The English marched east, and seemed to find a more welcome reception at Ghent. There, on 19 September, in gratitude that their travels across the sea and through a foreign country at war had concluded safely, and perhaps wishing to listen to familiar sounds, Elizabeth sought out local friars and paid them to sing Masses for the soul of her mother. To protect themselves, their horses, and their provisions against French attack, her father’s men set about building a fosse, or defensive ditch, around an undeveloped area of marshland to the south of the ancient abbey of St Peter, where the main forces were to be quartered as they awaited the arrival of their ally, the King of Germany. Elizabeth may have seen little of this building work, though as the weeks went by, she would have heard rumours that Edward’s supposed allies were failing to challenge the French. She was lodged with her companion Isabella de Vescy and most of the king’s immediate household, in a house inside the protection of the city’s walls, which must have provided some reassurance of safety from hostile forces (her father sought to improve the comfort of their rooms, which were seemingly unrefined by royal standards, ordering a new chimney to be installed). It was here that Elizabeth learned the news sent from England that her sister Joanna had safely delivered a daughter, named Mary, for the only one of their sisters lacking a namesake among Joanna’s children with her first husband, Gilbert. Despite all the ill-feeling about Joanna’s secret remarriage earlier in the year, the child’s birth was celebrated by her father and sister: the king sent word back to Prince Edward at Eltham to release ten does from the royal park at Raleigh, as a gift to Joanna.5
By early October, they were still waiting in Ghent, and it was increasingly clear that the King of Germany would not engage the French during that campaign season. The English army, despite the king’s efforts, was simply insufficient on its own to hope for success against the French. Therefore, exactly one month after they had arrived in Ghent, Edward agreed a truce with France, and sent an embassy south to Tournai on the French border, to negotiate a peace treaty.
The king’s continental campaign had been called off before it had really begun, but all those men, horses, and supplies could not be magically whisked back to England, and extricating his expeditionary force from Flanders took Edward some time. Elizabeth was once again offered a short respite, during which she might remain in the company of her father, before joining her new husband, Johan. As winter approached, the usual orders for apples, pears, and nuts to furnish the king and princess’s table were supplemented by demands for richer and more exotic foodstuffs, including dates and pomegranates – suggesting the influence of Eleanor of Castile’s Spanish palate long after her death.6
Amid the efforts to mitigate the wasted campaign, there were some glimmers of joy: Christmas would see a reunion between the king and three of his daughters, and would be the first time any of the family had seen Eleanora since she left England, three-and-a-half years earlier. The excitement built over several weeks, as a messenger arrived for the king with yet another horse, this time a gift from Eleanora. Though she was serving as informal regent of Bar while Henri languished in French captivity, she left the county in the hands of her husband’s men and travelled more than 190 miles to Ghent, which would have taken her at least a week. If she brought the three-year-old Edward or the infant Joanna to meet their grandfather and aunts, their presence is not recorded; perhaps her grandmother’s fears about the dangers of young children travelling in winter resonated with Eleanora, or perhaps it felt wise to ensure that Henri’s heir remained safely ensconced within Bar while the count was still imprisoned. Arriving in Ghent, she made it her first business to plead with her father for a contribution towards Henri’s ransom, to which the king – low on ready supplies of cash – offered the relatively modest sum of fifteen hundred pounds. As Christmas approached, Margaret and her husband Jan travelled from nearby Brussels to join her sisters and father in the city of wool weavers and waterways. Other nobles from the region also converged in Ghent for the holiday festivities, including Edward’s ally the Count of Flanders and Marie of Brittany, the cousin of the English princesses and adolescent companion to Eleanora who had married the count of the small province of Saint-Pol near the border with Flanders. In the decades that followed the death of her mother – Edward’s sister, Beatrice – Marie’s family had developed closer ties with France than England; her presence at this family reunion illustrates how international politics could complicate personal and familial relationships. It also highlights how blood ties remained firm for many royal women and how they might maintain family ties, even in times of war. Marie’s father and her husband had both fought for the French king, and one of her brothers-in-law was slowly dying from gruesome wounds he had received fighting against England’s allies. And yet, despite the myriad reasons for not being there, Marie travelled to Ghent in late November to celebrate an extended Christmas holiday with her English relatives and their Flemish allies. She even brought gifts, presenting her uncle, King Edward, with a knife affixed with an enamelled silver handle and a crystal fork. Marie’s visit is evidence of a strong attachment to her English cousins, and a tacit acknowledgement that her own allegiances might be distinct from those of her father and husband.7
For Eleanora, Margaret, and Elizabeth, Marie’s arrival may have been a welcome reunion, but it was also a reminder that each of them might face similar estrangements between their marital and birth families, and offered a model for how a royal woman might navigate such a challenging situation. Conversations between the cousins must also have served to break down simplistic notions of ‘ally’ and ‘enemy’, countering a natural tendency to presume one’s own side as innocent and the righteous victim of external aggressors. As Marie and her cousins reminisced and shared stories of their adult lives, they could hardly have spoken of husbands and children without also talking of the war. If Eleanora shared her fear and sorrow about Henri’s imprisonment by the French king and the difficulties she faced acting as regent of Bar, Marie might have also spoken about the sadness and anxiety her sister was suffering as she watched her own husband slowly die from incurable wounds received at the hands of Edward’s Flemish allies. Yet, through their continuing relationship with their cousin, Eleanora and her sisters had access to a form of embassy denied to men: the opportunity to hear about the horrific impact of war on the lives of individuals on the other side, first-hand and unfiltered.
