For Edward’s surviving sisters, the early days of their brother’s reign must have been a great disappointment and a grave concern. Whether as an English noblewoman, a foreign consort, or a nun, their positions as royal women of England had, so far, guaranteed them extraordinary lives. Their great wealth ensured they lived surrounded by material luxury that was nearly unthinkable to most of their contemporaries: they dined on prized meats and specially bred fish, exotic fruits and spices, and rich delicacies like almonds and sugar imported from the far ends of the known world; they were clothed in the finest linens, silks, and velvets – brilliantly coloured and shot through with gold thread or peppered with flashes of light reflecting off silver buttons; their heads, fingers, and waists were adorned with dazzling gemstones set into gleaming coronets, rings, and girdles. They ate in painted halls lined with warm tapestries and cushioned benches, and slept in feather beds, hung with thick curtains woven with pictures and heraldry; their chambers were brightly lit by large, glazed windows, and warmed by constantly roaring fires. They travelled often but comfortably, with new saddles on the finest riding horses, inside ornately decorated and cushioned carriages, and on barges and ships that offered the most lavish facilities available. They received educations from their mother, grandmother, and governesses to far outstrip their peers – perhaps even including their brother – and maintained libraries, kennels, stables, choirs, and minstrels to supply their love of literature, music, and the hunt. For Mary, her status also provided her with the luxury she prized above all: freedom of movement, a remarkable privilege for a woman who, at six, had been made to join a religious order that advocated the strict enclosure of nuns. For each of Edward’s sisters, the ability to deploy intercession – to request money or favours of the king and thereby offer patronage to individuals and causes – throughout her father’s reign, enabled her to hold power even when far from the English court, whether in Glamorgan, Brussels, Holland, or Bar.
Their status as daughters of the king provided Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, Mary, and Elizabeth the rare ability, as women living in a deeply patriarchal society, to build and maintain an influence that few of their contemporaries experienced and even to realize a degree of self-determination in their lives. The ways that each of his sisters sought to secure their brother’s loyalty in the final years of their father’s reign – perhaps most especially Joanna, who did not survive to see the ungracious way her brother repaid her in allowing his favourite to besmirch her name – suggests that these women realized how fully their destinies were tied to his. These were not cynical gestures, designed to convince Edward of a loyalty or love that was insincere, but rather reminders of shared interests or experience forged over decades: Elizabeth and her brother shared a passion for music and prized dogs; Joanna felt an affinity to her brother when he quarrelled with his father, whose ire she had also tasted; Margaret sought to reconnect with a brother she barely knew, as a peer and ally among the ruling families of Western Europe. Mary, without the security of a powerful husband, had the most to lose, but offered him what she could – the sanctuary of her home at Amesbury. Above all, they shared with their brother an indissoluble membership of the English royal family, which linked their fates together. Undoubtedly, each of his sisters hoped that their ability to intercede with a powerful king would continue once their brother wore the crown, securing their special position and the power and influence that flowed outwards from it. But, like so much else threatened by Edward’s infatuation with Piers Gaveston and his naive reluctance to moderate his behaviour, the privileges his princess sisters had always enjoyed were endangered from the very start of his rule.
Epilogue
The reign of Edward II – most remembered for its gory, if probably apocryphal, end – lasted for twenty years. His record as a king and as husband to the French princess Isabella (who became known to posterity as the ‘She-Wolf of France’) has been examined by countless historians, some more sympathetically than others, but few have managed to avoid characterizing his kingship as a stark contrast to the reign of his father. Even contemporary commentators seem to have been fixed on the differences between the kings: persistent rumours that he was not really the old king’s son dogged Edward of Caernarfon throughout the 1310s but, whether his perceived failings were connected to sexual relationships with successive, hated favourites – the question that has most obsessed writers – or otherwise, Edward’s hold on power was clearly weaker than his father’s had been. The comparative vulnerability of his position impacted those within his circle, including his sisters, whose influence rose or fell, depending on the king’s own authority. Margaret’s later years provide a good example of this impact: on Jan’s death in 1312, their son was aged only twelve, and a regency was therefore instituted in Brabant. Although Margaret might have expected to act as regent herself – it was a common role for women in her position, and one she would have been well prepared for, having lived nearly two decades as consort – she played no formal role while her heir was under age, and nor did she assume a meaningful advisory role once her son began to rule, despite his youth and her trustworthy experience. Instead, Margaret’s dowager period saw her living quietly and largely outside the sphere of influence around court, sidelined during the course of her brother’s reign.
