Many thanks to the wonderful historical novelist Sharon Penman for re-posting my 'Commandments for Writing about History' on her own blog! I'm delighted! After she, Michael Jecks and a few of my friends linked to the post on Facebook and Twitter, I got literally thousands of blog visitors within a couple of days. Thanks, everyone!
My lovely talented awesome friend Paula Lofting has an interview with me today on her blog Paula's Perusings. Thanks so much for inviting me and asking great questions about Edward II, Paula! Her other blogs are Sons of the Wolf, about her fab forthcoming novel set in England in the eleventh century, and Threads to the Past, about the Bayeux Tapestry. Hope you enjoy the interview!
I'd also like to draw your attention to some other blogs by friends of mine (please read them! :), in no particular order:
Piers Gaveston, by Anerje, who often comments here - mostly about everyone's favourite fourteenth-century Gascon knight and earl, with posts about other periods of history too.
A Nevill Feast - a detailed look at the family which played such an important role in the Wars of the Roses.
Historical novelist Susan Higginbotham - many fascinating posts about the fourteenth century, the Wars of the Roses and the Tudors.
Hannah's Thomas Cromwell Experience and Henry Tudor Experience, about Henry VII.
A Bit of Henry Love, about Henry VIII. The latest post is an excellent rant about non-fiction history books.
Sam's Loyalty Binds Me, featuring all aspects of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history.
Sarah's Remembering the Executed, with posts about all manner of people executed in the past, and her Sarah's History Blog, with book reviews, photos and discussions about history. Her latest post in Remembering the Executed features Edward II's half-brother Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent.
Christy's blogs Rooting for Ancestors, about genealogy, and Mary Barrett Dyer, focusing on seventeenth-century cultural history in England and New England.
Fem's It Happened To Her, with posts about female oppression in history.
Lorri's exciting new blog about nineteenth-century Australia.
29 May, 2012
23 May, 2012
Ten Commandments For Writing About History And Discussing It Online
Some things I need to get off my chest, based on reading about and discussing history on various online forums and Facebook groups, and certain articles and books.
1) You shall remember that people who lived hundreds of years ago were complex human beings every bit as complex and human as we are, who had families, and feelings, and human dignity, and that therefore you should write about them with respect, in the same way that you would wish writers to treat the memory of you and your loved ones with respect decades or centuries hence. You will not laugh or sneer or gloat at their painful deaths and suffering, or claim that they deserved everything they got, or express a wish that they'd suffered even more, or call them vile names. If you wouldn't want someone in the future to make light of tragic events which have befallen you and your loved ones, or to depict your beloved father as a callously neglectful parent or not in fact your biological father thanks to your mother's cheating on him, or your kind and wonderful husband as a spineless snivelling coward who frequently beat you up and forced himself on you, or your daughter as a cold-blooded child killer - and if it would make you angry and upset if anyone wrote things like this about your favourite historical person - then you should think twice about inventing such calumnies about other people merely because you don't like them or because they were an enemy of your favourite historical person.
2) You shall remember that accusing someone of a horrible crime such as murder, rape, child abuse, violent assault or torture is a serious allegation which should not be made without real, actual evidence. This is no less true merely because the person you are accusing lived 500 or 700 years ago, and lame so-called justifications such as "s/he was an unpleasant person who might have done such a thing" or "s/he had a motive to commit the crime, in my opinion" or meaningless rhetorical questions and mealy-mouthed statements such as "it is not beyond the bounds of possibility" that s/he committed the crime are insufficient. A motive, or what you with the benefit of more than half a millennium's hindsight perceive to be a motive, does not in itself constitute evidence. A wish to point the finger at your favourite historical person's enemies rather than him/her does not in itself constitute evidence. A wish to portray your favourite historical person as a long-suffering victim to arouse your audience's sympathies for him/her does not in itself constitute evidence.
3) You shall remember that complaining about your favourite historical person being unfairly maligned by history, while enthusiastically maligning his/her enemies for all you're worth, looks hypocritical.
(I have been wondering whether I myself am somewhat guilty of this one, as I do sometimes jokingly refer to Roger Mortimer as 'Le Manly Wodge' or similar, which is pretty snide of me. Having said that though, my aim is to take the mickey out of bizarre modern statements about his sexuality such as Alison Weir's, and the assumption that his 'unequivocal heterosexuality' made him stronger, more virile, more manly, generally just better than Edward II not because of his abilities but simply by virtue of who he was sexually and romantically attracted to. My intention is to point up bigotry and stereotypes, and I do not in any way mean to be cruel or mocking about Roger himself - just about the way some people in the twenty-first century choose to depict him. I don't dislike Roger at all; he was an extremely able and courageous man and I find much to like and admire about him. Same with Robert Bruce, or Isabella for that matter, and I really don't see why I need to dislike and spit venom at people who were in some way Edward II's enemies. For sure I'd never make up the kind of hateful, hurtful slurs about them which certain Isabella fans have invented to throw at Edward.)
4) You shall remember that your favourite historical person's enemies were complex, multi-dimensional human beings too and deserve to be acknowledged as such, rather than as cardboard cut-out evil villains devoid of any humanity. Depicting them as cruel to animals, or attracted to little boys, or sadistic rapists, is a ridiculously unsubtle and obvious way to make them unsympathetic to your readers. You shall also remember that however much you like your favourite historical person, s/he was a human being and thus had character flaws and made mistakes like every other human being who has ever lived, and that depicting him/her as impossibly saintly and perfect looks kind of silly. And also strips them of their humanity.
5) Unless you're twelve, you shall remember that there is no need to divide historical people into 'teams' or 'sides' and hurl abuse at the other 'team' or people who like them.
6) If you're discussing history online and make a surprising or implausible statement, such as claiming that it was treason to refuse to have sex with the king of England in the sixteenth century, you shall remember that it is entirely reasonable to be asked for a primary source to back up your statement. This is not a reason to accuse people of rudeness and bullying and to get all huffy and offended.
7) You shall remember that modern historical novels, however well-researched, well-written and enjoyable, do not count as primary sources. Responding to a request to provide a source for a statement you've made about a historical person with "Historical Novelist X depicted him this way" does not actually answer the question. You should also bear in mind that merely because something has appeared in print in a historical novel does not automatically mean that it has a basis in fact, and you should check before repeating it as though it certainly does. This is how historical myths get started, and once established, they're damn hard to shake.
8) You shall remember that familial, societal and marital norms of the Middle Ages were different to ours, and refrain from referring to women as "helpless pawns" when their marriages are arranged by their (cruel, heartless, callous, uncaring...) fathers. You shall remember that having your royal or noble heroine wail "But I don't love him!" when informed of her impending marriage to a king or nobleman is by now a tedious cliché. You will not assume that a medieval king must have been an uncaring neglectful father because he didn't live in a nuclear family arrangement with his children. You will remember that, contrary to what you might assume, depicting Isabella of France as being willing to take a lover at the age of sixteen and foist a child of non-royal blood onto the English throne is an insult to her, not a compliment.
9) You shall remember that depicting women as all of a sudden no longer possessing their own agency, becoming the proverbial "helpless pawns" and coming under the total control of nasty unscrupulous men whenever they do things you don't approve of, when two pages earlier you were applauding their independence of action and thought as they did noble and good things, is as patronising and paternalistic as the 'sexual prejudices' of previous centuries you're decrying. Repeat to yourself until it sinks in: Adult women are responsible for their own actions, good or bad, just as much as men are.
10) If you wouldn't refer to Roger Mortimer as Isabella of France's 'straight lover', to Alice Perrers as Edward III's 'female lover', or to John of Gaunt's 'heterosexual relationship' with Katherine Swynford - and of course you wouldn't - then you shall remember that there is no reason to call Piers Gaveston or Hugh Despenser Edward II's 'gay lover' or to talk about their 'homosexual relationship'. Merely 'lover' and 'relationship' or 'sexual relationship' will suffice; it will be readily apparent to your reader that Edward, Piers and Hugh were all men and that their relationships were therefore evidently same-sex. Furthermore, you shall remember that making lame statements such as "It's different when men love women" in an attempt to justify why you think Edward's (presumed) adultery with men is nasty and icky while his grandson John of Gaunt's adultery with Katherine Swynford is fabulously romantic, looks bigoted. There are ways that we can discuss prejudices of other eras without making it look as though we share them and expect our readers to do so too.
EDITED TO ADD: My friend at the wonderful A Nevill Feast blog has written a great post about women in historical fiction. Please read it!
1) You shall remember that people who lived hundreds of years ago were complex human beings every bit as complex and human as we are, who had families, and feelings, and human dignity, and that therefore you should write about them with respect, in the same way that you would wish writers to treat the memory of you and your loved ones with respect decades or centuries hence. You will not laugh or sneer or gloat at their painful deaths and suffering, or claim that they deserved everything they got, or express a wish that they'd suffered even more, or call them vile names. If you wouldn't want someone in the future to make light of tragic events which have befallen you and your loved ones, or to depict your beloved father as a callously neglectful parent or not in fact your biological father thanks to your mother's cheating on him, or your kind and wonderful husband as a spineless snivelling coward who frequently beat you up and forced himself on you, or your daughter as a cold-blooded child killer - and if it would make you angry and upset if anyone wrote things like this about your favourite historical person - then you should think twice about inventing such calumnies about other people merely because you don't like them or because they were an enemy of your favourite historical person.
2) You shall remember that accusing someone of a horrible crime such as murder, rape, child abuse, violent assault or torture is a serious allegation which should not be made without real, actual evidence. This is no less true merely because the person you are accusing lived 500 or 700 years ago, and lame so-called justifications such as "s/he was an unpleasant person who might have done such a thing" or "s/he had a motive to commit the crime, in my opinion" or meaningless rhetorical questions and mealy-mouthed statements such as "it is not beyond the bounds of possibility" that s/he committed the crime are insufficient. A motive, or what you with the benefit of more than half a millennium's hindsight perceive to be a motive, does not in itself constitute evidence. A wish to point the finger at your favourite historical person's enemies rather than him/her does not in itself constitute evidence. A wish to portray your favourite historical person as a long-suffering victim to arouse your audience's sympathies for him/her does not in itself constitute evidence.
3) You shall remember that complaining about your favourite historical person being unfairly maligned by history, while enthusiastically maligning his/her enemies for all you're worth, looks hypocritical.
(I have been wondering whether I myself am somewhat guilty of this one, as I do sometimes jokingly refer to Roger Mortimer as 'Le Manly Wodge' or similar, which is pretty snide of me. Having said that though, my aim is to take the mickey out of bizarre modern statements about his sexuality such as Alison Weir's, and the assumption that his 'unequivocal heterosexuality' made him stronger, more virile, more manly, generally just better than Edward II not because of his abilities but simply by virtue of who he was sexually and romantically attracted to. My intention is to point up bigotry and stereotypes, and I do not in any way mean to be cruel or mocking about Roger himself - just about the way some people in the twenty-first century choose to depict him. I don't dislike Roger at all; he was an extremely able and courageous man and I find much to like and admire about him. Same with Robert Bruce, or Isabella for that matter, and I really don't see why I need to dislike and spit venom at people who were in some way Edward II's enemies. For sure I'd never make up the kind of hateful, hurtful slurs about them which certain Isabella fans have invented to throw at Edward.)
4) You shall remember that your favourite historical person's enemies were complex, multi-dimensional human beings too and deserve to be acknowledged as such, rather than as cardboard cut-out evil villains devoid of any humanity. Depicting them as cruel to animals, or attracted to little boys, or sadistic rapists, is a ridiculously unsubtle and obvious way to make them unsympathetic to your readers. You shall also remember that however much you like your favourite historical person, s/he was a human being and thus had character flaws and made mistakes like every other human being who has ever lived, and that depicting him/her as impossibly saintly and perfect looks kind of silly. And also strips them of their humanity.
5) Unless you're twelve, you shall remember that there is no need to divide historical people into 'teams' or 'sides' and hurl abuse at the other 'team' or people who like them.
6) If you're discussing history online and make a surprising or implausible statement, such as claiming that it was treason to refuse to have sex with the king of England in the sixteenth century, you shall remember that it is entirely reasonable to be asked for a primary source to back up your statement. This is not a reason to accuse people of rudeness and bullying and to get all huffy and offended.
7) You shall remember that modern historical novels, however well-researched, well-written and enjoyable, do not count as primary sources. Responding to a request to provide a source for a statement you've made about a historical person with "Historical Novelist X depicted him this way" does not actually answer the question. You should also bear in mind that merely because something has appeared in print in a historical novel does not automatically mean that it has a basis in fact, and you should check before repeating it as though it certainly does. This is how historical myths get started, and once established, they're damn hard to shake.
8) You shall remember that familial, societal and marital norms of the Middle Ages were different to ours, and refrain from referring to women as "helpless pawns" when their marriages are arranged by their (cruel, heartless, callous, uncaring...) fathers. You shall remember that having your royal or noble heroine wail "But I don't love him!" when informed of her impending marriage to a king or nobleman is by now a tedious cliché. You will not assume that a medieval king must have been an uncaring neglectful father because he didn't live in a nuclear family arrangement with his children. You will remember that, contrary to what you might assume, depicting Isabella of France as being willing to take a lover at the age of sixteen and foist a child of non-royal blood onto the English throne is an insult to her, not a compliment.
9) You shall remember that depicting women as all of a sudden no longer possessing their own agency, becoming the proverbial "helpless pawns" and coming under the total control of nasty unscrupulous men whenever they do things you don't approve of, when two pages earlier you were applauding their independence of action and thought as they did noble and good things, is as patronising and paternalistic as the 'sexual prejudices' of previous centuries you're decrying. Repeat to yourself until it sinks in: Adult women are responsible for their own actions, good or bad, just as much as men are.
