by Penny Lawne
Attitudes towards religious observances varied widely. The Church regarded charity and almsgiving as an essential part of religious practice and Joan would have learned that noblewomen were expected to give food and money to the poor. There were some great ladies of the court who were renowned for their piety, such as Elizabeth de Burgh (an older half-cousin of Joan’s through her father) and Marie de St Pol, Countess of Pembroke. Both ladies were wealthy widows when Joan was a child, and gave generously to religious foundations, each also founding a college at Cambridge. Some noblewomen showed a devotion to a particular saint and there were many shrines devoted to different saints in England, such as the site to Our Lady at Walsingham, which were visited on pilgrimage. However, those closest to Joan did not show any marked inclination towards piety. Her mother, Margaret, does not seem to have been deeply interested. Not only did she not make a chantry foundation for her husband, but there is no indication that she ever went on pilgrimage or made any significant donation to one of the many religious foundations, in contrast to her brother Thomas Wake. Edward III and his queen were naturally important religious patrons but appear to have been conventional and conformist in their religious practices, and although there has been a suggestion that Philippa shared her eldest son’s later interest in the Trinity she does not seem to have made any major benefactions.12
Apart from religious works, such as the lives of saints, what sort of books would Joan have read? This is indicated from the literature popular among the aristocracy at the time. Courtly and historical romances were widely circulated, with the most popular subject matter being the tales of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, Charlemagne and his paladins, the classical histories of ancient Greece and Rome, the tales of Troy and Thebes, Alexander and Caesar. All of these tales were among the collection of books Queen Isabella is known to have had. In romantic stories the heroes were given the qualities associated with good knighthood: prowess in arms, bravery, loyalty, generosity and courtesy. There was a direct link between Christian belief and chivalry, with knights upholding justice, defending the Church, protecting the weak and the poor. It was an honour to aid and defend women, with love portrayed as an emotion which rewarded while sharpening and refining the knight’s honourable ambitions. The values expounded in these chivalrous tales were reflected in the life around Joan, with tournaments as an obvious visual display. Tournaments acted as social gatherings for the elite as well as training grounds for young knights, and bestowed prestige and prizes on the successful contenders. In the tournaments women supplied the support, the appreciative audience, the decoration – and possibly the prize, as wearing a token of an admiring lady was a usual and popular practice.
Joan grew up in an environment that encouraged and endorsed chivalry as well as the majesty of the Crown. As Edward III gained in confidence he gathered the nobility around him and set the style for his court. He started to behave in such a way as to reflect his ideas for the splendour and grandeur of monarchy. Although dress was not extravagant in the first years of Edward III’s reign, the king’s enjoyment of fine clothing was apparent early on.13 He gave Philippa several robes to wear for her churching after Prince Edward’s birth in July 1330: one of violet velvet embroidered with gold squirrels, one of cloth of gold faced with miniver fur and a robe of silk and gold to wear in evening.14 The reading of chivalric romances such as the Arthurian legend, common among the nobility, was reflected in the plentiful royal library.15 Edward III fostered this, deliberately encouraging a chivalric ethos in his court to help to unite the nobility and create camaraderie among them. Chivalric ideas permeated his court from 1330 onwards. In 1333, for example, Philippa gave Edward III a silver and enamelled cup decorated with figures from Charlemagne and the court of King Arthur stories as a New Year gift.16 Tournaments, watched by the court, such as the Cheapside tournament held in 1331, increased in number. In the 1340s Edward III was to give his ideas their apotheosis with his creation first of a round table for up to three hundred knights at Windsor in 1344, then in 1348 by setting up the Order of the Garter. All the noble, and royal, children were exposed to this atmosphere, with the boys expected to acquire knightly attributes, and the girls to provide a suitable supporting role, and their role models were the king and queen. It is no coincidence that all of Joan’s male playmates were to become renowned knights.