On Christmas Day, the family and their allies watched as Edward knighted his son-in-law Jan of Brabant, and then joined in a feast that began the holiday celebrations. One week later, the family exchanged the gifts with which they traditionally welcomed the new year. Eleanora remained intent on gaining more support for Henri from her father, and sought to sweeten him with a gift of exceptional sophistication. In previous years, she had given him a simple gold ring, but as 1298 began, she presented him with a leather case containing a silver mirror, enamelled and gilded on the reverse, a comb (perhaps of ivory), and a silver bodkin to aid the king in drawing his laces.8
Eleanora and Elizabeth, along with Margaret and Jan, remained with the English party into the new year. The sisters clearly relished being together, and most likely took the opportunity to talk about the proposed marriage that would link their father with the youngest sister of the French king and end the war with France. Marguerite, the prospective bride was, at eighteen, the same age as their middle sister Mary. (They would probably have been less interested in two-year-old Isabella, whose betrothal to their brother Prince Edward was being discussed by the same ambassadors, though she would loom larger in later events.) But, alongside the renewal of their personal relationships with family, Eleanora and Margaret also aimed to capitalize on the chance for direct access to their father to practise the intercession that, as princesses of England, only they could do: before she left Ghent, Margaret secured an official position as bailiff back in England for a courtier under her protection.9
Despite the ceremonial feasts and the exchange of gifts, re
cords from their time in Ghent point to a court in disarray, and to the stresses created by the immense expense of Edward’s never-ending wars. In January, the knights who dined in the king’s hall became dissatisfied with the meagre provisions of food and, in protest, they sent their private servants into the city to buy bread, which they brought into the king’s hall. For a monarch as intent as Edward on promotion of himself as a pattern of chivalry, the embarrassment of seeming unable to provide for his men provoked his ‘manifest contempt’. Wealth was, after all, an important precursor to practising the virtue of largesse, and Edward had frequently expended vast sums to demonstrate the depths of his coffers. Now the same Low Country nobles who had been awed by the splendour of Margaret’s wedding were witness to an English king who could scarcely feed his soldiers. The situation was made worse when the purveyor of the king’s household, questioned about the lack of food, proclaimed publicly that he was unable to provide sufficient bread for the knights as there was not enough cash in the royal coffers to pay for it. At around the same time, a thief gained access to Eleanora’s bedchamber and stole a silver-gilt cup belonging to the countess; her father insisted on replacing it, again embarrassed that his own reputation did not provide adequate protection for his daughter.10
Eleanora and Margaret eventually needed to return to their own dominions, and Elizabeth needed to travel north to begin her life in Holland. A Brabaçon chronicle records that Margaret received her father in Brussels later that winter, and she and Jan probably left Ghent at the start of February. The king was said to be delighted by Brabant’s capital and gratified by the number of important lords who held land from his son-in-law. Elizabeth departed Ghent sometime before the middle of March, being escorted into Holland by a retinue of English noblemen who then returned, heading west across the sea with the king. It would be the last time one member of the family would see her relatives.11
The situation awaiting Elizabeth in Holland was nearly as precarious as that faced by Eleanora after Henri’s capture. She was installed in the Binnenhof, the sprawling royal residence that Johan’s father and grandfather had built in The Hague. Newly enlarged to replace a hunting lodge, the palace was Gothic in style, and was built around a magnificent timber-beamed great hall that rivalled the one at Westminster – the Ridderzaal, or Knight’s Hall. A natural lake had been extended to form a moat surrounding the palace, and a growing town to the south served the court. Here, the fifteen-year-old English princess lived quietly while her young husband resided to the south in the trading centre of Dordrecht, near his watery province of Zeeland. Very little else is known of Elizabeth’s life during her first year in Holland. She would have received letters from home and learned of her father’s significant (yet frustratingly indecisive) victory over the Scottish rebel