10) If you wouldn't refer to Roger Mortimer as Isabella of France's 'straight lover', to Alice Perrers as Edward III's 'female lover', or to John of Gaunt's 'heterosexual relationship' with Katherine Swynford - and of course you wouldn't - then you shall remember that there is no reason to call Piers Gaveston or Hugh Despenser Edward II's 'gay lover' or to talk about their 'homosexual relationship'. Merely 'lover' and 'relationship' or 'sexual relationship' will suffice; it will be readily apparent to your reader that Edward, Piers and Hugh were all men and that their relationships were therefore evidently same-sex. Furthermore, you shall remember that making lame statements such as "It's different when men love women" in an attempt to justify why you think Edward's (presumed) adultery with men is nasty and icky while his grandson John of Gaunt's adultery with Katherine Swynford is fabulously romantic, looks bigoted. There are ways that we can discuss prejudices of other eras without making it look as though we share them and expect our readers to do so too.
EDITED TO ADD: My friend at the wonderful A Nevill Feast blog has written a great post about women in historical fiction. Please read it!
18 May, 2012
Isabel of Castile, Queen of Aragon and Duchess of Brittany
A post about Edward II's kinswoman, Isabel of Castile, queen of Aragon and duchess of Brittany (1283-1328), who, in different circumstances, might have been his queen.
Infanta Doña Isabel was born in Toro between Zamora and Valladolid in northern Spain sometime in 1283 as the granddaughter of the then reigning king of Castile, Alfonso X (Eleanor of Castile's half-brother and thus Edward II's uncle). Her mother was Maria de Molina, who was born in the late 1250s or early 1260s and was the daughter of Fernando III's brother Alfonso, lord of Molina, and her father was Sancho, second son of Alfonso X and grandson of Fernando III, born in May 1258 (Isabel's parents were first cousins once removed). Isabel was the eldest of the children of Sancho and Maria, who had married in Toledo in July 1282, and her younger siblings were: King Fernando IV, December 1285 - September 1312; Pedro, lord of Los Cameros, born 1290, killed at the battle of Vega de Grenada in 1319; Felipe, lord of Cabrera and Ribera, May 1292 - April 1327; Beatriz, queen of Portugal, 1293 - October 1359; and two brothers, Alfonso and Enrique, who died in childhood. Her father also had three known illegitimate children. Isabel was Edward II's first cousin once removed on her father's side and his second cousin on her mother's. She was also the second cousin of Edward's queen Isabella of France, both of them great-granddaughters of King Jaime I 'el Conquistador' of Aragon and his queen, Yolande of Hungary; Jaime and Yolande's daughter Violante was queen of Castile, their daughter Isabel queen of France.
When Isabel was a few months old, in April 1284, her grandfather Alfonso X died, and her father seized the throne of Castile as Sancho IV, ignoring the claims of his young nephews, the sons of his dead older brother Fernando de la Cerda ('of the bristle'). Alfonso X cursed Sancho on his deathbed for this disinheritance of his grandsons. [1] Apparently Isabel was betrothed as a child to her first cousin, Fernando de la Cerda's elder son Alfonso, whose mother Blanche was the daughter of Louis IX of France, though ultimately nothing came of it. What Isabel's childhood and relationship with her parents were like is a matter for speculation, though her father Sancho is known to have beaten men, dissident nobles, to death with his own hands, which gives some insight into the kind of court she grew up in. [2] She married very young: in Soria (between Valladolid and Zaragoza) in December 1291, when she was just eight years old, she was married to King Jaime II of Aragon, as a means of securing peace between Aragon and Castile. Jaime was then twenty-four and had succeeded his childless brother Alfonso III, who had long been betrothed to the future Edward II's eldest sister Eleanor, the previous June.
Sancho IV died on 25 April 1295, not yet thirty-seven, leaving Isabel, then eleven or twelve, his eldest son Fernando IV, aged nine, as his successor, and four younger children. Shortly before his death, Sancho appointed his wife Queen Maria as guardian of their eldest son and as regent of Castile during the boy's minority. [3] Castile erupted into chaos and civil war on the accession of the boy-king Fernando; his father had wrongfully seized the throne and his de la Cerda cousins, backed by France, had a strong claim; Sancho IV's brother Infante Don Juan also claimed the throne; the marriage of Sancho and Maria de Molina was said to have been uncanonical - presumably they hadn't received a dispensation for consanguinity - and their children thus illegitimate. The strenuous efforts of the powerful, intelligent and politically astute Queen Maria saved the throne for her son Fernando, and in 1301 her and Sancho's marriage was declared to have been legal, which also calmed the situation considerably. [4] Her eldest child Isabel, the young queen of Aragon, was not so lucky, however. Jaime II had their unconsummated marriage annulled on the grounds of consanguinity* soon after her father's death, presumably because the turmoil in Castile made the kingdom an unattractive ally and because he hoped to use the chaos to his own advantage. He married instead, on 29 October or 1 November 1295, Blanche of Anjou, the second daughter of Charles of Salerno, king of Naples and Albania (Blanche's brothers were king of Hungary, king of Jerusalem, titular emperor of Constantinople and so on). Blanche was the mother of Jaime's successor Alfonso IV.
* Isabel and Jaime were first cousins once removed: Isabel was the great-granddaughter, via Alfonso X's queen Violante, of Jaime I 'el Conquistador' of Aragon, Jaime his grandson. They were related in the same way that her parents were. The marriage of Fernando III's parents Alfonso IX of Leon and Berenguela of Castile was also annulled by the pope in the early 1200s on the grounds that they were first cousins once removed. You'd think the Iberian kings would have figured out that they needed a papal dispensation to marry relatives.
Isabel, still only twelve, presumably returned to Castile and lived at her brother Fernando IV's court for the next few years; she was not to marry again until she was twenty-seven. In January 1302 in Valladolid, she probably attended her sixteen-year-old brother's wedding to Constança of Portugal - Constança was their first cousin once removed, as her grandmother Beatriz, queen of Portugal, was an illegitimate daughter of Alfonso X of Castile and thus Sancho IV's half-sister. Constança was also Jaime II of Aragon's niece. Isabel's sister Beatriz, ten years her junior, married Constança's brother the future King Afonso IV of Portugal in September 1309, and in 1310 her brother Pedro married Maria, one of the daughters of Isabel's former husband Jaime II by his second wife Blanche of Anjou. How Isabel felt about that is not recorded. (The Iberian kings of the era were extremely inter-related; Fernando IV and Constança's son Alfonso XI married Maria of Portugal, daughter of Beatriz of Castile and Afonso IV, who was his first cousin on both sides of the family.)
In 1303, Edward of Caernarfon's colourful uncle Infante Don Enrique, who was Isabel's great-uncle - he was one of the brothers of Alfonso X - proposed Isabel as a bride for the future king of England. The two were close in age, Isabel just a few months older, and it may be the half-Castilian Edward would have liked to marry a woman from that country, but his betrothal to Philip IV of France's daughter Isabella, arranged in 1299, could not be broken without England losing Gascony and going to war with France. Edward I wrote courteously to Enrique, whom he had probably known very well in the 1250s when Enrique rebelled against his brother Alfonso X and lived in exile at Henry III's court in England for several years, on 10 April 1303, thanking him for "using his influence in the matter of a marriage between Edward, the king's son, and Infanta Isabel, daughter of the late King Sancho, king of Castile and Leon, Henry [Enrique]'s cousins. The king requests him to give credence to what Gunsalvius Martini, Henry's man and the bringer of his letters, who is carrying the present letters, shall explain to him by word of mouth, as the king has fully opened his mind to him in the things that concern the matter aforesaid." [5] I wonder what Edward said, and what he and his son felt about this possible match with the younger Edward's first cousin once removed.
Isabel finally married again when she was twenty-seven in 1310, apparently in Burgos: her husband was the future Duke John III 'the Good' of Brittany, who was two and a half or three years her junior, born on 8 March 1286. John was, in what appears to be a major feature of this blog post, also a first cousin once removed of Edward II: his father Arthur II, duke of Brittany (born 2 July 1262) was the eldest son of Edward I's sister Beatrice. John's mother was Marie of Limoges, daughter and heir of Guy, vicomte of Limoges and Marguerite, daughter of Duke Hugues IV of Burgundy. John had firstly been married, in 1298, to Isabelle, eldest child of Philip IV of France's brother Charles de Valois; her nearest sibling became Philip VI of France in 1328; the next eldest sister Jeanne was the mother of Edward III's queen Philippa of Hainault. Isabelle de Valois died in 1309, still only about seventeen, and left no children. Duke John and Doña Isabel were fourth cousins via common descent from Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine; Pope Clement V issued a dispensation for them to marry on 21 June 1310. [6] (After her own experience and that of her parents, it's hardly surprising that Isabel wanted everything to be water-tight this time.)
Isabel became duchess of Brittany and viscountess of Limoges on 27 August 1312 when her father-in-law Duke Arthur died. Her brother King Fernando IV of Castile died eleven days later at the age of only twenty-six, leaving his one-year-old son Alfonso XI as king and throwing Castile into turmoil yet again, and yet again, Isabel's astute mother Maria saved the situation for her grandson the baby king. Queen Maria, incidentally, wrote her will on 29 June 1321, and it mentions la Infanta Doña Isabel mi fija (my daughter). There's very little I can say about John and Isabel's marriage, unfortunately, or their lives in general. Pope John XXII absolved Isabel on 6 July 1317 of her vow to visit Santiago de Compostela. [7] Edward II was in occasional contact with his kinsman Duke John, mostly in connection with English sailors robbed or arrested within John's territory. Duke John's uncle John of Brittany, whose heir he was, was earl of Richmond and spent his life in England, loyal to Edward II until he joined Isabella and Roger Mortimer in Paris in early 1326. Roy Martin Haines has pointed out [8] that Edward in and after 1324 was keen to stay on good terms with Duke John as a counterbalance to the French, with whom he was then at war. Several letters and writs of Edward's from 1320 to 1325 refer to a truce and an accord of peace between the king and the duke, and one of Edward's letters to Charles IV of France regarding the non-return of Queen Isabella in late 1325 was also sent to John. Finally, Edward II wrote to John on 6 October 1324 after the outbreak of hostilities in France, as he did to his kinsmen in Castile, complaining that "Charles [IV of France] is moved against the king, God knows why..." and asking John to use his influence with Charles on Edward's behalf. [9]
Infanta Doña Isabel of Castile, queen of Aragon and duchess of Brittany, died on 24 July 1328, in her mid-forties, and was buried at Notre-Dame de Prières, a Cistercian abbey in Nantes which had been founded in 1252 by her husband's great-grandfather Duke John I. She left no children. Her will still exists, in the National Archives in London (I don't know how it ended up there); I have a copy of it, but sadly it's so faded it's basically illegible, and I'm really not sure if I can glean anything from it. Duchess Isabel's tomb was destroyed in the early eighteenth century when work began on a new church at Notre-Dame de Prières, although her remains were removed to another sarcophagus in the new church. This was discovered in the ruins of the abbey in 1841, and was placed in a chapel built on the site.
Duke John III married thirdly, on 21 March 1329 (or 1330 - I've seen both dates), Jeanne of Savoy (born 1310), daughter of Édouard I, count of Savoy and Blanche of Burgundy, granddaughter of Louis IX of France. Two of Blanche's sisters, Marguerite and Jeanne, were queens of France, and another sister, Marie, married Edward II's nephew Count Édouard I of Bar. John III married three times and fathered no legitimate children, though apparently he did acknowledge an illegitimate son, named John after himself. This is somewhat odd, as it seems rather implausible that his three wives were all infertile. He died on 30 April 1341 at the age of fifty-five and was buried in Ploërmel. His childless death led to the War of the Breton Succession between his niece Jeanne of Penthièvre (b. 1319), daughter and heir of John's brother Guy who died in 1331, and John's half-brother, confusingly also called John, born in c. 1293 as the son of Duke Arthur II by his second wife Yolande de Dreux, countess of Montfort and dowager queen of Scotland (having been briefly married to Alexander III, Edward I's brother-in-law, who died in an accident in March 1286).
Sources
1) Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spain's Centuries of Crisis: 1300-1474, p. 53.
2) Malcolm Vale, 'Ritual Ceremony and the 'Civilising Process': The Role of the Court, c. 1270-1400' in Steven J. Gunn and A. Janse, eds., The Court as a Stage (2006), p, 27; Teofilo F. Ruiz, The City and the Realm 1080-1492, p. 144.
3) Evelyn S. Procter, Curia and Cortes in León and Castile 1072-1295, p. 231.
4) Ruiz, Spain's Centuries of Crisis, pp. 53-55.
5) Calendar of Close Rolls 1301-1307, p. 83; Foedera 1272-1307, p. 951.
6) Foedera 1307-1327, p. 109.
7) Foedera 1307-1327, p. 336.
8) Roy Martin Haines, King Edward II: His Life, His Reign and Its Aftermath, 1284-1330, p. 175.
9) Close Rolls 1323-1327, pp. 321-322.
Infanta Doña Isabel was born in Toro between Zamora and Valladolid in northern Spain sometime in 1283 as the granddaughter of the then reigning king of Castile, Alfonso X (Eleanor of Castile's half-brother and thus Edward II's uncle). Her mother was Maria de Molina, who was born in the late 1250s or early 1260s and was the daughter of Fernando III's brother Alfonso, lord of Molina, and her father was Sancho, second son of Alfonso X and grandson of Fernando III, born in May 1258 (Isabel's parents were first cousins once removed). Isabel was the eldest of the children of Sancho and Maria, who had married in Toledo in July 1282, and her younger siblings were: King Fernando IV, December 1285 - September 1312; Pedro, lord of Los Cameros, born 1290, killed at the battle of Vega de Grenada in 1319; Felipe, lord of Cabrera and Ribera, May 1292 - April 1327; Beatriz, queen of Portugal, 1293 - October 1359; and two brothers, Alfonso and Enrique, who died in childhood. Her father also had three known illegitimate children. Isabel was Edward II's first cousin once removed on her father's side and his second cousin on her mother's. She was also the second cousin of Edward's queen Isabella of France, both of them great-granddaughters of King Jaime I 'el Conquistador' of Aragon and his queen, Yolande of Hungary; Jaime and Yolande's daughter Violante was queen of Castile, their daughter Isabel queen of France.