Queen Philippa was devoted to Edward III and followed him whenever she could, taking her children with her.17 It is therefore probable that in joining the royal nursery Joan experienced an itinerant lifestyle as a child, staying with the queen’s household when it accompanied the king on his journeys. In the early 1330s the king remained mainly in and around London, staying in different royal residences: the palace at Westminster, the royal apartments in the Tower, Windsor, Havering, Eltham and Sheen. In September 1331 the household was based at Westminster, while the king and queen attended the jousts held at Smithfield arranged by Montague. By April 1332 the queen was at Woodstock, one of her favourite palaces (Havering was another), some distance outside London but within easy reach should she need to return. Woodstock had particular associations for Joan as it was her father’s birthplace, was comfortable without being elaborately grand and had a park built by Henry I surrounded by a stone wall, turned into a menagerie for the amusement of the royal family which was being maintained for wild animals in 1334.18 In 1334 the prince is recorded as staying in the Tower (where Princess Joan had been born a year earlier) with his sisters and Elizabeth Saint Omer, receiving gifts from the City of London, and in July 1335 they were at Peterborough Abbey and then at Nottingham Castle.19 Joan and John probably accompanied their royal cousins on each of these trips, and may have been with the queen at Hatfield in Yorkshire in 1336 when she gave birth to another son, William. Given complete protection in a stable and secure environment, those early years may have been happy ones for Joan and John.
4
A Clandestine Marriage
1338–1340
The most secret love is the most joyful, lasting and loyal.
Geoffrey de Charny
In the spring of 1340, when Joan was twelve, she married a household knight, Sir Thomas Holand. This was an extraordinary match, not so much because of the difference in rank between Joan and Thomas but because she married him in secret without the knowledge or consent of her family or her guardians. How did this clandestine marriage come about? Joan would have known at an early age that she would be expected to marry, and that her marriage would be arranged for her. It was customary for children of noble families to enter into marital alliances carefully planned by their parents. Negotiations for marriages often started when the children were very young (although betrothals were not considered binding by the Church until the age of puberty, which for girls was twelve and for boys fourteen). Marital proposals were invariably for political or financial reasons rather than based on personal inclination. Joan’s uncle, the Earl of Norfolk, for example, had secured a political affiliation when he agreed to his son and heir marrying Roger Mortimer’s daughter in 1329, while marrying his daughter Margaret to his ward John Segrave was for purely financial reasons. In the case of royal children it was taken for granted that their marriages represented a diplomatic opportunity to foster alliances. Edward III’s matrimonial plans for his own children had started almost as soon as Prince Edward was a year old. The king considered Joan and John’s marriages to be his responsibility and felt that as they had royal blood they should make suitably prestigious matches. In March 1334 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir William Clinton, Geoffrey Scrope and John Shoreditch were ordered to treat for a marriage for John with the daughter of ‘some French noble’, while negotiating a match between Edward III’s younger brother John, Earl of Cornwall, with Mary, daughter of the Count of Blois.1 Although this particular proposal for Joan’s brother did not come to fruition, John did later make an equivalent match, and Joan could expect to be similarly provided for. Yet instead, Joan made her own personal choice,
and married without the king’s consent.
In July 1338, when Joan was ten years old, she left England for Antwerp, with Princesses Isabella and Joan, in the company of the king and queen. The royal entourage set sail from Orwell in Sussex. Going on board ship, sailing with the fleet, with the colourful flags displaying the royal arms and those of the king’s favourite saints (St George, St Edward and St Edmund) must have been an exciting adventure for the princesses and their cousin.2 Joan was parted from her mother and brother, who remained in England, with Margaret looking after the family estates, while John stayed with Prince Edward. The eight-year-old prince was appointed guardian of the realm in his father’s absence and was assisted in his duties by members of his council, the earls of Huntingdon, Arundel and Ralph Neville.3 The purpose of the trip was Edward III’s need to secure allies as part of his plan to launch his campaign against France to settle the long running dispute over sovereignty in Aquitaine. The obvious place to look for allies was in the Low Countries. The count of Hainault was his father-in-law, and the export of English wool had built up close trading links with a number of important cloth weaving towns in Flanders. Edward had already tried to obtain support by sending an embassy to the Low Countries a year earlier, in May 1337, promising economic benefits such as trading concessions, but when this was unsuccessful he decided he needed to go in person. Philippa’s presence would remind her Hainault relations of their dynastic connection to the English throne, while those of his daughters and Joan would suggest the potential for securing alliances by marriage.
