsequent leading role in the baronial uprising that nearly cost his brother-in-law, Henry III, his crown did little to improve popular perception of his secret marriage to an English princess.11

  The story of Princess Eleanor and Simon de Montfort was therefore a cautionary tale for any noblewoman contemplating a covert second marriage to a man from a lower social background. At the time of Joanna’s second wedding, however, more favourable examples could be found in popular romance stories, several of which detailed accounts of princesses falling in love with, and proposing marriage to, obscure knights and squires whose virtue shone through, despite their apparent low birth. In King Horn, Rimenhild, Princess of Westernesse, became wild in her desire for a mysterious young man, Horn, who had washed up on the shores of her father’s kingdom. Rimenhild was desperate to marry him, but he refused until he had proven himself worthy by reclaiming his kingdom. In Bevis of Hampton, the Armenian princess Josian was so enamoured of an English teenager training to be a knight in her father’s army, that she sought him out while he was naked in bed and there confessed her love; this time she was the one who had to undergo a transformation – to become a Christian – before Bevis would agree to marry her. In both romances, the lady ultimately succeeded in marrying her beloved who, after many trials, was both restored to his own rightful position and even elevated, through holding hers as well. These tales – of virtuous noblewomen marrying outside the normal social rules – are distinct from the more common recurring theme of adulterous noblewomen familiar from the Arthurian cycle or Tristan and Isolde, where the princesses Guinevere and Isolde are ultimately punished for indulging their love. Modern scholars are divided over whether romances such as King Horn and Bevis of Hampton were intended as pure fantasy and escapism for women inextricably trapped within loveless dynastic unions, or whether they could have provided models through which elite women might construct their own understandings of sexual behaviours. For a woman like Joanna with extraordinary wealth and the authority which came from her position as a widow, the prevalence of social narratives in which princesses openly declared their intention to marry a virtuous-but-unproven youth may have been enough to embolden her. Unlike Rimenhild and Josian, the real-world Joanna would never have been granted seven years to allow young Ralph to prove his worth, even if she had been willing to wait, and her father’s swift offer of a union to Amadeus of Savoy certainly does not imply that Edward had the patience of the kingly fathers of fiction. And so, Joanna and her knight were married, swiftly and irrevocably.

  At Goodrich Castle, unable to access the income from her estates, running out of money quickly, and only able to rely on her friends’ support for so long, Joanna was in an increasingly precarious position. Around the time she learned her father was advancing plans to wed her to Amadeus of Savoy, she also faced a realization that must have added considerable pressure to the already anxious time: she had become pregnant with Ralph’s child. This knowledge seems to have provoked an awareness that the time had come for full disclosure to her father; she sent her young children to their grandfather – a clear signal of submission – and travelled shortly after them to court. But if she thought her father would rapidly forgive her, she was wrong. Several chronicles record that when he learned Joanna had already married the obscure knight, the king was ‘gravely offended’ and reacted with ‘excessive heated fury’. His anger is easily understood; Joanna had disregarded the king’s authority as her feudal lord and as her father. She had broken the rules and now flaunted in his face her expanding belly.12

  Orders were immediately dispatched for Ralph’s arrest. He was taken – in a gesture that resounded with spite – to Bristol Castle, the usual nursery home of Joanna’s Clare children, where he was held in the same prison that contained the caged Welsh prince Owain ap Dafydd. The king ordered his clerk to provide the pregnant countess with an allowance of ‘reasonable maintenance’ from the profits of her own lands, in order to support her and her children at court. This may resemble a nod towards reconciliation, but the king was still angry, and not above taking advantage of his daughter’s insecure position to advance his long-term agenda to increase his control over the Welsh Marches. On the same day in May that he granted Joanna an income, he sent his own men, including Morgan ap Maredudd, who had rebelled so ferociously against Earl Gilbert, into her Welsh provinces to hear local grievances against the Marcher lords. In the middle of July, he instructed his men to seize all outstanding debts attached to the late Earl Gilbert from Joanna’s estate since it remained in his possession; he was also still angry enough at his daughter to enrich his own men with the rents from her town of Cardiff and houses such as the castle at Neath. Court, meanwhile, whirled with gossip over the scandal, though Joanna’s dual position as daughter of the king and the most powerful countess in the kingdom seems to have held the worst criticism in check. The king’s adviser and friend, Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham, reasoned with Edward that, since the marriage was legitimately made, it could not be undone, and advised the king to calm his wrath.13