When Isabel was a few months old, in April 1284, her grandfather Alfonso X died, and her father seized the throne of Castile as Sancho IV, ignoring the claims of his young nephews, the sons of his dead older brother Fernando de la Cerda ('of the bristle'). Alfonso X cursed Sancho on his deathbed for this disinheritance of his grandsons. [1] Apparently Isabel was betrothed as a child to her first cousin, Fernando de la Cerda's elder son Alfonso, whose mother Blanche was the daughter of Louis IX of France, though ultimately nothing came of it. What Isabel's childhood and relationship with her parents were like is a matter for speculation, though her father Sancho is known to have beaten men, dissident nobles, to death with his own hands, which gives some insight into the kind of court she grew up in. [2] She married very young: in Soria (between Valladolid and Zaragoza) in December 1291, when she was just eight years old, she was married to King Jaime II of Aragon, as a means of securing peace between Aragon and Castile. Jaime was then twenty-four and had succeeded his childless brother Alfonso III, who had long been betrothed to the future Edward II's eldest sister Eleanor, the previous June.
Sancho IV died on 25 April 1295, not yet thirty-seven, leaving Isabel, then eleven or twelve, his eldest son Fernando IV, aged nine, as his successor, and four younger children. Shortly before his death, Sancho appointed his wife Queen Maria as guardian of their eldest son and as regent of Castile during the boy's minority. [3] Castile erupted into chaos and civil war on the accession of the boy-king Fernando; his father had wrongfully seized the throne and his de la Cerda cousins, backed by France, had a strong claim; Sancho IV's brother Infante Don Juan also claimed the throne; the marriage of Sancho and Maria de Molina was said to have been uncanonical - presumably they hadn't received a dispensation for consanguinity - and their children thus illegitimate. The strenuous efforts of the powerful, intelligent and politically astute Queen Maria saved the throne for her son Fernando, and in 1301 her and Sancho's marriage was declared to have been legal, which also calmed the situation considerably. [4] Her eldest child Isabel, the young queen of Aragon, was not so lucky, however. Jaime II had their unconsummated marriage annulled on the grounds of consanguinity* soon after her father's death, presumably because the turmoil in Castile made the kingdom an unattractive ally and because he hoped to use the chaos to his own advantage. He married instead, on 29 October or 1 November 1295, Blanche of Anjou, the second daughter of Charles of Salerno, king of Naples and Albania (Blanche's brothers were king of Hungary, king of Jerusalem, titular emperor of Constantinople and so on). Blanche was the mother of Jaime's successor Alfonso IV.
* Isabel and Jaime were first cousins once removed: Isabel was the great-granddaughter, via Alfonso X's queen Violante, of Jaime I 'el Conquistador' of Aragon, Jaime his grandson. They were related in the same way that her parents were. The marriage of Fernando III's parents Alfonso IX of Leon and Berenguela of Castile was also annulled by the pope in the early 1200s on the grounds that they were first cousins once removed. You'd think the Iberian kings would have figured out that they needed a papal dispensation to marry relatives.
Isabel, still only twelve, presumably returned to Castile and lived at her brother Fernando IV's court for the next few years; she was not to marry again until she was twenty-seven. In January 1302 in Valladolid, she probably attended her sixteen-year-old brother's wedding to Constança of Portugal - Constança was their first cousin once removed, as her grandmother Beatriz, queen of Portugal, was an illegitimate daughter of Alfonso X of Castile and thus Sancho IV's half-sister. Constança was also Jaime II of Aragon's niece. Isabel's sister Beatriz, ten years her junior, married Constança's brother the future King Afonso IV of Portugal in September 1309, and in 1310 her brother Pedro married Maria, one of the daughters of Isabel's former husband Jaime II by his second wife Blanche of Anjou. How Isabel felt about that is not recorded. (The Iberian kings of the era were extremely inter-related; Fernando IV and Constança's son Alfonso XI married Maria of Portugal, daughter of Beatriz of Castile and Afonso IV, who was his first cousin on both sides of the family.)
In 1303, Edward of Caernarfon's colourful uncle Infante Don Enrique, who was Isabel's great-uncle - he was one of the brothers of Alfonso X - proposed Isabel as a bride for the future king of England. The two were close in age, Isabel just a few months older, and it may be the half-Castilian Edward would have liked to marry a woman from that country, but his betrothal to Philip IV of France's daughter Isabella, arranged in 1299, could not be broken without England losing Gascony and going to war with France. Edward I wrote courteously to Enrique, whom he had probably known very well in the 1250s when Enrique rebelled against his brother Alfonso X and lived in exile at Henry III's court in England for several years, on 10 April 1303, thanking him for "using his influence in the matter of a marriage between Edward, the king's son, and Infanta Isabel, daughter of the late King Sancho, king of Castile and Leon, Henry [Enrique]'s cousins. The king requests him to give credence to what Gunsalvius Martini, Henry's man and the bringer of his letters, who is carrying the present letters, shall explain to him by word of mouth, as the king has fully opened his mind to him in the things that concern the matter aforesaid." [5] I wonder what Edward said, and what he and his son felt about this possible match with the younger Edward's first cousin once removed.
Isabel finally married again when she was twenty-seven in 1310, apparently in Burgos: her husband was the future Duke John III 'the Good' of Brittany, who was two and a half or three years her junior, born on 8 March 1286. John was, in what appears to be a major feature of this blog post, also a first cousin once removed of Edward II: his father Arthur II, duke of Brittany (born 2 July 1262) was the eldest son of Edward I's sister Beatrice. John's mother was Marie of Limoges, daughter and heir of Guy, vicomte of Limoges and Marguerite, daughter of Duke Hugues IV of Burgundy. John had firstly been married, in 1298, to Isabelle, eldest child of Philip IV of France's brother Charles de Valois; her nearest sibling became Philip VI of France in 1328; the next eldest sister Jeanne was the mother of Edward III's queen Philippa of Hainault. Isabelle de Valois died in 1309, still only about seventeen, and left no children. Duke John and Doña Isabel were fourth cousins via common descent from Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine; Pope Clement V issued a dispensation for them to marry on 21 June 1310. [6] (After her own experience and that of her parents, it's hardly surprising that Isabel wanted everything to be water-tight this time.)
Isabel became duchess of Brittany and viscountess of Limoges on 27 August 1312 when her father-in-law Duke Arthur died. Her brother King Fernando IV of Castile died eleven days later at the age of only twenty-six, leaving his one-year-old son Alfonso XI as king and throwing Castile into turmoil yet again, and yet again, Isabel's astute mother Maria saved the situation for her grandson the baby king. Queen Maria, incidentally, wrote her will on 29 June 1321, and it mentions la Infanta Doña Isabel mi fija (my daughter). There's very little I can say about John and Isabel's marriage, unfortunately, or their lives in general. Pope John XXII absolved Isabel on 6 July 1317 of her vow to visit Santiago de Compostela. [7] Edward II was in occasional contact with his kinsman Duke John, mostly in connection with English sailors robbed or arrested within John's territory. Duke John's uncle John of Brittany, whose heir he was, was earl of Richmond and spent his life in England, loyal to Edward II until he joined Isabella and Roger Mortimer in Paris in early 1326. Roy Martin Haines has pointed out [8] that Edward in and after 1324 was keen to stay on good terms with Duke John as a counterbalance to the French, with whom he was then at war. Several letters and writs of Edward's from 1320 to 1325 refer to a truce and an accord of peace between the king and the duke, and one of Edward's letters to Charles IV of France regarding the non-return of Queen Isabella in late 1325 was also sent to John. Finally, Edward II wrote to John on 6 October 1324 after the outbreak of hostilities in France, as he did to his kinsmen in Castile, complaining that "Charles [IV of France] is moved against the king, God knows why..." and asking John to use his influence with Charles on Edward's behalf. [9]
Infanta Doña Isabel of Castile, queen of Aragon and duchess of Brittany, died on 24 July 1328, in her mid-forties, and was buried at Notre-Dame de Prières, a Cistercian abbey in Nantes which had been founded in 1252 by her husband's great-grandfather Duke John I. She left no children. Her will still exists, in the National Archives in London (I don't know how it ended up there); I have a copy of it, but sadly it's so faded it's basically illegible, and I'm really not sure if I can glean anything from it. Duchess Isabel's tomb was destroyed in the early eighteenth century when work began on a new church at Notre-Dame de Prières, although her remains were removed to another sarcophagus in the new church. This was discovered in the ruins of the abbey in 1841, and was placed in a chapel built on the site.
Duke John III married thirdly, on 21 March 1329 (or 1330 - I've seen both dates), Jeanne of Savoy (born 1310), daughter of Édouard I, count of Savoy and Blanche of Burgundy, granddaughter of Louis IX of France. Two of Blanche's sisters, Marguerite and Jeanne, were queens of France, and another sister, Marie, married Edward II's nephew Count Édouard I of Bar. John III married three times and fathered no legitimate children, though apparently he did acknowledge an illegitimate son, named John after himself. This is somewhat odd, as it seems rather implausible that his three wives were all infertile. He died on 30 April 1341 at the age of fifty-five and was buried in Ploërmel. His childless death led to the War of the Breton Succession between his niece Jeanne of Penthièvre (b. 1319), daughter and heir of John's brother Guy who died in 1331, and John's half-brother, confusingly also called John, born in c. 1293 as the son of Duke Arthur II by his second wife Yolande de Dreux, countess of Montfort and dowager queen of Scotland (having been briefly married to Alexander III, Edward I's brother-in-law, who died in an accident in March 1286).
Sources
1) Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spain's Centuries of Crisis: 1300-1474, p. 53.
2) Malcolm Vale, 'Ritual Ceremony and the 'Civilising Process': The Role of the Court, c. 1270-1400' in Steven J. Gunn and A. Janse, eds., The Court as a Stage (2006), p, 27; Teofilo F. Ruiz, The City and the Realm 1080-1492, p. 144.
3) Evelyn S. Procter, Curia and Cortes in León and Castile 1072-1295, p. 231.
4) Ruiz, Spain's Centuries of Crisis, pp. 53-55.
5) Calendar of Close Rolls 1301-1307, p. 83; Foedera 1272-1307, p. 951.
6) Foedera 1307-1327, p. 109.
7) Foedera 1307-1327, p. 336.
8) Roy Martin Haines, King Edward II: His Life, His Reign and Its Aftermath, 1284-1330, p. 175.
9) Close Rolls 1323-1327, pp. 321-322.
13 May, 2012
Blog Searches And Stuff
Until the next proper post, here are some of today's blog searches and some other stuff. (Am not feeling very articulate today. Sorry.)
EDITED TO ADD: Wigmore Castle is up for sale! Yes, the Wigmore Castle, that belonged to the Mortimers, including Edward II's nemesis Roger. Yours for just under half a million; see here.
EDITED TO ADD: Wigmore Castle is up for sale! Yes, the Wigmore Castle, that belonged to the Mortimers, including Edward II's nemesis Roger. Yours for just under half a million; see here.
edward 2 story simple I hope that means a simple version of Edward II's story, rather than an assumption that he himself was simple.
parallel murder edward ii princes tower Whaaaat?? Edward II killed some princes in the Tower too? That's news to me.
effigy edward ii Here it is!
Spotted on a forum: "It would appear that you have not read up on Edward II of England, who expelled the Jews during the 13th Century." It would appear you haven't either, chum. That was his father. I know, I know, all these confusing Edwards, eh? Still, best to try and get them sorted out if you want to act superior.
I'm a huge fan of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, but hadn't even thought of this comparison: "If GRRM was copying English history Renly Baratheon would have died by having a hot poker shoved up his bum!"
In the 'Well, It's Pretty Hard To Argue With That, Actually' category: "His son, a third Hugh, often referred to as the younger Despenser, was a rash, greedy and ruthless man who abused his power and his position of favour in the unsettled court of Edward II." (In a very interesting post about Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire.)
In the 'I Wouldn't Read That If You Paid Me' category: a novel which, according to a review of it, portrays Edward II as a "spineless, sniveling creature" and Hugh Despenser the Younger as "devoid of humanity." Well, that sounds just great. And Piers Gaveston? I await the deep and psychologically convincing portrayal with bated breath.
Has anyone been listening to Vivat Rex on Radio Four? More info here; it features Christopher Marlowe's play about Edward II. John Hurt stars as Edward, who apparently is "creepy, weak and roaringly gay." But of course. See also this page, which says "John Hurt played Edward, managing a note of affronted whingeing that made me sympathise with Mortimer and Queen Isabella for deposing him, then his simple and dignified suffering at the end had me pitying him." That's a fair point, actually; I felt much the same way when watching Marlowe's play.
From a review in the Evening Standard of Dan Jones' new book about the Plantagenets: "We meet drivelling incompetents like Edward II. Tall, blond and athletic, he preferred rowing, boat building and Piers Gaveston to the more noble pursuits of warfare." Whatever else Edward was, he sure as heck wasn't a 'drivelling incompetent'.
