Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  Though Borselen was gone, the Dutch nobles were not content to return the naive fifteen-year-old Johan to power, and his uncle, the Count of Hainault, was approached to act as regent. Elizabeth’s role in Borselen’s downfall seems to have won her a greater degree of influence than she had previously enjoyed: her own seal is affixed to the charter of 27 October 1299 alongside Johan’s, in which the couple consented to the regency, and a codicil appended to the same document declared that Johan agreed to the arrangement, on the advice of his nobles and his wife. But, if Elizabeth had hoped for a quieter, more settled period after she and Johan attended the ceremony that officially confirmed Johan’s uncle as regent in Dordrecht, she was tragically disappointed. Competing factions almost immediately formed around Johan and his regent uncle, and the latter decamped to the safety of his own dominion of Hainault. Johan fell suddenly ill with a fever soon afterwards; it rapidly turned to dysentery, and on 10 November he died, sparking centuries of speculation that he had been poisoned by the uncle who now became his heir. Whatever fears Elizabeth may have entertained when Johan absconded with Borselen had now been realized: she was now a childless widow at the court of a potentially murderous ruler. If Johan had been poisoned, she must have asked herself, would his killer hesitate to prescribe the same fate to a young widow whose dower would steal away immense portions of Dutch wealth? Elizabeth may have commented on a feeling of isolation or fear in letters to her father, for Edward sent two ladies to provide the countess with friendly companionship. Then, when early efforts to claim her dower were met with seemingly endless delays, he sent over his own men. In the letter accompanying their voyage in late March, her father instructed Elizabeth to follow closely the advice of his ambassadors and offered his ‘treasured daughter’ the ‘blessings of a father’; the same day, he dispatched a series of further missives to Dutch nobles and whole communities in Holland, requesting their support for Elizabeth’s cause. Still, no progress was forthcoming, and when more than half a year had elapsed after Johan’s death and Elizabeth was evidently not carrying his heir, the widowed, seventeen-year-old countess, once again dependent upon her father for income, returned to England.16

  XIII

  Homecoming

  1300–1

  THE NORTH, WOODSTOCK

  On her way back to England, Elizabeth stopped off in Brussels to bid farewell to Margaret who, after ten years of marriage and at the age of twenty-five, was finally pregnant, a cause of much rejoicing within Brabant. For Margaret, the pregnancy must have been an extraordinary relief – not only was she finally providing Brabant with a legitimate heir, but having a child of her own would go some way to make up for the loss of her sisters, whose proximity she had until recently enjoyed. If the death of her eldest sister Eleanora was surprising and saddening for the Duchess of Brabant, Elizabeth’s departure for England left Margaret utterly isolated from her family. It was a loss the duchess seems to have felt keenly – references in the wardrobe records show that messengers were frequently dispatched to or from Brabant, carrying letters to her father and sisters.1

  Elizabeth left Brussels in July, along with her travelling companions – the Dutch noblewoman Lady de Saux, and the two English ladies her father had sent over to comfort her after Johan’s death, Alice de Breton and Joanna de Mereworth. The party travelled west through Brabant and Flanders, and across the sea, arriving in London in August. From there, they travelled two hundred miles north to Cawood in Yorkshire, where her father had established a northern court in a palace belonging to the Archbishop of York; this was to act as a base, while he attempted to draw the Scottish lords into battle and recreate the success he had found at Falkirk two years before.

  Elizabeth had many weeks of travel with her ladies – long, boring days perched atop a palfrey or hidden within a richly ornamented carriage, with little to do but stare out at the countryside and gaze back at the awed faces of common labourers and pilgrims along the roads, her back perhaps straightening as she remembered the importance of projecting a regal image to her father’s subjects. They stopped each evening to rest at different royal castles, monasteries, and at the manor homes of wealthy aristocrats who provided food and beds, before setting off again the next day. As they travelled north, Elizabeth had plenty of time in which to consider her future. Given the drama of Johan’s death and the uncertainty which surrounded her dower from Holland, she might reasonably have anticipated to be granted a period at court before any remarriages were planned, although her father was undoubtedly mindful of the example set by Joanna’s secret remarriage. The journey Elizabeth took led her past many sites familiar from her life before marriage, including Langley, her childhood home with its orchards and exotic pets, and the hunting lodge at Clipstone, where she had said goodbye to her mother a decade before.

  Elizabeth was principally focused on reaching her father, and it is possible that her sister Joanna was also present in the north (along with their brother, Prince Edward, who was now sixteen): the Countess of Gloucester frequently accompanied her dearly won husband Ralph when he travelled to fight in her father’s wars, and Ralph had certainly been present with the king in Scotland in July of that year, one of only three magnates who had come to serve the king’s feudal summons in person rather than sending a member of their retinue to deputize. Ralph had returned earlier that summer from several months attending the Clare estates in Ireland, and he and his men made up a significant proportion of the roughly 850 knights and nine thousand men-at-arms who comprised Edward’s campaigning army on the south-west coast of Scotland that year. In the list of noblemen appearing in the Anglo-Norman herald’s roll, written the following year and detailing in heavily romanticized imagery the siege of Caerlaverock Castle, the following is the third entry:

  He by whom [the king’s men] were well supported,

  acquired, after great doubts and fears

  until it pleased God he should be delivered,

  the love of the Countess of Gloucester,

  for whom he a long time endured

  great sufferings. He had only a banner

  of fine gold with three red chevrons.