Edward III had another object in mind: his claim to the French throne. When Charles IV of France died in 1328 the succession to the French throne was in dispute. Edward’s mother, Queen Isabella, was Charles IV’s only sister, making him the closest surviving male relation. However, the French preferred the claim of Philip of Valois, Charles IV’s uncle. When Edward seized power from his mother in 1330, he had initially tried to use his grandfather’s example of marriage alliances to resolve Anglo-French relations, rather than pursue his claim. However, his negotiations for Prince Edward to marry Philip VI’s daughter, and for Princess Joan to marry the French king’s son, came to nothing, while Philip took advantage of Edward’s war with Scotland to strengthen the French position in Aquitaine, declaring the duchy confiscate to the French crown in May 1337.4 Edward’s response was to assert his own claim to the French crown. Once in Antwerp Edward left the queen and her household, and travelled down the Rhine to drum up support among his allies, returning in November 1338 to join Philippa when she gave birth to their second son, Lionel. Campaigning against the French started in the autumn of 1339, and in January 1340 Edward formally assumed the title of King of France. In February 1340 he returned to England, to persuade Parliament to give him financial support, but he was forced to leave Philippa behind in Antwerp, with his friend William Montague (created Earl of Salisbury in 1337), and the Earl of Derby, as pledges for payments of his debts. The queen was pregnant again, and in March 1340 gave birth to a third son, John, in Ghent, possibly at the abbey of St Bavo.5
By March 1340 Joan had been away from England for nearly two years, and she had probably not seen her mother or her brother in all that time. Lady Saint Omer had presumably accompanied the princesses, and it is likely that Catherine Montague had accompanied her husband William with the royal party. Philippa would have relied on both women to take charge of her daughters and Joan. Edward III had not forgotten Joan’s presence, with her value as a potential matrimonial bargaining counter. Anxious to secure the loyalty and support of his subjects in the duchy, and preoccupied with the necessity to raise money to pay his allies, a marriage alliance was an obvious means at his disposal, and Joan a suitably attractive prospect, with her royal kinship. Bernard, Lord of Albret, the head of a leading and powerful Gascon family, had been persuaded to support the English cause in the autumn of 1339, having formerly been an ally of the French Crown. He brought much-needed cash and many friends and allies, and it clearly behoved Edward to offer him inducements to keep him on his side.6 In April 1340 the king authorised Oliver Ingham, his seneschal in Gascony, to negotiate a marriage between Joan and Armand d’Albret, Bernard’s eldest son.7 The clerk recording the details muddled the names and cited Joan as ‘Margaretam filiam, clarae memoriae, Edmundi Comitis Kantiae’, clearly confusing Joan’s name with that of her mother. However, the negotiations were never concluded (although the hoped for alliance with the d’Albrets remained high on the king’s agenda, as he considered it of sufficient importance to propose his eldest daughter Isabella as a bride for the d’Albret heir in 1351).8
Joan had other ideas about her own future. She was now twelve, and the arrangements for her supervision were probably considerably laxer than they would have been in England. There was an atmosphere of impermanence, as it was unclear from the start how long the queen would remain abroad. The comings and goings of the king and his retinue, with the constant round of diplomatic initiatives with one after another potential ally, and the talk of war with France, created an element of insecurity. The age gap between Joan and the princesses (Joan was three years older than Princess Isabella, and five years older than Princess Joan) was more noticeable now that Joan was entering her teens, and she may have spent less time with them. Although Joan would not have been consulted, it is possible that she was aware of the discussions regarding her own future, and realised that if she married d’Albret it was likely that she would stay in France and might never see her mother or her brother again. At twelve she would have been showing signs of the great beauty for which she would become renowned. This was a family characteristic, and one certainly inherited from her father’s side of the family; her grandfather, Edward I, was considered a handsome man, and her uncle, Edward II, was described as tall, strong, golden-haired and good-looking. The same striking good looks and height were attributes shared by Edward III (Joan’s cousin) and his sons.9 Alone, vulnerable and pretty, it is not remarkable that Joan attracted the attention of an admirer.