Blog visitors from the last week:
From a review in the Evening Standard of Dan Jones' new book about the Plantagenets: "We meet drivelling incompetents like Edward II. Tall, blond and athletic, he preferred rowing, boat building and Piers Gaveston to the more noble pursuits of warfare." Whatever else Edward was, he sure as heck wasn't a 'drivelling incompetent'.
Blog visitors from the last week:
OK, proper blog post coming as soon as I can - am just waiting for something from the National Archives to finish off a biography!
06 May, 2012
Edward II And His Staff
I posted a few weeks ago about Edmund and 'Litel Wille' Fisher, father and son, who both worked in Edward II's chamber, and about Edward's treatment of them: he bought Wille shoes in 1323, and gave generous sums of money to Edmund's widow Sibille and daughter Johane in 1326. This post contains more insights into Edward II's treatment of his household staff and their families, taken from his extant chamber journal of June 1325 to October 1326 (now in the library of the Society of Antiquaries, London). Generally it seems that Edward was generous and kind to his staff and treated them well, although the Polychronicon, written by Ranulph Higden, monk of Chester, in the 1350s, claims that he lashed out at his servants when he was in a rage. No other source I know of confirms this, however. In the interests of fairness and balance, I should point out that Edward II was capable of being cruel and vindictive towards anyone who angered him or who he thought (rightly or not) had betrayed him. I could give many examples, but let's just take a minstrel called John le Botiller, who played at Edward's knighting in 1306 but fought against the royal army at Boroughbridge in 1322, and who was still imprisoned in late 1326; not a lot of forgiveness there from the vengeful king. Edward II inherited a vile temper from his father, who assaulted a servant at his daughter Margaret's wedding in 1290 and had to pay him compensation for injury, and perhaps from his mother Queen Eleanor as well. This is demonstrated on one occasion in the 1320s when he flew into such a violent rage with his ally Walter Reynolds, archbishop of Canterbury, that the archbishop pretended that he had to make an urgent visitation to his cathedral in order to escape from the king’s presence.* Edward II, for all his bad temper and other character flaws, was often astonishingly generous and kind to the people he loved and who pleased him, to the point of political foolishness when he lavished gifts and lands on Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser. Still, there are far worse character traits than generosity and loyalty to the people you love.
* Kathleen Edwards, 'The Political Importance of the English Bishops During the Reign of Edward II', English Historical Review, 59 (1944), p. 340.
Staff of the king's household earned one and a half pence, three pence, four and a half pence or seven and a half pence a day depending on rank and position (except for sergeants-at-arms, who earned twelve pence or one shilling, and knights, who got two shillings), and all their clothing, shoes, food and drink was provided.
- Late April 1326: "Item, paid to Hick Mereworth, valet of the king's chamber, who had leave to go to Henley to his house with his wife, who came to Kenilworth great with child [grosse denfaunt], for his expenses, of the king's gift, 20 shillings...Item, paid to Johane, wife of the said Hick Mereworth, who came to her baron [i.e. husband] at the said Kenilworth great with child as is said above, because she heard that her husband had been ill, 40 shillings." (Hick was a nickname for Richard.)
I find this entry really interesting for the insight that the king's household staff got royal permission to go home, i.e.that they got holidays, though I don't know how often leave was granted. They didn't live with their families; the Household Ordinance of December 1318 states that no wife was allowed to accompany or to follow the household, not even the wives of highly-ranked staff. I also love this entry for the information that Johane Mereworth had somehow heard that her husband had been ill, and out of concern for him travelled, while heavily pregnant - on foot or via cart, perhaps? - the eighty-odd miles from Henley-on-Thames to Kenilworth to see him. Litel Wille Fisher was forced to remain behind ill at Kenilworth when Edward left there in late April 1326, so it does seem as though some illness was making its way around the chamber staff. Edward granted Hick and Johane permission to go home together, perhaps to await the birth of their child, and gave them a remarkably generous gift of three pounds for their expenses (and note that Johane's share of that was two pounds). At wages of threepence a day, that was half a year's income for Hick, or if he earned one and a half pence, a full year.
- Having said that wives were not allowed at court, Edward did give permission for them to stay there on occasion: in early January 1326, he gave seven shillings to Anneis, wife of his porter Roger de May? (his name is abbreviated), who stayed with her husband from 5 December to 1 January. Anneis was also given forty shillings on 9 June 1326 when she came from 'the parts of Nottingham' to visit her husband at court.
- Hick Meworth or Mereworth, now called by his full name of Richard, is mentioned again on 28 June 1326, given twenty shillings and leave to go home because he "had news that his goods were stolen."
- 21 September 1325: five shillings given to Philip, "who was a page of the king's chamber and who can no longer work." (This is not explained.)
- 10 March 1326: Two and a half pounds "paid to Jack of St Albans, king's painter, who danced before the king on a table and made him laugh very greatly [lui fist tr' gr'tment rire], of the king's gift, by the king's own hands, in aid of him, his wife and his children."
This entry is often cited in secondary sources, but no-one ever points out that the payment to Jack was not only made for entertaining Edward - and notice that the king hadn't lost his sense of humour despite knowing by then that his wife was associating with Roger Mortimer in Paris - but was intended to support Jack's wife and children.
- 11 August 1325: five shillings given to Robert Traghs, one of the king's porters, "of the king's gift, because his wife was delivered of a child." In mid-September, Robert (now named as 'Robyn') was given another five shillings for his expenses in travelling home to London to see his daughter and his wife, whose name was Johane.
- 27 May 1326: Edward paid eight shillings for cotes (tunics) made of worsted for seven of his household archers.
- 11 February 1326: twenty shillings given to Roger Lesturmy, one of the king's squires, who had been ill.
- 16 October 1325: "Item, paid to Will Shene, one of the porters of the king's chamber, who will marry his wife at Henley on the next Sunday after the date of this [entry], five shillings. Item, paid to Isode, whom the said Will will marry, for their expenses on the said Sunday when they will be wed, twenty shillings." Again, the wife got far more money from Edward than her husband. Will was one of three porters who received ten shillings each on 30 April 1326 for their expenses in returning home when they "had leave to go to their country" (avoient conge daler en lour pais). Edward II gave Isode another ten shillings on 4 July 1326, though it's not stated why.
- 17 May 1326: forty shillings paid to Will de Bromleye, king's harper, who "has leave to go to Ireland."
- 14 January 1326: forty shillings paid to Hugh Despenser the Younger's confessor Richard Bliton, "for what he did in the park of the said South Elmham when the king went to eat in the said park."
- 29 October 1325: one of Edward's chamber valets, who often appears in the journal, was called Syme Lawe. Evidently his brother Henry was a member of the king's household too. Their sister Alis Coleman was paid twenty shillings on this day for brewing forty gallons of "ale for the king's mouth," and her brother Henry was sent to give her the money. Edward bought Syme Lawe a saddle on 5 March 1326, and he was granted permission on 20 May to go home for a while and given a pound for his expenses. Syme, Henry and Alis also had a brother called Willecok, who on 23 May 1326 travelled with Edward II by water from Shene to Bisham and was paid three shillings for doing something with the rope in the king's boat (I'm not quite sure what; my knowledge of Anglo-Norman doesn't quite stretch to such technical matters).
- 31 October 1325: Edward gave two pounds to Katherine, wife of Hugh Despenser the Younger's chamberlain Clement Holditch, "who came to the king for some great business which she had to do with his help."
- 20 January 1326: Edward II paid thirty shillings to a draper of Norwich for fourteen ells of 'cloth of Coggeshall' - a town in Essex famed in the Middle Ages for its production of cloth - to make tunics (cotes) for the wives of five of his porters, including Roger de May and Robyn Traghs. The cloth, however, turned out to be "too stiff" for this purpose, and was sent to Edward's wardrobe to be used for something else. Edward bought instead eighteen ells of "bright blue English cloth," at twenty pence an ell, from a draper of Leicester, to make cotes hardies and hoods for the five women.
- 11 February 1326: forty shillings given to Thomas of Goodrich Castle, one of Hugh Despenser the Younger's clerks, "who remained at court, ill, and this day has the king's leave to go to London to the said Sir H. [a dit mons' H], for his expenses."
- 19 March 1326: a whopping hundred shillings, five pounds, given to John Dene, one of the ushers of the king's hall, who had been ill and had the king's leave to "go to his country in the parts of Canterbury" (daler en son pais en les p’ties de Cant’bury).
- 19 April 1326: a sum of money that I can't work out paid to a man with the fantastic name of Willecok de Brakenhale, "king's blacksmith," who "had news that his father was almost dead."
- 19 May 1326: twenty shillings paid to Will Muleward, one of the valets of Hugh Despenser the Younger's sister Isabel, Lady Hastings, who "was with the king for some time and made him laugh very greatly" when Edward attended the wedding of Lady Hastings' daughter Margaret to Sir Robert Wateville at Marlborough that day.
- 26 July 1326: Edward gave three shillings to 'Will, the gardener of Kenilworth, who came from there to talk with the king on some affairs touching him, of the king's gift, for his expenses in returning to the said Kenilworth."
* Kathleen Edwards, 'The Political Importance of the English Bishops During the Reign of Edward II', English Historical Review, 59 (1944), p. 340.
Staff of the king's household earned one and a half pence, three pence, four and a half pence or seven and a half pence a day depending on rank and position (except for sergeants-at-arms, who earned twelve pence or one shilling, and knights, who got two shillings), and all their clothing, shoes, food and drink was provided.
- Late April 1326: "Item, paid to Hick Mereworth, valet of the king's chamber, who had leave to go to Henley to his house with his wife, who came to Kenilworth great with child [grosse denfaunt], for his expenses, of the king's gift, 20 shillings...Item, paid to Johane, wife of the said Hick Mereworth, who came to her baron [i.e. husband] at the said Kenilworth great with child as is said above, because she heard that her husband had been ill, 40 shillings." (Hick was a nickname for Richard.)
I find this entry really interesting for the insight that the king's household staff got royal permission to go home, i.e.that they got holidays, though I don't know how often leave was granted. They didn't live with their families; the Household Ordinance of December 1318 states that no wife was allowed to accompany or to follow the household, not even the wives of highly-ranked staff. I also love this entry for the information that Johane Mereworth had somehow heard that her husband had been ill, and out of concern for him travelled, while heavily pregnant - on foot or via cart, perhaps? - the eighty-odd miles from Henley-on-Thames to Kenilworth to see him. Litel Wille Fisher was forced to remain behind ill at Kenilworth when Edward left there in late April 1326, so it does seem as though some illness was making its way around the chamber staff. Edward granted Hick and Johane permission to go home together, perhaps to await the birth of their child, and gave them a remarkably generous gift of three pounds for their expenses (and note that Johane's share of that was two pounds). At wages of threepence a day, that was half a year's income for Hick, or if he earned one and a half pence, a full year.
- Having said that wives were not allowed at court, Edward did give permission for them to stay there on occasion: in early January 1326, he gave seven shillings to Anneis, wife of his porter Roger de May? (his name is abbreviated), who stayed with her husband from 5 December to 1 January. Anneis was also given forty shillings on 9 June 1326 when she came from 'the parts of Nottingham' to visit her husband at court.
- Hick Meworth or Mereworth, now called by his full name of Richard, is mentioned again on 28 June 1326, given twenty shillings and leave to go home because he "had news that his goods were stolen."
- 21 September 1325: five shillings given to Philip, "who was a page of the king's chamber and who can no longer work." (This is not explained.)
- 10 March 1326: Two and a half pounds "paid to Jack of St Albans, king's painter, who danced before the king on a table and made him laugh very greatly [lui fist tr' gr'tment rire], of the king's gift, by the king's own hands, in aid of him, his wife and his children."
This entry is often cited in secondary sources, but no-one ever points out that the payment to Jack was not only made for entertaining Edward - and notice that the king hadn't lost his sense of humour despite knowing by then that his wife was associating with Roger Mortimer in Paris - but was intended to support Jack's wife and children.
- 11 August 1325: five shillings given to Robert Traghs, one of the king's porters, "of the king's gift, because his wife was delivered of a child." In mid-September, Robert (now named as 'Robyn') was given another five shillings for his expenses in travelling home to London to see his daughter and his wife, whose name was Johane.
- 27 May 1326: Edward paid eight shillings for cotes (tunics) made of worsted for seven of his household archers.
- 11 February 1326: twenty shillings given to Roger Lesturmy, one of the king's squires, who had been ill.
- 16 October 1325: "Item, paid to Will Shene, one of the porters of the king's chamber, who will marry his wife at Henley on the next Sunday after the date of this [entry], five shillings. Item, paid to Isode, whom the said Will will marry, for their expenses on the said Sunday when they will be wed, twenty shillings." Again, the wife got far more money from Edward than her husband. Will was one of three porters who received ten shillings each on 30 April 1326 for their expenses in returning home when they "had leave to go to their country" (avoient conge daler en lour pais). Edward II gave Isode another ten shillings on 4 July 1326, though it's not stated why.
- 17 May 1326: forty shillings paid to Will de Bromleye, king's harper, who "has leave to go to Ireland."
- 14 January 1326: forty shillings paid to Hugh Despenser the Younger's confessor Richard Bliton, "for what he did in the park of the said South Elmham when the king went to eat in the said park."
- 29 October 1325: one of Edward's chamber valets, who often appears in the journal, was called Syme Lawe. Evidently his brother Henry was a member of the king's household too. Their sister Alis Coleman was paid twenty shillings on this day for brewing forty gallons of "ale for the king's mouth," and her brother Henry was sent to give her the money. Edward bought Syme Lawe a saddle on 5 March 1326, and he was granted permission on 20 May to go home for a while and given a pound for his expenses. Syme, Henry and Alis also had a brother called Willecok, who on 23 May 1326 travelled with Edward II by water from Shene to Bisham and was paid three shillings for doing something with the rope in the king's boat (I'm not quite sure what; my knowledge of Anglo-Norman doesn't quite stretch to such technical matters).