  He made no bad appearance

  when attired in his own arms,

  which were yellow with a green eagle.

  His name was Ralph de Monthermer.

  Joanna’s husband was already making a name for himself as a worthy knight, but he remained of greatest interest to courtly society for his association with the king’s daughter. When he fought, it was under the banner of her first husband; Joanna must have been proud to witness the ‘gallant youth’ she had promoted through marriage so splendidly arrayed and bolstered by the marker of nobility – the Clare banner – that his association with her had brought him. Seeing her sister, Elizabeth may have hoped to catch up on news of the niece who was named for her or Joanna’s other children, and in return to share with her stories from Christmas in Ghent, the last time she had seen Eleanora before her death. The elder countess could have shared stories of the marvellous courtly feasts which her younger sister had missed while in Holland, including the fabulous event at the Tower of London in late 1299, at which the Countess of Gloucester had presided as the principal lady in the Great Chamber, refitted expressly for the occasion. Above all, Elizabeth may have hoped for her most fearless sister’s frank perspective on Marguerite, the French princess whom the year before had become their father’s second wife, and whom Joanna had met in March.2

  Marguerite was the younger half-sister of the French king who had invaded Gascony, precipitating a war with Edward and imprisoning Henri of Bar. As was common in the entwined royal families of the day, she was a cousin of her new husband: the granddaughter of Edward’s aunt, Margaret (wife of the French king St Louis and eldest sister of Eleanor of Provence). Marguerite was born the same year as Mary of Woodstock, making her about twenty in September 1299 when she travelled to Canterbury, to marry the sixty-year-old widower king in the shadow of the great shrine to St Thomas Becket.
Edward’s living children at that time ranged in age from twenty-seven (Joanna) to fifteen (Prince Edward). The marriage between the aged king and the youthful princess was a key part of the treaty that brought peace between France and England, and its agreement allowed Edward and his expeditionary force to depart Flanders, after months of expensive inaction. A young bride also offered Edward the possibility of further sons to secure the future of his throne, which, in the event of Prince Edward’s childless death, would pass by default to Eleanora’s son Edward, the future Count of Bar. The English king had been very close to his first wife, and few could have expected the strong emotional attachment he would form to Marguerite, or the great affection that would grow between the new queen and her stepchildren.

  As Elizabeth and her companions rode into the walled precinct of the archbishop’s castellated house at Cawood, nestled between his hunting forest and an important ferry point on the great northern River Ouse, she might have been anxious to meet the woman – barely her senior – who stood in her mother’s place. It is possible that Elizabeth had already had been reassured in a letter from her sister Mary, who had gladly accepted her father’s invitation to spend some time at court soon after Marguerite’s arrival in England. Any reluctance to love her mother’s replacement may have melted away when Elizabeth was presented with her two-month-old baby brother, Thomas of Brotherton, to whom Marguerite had given birth early and in apparently dramatic circumstances – Langtoft’s chronicle records that the king flew to his wife ‘like a falcon before the wind’ on hearing news of the premature arrival. The little prince was sickly from birth, though he was said by the chronicler Rishanger to thrive once the French wet nurse appointed by his mother was replaced by an Englishwoman. The baby was certainly doted upon: elaborate cradles were curtained in scarlet and deep blue using huge amounts of the finest English cloth, topped with fur covers and bed sheets of linen imported from Rheims, and surrounded by hangings embroidered with heraldry that marked out Thomas as a prince of England. Marguerite’s personality may also have won her easy friends: she was remembered as ‘good without lack’ by an English chronicle of the early fourteenth century. Either way, both at Cawood and as they travelled north together towards Carlisle to rendezvous with the king, Elizabeth and her new stepmother found in each other an important friend. In the years that followed, the women were only rarely apart from one another, and they are often seen in the records playing the part of twin intercessors with the king.3

  The pair departed on 9 September and arrived in the north eight days later. They settled into the Bishop of Carlisle’s house at Rose Castle, nestled among gently undulating hills to the south of the city. For Elizabeth, the reunion with her family had been a long time coming – nearly a year had elapsed since Johan’s death had thrown her future into disarray, and although she was far from Langley and the other houses of her childhood, once she was at court with her father and brother, she was essentially home. For Edward, the arrival of his youngest daughter would have proved a welcome distraction from what had been a dispiriting season of campaigning, with little in the way of successful military action; beyond the capture of Caerlaverock Castle (described somewhat disdainfully by the chronicler Peter Langtoft as a ‘chastelet’), there had been little meaningful progress against the Scots, and his army was fading rapidly, as thousands of men-at-arms deserted. That autumn, while residing at Rose Castle and the nearby Cistercian abbey of Holme Cultram, Edward and Elizabeth rediscovered a companionship that they would regularly seek in years to come. Her brother came and went from the main court, his growing independence expressing itself in short visits to other parts of the region, in the way that the royal children had always done. While staying with his father’s household, the prince is likely to have met a youth who had recently arrived from Gascony and joined the king’s men in July that year; he was a young man whose charm the prince would ultimately find irresistible. His name was Piers Gaveston.4