William Wallace at Falkirk in late July. She would have learned that her new brother-in-law Ralph had been called to Scotland to fight on behalf of his wife as Earl of Gloucester, but that the newlyweds had remained together long enough for Joanna to fall pregnant once again, and that she had delivered her fifth daughter, whom – having run out of sisters to honour – the countess named for herself. She would have heard that Mary had fallen seriously ill in 1298 and was moved from the priory at Amesbury to Ditton near Cambridge, where she recovered for several weeks. Elizabeth may also have learned that the nun – never one to eschew luxury on account of her vow of poverty – had run up such a large unpaid account to a goldsmith named Martin that he had been thrown into a debtors’ prison for being unable to pay his own creditors, and that only the king’s intervention in settling his daughter’s account released him from jail. From Brussels, there was little in the way of good news. Margaret remained childless, even while her husband’s mistress gallingly produced a healthy son, proving Jan’s fertility.12
However, sometime near the end of Elizabeth’s first year in Holland, some news arrived that devastated the countess. Her eldest sister Eleanora, ever loyal and dutiful to her family, had died of an unrecorded illness or injury in Bar on 29 August. All that is known about her death, other than the date (which was added into the calendar of her Alphonso Psalter, at Elizabeth’s instruction) is that she probably did not die in childbirth, since her husband Henri was still stuck in prison in France at the time. The death of the twenty-nine-year-old countess was cursorily reported in only one minor contemporary chronicle, that of Hagnaby Abbey in Lincolnshire, which included in its account of the twenty-seventh year of Edward’s reign the detail that ‘this year died Eleanora daughter of King Edward, who had married the Count of Bar’. Given how richly detailed an account of the life and personality of England’s eldest princess the wardrobe records and surviving charters have provided, the sparsity of information about her death feels both surprising and strangely painful. Had the wardrobe accounts of Bar survived, an illness might have been traced, through the purchase of medicinal herbs and resins or through the payment of physicians in attendance upon the countess, but these records have been lost, and no letters survive which passed the sad news back to England – though messengers must have been sent to Edward’s court, as well as to Count Henri. The sudden gap in information about Eleanora’s life is representative of the shift towards a reliance on chronicles as source material about the lives of medieval women. Many more chroniclers recorded Eleanora’s marriage than either her birth or her death, and the same is also true of her sisters. The lack of detail pertaining to the princess’s death is indicative of what little importance she was regarded as an individual by contemporary historians, who saw her predominately as a link between male-led dynasties. Yet, through the survival of the wardrobe rolls and other documents and material that illustrate her life, Eleanora’s individuality is restored and the role she played in shaping her own life is recaptured.13
While Henri may have grieved the death of his wife, fearing the consequences of losing his connection to his powerful father-in-law, while he was still imprisoned he was powerless to mourn Eleanora in the manner appropriate for a member of the royal family. No memorial commemorating the English countess-regent remains in Bar; instead, her body seems to have been brought home by her father for burial among her own ancestors and siblings at Westminster. A seventeenth-century antiquarian survey of London and Westminster records a tomb in the chapter house of the abbey church that was dedicated to Eleanora, describing her as Countess of Bar and daughter of Edward the king. No further detail of the monument is given, but it is unlikely to have been as grand as those commissioned by the king to remember his wife and father. It may have been moved from elsewhere inside the church, but if it was intended to rest in the chapter house, the memorial may have been as simple as an inscription on a stone floor slab, perhaps surrounding a carved decorated cross. Eleanora’s is the only royal tomb recorded as being in the chapter house; another nine graves in one of the side chapels located off the central pilgrimage circuit that included the shrine of Edward the Confessor and the monumental effigies to Henry III and Eleanor of Castile were recorded as belonging to royal children. One of these contained the remains of Katherine, the youngest child of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence, whose