- 31 October 1325: Edward gave two pounds to Katherine, wife of Hugh Despenser the Younger's chamberlain Clement Holditch, "who came to the king for some great business which she had to do with his help."
- 20 January 1326: Edward II paid thirty shillings to a draper of Norwich for fourteen ells of 'cloth of Coggeshall' - a town in Essex famed in the Middle Ages for its production of cloth - to make tunics (cotes) for the wives of five of his porters, including Roger de May and Robyn Traghs. The cloth, however, turned out to be "too stiff" for this purpose, and was sent to Edward's wardrobe to be used for something else. Edward bought instead eighteen ells of "bright blue English cloth," at twenty pence an ell, from a draper of Leicester, to make cotes hardies and hoods for the five women.
- 11 February 1326: forty shillings given to Thomas of Goodrich Castle, one of Hugh Despenser the Younger's clerks, "who remained at court, ill, and this day has the king's leave to go to London to the said Sir H. [a dit mons' H], for his expenses."
- 19 March 1326: a whopping hundred shillings, five pounds, given to John Dene, one of the ushers of the king's hall, who had been ill and had the king's leave to "go to his country in the parts of Canterbury" (daler en son pais en les p’ties de Cant’bury).
- 19 April 1326: a sum of money that I can't work out paid to a man with the fantastic name of Willecok de Brakenhale, "king's blacksmith," who "had news that his father was almost dead."
- 19 May 1326: twenty shillings paid to Will Muleward, one of the valets of Hugh Despenser the Younger's sister Isabel, Lady Hastings, who "was with the king for some time and made him laugh very greatly" when Edward attended the wedding of Lady Hastings' daughter Margaret to Sir Robert Wateville at Marlborough that day.
- 26 July 1326: Edward gave three shillings to 'Will, the gardener of Kenilworth, who came from there to talk with the king on some affairs touching him, of the king's gift, for his expenses in returning to the said Kenilworth."
29 April, 2012
A Cowhouse, A New Bakehouse And A Dairy: Dower In 1317
I recently found this interestingly detailed entry on the Close Roll of 8 November 1317: assignation of dower to 'Margaret late the wife of Laurence de Tany' in the Hertfordshire manor of 'Estwyke' (i.e. Eastwick, just north of Harlow and not far from Stansted airport). Laurence de Tany's effigy still exists; he and Margaret had no children and his heir was his sister, confusingly also named Margaret. In his father Roger's inquisition post mortem of August 1301 - Roger was himself only in his early twenties at the time of his death - Laurence was said to be two years old, so must have been just eighteen when he died in the autumn of 1317. Margaret the sister and heir performed homage and received livery of her lands on 24 December 1317 (Fine Rolls 1307-1319, p. 349); Margaret the widow received the following in Eastwick:
"A house called 'the new bakehouse', on the east side of the manor, lying east and west, and a house called 'the dairy' with two doors, lying before the said bakehouse, lying north and south, and a plot of land before these two houses, extending thence to the corner of the porch of the great hall and to the corner of the kitchen and to the garden enclosure; and a new stable with two doors within the inner gate of the manor and with a porch over the doors, of which stable one end is towards the outer gate and the other towards the kitchen; and a third of the barn, to wit one door of the same on the south with all the end of the barn towards towards the common way to the church of Estwyk; and a third of the cowhouse, to wit one door of the same on the east with all the end of the cowhouse from the door to the barn; and all the plot of land from the gate of the enclosure before the barn to the door of the same towards the common way on one side in length, and from the said door to the bottom of the ditch between the cowhouse and garden in breadth, extending the length of the said ditch on the other side from the garden behind the barn to the two parts of the cowhouse that remain to the heir [i.e. Margaret's sister-in-law]; and a small house near the gate on the east. The inner and outer gates of the manor and the plot of land extending from the outer gate to the inner gate in length, and from the gate of the enclosure of the barn to the garden behind the kitchen and stable in breadth, and the plot of land from the inner gate of the manor to the plot before the bakehouse and dairy above assigned to her shall remain in common, so that she shall have free ingress and egress to all the houses and plots abovesaid by day and by night for all her things whensoever she pleases.
There are assigned to her one and a half acres of the garden called 'Isewellegardyn', one end of the one and a half acres begins near the gate of the manor and extends between the kitchen and the common way between the bakehouse and the enclosure of the garden to the field called 'Isewelleschote' on the east; and a third of the garden called 'Wynyard' and of the pasture called 'Roumore' in the same garden, which third contains two and a half acres lying near the field called 'Calstokstret'...[more details of lands assigned, snipped]. There are also assigned to her twenty-five acres of wood in the wood called 'le Perk', whereof one end abuts upon the way to the wood that belonged to W[...] le Parker on the south, and the other end abuts upon the field called 'Wydefordeleye' on the north, and one side near the lord's* wood in the west...There are also assigned to her the rents and services of five free tenants, to wit Robert de Geldeford, William le Frere, William de Westmulle, William de Theydon, and Simon Roche, who render yearly fifty-eight shillings and do suit of court. There are also assigned to her the rents, works and customs of Richard Bosse, customary-tenant in the same manor, of the yearly value of four shillings and four and a half pence; and three capons from certain tenements that John de Farnham and Roger Bataille, free tenants, hold, worth sixpence. There are also assigned to her three messuages with twenty-two acres of arable land that Adam Saeles, Richard le Hunte and Peter le Hopare, villeins, held at one time, which are now in the hands of the lord on account of the default of the tenants, of the yearly value of thirteen shillings and eightpence...and two cottages that belonged to Matilda Coleman and John Cutbert, in the lord's hands for the above cause [default], which are not extended because they are decayed."
It ends by assigning to Margaret part of a fishery and rent from a water-mill, and "pleas and perquisites of court, fines, reliefs and heriots of all the tenants above assigned to her, of the yearly value of twenty pence. [Calendar of Close Rolls 1313-1318, pp. 573-574]
* The lord of Eastwick in 1317 was Thomas Wake, brother of Margaret, future countess of Kent, who was still a minor and in Edward II's wardship.
I love this description of the manor; it's so detailed I feel like I could draw a diagram of it. :-)
"A house called 'the new bakehouse', on the east side of the manor, lying east and west, and a house called 'the dairy' with two doors, lying before the said bakehouse, lying north and south, and a plot of land before these two houses, extending thence to the corner of the porch of the great hall and to the corner of the kitchen and to the garden enclosure; and a new stable with two doors within the inner gate of the manor and with a porch over the doors, of which stable one end is towards the outer gate and the other towards the kitchen; and a third of the barn, to wit one door of the same on the south with all the end of the barn towards towards the common way to the church of Estwyk; and a third of the cowhouse, to wit one door of the same on the east with all the end of the cowhouse from the door to the barn; and all the plot of land from the gate of the enclosure before the barn to the door of the same towards the common way on one side in length, and from the said door to the bottom of the ditch between the cowhouse and garden in breadth, extending the length of the said ditch on the other side from the garden behind the barn to the two parts of the cowhouse that remain to the heir [i.e. Margaret's sister-in-law]; and a small house near the gate on the east. The inner and outer gates of the manor and the plot of land extending from the outer gate to the inner gate in length, and from the gate of the enclosure of the barn to the garden behind the kitchen and stable in breadth, and the plot of land from the inner gate of the manor to the plot before the bakehouse and dairy above assigned to her shall remain in common, so that she shall have free ingress and egress to all the houses and plots abovesaid by day and by night for all her things whensoever she pleases.
There are assigned to her one and a half acres of the garden called 'Isewellegardyn', one end of the one and a half acres begins near the gate of the manor and extends between the kitchen and the common way between the bakehouse and the enclosure of the garden to the field called 'Isewelleschote' on the east; and a third of the garden called 'Wynyard' and of the pasture called 'Roumore' in the same garden, which third contains two and a half acres lying near the field called 'Calstokstret'...[more details of lands assigned, snipped]. There are also assigned to her twenty-five acres of wood in the wood called 'le Perk', whereof one end abuts upon the way to the wood that belonged to W[...] le Parker on the south, and the other end abuts upon the field called 'Wydefordeleye' on the north, and one side near the lord's* wood in the west...There are also assigned to her the rents and services of five free tenants, to wit Robert de Geldeford, William le Frere, William de Westmulle, William de Theydon, and Simon Roche, who render yearly fifty-eight shillings and do suit of court. There are also assigned to her the rents, works and customs of Richard Bosse, customary-tenant in the same manor, of the yearly value of four shillings and four and a half pence; and three capons from certain tenements that John de Farnham and Roger Bataille, free tenants, hold, worth sixpence. There are also assigned to her three messuages with twenty-two acres of arable land that Adam Saeles, Richard le Hunte and Peter le Hopare, villeins, held at one time, which are now in the hands of the lord on account of the default of the tenants, of the yearly value of thirteen shillings and eightpence...and two cottages that belonged to Matilda Coleman and John Cutbert, in the lord's hands for the above cause [default], which are not extended because they are decayed."
It ends by assigning to Margaret part of a fishery and rent from a water-mill, and "pleas and perquisites of court, fines, reliefs and heriots of all the tenants above assigned to her, of the yearly value of twenty pence. [Calendar of Close Rolls 1313-1318, pp. 573-574]
* The lord of Eastwick in 1317 was Thomas Wake, brother of Margaret, future countess of Kent, who was still a minor and in Edward II's wardship.
I love this description of the manor; it's so detailed I feel like I could draw a diagram of it. :-)
24 April, 2012
Something Of A Rant
But first: The words in the image below are part of Edward II's speech when he was forced to abdicate in January 1327, as recorded in the Flores Historiarum: "I greatly regret that I have so utterly failed my people, but I could not be other than I am." The Flores was written in Latin, though anything Edward would have said - and whether or not he really said anything like the words ascribed to him here is anyone's guess - would have been in Anglo-Norman. The design was made by my friend Tim. Thanks for sharing and giving me permission to use it here, Tim!
Talking of trashing people, and referring to what I wrote at the end of my recent post about Hugh Despenser and Isabella, I had the misfortune recently to read part of a novel about Isabella and Roger Mortimer which really made my blood boil. In it - besides the usual tediously predictable stuff about Edward II being a 'coward' and the useless whining pathetic fool and callous uncaring husband he always is in badly-written and researched melodrama - the author has Isabella claiming that Edward couldn't care less about their four children and can barely even remember their names, and that if anything happens to Isabella they'd be better off if he were dead too and they were orphans. That just made me...I cannot believe...I literally have no words. What a laughably blatant and obvious attempt to make Edward II even more unlikeable than he already is to readers of the novel. No-one in the fourteenth century ever accused Edward of not caring about his children, unless you count the Brut chronicle, which repeats a rumour that in 1326 Edward wished to strangle his wife and eldest son to death. The chronicle reports that when this rumour was repeated to Edward after his forced abdication - evidently he hadn't heard it before - he was so upset and horrified that he exclaimed "God knows, I thought it never, and now I would that I were dead! So would God that I were! For then were all my sorrow passed." (The Brut or the Chronicles of England, ed. F.W.D. Brie, vol. 1, pp. 252-253.)
Hideous, and I'm sure that no-one who actually knew Edward believed that he would have ever wished to kill his son, including Isabella and Edward III himself. Edward II is generally accepted to have been a good and loving father, something even Alison Weir, who appears to despise him, admits. It just makes me so furious that modern writers invent this hateful, hurtful nonsense about him (another novelist has him committing 'atrocities' in Wales and having Jewish merchants visiting England during his reign killed, for pity's sake). How would they like it if someone made up crap like that about their families and people they care about? "The writer's late grandfather was a cruel and neglectful husband who cared so little about his children he struggled even to remember their names. Conceiving his children was nothing more than a painful and unpleasant duty for him and he may not even have been their real father; he was a feeble drunken weakling; and his wife despised him and chose to punish him by committing adultery with another man who was much better and manlier than him in every way. He was so evil that he had innocent people murdered for the sheer hell of it, and allowed his lover to rape his wife and torture anyone he felt like." How would these writers who obviously adore the story of Isabella and Roger Mortimer feel if I wrote a novel or story and made out that Roger frequently beat up and raped his wife and treated her with utter contempt as nothing more than a brood mare, and that Isabella was a nasty, spiteful little madam who treated everyone she met like dirt and didn't give a damn about her children except as a means to manipulate her husband and make herself powerful? After all, it would be reasonably easy - given that Roger had a dozen children and that Isabella did use her elder son as a means of striking against her husband in 1326, and sent her daughter Joan away to Scotland when she was only seven - to make these characterisations seem plausible and historically accurate to readers. But I'd never do that, because there is absolutely no basis in fact for such portrayals and it would be an incredibly unsubtle way of making the pair unsympathetic to readers, with the equally unsubtle aim of making Edward II, who would naturally be a candidate for Father Of The Year and a loving tolerant husband who becomes a tragic, even saintly victim of his adulterous wife's cruel manipulations, look much better to readers by comparison. True, you can't libel the dead. True, historical fiction is, of course, fictional and shouldn't be taken as actual historical fact (though lots of people do just that). But why invent and write nasty things about people who aren't around to defend themselves? Such a shame that some writers can't give their characters depth and complexity without resorting to such obvious and lame devices as making Edward II an even worse father than he is a husband - and sheesh, they might as well just have him walk into the novel carrying a neon sign proclaiming 'I AM A HORRIBLE CHARACTER! HATE ME!!!'.
