Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  Throughout the winter and spring, seemingly unhurried at deciding on the path her life would take next, Elizabeth travelled regularly around the centre of England, stopping at Towcester, venturing north to Lincoln, and west as far as Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, where she visited Hailes Abbey with its famous phial of Holy Blood, the rare and immensely valued relic of Christ’s physical presence on earth that had comforted Joanna in the delivery of her first child. Winchcombe was also near Tewkesbury, one of Joanna’s principal residences, and Elizabeth’s visit there may have included a meeting with her oldest living sister. She often returned to the company of her father and stepmother, and was with them in Worcester in April, interceding with the king on behalf of a retainer granted lands ‘by reason of his services to Elizabeth, Countess of Holland, the king’s daughter’, and at Kempsey in May, when she requested a posting at Wallingford Castle for another servant in her patronage. Her Dutch companion, Lady de Saux, left the countess’s household during this time, returning to Holland with a gift of silver plate for her service. Lady de Saux may have travelled home in the company of Sir Gerald de Freney, whom Edward posted to Holland, in a continuing effort to make progress in obtaining Elizabeth’s dower estate, ‘as the affairs of the countess in those parts progress badly nowadays owing to the hindrances of certain men’. Another English embassy that spring had achieved, with the intervention of Marguerite, one of Edward’s long-held ambitions: the freedom of Henri of Bar, husband of the late Princess Eleanora. After four years imprisoned in France, the count was released in early June, under a treaty that required him not only to pay a hefty ransom but to relinquish significant portions of his province and to place the entirety of it under French feudal overlordship. He returned to Bar and to his children Edward and Joanna, but the remonstrations of his nobles, incensed at the terms he had agreed, rang in his ears loudly enough to drive Henri swiftly away again on Crusade.8

  Back in England, Marguerite, whose influence with her brother in France had helped to win Henri his freedom, was pregnant again. Anxious not to be caught unprepared, as she had been with the birth of her first child at Brotherton the year before, she decided early in her pregnancy to stay in the large castellated manor at Woodstock, just north of Oxford; early in June, when her husband’s attentions again turned north to Scotland, Marguerite retired to the rambling palace on a hill overlooking a large royal park, which would be demolished during the building of Blenheim Palace in the early eighteenth century. By 1301, the lions and leopards with which Henry I had stocked the space almost two centuries earlier, were already long gone. But the intricate pleasure gardens that may originally have been planted for Henry II’s favourite mistress, ‘Fair Rosamund’ Clifford, remained, surrounding a secluded Gothic chamber remembered in her honour as ‘Rosamund’s Bower’. To this luxurious compound, Henry III had added multiple chapels, a wine cellar and larder, stables and a gatehouse. The house had been comfortable enough to tempt Eleanor of Castile to give birth to Mary there late in the winter of 1279, and its extensive gardens would have made it even more attractive for a summer sojourn when the flowers would have been in full bloom.

  Elizabeth, by now among the new queen’s most intimate friends, accompanied her stepmother to Woodstock, but she was not the only one of Edward’s children whose company was requested. Edward wrote from Berwick, where he was poised to move up the east coast of Scotland, to Mary at Amesbury to pass on his wife’s request that she also travel to Woodstock to attend the new queen, a journey which would require her to withstand three days of bumpy riding over the North Wessex Downs. Throughout the late spring and summer and into autumn, the three royal women – more like sisters than mother and daughters – stayed together at Woodstock. Like most elite women in medieval Europe, Elizabeth and Marguerite spent most of their lives ensconced within heavily male-dominated households and had fewer opportunities to build and sustain close friendships with other women than their male counterparts, who might remain in attendance on a lord together, or travel on campaign for years in each other’s company. Women also had fewer ceremonial options for marking the importance of a particular bond (unlike men, who might, for example, be knighted together or form a team at a tournament), but chief among those open to them was witnessing a birth. Among royal women, the practice of waiting for a baby to arrive with a close friend or relative was well-established by the early fourteenth century: a generation before, King Edward’s sister, Margaret, had travelled back to England from her home in Scotland to give birth to a Scottish heir at Windsor in the presence of her mother, Eleanor of Provence. Mary would serve again as companion for her niece (one of Joanna’s daughters) when she gave birth a decade later, and one of Elizabeth’s deliveries would also be attended by her sister-in-law, the future Queen Isabella of France.

