Secrets at Court
Page 21
Afterword
The accepted wisdom of the clandestine marriages of Joan of Kent is that she did, indeed, marry Thomas Holland, then William Montacute (also Montague), who became the second Earl of Salisbury, and that when Holland returned, he claimed her as his wife by their previous vow. He waited five years to pursue his legal claim to her, however, ostensibly because he lacked money to take it to the courts. After several years, and a petition to the Pope, his claim was accepted and her marriage to Salisbury was put aside.
The story was, apparently, accepted at the time and few questions have been raised about it over the years, though there were whispers. The reference to Joan as the ‘Virgin of Kent,’ was taken straight from the medieval chronicles. When her son, Richard II, was deposed, he was slurred as a bastard, though that is easily explained as further justification for removing him from the throne.
But as I dug into the details, I could not reconcile the facts as I uncovered them with the story that had been spun about them.
Why would Joan allow herself to be married if she believed she was already married in God’s eyes?
How could her first husband work for her second, and fight beside him, if he were truly married to Joan? And how could Salisbury allow it if Holland had immediately stated his claim when he returned to England in the winter of 1341–42?
Bit by bit, I came to believe that there was another story, more believable, to me, at least, to explain what had happened. It is that story, and its discovery, that drive Nicholas and Anne in this book.
I am not the first modern researcher to raise doubts about Joan’s first marriage. Chris Given-Wilson and Alice Curteis in The Royal Bastards of Medieval England said much the same thing. There has been no full-scale biography written of Joan, but the scholarly articles continue to support the official story that she had two clandestine marriages.
And what about King Edward and Queen Philippa’s role in all this? Joan was in their care when young, so if the story were true, she had ‘married’ Holland right under the Queen’s nose in Flanders. They supported her marriage to Salisbury and one explanation for Holland’s long delay in petitioning to have her returned was that he needed the money to go directly to the Pope because the King would have stopped him if he had started with the English ecclesiastical courts, as would have been the protocol. This suggested, to me at least, that Edward did not believe he was in the right. Still, Holland was one of the first knights to be initiated into the Order of the Garter, so he was certainly part of the King’s trusted circle.
Imagine King Edward and Queen Philippa’s chagrin to have to deal with Joan’s irregular marriages not once, but twice, and the second time to their oldest son and future King. A few historians have suggested that the King was opposed to this marriage, but other interpretations disagree and, in the end, he did not forbid it.
And there was a real Nicholas Lovayne—or Loveign or Loveyne or Lovagne—who was sent by the crown to the Curia on matters relating to the dissolution of Joan’s marriage not once, but twice. (I have borrowed his name in homage, but few other particulars of his life.) So if King Edward had protested, he ultimately supported his son’s efforts.
The traditional tale of the Black Prince and Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, is that theirs was a love match. It’s even been suggested that he had loved his ‘Jeanette’ as a child and there’s a charming, though probably imaginary, tale that the Prince had been sent to plead on behalf of a friend for the hand of the beautiful and wealthy widow. She declined, saying there was only one man she loved and would marry. Him.
Edward and Joan stayed happily married, apparently, for the remainder of Edward’s life. Shortly after their marriage, they went to Aquitaine to rule over what was left of Edward III’s French possessions. Prince Edward continued his record of successful leadership in war, but died before his father. Thus, Joan, the first Princess of Wales, never became Queen of England. She was, however, very influential in the court of her son, Richard II, and popular with the people.
After Edward’s death, she did not remarry, though she lived another nine years. But on her death she was buried, as she had asked, not beside her royal husband, but ‘near the monument of our late lord and husband, the Earl of Kent.’ Thomas Holland.
* * *
Readers of my other books might want to note these connections. Joan and Thomas’s ostensible rendezvous in Flanders took place in the same world as INNOCENCE UNVEILED, though I do not portray any of these characters in that story except for Queen Philippa. THE HARLOT’S DAUGHTER and IN THE MASTER’S BED both take place in the reign of Richard II, Joan’s son. She was very likely at court at this time, though again, I did not show her in the story.
Coming soon
WHISPERS AT COURT
Next, Anne’s friend Lady Cecily
is drawn to a French knight,
held captive at the English court.
Lady Cecily frowns on the developing romance between the English Princess she serves and a wealthy French lord, held hostage in her father’s court. Though King Edward triumphed in war, Cecily’s father was slain in battle. The royal family may forgive their one-time enemies. She never will.
Another hostage, Marc de Marcel, resents the English as much as Cecily does the French. Refusing to languish in a foreign land waiting for a ransom that may never be paid, he is determined to find another way home. One his captors will not like. But as Cecily and Marc struggle against an attraction neither wants they discover that love has a way of upsetting the strongest loyalties. And the best-laid plans.
ISBN: 978 1 472 04365 8
SECRETS AT COURT
© 2014 Blythe Gifford
Published in Great Britain 2014
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited
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