Mary and Elizabeth also saw their influence fade, in part because their brother’s attention was normally focused on the advice of his favourites, and in part simply because they were less frequently at court. Mary continued to use her connection to the king when it benefitted Amesbury – in appeals to the Pope, or in disputes between the priory and the abbess of its motherhouse at Fontevraud. And, though she was less often at court, Mary still exercised the special freedoms of movement she had always enjoyed – once her estates had been confirmed by her brother, she continued to travel to her manors, including Swainston on the Isle of Wight, where she held a sizable house with a great hall brightened by large Gothic windows, that had been built in the thirteenth century by the Bishop of Winchester. Increasingly her energy, however, seems to have been expended in raising, educating, and safeguarding as much as she could the daughters of her sisters and nieces, including Elizabeth de Clare, Eleanor de Bohun, Joanna de Monthermer (who joined the priory at Amesbury as a fully professed nun), and Joanna Gaveston. The last of these died young while living at Amesbury, as did Mary’s half-sister, Princess Eleanor, daughter of Queen Marguerite.1
In 1309, Elizabeth bore twin boys, followed in the next five years by three additional children, including Eleanor and a second daughter called Margaret. During the years of estrangement from her brother over Piers Gaveston, and the period when Humphrey was imprisoned after the English defeat at Bannockburn (when he fought Robert Bruce in single combat, but was forced to concede), her children may have provided Elizabeth – who seemed of all her sisters to most need to be surrounded by family – with a degree of comfort. She appears to have taken an active interest in her daughters’ marriages, enlisting her stepmother and friend Marguerite to help secure favourable matches for them. She also provided them with exceptional educations, a fitting testimony to the lifelong impact of her own mother’s memory: her daughter Margaret could read not only Latin but also Greek, and grew to be an enthusiastic collector of books. Finally reconciled with her brother three years after Piers’ death, Elizabeth spent Christmas of 1315 with Edward and Isabella at Clipstone, and retired afterwards to Quendon in Essex to await the birth of her tenth child. There, on 5 May 1316, a daughter, named Isabella in honour of the queen, was born, but complications soon set in, and within days both mother and child were dead. Her husband buried her among his own ancestors at Walden Abbey. Though her death left many young children without a mother, Elizabeth was at least spared having to witness Humphrey’s horrific death in battle while fighting against her brother’s army at Boroughbridge in 1322, and the terrible years that followed.2
Margaret and Mary both lived to see the full tragedy of their brother’s reign. Desp
ite the many warnings from his counsellors, Edward’s unchecked favouritism of his noble friends ultimately led to the tumultuous usurpation of his throne by his wife Isabella and her Marcher lord paramour, Roger Mortimer. Imprisoned under Isabella and Mortimer’s orders, Edward was likely murdered at Berkeley Castle in September 1327. Three years later, his seventeen-year-old eldest son – in a manoeuvre redolent of Edward I’s youthful daring – overthrew, captured and executed Mortimer, consigning Isabella to genteel retirement and gaining control of the throne he would hold for five decades. But far from the English court, Edward’s surviving sisters were insulated from the most devastating consequences of their brother’s mistakes. Mary lived out her years quietly, mostly at Amesbury, where she died in 1332 at the age of fifty-three, five years after her brother’s death. Buried in the priory near her grandmother, a monument will have remembered the princess-nun, but it was lost with the destruction of the priory church during the Dissolution. Her sister Margaret was still alive at the age of fifty-eight in 1333, resident on her dower estate and uninvolved with the high politics of her son’s or brother’s courts, but perhaps close to her six young grandchildren. She most likely died soon after, as her name disappears from the historical record. She was buried next to Jan in the ducal chapel of the great collegiate church in Brussels, but her tomb, too, has been lost.