  Early in November as court prepared to return south, joyful news arrived from Brussels: Margaret had safely delivered a healthy baby boy, an heir for Brabant. The future duke was named Jan for his father, seemingly at the latter’s request. (Margaret’s husband was so fond of bestowing his own name on his progeny that there are records of at least six Jans among his many illegitimate children.) The whole family’s pleasure at the safe and successful birth of little Jan is evident in the extravagant rewards they bestowed on the Dutch messenger who brought news of baby Jan’s birth: Edward gave him one hundred marks, Marguerite offered fifty, and Prince Edward a further forty. Elizabeth seems not to have been with her family when the message arrived from Brabant on 8 November – her own gift to the messenger of thirteen-and-a-half pounds is post-dated. Along with the good wishes of her family, a sensitive diplomatic message was sent back to Brussels, conveyed by word-of-mouth to a clerk who was instructed to discuss the matter with both the Duke of Brabant and with Margaret, ‘the king’s daughter’. Within weeks of giving birth, Margaret – her influence as consort perhaps at its peak, now that an heir had been born – was required as a friendly voice for England in Brabant. Her support would be needed again in the next year when an emissary would come bearing gifts for the princess and her baby, as well as a message ‘concerning the king’s arduous affairs’ that was intended for the ears of the duke and duchess only.5

  Two days after learning that her sister had safely given birth, Elizabeth entered the city of Carlisle. She was heading for the Dominican priory near the bottom end of the city market, away from the bustle and the crude exchanges of commerce and flesh that occupied the top of the marketplace. There she paid the friars to sing Masses in commemoration of the first anniversary of Johan of Holland’s death – special prayers meant to speed his soul on its journey through purgatory and towards heaven – and afterwards, she provided a feast for all Dominican friars within the city. Her new friend Marguerite stood by her side as the young countess marked one year as a widow, hundreds of miles away from Holland. For this ceremony, Elizabeth most likely wore the new blue robe embroidered with gold thread that her tailor, Peter of Guildford, had made for the feast of All Saints nine days earlier; it was the first new gown made for her since her arrival back in England. That she chose to hear Mass in the Dominican friary rather than the nearby house of the Franciscans suggests the enduring influence of her mother on Elizabeth’s life. In the days following, Elizabeth and her small household – now headed by a clerk named Stephen de Brewode – left Carlisle and headed south. They stopped briefly at a decaying wooden motte-and-bailey castle in Kirkby Fleetham in Yorkshire, near a convergence of medieval roads. The party arrived at Ripon at the end of the month, where Elizabeth, her brother, their father, and stepmother observed the tenth anniversary of her mother’s death, with Masses sung before the high altar of Ripon Minster (the church would have to wait many centuries before it obtained cathedral status). The eastern end of the minster had collapsed two decades before – the result of building the immense Gothic structure atop an uneven, seventh-century crypt – and work constructing the gloriously delicate east window that survives today continued well into the fourteenth century. But Edward and his family were long-accustomed to carrying out the solemn ceremonies that punctuated their lives in the middle of building sites. From the surviving Alphonso Psalter, which includes the anniversary dates of the deaths of her mother, grandmother, and those sisters who predeceased her, we know that Elizabeth was a keen observer of remembrance ceremonies, but her dedication to the memory of her mother was particularly fierce: more than a decade after the queen’s death, Elizabeth was still making the case to her father that Eleanor’s former servants should be granted special privileges for the devotion they showed her.6

  From Ripon, the royal party continued their southern trajectory. By 11 December they had arrived at Leicester, and Elizabeth felt sufficiently secure in her position within her father’s household to order an expensive new fur cape, lined with vair and embellished with gold thread
and forty-four silver buttons. Peter the tailor was dispatched to acquire the silks he would need for making the countess a new wardrobe as well as to buy candles to enable him and the furrier to finish the cape in time for Christmas by working into the night. She also dispatched a page back to London to collect her jewels – including the magnificent crowns she had taken to Holland after her marriage. Over Christmas, Elizabeth, her brother, father, and stepmother were splendidly entertained at Northampton by minstrels including two German ‘giants’ employed by the king, whose repertoire may have included feats of strength as well as song. Prince Edward’s pleasure at being reconnected with his childhood companion is recorded – he made sure to include her among his new year’s gifts, giving her a smooth-riding, slim-backed palfrey on 8 January 1301, but he departed from the group shortly afterwards, heading for Langley to represent the royal family at the funeral of an important magnate.7