  For Elizabeth, the summer of 1301 at Woodstock was the most settled period of her life since her return to England following Johan’s death. The long summer days awaiting the onset of labour provided opportunity to deepen her relationship with Marguerite, and a chance to reconnect with her closest sister, Mary, whom she had not seen since their time at Langley just after her wedding, four years earlier. Elizabeth had faced extraordinary pressures and potentially grave danger abroad since saying goodbye to Mary, and stories of her experiences in Holland during the intervening years must have featured in her conversations with her sister. For Mary, insulated as she was from the experiences of marriage and life as a consort at a foreign court, Elizabeth’s tales of intrigue and conspiracy and Marguerite’s ever-growing belly would have served as reminders of how different her own life was from most royal women. Eleanora, Margaret, Elizabeth, and Marguerite – even Joanna, who had in essence been a bride in a foreign province when she first accompanied Gilbert de Clare to the wild lands of Glamorgan – all shared many essential experiences. The constant itinerancy, the travel across seas and into unfamiliar landscapes where the natives spoke incomprehensible tongues, the unrelenting pressure to produce heirs for expectant husbands, the fears associated with pregnancy and delivery, and the difficulty in settling into life in a different culture; all these things drew those women together and their shared familiarity of uncommon experiences made them natural allies and confidants, and easy friends to turn to in times of trial. However, the same ties that bound most royal women together, also set them apart from Mary. The disparity cannot have escaped the regular acknowledgement of the nun, for whom daily life centred around one constant home, whose life could never include children or husbands, and whose travel was necessarily limited. If the gulf between their experiences occasionally made Mary feel isolated from her sisters and other relatives, the feeling was never so great that the nun refused an invitation to join court and renew her association as an intimate member of the royal family. Perhaps she felt her position, free as it was from the usual expectations on royal women, was the more desirable one – certainly she never sought out opportunities, which would have been open to her, to embrace the challenge of life in a foreign land and transfer to Fontevrault, as her grandmother had intended.

  On 5 August, a second prince, yet another spare for the king’s seventeen-year-old heir Prince Edward of Caernarfon, was born to Queen Marguerite. The delivery this time seems to have been less dramatic than Thomas’s. The name chosen for the baby boy, Edmund (for the martyred boy-king of the East Angles), completed the triumvirate of favourite saints of the English royal line – alongside his surviving brothers Edward (for the great pre-Norman Conquest Confessor king) and Thomas (Becket, the canonized archbishop murdered by knights loyal to Henry II). As his mother recuperated in the company of his much older sisters, the baby’s father, the king, was marching north to Glasgow.

  Joanna spent the summer between her various estates in the western counties of England, but she did not travel to Woodstock to join her sisters and the new queen. Her adored husband Ralph was in Scotland once again, struggling to make decisive headway against the Scottish forces as one of the half-dozen earls
who led the army in that year’s campaign, nominally under the command of Prince Edward. Joanna had remained in England rather than accompanying him because she was preparing, aged twenty-nine, for the delivery of her seventh child. Her older Clare daughters – Eleanor (nine), Margaret (eight), and Elizabeth (six) – were most likely by this time already at Amesbury Priory, where they were being educated under the guidance of their aunt Mary, when she was in residence. Joanna’s younger Monthermer daughters – Mary (four) and Joanna (two) – probably remained with their mother, though they would in due course follow their sisters to Amesbury, with young Joanna Monthermer ultimately joining the priory as a vowed nun (as would one of Margaret de Clare’s daughters). Joanna’s only son and heir, ten-year-old Gilbert, had effectively been head of his own itinerant household for several years, but he seems to have been residing with or near his mother in the autumn of 1301, as it was to her that King Edward wrote at the end of September, with a mandate that Joanna relinquish custody of the boy.