  Eventually, in late July, a visibly pregnant Joanna was ushered before her father at St Albans. She had come to present her case directly and, knowing her father intimately, she chose to frame her argument in a way designed to appeal to his conscious promotion of chivalry at his court. Extraordinarily, and uniquely in the history of the lives of Edward’s daughters, the countess’s own words on this occasion are recorded. They were noted and recalled by monks of the local abbey as words that paid vivid testimony to Joanna’s character, and are recounted in a passage describing the spirit of King Edward and his family. Addressing her father before his court, in an effort to win not only her imprisoned husband’s freedom but also to regain control of her estate and her independence, Joanna offered a powerful rationalization of her actions. ‘It is not considered ignoble or disgraceful for a great and powerful earl to join himself in legal marriage with a poor and lesser woman,’ she began. ‘Therefore, in the same manner, it is not reprehensible or too difficult a thing for a countess to promote a gallant youth.’14

  This was an extraordinary assertion because, despite the undeniable internal logic of her argument, it flew against contemporary opinion about the nature of marriage and social rank. An example of this may be found in the De arte honeste amandi, usually translated as The Art of Courtly Love, by the twelfth-century French thinker Andreas Capellanus, writing at the court of Marie de Champagne. In a section discussing courtly marriage, he wrote that the social status of an aristocratic woman changed on the occasion of her marriage, moving higher or lower to correspond with the social rank of her husband; in contrast, the social status of a man could never be socially elevated or demoted by marriage. In Capellanus’ view, a man could confer aristocracy upon his wife, but a woman could not bestow nobility and promote her husband, however ga
llant he might be. Clearly, Joanna differed in her opinion, forged by a more direct reading of the contemporary romance narratives to which she was appealing. Hers was a rationale designed to appeal to a king who consciously promoted the chivalric sophistication of his court. This was Joanna’s plan for breaking the rules and getting away with it, for marrying who she wanted, living where she wanted, and maintaining the wealth and power that provided her independence.15

  Happily, her gamble worked; her words placated her father and, on 31 July, Edward restored Joanna’s estate to her, withholding only the castle at Tonbridge (with its too-faithful constable), as a reminder to her that she held her lands at the pleasure of the king. Whatever warm feeling may have accompanied the resolution of the dispute between father and daughter, the business of war continued, and part of Joanna’s settlement with the king was a promise to find one hundred men-at-arms, equipped with horses, to fight in his war with France. A curious stipulation appended to this agreement stated that Joanna would appoint a man other than Ralph, ‘who will at present remain in England by license of the king’, the captain of her forces; evidently Edward was sufficiently glad to be once more on good terms with his heavily pregnant daughter that he was willing to grant that she might enjoy some time with her new husband before he was sent off to war. Ralph must have been released from Bristol Castle around the same time his wife’s lands were restored to her – as early as the morning of 2 August he was already with the king, Joanna, and her brother, at Anthony Bek’s moated manor house near Eltham, south-east of London. Fittingly, it was there, in the great hall of the bishop who had advocated for acceptance of their marriage, that Joanna and her new husband knelt on the newly tiled floor and performed together the ceremony of homage for her lands – first to her father, the king, and then to her brother, Prince Edward.16

  XII

  Crisis

  1297–9

  GHENT, THE HAGUE

  On the same day that Joanna knelt before her father and brother in another ceremony of feudal homage, the trousseau of her youngest sister Elizabeth was released from the king’s wardrobe, to be packed aboard a ship heading to Holland. Among the countess’s household items, jewellery, and robes was the zone of pearls that had been unfinished at her wedding the previous January, as well as a new purse with the arms of England traced out in pearls, which matched an embroidered saddle that the king had given Johan as a parting gift. The bridal goods included the usual copious golden clasps and rings, silver-gilt plates, and chalices, among them a silver cup with a cover that had once belonged to the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Peckham. Elizabeth had a new carriage and twenty-six horses to stock her private stable; a large silver crucifix and service books for her chapel (including the gloriously illustrated Alphonso Psalter); benches, candles, pitchers, and linens to furnish her table, and mixing bowls, cooking pots, knives, and mortars to equip her kitchen.1

  For Elizabeth’s sisters, 1297 was a year of crises – Joanna was estranged from her father, her husband was imprisoned, and her estates were confiscated; Eleanora was in command of the County of Bar, after her husband Henri had been captured by French forces near Lille, and in need of a vast ransom to set him free; Margaret was under acute pressure to produce an heir for her husband, while learning to navigate a foreign court. Their father’s kingdom, meanwhile, teetered on the edge of civil war, as barons refused military summons and resentment grew at the king’s incessant taxation to refill the coffers and pay off his allies. For the youngest princess, however, the months between her wedding in January and her departure for Holland in August were marked by an embrace of the freedom that remained to her. Wardrobe accounts from the year show Elizabeth travelling, often joining up with the itinerant courts of her father or her brother, or embarking on independent travel to various shrines and royal palaces throughout southern England, as well as numerous payments to minstrels hired to entertain her, and the purchase of adornments such as vibrantly coloured silken belts. In July, she and her brother visited their childhood home at Langley, where they were joined by Mary. During their time there, the siblings seem to have reminisced about their childhoods spent in the house their mother had built – itself the backdrop to many of their own earliest memories – because when Mary and Elizabeth arrived at Westminster together at the end of the month, they arranged for a Mass to be performed in their mother’s memory. Alongside fond remembrances there would have been much conversation between the sisters about the future – Mary’s extended visit was intended as a farewell to Elizabeth, who at fifteen was by far the youngest of Edward’s daughters to venture into a new life abroad.2