This year, which marks the 700th anniversary of the birth of Edward III, I feel like starting a new blog
feature called Who's Edward III's Father This Week? A friend on Facebook told me the other day about a person of his acquaintance who thinks that Isabella conceived the future king with Sir Robert Holland, on the grounds that - get this - she and he were once supposedly 'in the same vicinity'. What an utterly fabulous, well-thought-out and plausible theory. Don't know about you, but I'm totally convinced. In fact, Sir Robert Holland (whose grandsons, via his second son Thomas who secretly married Joan of Kent, were Richard II's half-brothers) was a close adherent and friend of Thomas, earl of Lancaster; Edward II wrote to Holland in November 1311 about an illness Lancaster was then suffering from. Given the political situation in February/March 1312 when Edward III was conceived, when Edward II and Piers Gaveston were skulking in the north to avoid Lancaster and actually fled from him when he arrived in Tynemouth a few weeks later, anyone as close to the earl as Holland was is incredibly unlikely to have been anywhere near the queen. Still, don't let that stand in the way of a good theory, eh? It strikes me as odd, the way some people who otherwise seem to like and admire Isabella of France are so happy to trash her morals and accuse her of being willing to foist a child of non-royal blood onto the English throne. You'd think they didn't understand the contemporary mindset or hadn't done any basic research at all or something.
(Why does Blogger's formatting always go weird when I include an image in a post?)
Talking of trashing people, and referring to what I wrote at the end of my recent post about Hugh Despenser and Isabella, I had the misfortune recently to read part of a novel about Isabella and Roger Mortimer which really made my blood boil. In it - besides the usual tediously predictable stuff about Edward II being a 'coward' and the useless whining pathetic fool and callous uncaring husband he always is in badly-written and researched melodrama - the author has Isabella claiming that Edward couldn't care less about their four children and can barely even remember their names, and that if anything happens to Isabella they'd be better off if he were dead too and they were orphans. That just made me...I cannot believe...I literally have no words. What a laughably blatant and obvious attempt to make Edward II even more unlikeable than he already is to readers of the novel. No-one in the fourteenth century ever accused Edward of not caring about his children, unless you count the Brut chronicle, which repeats a rumour that in 1326 Edward wished to strangle his wife and eldest son to death. The chronicle reports that when this rumour was repeated to Edward after his forced abdication - evidently he hadn't heard it before - he was so upset and horrified that he exclaimed "God knows, I thought it never, and now I would that I were dead! So would God that I were! For then were all my sorrow passed." (The Brut or the Chronicles of England, ed. F.W.D. Brie, vol. 1, pp. 252-253.)
Hideous, and I'm sure that no-one who actually knew Edward believed that he would have ever wished to kill his son, including Isabella and Edward III himself. Edward II is generally accepted to have been a good and loving father, something even Alison Weir, who appears to despise him, admits. It just makes me so furious that modern writers invent this hateful, hurtful nonsense about him (another novelist has him committing 'atrocities' in Wales and having Jewish merchants visiting England during his reign killed, for pity's sake). How would they like it if someone made up crap like that about their families and people they care about? "The writer's late grandfather was a cruel and neglectful husband who cared so little about his children he struggled even to remember their names. Conceiving his children was nothing more than a painful and unpleasant duty for him and he may not even have been their real father; he was a feeble drunken weakling; and his wife despised him and chose to punish him by committing adultery with another man who was much better and manlier than him in every way. He was so evil that he had innocent people murdered for the sheer hell of it, and allowed his lover to rape his wife and torture anyone he felt like." How would these writers who obviously adore the story of Isabella and Roger Mortimer feel if I wrote a novel or story and made out that Roger frequently beat up and raped his wife and treated her with utter contempt as nothing more than a brood mare, and that Isabella was a nasty, spiteful little madam who treated everyone she met like dirt and didn't give a damn about her children except as a means to manipulate her husband and make herself powerful? After all, it would be reasonably easy - given that Roger had a dozen children and that Isabella did use her elder son as a means of striking against her husband in 1326, and sent her daughter Joan away to Scotland when she was only seven - to make these characterisations seem plausible and historically accurate to readers. But I'd never do that, because there is absolutely no basis in fact for such portrayals and it would be an incredibly unsubtle way of making the pair unsympathetic to readers, with the equally unsubtle aim of making Edward II, who would naturally be a candidate for Father Of The Year and a loving tolerant husband who becomes a tragic, even saintly victim of his adulterous wife's cruel manipulations, look much better to readers by comparison. True, you can't libel the dead. True, historical fiction is, of course, fictional and shouldn't be taken as actual historical fact (though lots of people do just that). But why invent and write nasty things about people who aren't around to defend themselves? Such a shame that some writers can't give their characters depth and complexity without resorting to such obvious and lame devices as making Edward II an even worse father than he is a husband - and sheesh, they might as well just have him walk into the novel carrying a neon sign proclaiming 'I AM A HORRIBLE CHARACTER! HATE ME!!!'.
22 April, 2012
April Anniversaries
Some April anniversaries relating to Edward II:
28 April 1313: Edward orders the release of Isabel MacDuff, countess of Buchan, who had crowned Robert Bruce king of Scotland in 1306, into the custody of his kinsman Henry Beaumont. This is the last mention of Isabel that I know of; she is not named among the Scottish hostages released after Bannockburn the following year.
28 April 1317: Wedding of Margaret de Clare and Hugh Audley at Windsor Castle, in Edward's presence.
27 April 1318: Edward writes to Pope John XXII asking his permission to found a house of Dominican nuns at Langley Priory, which he had founded in 1308. Sadly, nothing came of this until 1349, when Edward III finally established a sisters' house there. (Nice to see Edward III taking an interest in his father's foundation.)
25 April 1284: Birth of Edward II at Caernarfon.
25 April 1287: Birth of Roger Mortimer, lord of Wigmore and earl of March.
25 April 1295: Death of Edward's first cousin Sancho IV of Castile.
25 April 1309: Pope Clement V gives Edward an excellent twenty-fifth birthday present by agreeing to lift the excommunication on Piers Gaveston.
24 April 1316: Edward II asks the Dominicans of Toulouse to pray for him (something he did fairly often, also asking the Dominicans of Pamplona, Marseilles, Paris, Rouen, Citeaux, Florence, Venice, Barcelona and Vienna to say prayers "for the good estate" of himself, Queen Isabella and their children at various times over the years).
23 April 1307: Death of Edward's sister Joan of Acre, countess of Gloucester.
22 April 1355: Death of Edward's elder daughter Eleanor of Woodstock, dowager duchess of Gelderland, at the age of thirty-six. Duchess Eleanor was buried at Deventer Abbey. She left two sons: Duke Reinald III of Gelderland, then not quite twenty-two, and the future Duke Eduard of Gelderland, then nineteen.
20 April 1314: Pope Clement V, born Raymond Bertrand de Got, dies in Avignon, a month and two days after Jacques de Molay, last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, supposedly curses him from the flames of his execution pyre.
20 April 1315: Edward II holds a great banquet for the archbishop of Canterbury and most of the nobility at Westminster Hall, which is damaged by a fire shortly afterwards.
17 April 1290: At Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire, Gilbert 'the Red' de Clare, earl of Gloucester, signs an agreement with his soon-to-be father-in-law Edward I, acknowledging that after the king's death he will recognise Edward of Caernarfon (not quite six years old) as his liege lord, and, if Edward I dies without fathering more sons and Edward of Caernarfon dies without heirs of his body, then the king's eldest surviving daughter Eleanor will be rightful heir to the throne.
17 April 1306: Edward gives ten shillings each to the watchmen who rouse him from his bed and evacuate his household as flames swept through Windsor Castle.
17 April 1320: Pope John XXII canonises Thomas Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford, who had died in August 1282. This was due in part to the efforts of Edward II himself, who wrote to Clement V and John XXII half a dozen times between December 1307 and January 1319, asking them to canonise Cantilupe.
15 April 1318: Edward’s brother-in-law Philip V of France (who succeeded to the throne in November 1316) accepts Edward’s excuses for not travelling to France to perform homage for Gascony and Ponthieu and grants him permission to appoint envoys to do homage on his behalf, around the time of the Nativity of St John the Baptist, or 24 June. Edward manages to put off the dread moment of kneeling to another person until late June 1320.
15 April 1324: The final date by which Edward is meant to perform homage to yet another brother-in-law, Charles IV. His failure to do so precipitates the last great crisis of his reign.
15 April 1326: Edward II informs his kinsman Afonso IV of Portugal that his son Edward will be unable to marry Afonso's daughter Maria, as the Portuguese king has suggested, as the boy is betrothed to Leonor of Castile. (And ultimately marries Philippa of Hainault.)
14 April 1322: Execution of Bartholomew, Lord Badlesmere, formerly steward of Edward II's household, who took part in the Contrariant rebellion against the king and was captured by Donald of Mar at one of the manors of his nephew the bishop of Lincoln. Bartholomew is dragged the three miles from Canterbury to the crossroads at Blean, hanged, drawn and quartered - one of only three men I know of who suffered the traitor's death during Edward II's reign, the others being Sir Gilbert Middleton and Hugh Despenser the Younger (and the latter was not done at Edward's order, of course). Poor man; no-one deserves to die like that.
13 April 1326: Edward tells the archbishop and prior of Canterbury and the abbot of St Augustine’s that "an invasion of the realm by aliens is threatened," i.e. his queen and Mortimer's invasion.
10 April 1315: Edward passes legislation ordering the price of various basic foodstuffs to be fixed and regulated in an attempt to mitigate his subjects' misery during the Great Famine.
8 April 1314: Edward spends Easter Monday at Ely Cathedral, quizzing the monks as to their supposed possession of the body of St Alban when he'd just seen it in St Albans Abbey. Heh. "You know that my brothers of St Albans believe that they possess the body of the martyr. In this place the monks say that they have the body of the same saint. By God’s soul, I want to see in which place I ought chiefly to pay reverence to the remains of that holy body."
7 April 1323: Edward orders an inquiry into the recent near-escape of several Contrariants from Wallingford Castle.
4 April 1284: Death of Edward's uncle Alfonso XI of Castile, exactly three weeks before Edward was born.
4 April 1311: An anonymous letter-writer says that "a secret illness troubles [Piers Gaveston] much, compelling him to take short journeys."
3 April 1327: Custody of the former King Edward II is transferred from his cousin Earl Henry of Lancaster at Kenilworth Castle to Thomas, Lord Berkeley, Sir John Maltravers and Sir Thomas Gurney at Berkeley Castle.
2 April 1318: Robert Bruce seizes the port of Berwick-upon-Tweed, following several unsuccessful attempts. Edward's efforts to take it back the following year end in embarrassing failure and it remains in Scottish hands until Edward III recaptures it in July 1333.
1 April 1312: Edward pretends in a letter to his father-in-law Philip IV of France that he is hurrying to Berwick-upon-Tweed, which Robert Bruce is currently besieging, when he is in fact far too concerned with Piers Gaveston's safety to do any such thing. He fails to mention that his own men are holding the Scottish border against him to prevent him sending Piers there.
28 April 1313: Edward orders the release of Isabel MacDuff, countess of Buchan, who had crowned Robert Bruce king of Scotland in 1306, into the custody of his kinsman Henry Beaumont. This is the last mention of Isabel that I know of; she is not named among the Scottish hostages released after Bannockburn the following year.
28 April 1317: Wedding of Margaret de Clare and Hugh Audley at Windsor Castle, in Edward's presence.
27 April 1318: Edward writes to Pope John XXII asking his permission to found a house of Dominican nuns at Langley Priory, which he had founded in 1308. Sadly, nothing came of this until 1349, when Edward III finally established a sisters' house there. (Nice to see Edward III taking an interest in his father's foundation.)
25 April 1284: Birth of Edward II at Caernarfon.
25 April 1287: Birth of Roger Mortimer, lord of Wigmore and earl of March.
25 April 1295: Death of Edward's first cousin Sancho IV of Castile.
25 April 1309: Pope Clement V gives Edward an excellent twenty-fifth birthday present by agreeing to lift the excommunication on Piers Gaveston.
24 April 1316: Edward II asks the Dominicans of Toulouse to pray for him (something he did fairly often, also asking the Dominicans of Pamplona, Marseilles, Paris, Rouen, Citeaux, Florence, Venice, Barcelona and Vienna to say prayers "for the good estate" of himself, Queen Isabella and their children at various times over the years).
23 April 1307: Death of Edward's sister Joan of Acre, countess of Gloucester.
22 April 1355: Death of Edward's elder daughter Eleanor of Woodstock, dowager duchess of Gelderland, at the age of thirty-six. Duchess Eleanor was buried at Deventer Abbey. She left two sons: Duke Reinald III of Gelderland, then not quite twenty-two, and the future Duke Eduard of Gelderland, then nineteen.
20 April 1314: Pope Clement V, born Raymond Bertrand de Got, dies in Avignon, a month and two days after Jacques de Molay, last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, supposedly curses him from the flames of his execution pyre.
20 April 1315: Edward II holds a great banquet for the archbishop of Canterbury and most of the nobility at Westminster Hall, which is damaged by a fire shortly afterwards.
17 April 1290: At Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire, Gilbert 'the Red' de Clare, earl of Gloucester, signs an agreement with his soon-to-be father-in-law Edward I, acknowledging that after the king's death he will recognise Edward of Caernarfon (not quite six years old) as his liege lord, and, if Edward I dies without fathering more sons and Edward of Caernarfon dies without heirs of his body, then the king's eldest surviving daughter Eleanor will be rightful heir to the throne.
17 April 1306: Edward gives ten shillings each to the watchmen who rouse him from his bed and evacuate his household as flames swept through Windsor Castle.
17 April 1320: Pope John XXII canonises Thomas Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford, who had died in August 1282. This was due in part to the efforts of Edward II himself, who wrote to Clement V and John XXII half a dozen times between December 1307 and January 1319, asking them to canonise Cantilupe.