Joan’s admirer was one of the king’s household knights, Sir Thomas Holand, the second son of a Lancastrian knight, a young man in his early twenties. Surprisingly, no one among the royal household appears to have noticed his attentions to the young Joan. Thomas’ wooing was ardent, and Joan fell headlong in love. In March or April 1340 Thomas persuaded her to marry him in secret, without the knowledge of any of her family or anyone in the royal household.10 According to Thomas Holand’s later testimony, he and Joan exchanged marriage vows in the presence of witnesses, and consummated the marriage.11 Accomplishing this necessarily meant that Joan would have been absent from the royal household for a period of time, but her absence can only have been very brief – a matter of hours rather than days – as it was not remarked on when she returned to the household afterwards and resumed her place. Joan does not appear to have confided in anyone, either before or after the marriage. The fact that Joan placed her trust in a young man she hardly knew, rather than turn to any of those closest to her (it is hard to believe that a girl of her age would have been able to resist telling someone very close to her) suggests that Thomas was an extremely charming and plausible young man, who was able to completely captivate Joan and persuade her to enter into a clandestine marriage which she knew would be frowned on by her guardians. Perhaps for Joan theirs was a truly romantic love affair, resembling some of the stories she would have read.
Proof of the marriage comes from the proceedings taken eight years later by Thomas Holand in the papal courts when he needed to establish its legality beyond doubt. The papal court considered the evidence for the marriage, examining the witnesses and taking statements from both Thomas Holand and Joan herself. The outcome of their deliberations was a pronouncement by Pope Clement VI in November 1349 confirming the validity of the marriage.12 Although no exact date for the marriage is given in the transcript of the proceedings, on 3 May 1348 the Pope wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of London and Norw
ich about Thomas Holand’s petition and in his letter made reference to the marriage having taken place ‘upwards of eight years ago’, indicating the spring of 1340.13 The date can be confidently narrowed to March or April by Thomas Holand’s duties. He was on the king’s payroll between July 1338 and November 1339, returning to the royal household in Ghent with the other household knights, and then resumed active duties in the early summer of 1340, taking part in the naval engagement at Sluys on 24 June 1340, after which he remained with the army, going to France and taking part in the Siege of Tournai.14 His marriage to Joan would have taken place in the spring of 1340, in Edward III’s absence (the king returned to England on 21 February 1340) and around the time the queen was confined, giving birth to John of Gaunt in March 1340.
Joan’s secret marriage to Thomas Holand was extraordinary, and poses many questions. How could a girl of her age, presumably still closely supervised, mainly in the company of the princesses and Lady Saint Omer, if not the Countess of Salisbury as well, manage to escape the attention of all these people, form a relationship of such strength and then marry without the knowledge, let alone the permission, of any of those closest to her? Why did Joan agree to it? At twelve years old, Joan would have understood the importance and significance of entering into marriage, and been well aware of what was expected of her by her family and her guardians. Why the secrecy? There is no obvious explanation for this. Thomas Holand could, and should, have wooed her openly, presented his suit and obtained her guardians’ permission. Joan’s birth made her a very attractive matrimonial prize, and if her nine-year-old brother John predeceased her – not an entirely unlikely possibility – then she would become an extremely wealthy heiress as well. Admittedly, Thomas Holand would not have been regarded as a good match for Joan, but he was not ineligible. He was the second son of a Lancastrian knight and born into the ranks of the gentry. It was not unknown for men and women of rank to marry a social inferior, even those of royal blood. There were precedents in Joan’s own family. Both her father and her uncle, Thomas Brotherton, had married women of considerably lower social status than themselves, while her uncle Thomas Wake had done the opposite when he married Blanche of Lancaster. Blanche was the king’s cousin, and had married Thomas when they were both underage, without Edward II’s approval.15 But they had not done so in secret. The clandestine nature of Joan’s marriage made it extremely unusual.