  Elizabeth arrived at the port of Winchelsea accompanied by her late mother’s friend Isabella de Vescy – Mary’s position may have afforded her extraordinary powers of movement, but even a princess could not stretch the rules to include voyages overseas, and Prince Edward, aged thirteen, was acting as official regent during his father’s absence. Elizabeth would, at least, have his company. Any personal anxieties she may have felt at the point of leaving home may have been pushed to one side by the sight that greeted her, at least briefly: the fleet that had gathered for the king’s continental campaign was among the largest of the age. Two hundred and seventy-three ships had been hired or commandeered from as far north as Newcastle-upon-Tyne and as far south as Portsmouth, with the bulk coming from the harbours of the Cinque Ports between Sandwich and Hastings, or along the east coast at Great Yarmouth, Harwich, and Ipswich. The Swan, which had conveyed Margaret to Brabant, was again among the fleet, joined now by galleys and barges, such as the Godyere and La Blith, as well as the Nicholas (for the patron saint of seamen) and the Cog St Edward (the king’s own ship). As the countess’s chests, packed to the brim with luxurious fabrics and delicate workmanship, were loaded aboard, workmen all around the port were building gangplanks, cargo boxes, and horse stalls, and stowing away immense quantities of food, weaponry, and carts.3

  In stark contrast to the ‘inestimably ornamented’ fleet that had carried Margaret to her new home, Elizabeth’s guard-of-honour was an army bound for war, consisting of nearly nine hundred knights and over eight thousand archers and foot soldiers from across England, Wales, and Scotland. Provisions to feed this enormous contingent as they crossed the sea and moved inland towards Flanders were collected from counties as far afield as Durham and Northumberland: 135 hogsheads, or tuns, of wheat flour; dozens of bushels of barley, oats, peas and beans; the carcasses of more than fifty cows, over three thousand hams, almost five thousand fish, thirteen hundred eels, 521 hogsheads of Rhenish wine and forty-one of ale, in addition to 21,300 bundles of hay to provide fodder for the thousand-odd assortment of warhorses, riders, and cart horses. Along with these provisions, the ships were loaded with thousands of arrows, hundreds of large iron crossbow bolts designed to topple stone walls, and nine springalia (or catapults), to defend and attack during a siege. Other heavy material included the vast sums of metal coinage with which King Edward had bought his northern allies – thirty-six barrels strengthened with extra nails to transport eighteen thousand pounds sterling to the Count of Flanders.

  Elizabeth’s ship put to sea at Winchelsea on 22 August, but ill omens plagued the fleet almost immediately. After drifting slowly up the Channel for six days, they stopped at the small harbour town of Hellevoetsluis, near the Hook of Holland and not far from Rotterdam. As the ships began docking, a disagreement arose between the seamen of Great Yarmouth and those of the Cinque Ports and, fuelled by a fierce and long-standing rivalry between them, burst into a frenzied riot. The harbour was rapidly engulfed in chaos, and thirty ships were lost to fire, before any enemy had even been engaged. Though the king was outraged, the ships carrying the royal party were unaffected by the pandemonium, and though Elizabeth may have felt anxious, it is unlikely that she was in real danger. After the rioters had been subdued and the cargo had been unloaded, the princess travelled south with her father, stopping first at the newly walled city of Aardenburg in the pr
ovince of Zeeland to the south of Holland. There, a messenger awaited with a gift from Margaret for her father: a fresh horse to welcome him to the continent. Elizabeth and Edward both paid their respects to the image of the Blessed Mary over the altar at the church in Aardenburg on 29 August, before travelling on to the banking port of Bruges. Among the principal cities of Flanders, it was a place of bustling markets and crammed canals – thanks to wool traders from Norfolk, Genoese merchants selling spices from the east, and ships from Bordeaux laden with barrels of claret, Bruges was fast becoming one of Europe’s most prosperous cities. There they met the ally Edward had come to join, the aged Count of Flanders, whose daughter Philippa had been recently imprisoned in Paris by the French king, in order to prevent her marriage to Prince Edward. They learned from the count that the Flemish had been defeated at Furnes just two days before they had left England, and that Lille had surrendered five days later. With his army in tatters and his children in prison, the count could offer little assistance to the English. Instead, Edward’s army moved on from Bruges; it was lucky they did, as within weeks, the citizens had handed the city to the French king.4