The next generation did not fare so well; their uncle’s reign left the lives of Joanna’s children utterly ravaged. Margaret de Clare, the wife of Piers Gaveston, endured the widespread hatred of her husband at court for five years, including during the two separate periods that he was exiled (during the latter of which she was heavily pregnant). Their only child, Joanna – named for her grandmother and sent to Amesbury to be raised by her great-aunt Mary – was six months old when her father was executed in 1312, by nobles including Humphrey de Bohun. Mother and daughter were forced to fall back on the king for support, but that also faded over time. Joanna’s son Gilbert remained a loyal supporter of his uncle, often attempting a mediating role between the king and those opposed to Piers, but he died in battle at Bannockburn in 1314. According to one chronicler, Gilbert tried to dissuade the king from engaging the superior Scottish forces and, when Edward nevertheless insisted on fighting, he angrily and rashly flung himself into battle, unprotected by his men.
With the death of the childless Gilbert, the Clare estate was divided between his three sisters, which sparked an aggressive dispute between Eleanor’s husband Hugh le Despenser – who had matured into the most bullying of the king’s favourites – and her sisters. Hugh’s avarice and intimidation led to a complete breakdown in the sisters’ relationships: Margaret and Elizabeth de Clare were both held captive after they split from the king’s party, and Elizabeth was forced to relinquish part of her estate to Eleanor and Hugh. But, although Eleanor spent most of her uncle’s reign near the apex of power (some have even suggested that she may have had an adulterous and incestuous love affair with the king), she eventually suffered too; imprisoned for a time in the Tower of London, her unmarried daughters were forcibly veiled, and Hugh, as the king’s final favourite, was condemned to a traitor’s death by the invading forces of Queen Isabella. In 1330, Eleanor was forced to beg for royal permission to collect her husband’s bones for burial near her father at Tewkesbury – his head from a spike on Tower Bridge, the rest taken, after quartering, to Bristol, Dover, York, and Newcastle. It is impossible not to wonder how different her children’s lives might have turned out if Joanna, unafraid as she was to stand up to her father, had lived to stand against her brother.
If, having concluded the story of the five royal sisters at the court of Edward I – exceptional in their power, their education, and at times their bold action – we were to search for their legacy it might be found in the example their lives provided to some of their daughters, and above all to Joanna’s youngest Clare daughter, Elizabeth. Although she was not yet twelve at the time of her mother’s death, Elizabeth’s life encapsulates the independence, the passion for learning, and the confident self-determination that characterized her mother and aunts.
Raised within Joanna’s household and educated at Amesbury, Elizabeth’s life began, like those of her sisters, with an early marriage to a young nobleman – but, following the deaths of her first husband and her brother, she determined to shape her own future. She copied her mother’s example and defied her uncle, the king – who had hoped to betroth the widow-heiress to a favoured courtier – by eloping with a man of her choosing. She endured imprisonment under the orders of the king and was forced to concede parts of her estate, but emerged after the downfall of her enemies, a wealthy and powerful widow who outlived most of her generation. Clare Castle flourished under her management, supporting artisans and craftsmen, and cultivating gardens, stables, kennels, and menageries to rival the greatest in the kingdom. While her relationships with her Clare sisters suffered irreparably during their uncle’s reign, she was able to support her Monthermer half-siblings well into the prosperous decades of Edward III’s kingship, and also maintained a close friendship with her cousin Joanna of Bar, the spurned Countess of Surrey. However, Elizabeth’s most lasting achievement was her foundation of Clare College in Cambridge, the earliest college endowed by a woman, and an example that would be emulated by countesses and queens in the centuries that followed. The foundation provided a memorial to commemorate the now-defunct Clare dynasty, but its purpose harks back to the legacy of exceptional learning Elizabeth inherited from the women who came before her. In a quiet corner of the hall in Clare College, a small shield showing the royal arms and a slim pane of glass listing her name are all that attests the part Joanna of Acre played in the college’s establishment.