  The letter, with its stiff formal instruction that the countess should ‘deliver to Marguerite, queen consort, on her demand, Gilbert, son and heir of Gilbert de Clare . . . as it is the king’s will that he shall stay in the queen consort’s custody until further order’, feels to the modern reader cruel in its separation of a mother from her child. There is even a hint in the letter that Joanna’s father expected that his feisty daughter might resist the order: its final words, ‘for this [order] the present letter shall be her warrant’, underlined the non-negotiable nature of his instruction. And yet, prior to this, the king’s daughter had been allowed an unusually long period of time as the foremost influence on her son: most noble children like Gilbert would have entered the service of a lord or relative soon after their seventh birthday, becoming a page before acting as squire to a knight. It was through service within another household that boys like Gilbert learned the arts of the nobility, of war and administration, of chivalry and diplomacy. This tradition also forged powerful bonds within and between families that often continued throughout their lives. For young Gilbert, the king’s eldest grandson and a future leading magnate of England, there could be no better training ground than the royal household, where he would grow up at the centre of power in England, developing intimate knowledge of its machinations as well as its most powerful personalities; Joanna could not have failed to acknowledge this truth.9

  The king’s messenger, dispatched from Edward’s camp near Falkirk on 27 September, may not yet have reached Joanna when, on 4 October, she gave birth to a baby boy, an heir at last for Ralph. Again, there are hints in the baby’s name – he was christened Thomas, rather than after his father or kingly grandfather, as might be expected – that the countess had reason to appeal to a saintly intercessor during the birth. Nevertheless, Thomas was healthy enough not to be considered in grave danger – his baptism was delayed until December, by which time the baby had travelled with his mother into her dominion of Glamorgan, and he was baptized there by the Bishop of Llandaff. If Joanna remained aggrieved by her father’s demand that she send Gilbert to serve her new stepmother, she had also received the much more welcome news that Ralph’s service in Scotland had won back her castle of Tonbridge in Kent, the last remaining portion of Gilbert de Clare’s estate that her father had continued to withhold, in punishment for her secret marriage almost five years earlier.10

  Mary and Elizabeth remained with Marguerite and baby Edmund at Woodstock until October, when the queen was considered strong enough to recommence the endless journeying across the country that characterized the lives of the English royal family at that time. The three women and their sizable households must have presented an astonishing sight as they paraded slowly on their prized palfreys and in their painted carriages, their furniture and goods following behind in a dozen or more carts, north from Woodstock and then west, heading for Hereford. Their pilgrimage was intended as one of thanksgiving for the safe delivery and health of the child – the party stopped in each of the principal shrines along the road, making offerings to affirm in public their pious gratitude. But the occasion also afforded an opportunity for the queen and princesses to present an image of regal grandeur and largesse in all the villages they passed, as well as proof of the continued virility of the king who, despite his sixty-two years, was still producing healthy heirs for England. After hearing Mass and making offerings at Hereford Cathedral, the party separated. The baby safely born and the pilgrimage complete, it was time for Mary to return to her cloister at Amesbury and resume her role overseeing the education of her Clare nieces. She was escorted south in the protection of one of her father’s clerks while, in the second half of November, Marguerite turned north, bound on a long journey to Linlithgow in Scotland, where she would be reunited with her husband as he settled in for a cold winter in which scores of horses would die from lack of fodder and the king’s army would once again face desertion because of a lack of money to pay their wages. As she set off on the long journey, she was accompanied by young Gilbert de Clare, as well as his aunt, the countess Elizabeth.

