Marguerite Of France (2)

The second and final part (part one) of my post about Marguerite of France, second queen of Edward I and stepmother of Edward II. There is evidence to suggest that Marguerite was on close terms with Edward of Caernarfon - who was only about five years younger than she was - at least before his accession in 1307. In 1299, a few weeks after Marguerite's marriage to Edward I, her household was merged for a time with that of her fifteen-year-old stepson. Edward (of Caernarfon) sent her a gold ring set with a ruby as a New Year gift in January 1303, and in the regnal year of November 1302 to November 1303 gave her, and members of her household, jewels, rings, cups and belts to the value of a little over fifty pounds. Oh, and here are some nice details I forgot to mention in the first part: as her wedding gift in September 1299, Edward I gave his new wife jewels which had once belonged to her great-grandmother Blanche of Castile, queen of Louis VIII: a gold crown, a gold coronet and a gold belt, all adorned with precious stones. For New Year 1304, Edward I gave Marguerite a gold cup with foot and cover, and a gold pitcher; three years previously, she had given him a gold goblet with cover and "two silver platters called 'Lechefrithe'." [1]

Several hundred of Edward of Caernarfon's letters happen to survive for a few months in 1304/05, eight of them to Marguerite. [2] He usually addressed her as "my very dear lady and mother" (ma treschere dame e mere); references to Marguerite after Edward's accession to the throne almost invariably call her "the king's mother," though Edward also addressed his former wetnurse Alice Leygrave in the same terms and in 1305, rather poignantly given that he can barely have remembered Eleanor of Castile, called his much older kinswoman Agnes de Valence "our good mother" (nostre bone mere) and called himself her son. (Bless him.) It was in the summer of 1305 that Queen Marguerite really came into her own, acting as a liaison between Edward and his father the irascible sixty-six-year-old king: the two men fell out for a few weeks, supposedly after Edward of Caernarfon insulted Walter Langton, the treasurer, with "gross and harsh words" and went hunting, with Piers Gaveston, in Langton's parks without permission. [3] Edward wrote several letters to Marguerite during this period asking her to intercede with his father on his behalf, especially in the matter of Piers Gaveston and Gilbert de Clare, whom the king had, with many others, removed from his household: "if we should add those two to the others, we would feel much comfort and alleviation of the anguish which we have endured, and continue to suffer, by the ordinance of our aforementioned lord and father. My lady, will you please take this matter to heart, and pursue it in the most gracious manner that you may, so dearly as you love us." Marguerite evidently did so, the quarrel was soon resolved, and on 1 September 1305 Edward sent her a courteous letter of gratitude: "We thank you as dearly as we may for the distress which you have endured for us, and for the goodwill with which you have carried out the business touching us" (Nous vous mercioms si cherement come nous pooms des travals que vous avez endure pur nous, e du bien que vous avez mis en les busoignes que nous touchent; my translation).

Edward II's closeness to his stepmother, as well as to numerous other women such as his sisters (who, to judge from the surviving letters of 1304/05, thought the world of him), various nieces and other kinswomen, and the women who populate the pages of his chamber journals dining, drinking and otherwise spending quality time with him, goes a long way to disproving the notion that he was "hostile to women" (to cite a fairly recent review on Amazon which refers to him), a theory evidently based on some bizarre idea that men who love men must automatically hate women. To return to Marguerite, there are various entries which make it apparent that she followed her husband to Scotland on his campaigns of the early 1300s, which would seem to point to a close relationship. (Isabella of France also accompanied Edward II on his unsuccessful Scottish campaign of 1310/11 and spent a few months with him at Berwick-on-Tweed, a fact often missed or ignored; she also travelled as far north as Berwick with her husband in June 1314 when he went to fight at Bannockburn.) Marguerite must have been disappointed in the summer of 1305 when the planned trip to England of her mother Marie of Brabant and her brother Louis of Evreux was cancelled. Edward of Caernarfon, keen to present himself well during the visit of his royal relatives, had ordered "two palfreys which are beautiful and suitable for our proper mounting."

The death of sixty-eight-year-old Edward I on 7 July 1307 left Marguerite a widow in her late twenties with three children, Thomas, Edmund and Eleanor, aged seven, almost six and fourteen months. The now dowager queen was well dowered with lands, Edward II had bound himself to provide for her children, his half-siblings, and perhaps Marguerite looked forward to a continuation of the close relationship they had long enjoyed. Within months, however, Edward's obsessive favouritism towards Piers Gaveston began to fray this relationship, and it is possible that the dowager queen's opposition to the new earl of Cornwall was at least partly rooted in concern for her niece Isabella, daughter of Marguerite's half-brother Philippe IV of France and the queen of England from February 1308. Marguerite seems, however, not to have offered the twelve-year-old girl advice on how to deal with the complicated situation, but to have retired from court. According to a newsletter of May 1308, Marguerite and Philippe IV offered the English barons opposed to Piers Gaveston the enormous sum of £40,000, which sounds like one of those wild exaggerations so beloved of medieval chroniclers (to put the sum into perspective, Marguerite's dower gave her an income of £4500 a year). Another point of conflict between Marguerite and Piers arose over the castle of Berkhamstead, which was part of the dowager queen's dower but had previously belonged to Edmund (died 1300), Edward I's cousin and the previous earl of Cornwall; Edward II seems to have granted possession of the castle to Piers, and the royal favourite certainly married Margaret de Clare there in November 1307. Although it was sometimes stated in Edward II's lifetime, and still is nowadays, that Edward I had intended the earldom of Cornwall for one of his sons by Marguerite, a document which the king drew up in August 1306 states that Thomas should receive the earldom of Norfolk and Edmund unspecified lands worth 7000 marks a year, with no title mentioned. (See here: no mention of the earldom of Cornwall going to either son.)