Beyond the enclosed walls of Cambridge, nothing today survives of the monuments that remembered Eleanora at Westminster, Joanna at Clare Priory, Margaret in Brussels, Mary at Amesbury, or Elizabeth at Walden. Nor do Joanna or any of her daughters through whom the great Clare estate was dispersed appear among the Earls of Gloucester that gaze across the centuries from the vivid stained glass at Tewkesbury. The sisters are not depicted on the great tomb chests at Westminster Abbey, where tourists still flock to remember their parents, as are the many children of Edward III and his queen, Philippa, on his tomb. Lacking such visual reminders, these women have been largely forgotten. But, by recovering their stories and showing how they used the pathways for wielding power and achieving influence and independence that were open to them, we may construct a different kind of monument to them – one that they were denied in their own era. It is time that these extraordinary women were remembered.
Acknowledgements
During the many years that this book existed only in my head, and in the several it has actually been in production, I have incurred an extraordinary number of debts. In the way that writing a book connects to all parts of one’s life, the true list of those to whom I owe thanks would far outstrip the space allotted here.
My first thanks must go to my agent Ben Clark and his colleagues at Lucas Alexander Whitley, who saw a glimmer of promise in my desire to tell the story of some forgotten women from long ago and helped at a critical early stage to give structure to my aspiration. I am also incredibly indebted to the masterful Georgina Morley, who coaxed this still-raw idea into the book in your hands. She and her colleagues at Picador (in particular, Gillian Stern, Marissa Constantinou, and Chloe May, as well as the maps and design teams) have gently and persuasively, but (importantly) also thoroughly, advised, revised, and improved the argument and structure of the text, and made the book look as beautiful as some of the wondrous objects it describes.
The most significant among the debts I have incurred over many years to fellow historians are those owed to Nigel Saul, who taught me, among much else, how to understand the past through its material remains. His influence as a scholar, mentor, and friend has been essential to all of my historical research. Ever generous, he read much of this book in manuscript, as did
Edward Wilson-Lee; any remaining errors are of course entirely my own. I am also grateful to the librarians and keepers of the manuscripts rooms at the British Library and Cambridge University Library, as well as the National Archives and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Thank you, too, to the Church of St Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey, for permission to include among the illustrations their splendid mazer.
The book and I have benefited enormously from the extraordinarily rich intellectual culture that I have been immensely privileged to inhabit in Cambridge, where over the years I have been encouraged, supported, and, above all, inspired in this endeavour by friends and colleagues including: Phil Allmendinger, Rosa Andujar, David Beckingham, Paul Binski, Cyprian Broodbank, Ambrogio Caiani, Julia Lovell, Rob Macfarlane, Joe Moshenska, Nicholas Rogers, David Runciman, and Patrick Zutshi.
The final thanks are to my family. To my parents, Bill and Wanda Lee (who will attest that my interest in princesses with power has been lifelong), for instilling in me the confidence to dream beyond my immediate horizons. This book is dedicated to them with love and gratitude. To Ben and Vivian Lee, for extremely generously buying the computer on which the book was written. To Gabriel and Ambrose Wilson-Lee, for bringing incalculable joy and humour into my life, and for curing me of a tendency to procrastinate. And to my husband, Edward Wilson-Lee, without whose unwavering support and encouragement, this – and all the rest – would be impossible.
Footnote
II. BETROTHAL
* Italics my own.
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