death at the age of three reputedly caused both her parents such acute grief that their health was considered endangered. Above Katherine’s grave was an effigy sculpted out of solid silver, its extraordinary cost testimony to her parents’ suffering. The other eight were probably Eleanora’s sisters and brothers, born over more than two decades, who died in infancy or childhood in England: Katherine, Joanna, John, Henry, Alphonso, Berengaria, and a baby girl and boy whose lives were too short for any names to be recorded. This was the familial mausoleum to which Eleanora’s body returned, at the behest of her father, who even though he sometimes forced his daughters abroad in life, gathered all his children together in death. Back in Bar, Eleanora’s own small children Edward and Joanna were left practically orphaned in the care of Henri’s councillors, who were still plotting for the return of their lord.14
The news of her eldest sist
er’s death was a heavy blow to Elizabeth, and she would remember the anniversary of Eleanora’s death for the rest of her life. But isolated, friendless, and far from home as she was, she was soon forced to contend with challenges closer to hand. Since his return to Holland shortly after their marriage, Johan had fallen under the influence of a courtier named Wolfert van Borselen, Lord of Veere, one of the southern islands of Zeeland. Edward had initially encouraged his impressionable son-in-law to look to Borselen for advice, and even helped retrieve the Dutch lord’s sons from French imprisonment; he probably hoped Borselen would counter any French-leaning tendencies among the more established Dutch nobles. By 1299, however, Borselen’s influence had grown to such an extent that he was effectively exercising command of Holland through his control over the fifteen-year-old count, and – in a scenario that foreshadowed the troubles to come in England – the Dutch nobles rose in revolt. In August, Borselen fled Dordrecht into Zeeland, where his own power was greatest, taking Count Johan with him, either as a lover, a naive accomplice or a captive. The Annals of Holland and Zeeland record that, ensconced in her splendid palace at The Hague, Elizabeth received this news one morning, just after dawn.
She must have been genuinely terrified that Johan might come to share the fate of his father (who had been murdered at the hands of supposed friends) and also at her own exposure in the event, but as countess, she also had an important role to play in legitimizing the arrest of a nobleman who enjoyed the count’s protection. As Johan’s wife, she could make an emotional appeal that the people rise against Borselen out of loyalty to Johan, rather than as an act of treason against him. Her appeal could also mediate any negative feelings against the young count’s judgment or anxieties about his sexuality, by painting him as an innocent who had been bewitched and stolen away from his loving wife by a cunning malefactor. As Johan’s wife, she was therefore in a unique position to solve the problem of Borselen, restore Johan’s authority and buttress her own position. In a set piece before her courtiers, Elizabeth wept bitter tears for the husband she had barely seen since being forced to move to his dominion two years earlier. She loudly bewailed the fate that seemed to await Johan, and accused Borselen of treacherously misleading the innocent count. A party of anti-Borselen nobles immediately gathered around the countess, who served as a natural focal point for those who proclaimed loyalty to Johan; they vowed – in the name of saving Holland – to hunt down the supposed abductor, free Johan, and restore him to his devoted countess. The abductor’s own son-in-law – perhaps fearful that hatred of his father-in-law might negatively impact his own fortunes – offered himself in supplication to Elizabeth and convinced her to present herself in The Hague’s market, only a few minutes’ stroll from the Binnenhof. There, in front of a crowd, she repeated her performance; despairing over Johan’s likely fate, the English princess ‘made her grief and her fears pass into the souls of all the inhabitants’. Her performance had its intended effect: Borselen was captured and imprisoned, evidently without much protest from the count who had promoted him. Johan was returned to his wife at The Hague, while his abductor was taken to Delft, where, the countess’s lamentations fresh in their minds, the local populace threatened to burn down the prison in which he was held, unless he was handed over. Unwilling to risk a riot, the jailors stripped Borselen of his armour and pushed him into the street, where he was immediately hacked to pieces by the frenzied mob.15
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