Marguerite attended the wedding of Edward II to her niece Isabella in Boulogne on 25 January 1308; her mother Queen Marie and half-brother the king of France were also among the guests. Her opposition to Piers Gaveston later that year, however, appears to have cooled her relationship with her stepson, and for the remaining ten years of her life it is hard to say anything much about Marguerite of France - anything much that's interesting, at least - and she certainly played little if any role in politics. Edward briefly confiscated her castles of Gloucester, Berkhamstead (certainly hers after Piers Gaveston's death in 1312), Leeds and Odiham in October 1317, but soon restored them to her, and most of the references to Marguerite in the chancery rolls after 1308 concern her lands and are therefore pretty dull. [4] It's hard to say anything much about what kind of person she was; her successful relationship with a man four decades her senior and willingness to intercede with him on her stepson's behalf suggest a pleasant, accommodating personality. Various historians of the nineteenth century, foremost among them Agnes Strickland, record that Marguerite was "good withouten lack," though I don't know what the primary source for that quotation is. (I'm sure I could find out easily enough, but to be honest my interest in it only goes so far.)

Queen Marguerite died on 14 February 1318, probably not yet forty years old, at her castle of Marlborough in Wiltshire. On 8 March, Edward II sent two pieces of Lucca cloth to lie over her body, and sent six more pieces after it was moved to London shortly afterwards. The king visited his stepmother's remains at St Mary's Church in Southwark on 14 March, and attended her funeral at the Greyfriars Church the following day, purchasing six pieces of Lucca cloth for himself and two pieces each for two other people, his sister Mary the nun and Sir Roger Damory, his current court favourite, to wear. Edward appointed his half-brothers Thomas and Edmund, aged seventeen and sixteen, as executors of their mother's will. Isabella of France, then about six months pregnant with her and Edward's elder daughter Eleanor of Woodstock, also attended her aunt's funeral, apparently without the benefit of new Lucca cloth; forty years later she would be buried in the same church. [5]

Marguerite was survived by her brother Louis, count of Evreux, her mother Marie of Brabant, dowager queen of France, and two of her three children. Her younger son Edmund, earl of Kent, was beheaded in March 1330 at the age of twenty-eight after plotting to rescue the supposedly dead Edward II from Corfe Castle; her elder son Thomas, earl of Norfolk, died aged thirty-eight in August 1338 after a career which, to be frank, failed by some distance even to achieve mediocrity. Marguerite's granddaughters Joan of Kent (Edmund's daughter) and Margaret Marshal (Thomas's daughter) produced offspring from whom Marguerite has numerous illustrious descendants: Richard II, her great-grandson; all the kings and queens of England from Edward IV onwards; all the kings and queens of Scotland from James II (1430-1460) onwards; three of Henry VIII's wives, Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr; and my friend at the Nevill Feast blog might be interested to learn that Isobel Ingoldisthorpe was Marguerite's five greats-granddaughter and Richard Nevill, earl of Warwick, her four greats-grandson.

Sources

1) Roy Martin Haines, King Edward II, p. 4; Alison Marshall, 'The Childhood and Household of Edward II's Half-Brothers, Thomas of Brotherton and Edmund of Woodstock', in The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson, p. 197, note 43; Pierre Chaplais, Piers Gaveston: Edward II's Adopted Brother, p. 99; Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland 1272-1307, pp. 325, 370, 376.
2) Hilda Johnstone, ed., Letters of Edward, Prince of Wales 1304-5, pp. 44-45, 73-74, 88-90, 111, 127; J.S. Hamilton, 'The Character of Edward II', in Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives, pp. 16-17.
3) See Hilda Johnstone, Edward of Carnarvon 1284-1307, pp. 96-102, for a detailed account of the quarrel.
4) Calendar of Patent Rolls 1317-1321, pp. 38, 46, for the confiscation of the queen's castles.
5) Foedera 1307-1327, p. 360; Thomas Stapleton, 'A Brief Summary of the Wardrobe Accounts of the tenth, eleventh, and fourteenth years of King Edward the Second', Archaeologia, 26 (1836) p. 337.