15 April 1318: Edward’s brother-in-law Philip V of France (who succeeded to the throne in November 1316) accepts Edward’s excuses for not travelling to France to perform homage for Gascony and Ponthieu and grants him permission to appoint envoys to do homage on his behalf, around the time of the Nativity of St John the Baptist, or 24 June. Edward manages to put off the dread moment of kneeling to another person until late June 1320.
15 April 1324: The final date by which Edward is meant to perform homage to yet another brother-in-law, Charles IV. His failure to do so precipitates the last great crisis of his reign.
15 April 1326: Edward II informs his kinsman Afonso IV of Portugal that his son Edward will be unable to marry Afonso's daughter Maria, as the Portuguese king has suggested, as the boy is betrothed to Leonor of Castile. (And ultimately marries Philippa of Hainault.)
14 April 1322: Execution of Bartholomew, Lord Badlesmere, formerly steward of Edward II's household, who took part in the Contrariant rebellion against the king and was captured by Donald of Mar at one of the manors of his nephew the bishop of Lincoln. Bartholomew is dragged the three miles from Canterbury to the crossroads at Blean, hanged, drawn and quartered - one of only three men I know of who suffered the traitor's death during Edward II's reign, the others being Sir Gilbert Middleton and Hugh Despenser the Younger (and the latter was not done at Edward's order, of course). Poor man; no-one deserves to die like that.
13 April 1326: Edward tells the archbishop and prior of Canterbury and the abbot of St Augustine’s that "an invasion of the realm by aliens is threatened," i.e. his queen and Mortimer's invasion.
10 April 1315: Edward passes legislation ordering the price of various basic foodstuffs to be fixed and regulated in an attempt to mitigate his subjects' misery during the Great Famine.
8 April 1314: Edward spends Easter Monday at Ely Cathedral, quizzing the monks as to their supposed possession of the body of St Alban when he'd just seen it in St Albans Abbey. Heh. "You know that my brothers of St Albans believe that they possess the body of the martyr. In this place the monks say that they have the body of the same saint. By God’s soul, I want to see in which place I ought chiefly to pay reverence to the remains of that holy body."
7 April 1323: Edward orders an inquiry into the recent near-escape of several Contrariants from Wallingford Castle.
4 April 1284: Death of Edward's uncle Alfonso XI of Castile, exactly three weeks before Edward was born.
4 April 1311: An anonymous letter-writer says that "a secret illness troubles [Piers Gaveston] much, compelling him to take short journeys."
3 April 1311: Birth of Edward's niece Margaret de Bohun, future countess of Devon.
3 April 1327: Custody of the former King Edward II is transferred from his cousin Earl Henry of Lancaster at Kenilworth Castle to Thomas, Lord Berkeley, Sir John Maltravers and Sir Thomas Gurney at Berkeley Castle.
2 April 1318: Robert Bruce seizes the port of Berwick-upon-Tweed, following several unsuccessful attempts. Edward's efforts to take it back the following year end in embarrassing failure and it remains in Scottish hands until Edward III recaptures it in July 1333.
1 April 1312: Edward pretends in a letter to his father-in-law Philip IV of France that he is hurrying to Berwick-upon-Tweed, which Robert Bruce is currently besieging, when he is in fact far too concerned with Piers Gaveston's safety to do any such thing. He fails to mention that his own men are holding the Scottish border against him to prevent him sending Piers there.
15 April, 2012
Did Hugh Despenser the Younger Rape Isabella of France?
Almost certainly not. The notion that Hugh may indeed have raped or otherwise sexually assaulted Queen Isabella has become so entrenched in some people's minds over the last few years, however, that an Amazon review of my friend Susan Higginbotham's novel about Hugh's wife Eleanor criticises the novel for not including it. What's the evidence that he ever did such a vile thing?
Basically there isn't any, except modern speculation. The first reference to it appears to be found in (as a friend on Twitter reminded me) Susan Howatch's 1974 novel Cashelmara, which is set in nineteenth-century Ireland but is a re-telling of Edward II's story, with the king renamed Patrick de Salis, Isabella Sarah Marriott, Piers Gaveston Derry Stranahan, Hugh Despenser Hugh MacGowan, and Roger Mortimer Maxwell Drummond. I love the novel, though it's a touch melodramatic in places, and the scene where Edward/Patrick and Hugh both rape Isabella/Sarah is really disturbing. Going somewhat off-topic here, there are some odd notions about Edward II's sexuality in fiction, not least the popular one that he can't have fathered his children. Apart from this, the one that probably irritates me most appears in Maurice Druon's The She-Wolf of France (La Louve de France in the French original), a novel I loathed - I still get occasional comments and emails from Druon fans irate at my review of it - wherein Isabella states that Edward, ummmm, needed help from Hugh Despenser in order to be able to perform with her to conceive their children. As three of their four children were born before Edward's close relationship with Hugh began, this isn't terribly likely.
Paul Doherty's 2003 non-fiction work Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II contains a longish discussion about Edward and Isabella's sex life, which goes on for several pages (pp. 100-102), and discusses the contemporary (albeit not found in any English source) rumour that Edward II had an affair with his niece Eleanor de Clare, Hugh Despenser's wife. Rather than leaving it there, Doherty goes on to speculate about possible 'wife-swapping' involving Hugh Despenser and Isabella, and states "I suspect that Edward may have tried to pressure Isabella into accepting an open marriage in which de Spencer [i.e. Hugh Despenser the Younger] wished to play a part...Wife-swapping is not a phenomenon solely reserved for the twentieth or twenty-first centuries." Ummmmm, OK then. He further speculates "De Spencer's sexual harassment of her would also explain Isabella's conduct with Mortimer. Because of de Spencer's 'intrusion', she may have regarded her marriage as null and void. If her husband insisted on playing the pander and allowing his favourite into her bed, why shouldn't Isabella choose for herself...?". This is fantasy piled on fantasy without a shred of evidence, and I find the bit about Isabella regarding her marriage as 'null and void' particularly silly. The (dreadful) prologue* of Doherty's (otherwise pretty good) 2005 novel The Cup of Ghosts has Hugh Despenser's "heart bubbling with lust to possess Isabella." Given the way Doherty writes Isabella, it's hard to imagine how he thinks anyone of the era wasn't bubbling with lust to possess her, but I digress.
* Which contains such gems as Edward III being described as "screaming, his foam-flecked lips curling like those of a snarling dog" as though he was some kind of maniac, Isabella asking to be buried "next to Mortimer, like a bride beside her lover!", a myth Doherty insists on repeating in his novels, and the statement that Isabella "tore her husband from his throne. She locked him in Berkeley Castle, sealing him up like some rabid animal...". What the hell???
Doherty's theory that Hugh Despenser sexually assaulted or harassed Queen Isabella is based solely on several letters Edward II sent to Isabella and her brother Charles IV in late 1325 and early 1326, after she had refused to return to England. One letter says "The king knows for truth, and she knows, that Hugh has always procured her all the honour with the king that he could, and no evil or villainy was done to her...". To Charles IV, Edward wrote that he "wishes the king of France to know that he could never perceive that Hugh, privately or openly, in word or deed, or in countenance, did not behave himself on all points towards the queen as he ought to have done to his lady." Doherty assumes this means that some 'evil or villainy' was done to Isabella. Her letters to Edward do not survive, only his replies, so possibly she had indeed complained to her husband about some 'evil' done to her by Hugh - although Doherty doesn't mention Edward's claim that the queen had sent several "loving letters" to Hugh while she was in France, or a letter of the queen which does survive (see below). He argues that Isabella "had levelled allegations of a very serious nature against de Spencer. If it was simply the seizure of her estates and household, or a clash over political and administrative issues, this would be apparent. Instead, the king himself does not wish to spell out what de Spencer allegedly said or did to Isabella which she in turn, had reported to the French court. In my view, Edward is referring to some sexual misconduct, which Isabella found offensive and disgusting." In fact it's far more likely that - as discussed below - Isabella had claimed that her life was in danger from Hugh Despenser, not that he had committed any 'sexual misconduct' against her. This is something that Edward II would have been equally reluctant to 'spell out' to Isabella's powerful brother. We shouldn't forget either that Edward's messenger may have transmitted more details orally, details which Edward may not have been willing to commit to a written letter.
This supposed sexual misconduct, in Doherty's view, would explain "her elder son's adherence to her as well as the sustained support she received from both the papacy and the English hierarchy." Isabella's son was only thirteen and not operating under his own agency; Edward of Windsor was essential to Isabella and Roger Mortimer's plans to invade England and they would not have allowed him to return to England and his father even if he wanted to (and whether he did or not is impossible to say). It is most unlikely that Pope John XXII was supporting Isabella over Edward II - whatever his private sympathies may have been, the pope could hardly be seen to condone a wife refusing to return to her lord husband and her marital duties - and in fact appears to have been doing his best to reconcile the couple and avert war between them. As for the support Isabella received in England in 1326/27, this is amply explained by Edward II's gross incompetence, his excessive favouritism towards the Despensers at the expense of his royal kinsmen the earls of Norfolk, Kent and Leicester (i.e. Henry of Lancaster) and others, his greed and barely legal land-grabbing, his callous treatment of many of the Contrariants who took part in the 1321/22 rebellion and their families, his numerous military failures, and so on and so forth. Are we supposed to believe that the English nobility and episcopate knew that Hugh Despenser had sexually assaulted the queen and that this is the sole or main reason why so many of them supported her against Hugh and Edward? I find that argument very unconvincing.
Alison Weir's 2005 book Isabella, She-Wolf of France, Queen of England, takes up Paul Doherty's theory and runs with it (pp. 148-150). She cites a letter sent by Isabella to Edward on 5 February 1326, which (unlike the queen's earlier letter(s) to which Edward II responded) still survives, and which says, according to Weir, that Hugh "wished to dishonour her by every possible means". Weir says "The words 'by every possible means', whilst they perhaps refer to to Despenser's vicious campaign to discredit Isabella, the disrespectful and injurious way in which he was to treat her, and his possible homosexual relationship* with her husband, are also suggestive of some serious sexual misconduct towards the Queen herself with the intent of humiliating and intimidating her. Had Hugh thrust himself into her marriage bed, with Edward's connivance, or even raped her? It is not beyond the bounds of possibility, considering his cruelty towards other women."
* The words 'homosexual relationship' really irritate me. Why is it necessary to call it that when neither Weir nor anyone else would write about Isabella and Roger Mortimer's 'heterosexual relationship'? Why not just say 'sexual relationship'?
Notice here that Alison Weir goes further than Paul Doherty, who writes of 'sexual misconduct' and 'sexual harassment' but never uses the word rape. 'It is not beyond the bounds of possibility', she says: weasel words that could be used in support of absolutely anything. Isabella and Roger Mortimer imprisoned eighteen children in Chester Castle as hostages for the good behaviour of the townspeople in 1327 [Close Rolls 1327-1330, pp. 169, 187-188], had three of Hugh Despenser the Younger's daughters (the eldest of whom was about ten) forcibly veiled as nuns shortly after his execution, and had the earl of Kent's three infant children imprisoned with their mother at the time of Kent's execution in 1330. Maybe Isabella and Roger ate babies. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility, considering their cruelty towards other children. The words of their Chester Castle order are suggestive of some serious misconduct towards children with the intent of humiliating and eating them. I mean, you know, if we're going to accuse people of extremely serious crimes on remarkably flimsy evidence.
And I am really not a fan of meaningless rhetorical questions like Weir's "Did Hugh thrust himself into her marriage bed...?" and Paul Doherty's "Did de Spencer, who, after Boroughbridge, was given virtually everything else, demand Isabella as well?" Because yeah, obviously there's no difference at all between Edward giving him lots of other people's lands and giving him sexual access to the royal person of his queen. The 'cruelty to other women' Weir mentions means (presumably) Hugh's alleged torture of Lady Baret, a story I doubt the veracity of, his imprisonment of Elizabeth Comyn until she handed over some of her lands to him, and his threat to Alice de Lacy that she would be burned alive unless she gave him and his father some of her lands. Nasty, very nasty, but not in themselves evidence that he was a rapist.
Seymour Phillips (Edward II, 2010, p. 491) cites and translates much of the queen's letter to her husband of 5 February 1326: Isabella wrote that Hugh "wished to dishonour us by [all means in] his power" and that she had hidden her dislike of him for a long time in order to escape danger (Hughe...nous voudrait deshonurer a son poiar...nous layoms dissimule longtemps pur le peril eschuver). This danger is explicitly stated later as being danger to the queen's life, this being the reason Isabella did not dare to return to "the company of our said lord," i.e. Edward, and that this danger caused her so much grief that she could write no more of it (nous ne pourroms retourner en la compagnie de noster dit seignur saunz nous mestre en peril de mort dount nous sumes en plus graves meschief qe escrivre ne poems; Isabella had also written a few lines earlier that she wished above all else, after God and the salvation of her soul, to return to Edward's company and live and die there, estre en la compaignie de nostre dit seignur et vivre et morir en icele, and had called her husband "our very dear and very sweet lord and friend," nostre treschier et tresdouche seignur et amy). Notice that the letter says Hugh wished to dishonour Isabella a son poiar, literally 'by (or through) his power' in the sense of 'with all his power', not exactly 'by every possible means' as Weir cites it. There's no hint in the letter of any kind of sexual assault carried out or threatened by Hugh Despenser, though it's interesting to speculate in which ways Isabella felt her life to be in danger from him.