  XIV

  Companionship

  1302–4

  TYNEMOUTH, DUNFERMLINE, KNARESBOROUGH

  Elizabeth had probably met Humphrey de Bohun – the Earl of Hereford and Essex and Constable of England – when he visited Langley while she was living there in the late 1280s, but the young widow became reacquainted with him while staying with her father and stepmother at Carlisle and Linlithgow. Humphrey had succeeded his father (the earl with whom Gilbert de Clare had maintained a long-running and mutual animosity) only a few years earlier, and by the time Elizabeth met him again he was among the first lords of England and the March. By the spring of 1302, plans were being put in place for Humphrey and Elizabeth to marry. The papal dispensation required for the union was approved on 4 August 1302; it noted that King Edward particularly hoped the match would promote peace and reconciliation after the ‘great dissention’ between the king and Humphrey’s father.1

  It is not hard to see what the twenty-year-old Elizabeth might have liked about Humphrey. The herald of the Siege of Caerlaverock described him in 1300 as ‘a rich and elegant young man’, noting that his age at that date was not older than twenty-five. He was, therefore, young and courtly, but his Englishness would also have appealed to the princess, who had been made wary by her previous experiences in the uncertain world beyond her father’s realm. Unless and until Elizabeth’s dower income was secured, allowing her to enjoy the independence that she had experienced during her brief widowhood, she and her household were also a large drain on her father’s resources. Short of declaring a wish to join Mary in holy orders at Amesbury, the countess would need to remarry, and soon. She did not have the freedom Joanna had enjoyed to marry a penniless young gallant; furthermore, a match with a young lord, whose wealth would provide for her in suitable style, while also allowing her to remain close to friends and family, was surely preferable to a match with an aged ruler of a foreign land. She would have appealed to Humphrey, too; Elizabeth was not only young but also potentially extremely wealthy (if her dower in Holland, which was still proving irretrievable, despite the continuing efforts of Gerald de Freney, was ever successfully claimed), and she embodied a powerful connection to the king.

  Accordingly, the pair were married at Westminster Abbey as soon as Humphrey had signed over his whole estate to the king and been re-granted it on roughly the same terms that Gilbert de Clare had agreed a dozen years earlier (in which all the de Bohun estates were jointly held by Humphrey and Elizabeth). The ceremony took place on 14 November 1302, the bride attended by her close friend and stepmother Marguerite. The bridal coronet was solid gold, studded with rubies and emeralds and surmounted by a circlet that provided a second tier of gemstones: eighty-two pearls and a dozen large rubies and emeralds, as well as twenty-four small plaques depicting animal and human figures moulded in gold. A surviving wardrobe entry suggests that the crown had formerly belonged to Blanche, Duches
s of Austria and sister to Marguerite – if so, it was almost certainly given to Elizabeth as a personal gift from the queen, who filled the mother-of-the-bride role with panache but also bestowed special favour on her closest friend. After the wedding, Elizabeth remained at court with her new husband, as he joined in the preparations for the renewed large-scale assault against Scotland being planned for the following summer.2

  The Maid of Norway, who died on the way to marry Prince Edward in 1290, had been the granddaughter and last living heir of Alexander III, King of Scotland and brother-in-law to Edward I of England. Without a direct heir, the kingdom suffered instability in the aftermath of the Maid’s death, as competing claimants emerged to compete for the crown. Edward supported the installation of John Balliol as king, but also sought to exploit the insecurity of Balliol’s position to undermine Scottish autonomy, aiming to turn Scotland into a vassal fiefdom of England. When the Scots retaliated, forming an aggressive alliance with the French in 1295, Edward invaded, beginning a cycle of wars of conquest and independence that would last for five decades. Beginning in 1296, the English had spent four campaigning seasons north of the border, culminating in a truce in 1301. But, by the summer of 1302 this had expired, and rumours were circulating of a planned Scottish invasion of England.