This section of Weir's book, incidentally, puts forward the notion that Edward II in 1322 was "being promiscuous with low-born men", who were, she claims, paid "substantial sums" of money to spend time "in his company", which she describes as "hush money". Sadly for this salacious theory, the men she names were in fact members of Edward's household, and the supposed 'hush money' was merely - oh dear - their wages. Weir also claims that Hugh Despenser's influence over Edward "was rooted in a perverted sexual dominance" - needless to say, Roger Mortimer's later presumed sexual dominance over Isabella is not 'perverted' - and that Edward's relationship with Hugh was an "insult" to Isabella's "femininity". Ohhhhhkaaaaay.
The charges against Hugh Despenser at his trial in Hereford in November 1326 include: that he counselled Edward to leave Isabella in peril of her life at Tynemouth in 1322; that he procured discord between the king and queen; that he persuaded Edward to 'oust' her from her lands in 1324; that he had her sent to France in 1325 'meanly, against the dignity of her estate'; that he tried to bribe French courtiers to have her and her son Edward of Windsor 'destroyed'. No mention is made of any kind of physical or sexual assault on the queen. Not that Isabella would necessarily have wanted such an awful experience shouted out in public, of course, but one wonders how all the 'English hierarchy' in 1326 knew of the sexual assault Hugh Despenser supposedly inflicted on Isabella and yet not a trace of it has come down to us in any source. You'd think a chronicler or several would at least hint at it. Perhaps Hugh's attempts to bribe someone in France to - presumably - have Isabella killed are the source of her claims that her life was in danger from him.
Of course, there's no way of proving that Hugh Despenser didn't rape or otherwise sexually assault Isabella, but there's no reason to think that he did, or that he had any sexual interest in her. Before accusing someone of such a serious and awful crime, we should have more evidence than assumptions by a couple of modern writers that his 'dishonour' of the queen might possibly, perhaps, maybe, have meant something sexual. Hugh behaved extremely unpleasantly in many ways, but whatever his track record there is no evidence that he was a rapist, and just because he is so often written nowadays as a one-dimensional cartoonish moustache-twirling villain is no excuse to ascribe serious sexual crimes to him just because an unpleasant person 'might' have committed them. I've noticed a trend in some modern historical fiction to make certain characters highly unsympathetic to the reader by having them commit sexual offences: William, Lord Hastings is written as a rapist and killer of young girls in one novel which portrays the future Richard III, who had Hastings executed without trial in 1483, as not far removed from a saint; the earl of Buchan (d. 1308) is a rapist and beater of his wife Isobel MacDuff, who has what the author obviously considers a deeply romantic affair with Robert Bruce; John Morton, close ally and chancellor of Henry VII, is said to have a taste for young boys. It's bad enough in fiction to see the posthumous reputations of people who really lived trashed in a blatant attempt to make their opponents more sympathetic and 'tragic' to readers. I don't want to see it in non-fiction too.
Basically there isn't any, except modern speculation. The first reference to it appears to be found in (as a friend on Twitter reminded me) Susan Howatch's 1974 novel Cashelmara, which is set in nineteenth-century Ireland but is a re-telling of Edward II's story, with the king renamed Patrick de Salis, Isabella Sarah Marriott, Piers Gaveston Derry Stranahan, Hugh Despenser Hugh MacGowan, and Roger Mortimer Maxwell Drummond. I love the novel, though it's a touch melodramatic in places, and the scene where Edward/Patrick and Hugh both rape Isabella/Sarah is really disturbing. Going somewhat off-topic here, there are some odd notions about Edward II's sexuality in fiction, not least the popular one that he can't have fathered his children. Apart from this, the one that probably irritates me most appears in Maurice Druon's The She-Wolf of France (La Louve de France in the French original), a novel I loathed - I still get occasional comments and emails from Druon fans irate at my review of it - wherein Isabella states that Edward, ummmm, needed help from Hugh Despenser in order to be able to perform with her to conceive their children. As three of their four children were born before Edward's close relationship with Hugh began, this isn't terribly likely.
Paul Doherty's 2003 non-fiction work Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II contains a longish discussion about Edward and Isabella's sex life, which goes on for several pages (pp. 100-102), and discusses the contemporary (albeit not found in any English source) rumour that Edward II had an affair with his niece Eleanor de Clare, Hugh Despenser's wife. Rather than leaving it there, Doherty goes on to speculate about possible 'wife-swapping' involving Hugh Despenser and Isabella, and states "I suspect that Edward may have tried to pressure Isabella into accepting an open marriage in which de Spencer [i.e. Hugh Despenser the Younger] wished to play a part...Wife-swapping is not a phenomenon solely reserved for the twentieth or twenty-first centuries." Ummmmm, OK then. He further speculates "De Spencer's sexual harassment of her would also explain Isabella's conduct with Mortimer. Because of de Spencer's 'intrusion', she may have regarded her marriage as null and void. If her husband insisted on playing the pander and allowing his favourite into her bed, why shouldn't Isabella choose for herself...?". This is fantasy piled on fantasy without a shred of evidence, and I find the bit about Isabella regarding her marriage as 'null and void' particularly silly. The (dreadful) prologue* of Doherty's (otherwise pretty good) 2005 novel The Cup of Ghosts has Hugh Despenser's "heart bubbling with lust to possess Isabella." Given the way Doherty writes Isabella, it's hard to imagine how he thinks anyone of the era wasn't bubbling with lust to possess her, but I digress.
* Which contains such gems as Edward III being described as "screaming, his foam-flecked lips curling like those of a snarling dog" as though he was some kind of maniac, Isabella asking to be buried "next to Mortimer, like a bride beside her lover!", a myth Doherty insists on repeating in his novels, and the statement that Isabella "tore her husband from his throne. She locked him in Berkeley Castle, sealing him up like some rabid animal...". What the hell???
Doherty's theory that Hugh Despenser sexually assaulted or harassed Queen Isabella is based solely on several letters Edward II sent to Isabella and her brother Charles IV in late 1325 and early 1326, after she had refused to return to England. One letter says "The king knows for truth, and she knows, that Hugh has always procured her all the honour with the king that he could, and no evil or villainy was done to her...". To Charles IV, Edward wrote that he "wishes the king of France to know that he could never perceive that Hugh, privately or openly, in word or deed, or in countenance, did not behave himself on all points towards the queen as he ought to have done to his lady." Doherty assumes this means that some 'evil or villainy' was done to Isabella. Her letters to Edward do not survive, only his replies, so possibly she had indeed complained to her husband about some 'evil' done to her by Hugh - although Doherty doesn't mention Edward's claim that the queen had sent several "loving letters" to Hugh while she was in France, or a letter of the queen which does survive (see below). He argues that Isabella "had levelled allegations of a very serious nature against de Spencer. If it was simply the seizure of her estates and household, or a clash over political and administrative issues, this would be apparent. Instead, the king himself does not wish to spell out what de Spencer allegedly said or did to Isabella which she in turn, had reported to the French court. In my view, Edward is referring to some sexual misconduct, which Isabella found offensive and disgusting." In fact it's far more likely that - as discussed below - Isabella had claimed that her life was in danger from Hugh Despenser, not that he had committed any 'sexual misconduct' against her. This is something that Edward II would have been equally reluctant to 'spell out' to Isabella's powerful brother. We shouldn't forget either that Edward's messenger may have transmitted more details orally, details which Edward may not have been willing to commit to a written letter.
This supposed sexual misconduct, in Doherty's view, would explain "her elder son's adherence to her as well as the sustained support she received from both the papacy and the English hierarchy." Isabella's son was only thirteen and not operating under his own agency; Edward of Windsor was essential to Isabella and Roger Mortimer's plans to invade England and they would not have allowed him to return to England and his father even if he wanted to (and whether he did or not is impossible to say). It is most unlikely that Pope John XXII was supporting Isabella over Edward II - whatever his private sympathies may have been, the pope could hardly be seen to condone a wife refusing to return to her lord husband and her marital duties - and in fact appears to have been doing his best to reconcile the couple and avert war between them. As for the support Isabella received in England in 1326/27, this is amply explained by Edward II's gross incompetence, his excessive favouritism towards the Despensers at the expense of his royal kinsmen the earls of Norfolk, Kent and Leicester (i.e. Henry of Lancaster) and others, his greed and barely legal land-grabbing, his callous treatment of many of the Contrariants who took part in the 1321/22 rebellion and their families, his numerous military failures, and so on and so forth. Are we supposed to believe that the English nobility and episcopate knew that Hugh Despenser had sexually assaulted the queen and that this is the sole or main reason why so many of them supported her against Hugh and Edward? I find that argument very unconvincing.
Alison Weir's 2005 book Isabella, She-Wolf of France, Queen of England, takes up Paul Doherty's theory and runs with it (pp. 148-150). She cites a letter sent by Isabella to Edward on 5 February 1326, which (unlike the queen's earlier letter(s) to which Edward II responded) still survives, and which says, according to Weir, that Hugh "wished to dishonour her by every possible means". Weir says "The words 'by every possible means', whilst they perhaps refer to to Despenser's vicious campaign to discredit Isabella, the disrespectful and injurious way in which he was to treat her, and his possible homosexual relationship* with her husband, are also suggestive of some serious sexual misconduct towards the Queen herself with the intent of humiliating and intimidating her. Had Hugh thrust himself into her marriage bed, with Edward's connivance, or even raped her? It is not beyond the bounds of possibility, considering his cruelty towards other women."
* The words 'homosexual relationship' really irritate me. Why is it necessary to call it that when neither Weir nor anyone else would write about Isabella and Roger Mortimer's 'heterosexual relationship'? Why not just say 'sexual relationship'?
Notice here that Alison Weir goes further than Paul Doherty, who writes of 'sexual misconduct' and 'sexual harassment' but never uses the word rape. 'It is not beyond the bounds of possibility', she says: weasel words that could be used in support of absolutely anything. Isabella and Roger Mortimer imprisoned eighteen children in Chester Castle as hostages for the good behaviour of the townspeople in 1327 [Close Rolls 1327-1330, pp. 169, 187-188], had three of Hugh Despenser the Younger's daughters (the eldest of whom was about ten) forcibly veiled as nuns shortly after his execution, and had the earl of Kent's three infant children imprisoned with their mother at the time of Kent's execution in 1330. Maybe Isabella and Roger ate babies. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility, considering their cruelty towards other children. The words of their Chester Castle order are suggestive of some serious misconduct towards children with the intent of humiliating and eating them. I mean, you know, if we're going to accuse people of extremely serious crimes on remarkably flimsy evidence.
And I am really not a fan of meaningless rhetorical questions like Weir's "Did Hugh thrust himself into her marriage bed...?" and Paul Doherty's "Did de Spencer, who, after Boroughbridge, was given virtually everything else, demand Isabella as well?" Because yeah, obviously there's no difference at all between Edward giving him lots of other people's lands and giving him sexual access to the royal person of his queen. The 'cruelty to other women' Weir mentions means (presumably) Hugh's alleged torture of Lady Baret, a story I doubt the veracity of, his imprisonment of Elizabeth Comyn until she handed over some of her lands to him, and his threat to Alice de Lacy that she would be burned alive unless she gave him and his father some of her lands. Nasty, very nasty, but not in themselves evidence that he was a rapist.
Seymour Phillips (Edward II, 2010, p. 491) cites and translates much of the queen's letter to her husband of 5 February 1326: Isabella wrote that Hugh "wished to dishonour us by [all means in] his power" and that she had hidden her dislike of him for a long time in order to escape danger (Hughe...nous voudrait deshonurer a son poiar...nous layoms dissimule longtemps pur le peril eschuver). This danger is explicitly stated later as being danger to the queen's life, this being the reason Isabella did not dare to return to "the company of our said lord," i.e. Edward, and that this danger caused her so much grief that she could write no more of it (nous ne pourroms retourner en la compagnie de noster dit seignur saunz nous mestre en peril de mort dount nous sumes en plus graves meschief qe escrivre ne poems; Isabella had also written a few lines earlier that she wished above all else, after God and the salvation of her soul, to return to Edward's company and live and die there, estre en la compaignie de nostre dit seignur et vivre et morir en icele, and had called her husband "our very dear and very sweet lord and friend," nostre treschier et tresdouche seignur et amy). Notice that the letter says Hugh wished to dishonour Isabella a son poiar, literally 'by (or through) his power' in the sense of 'with all his power', not exactly 'by every possible means' as Weir cites it. There's no hint in the letter of any kind of sexual assault carried out or threatened by Hugh Despenser, though it's interesting to speculate in which ways Isabella felt her life to be in danger from him.
This section of Weir's book, incidentally, puts forward the notion that Edward II in 1322 was "being promiscuous with low-born men", who were, she claims, paid "substantial sums" of money to spend time "in his company", which she describes as "hush money". Sadly for this salacious theory, the men she names were in fact members of Edward's household, and the supposed 'hush money' was merely - oh dear - their wages. Weir also claims that Hugh Despenser's influence over Edward "was rooted in a perverted sexual dominance" - needless to say, Roger Mortimer's later presumed sexual dominance over Isabella is not 'perverted' - and that Edward's relationship with Hugh was an "insult" to Isabella's "femininity". Ohhhhhkaaaaay.
The charges against Hugh Despenser at his trial in Hereford in November 1326 include: that he counselled Edward to leave Isabella in peril of her life at Tynemouth in 1322; that he procured discord between the king and queen; that he persuaded Edward to 'oust' her from her lands in 1324; that he had her sent to France in 1325 'meanly, against the dignity of her estate'; that he tried to bribe French courtiers to have her and her son Edward of Windsor 'destroyed'. No mention is made of any kind of physical or sexual assault on the queen. Not that Isabella would necessarily have wanted such an awful experience shouted out in public, of course, but one wonders how all the 'English hierarchy' in 1326 knew of the sexual assault Hugh Despenser supposedly inflicted on Isabella and yet not a trace of it has come down to us in any source. You'd think a chronicler or several would at least hint at it. Perhaps Hugh's attempts to bribe someone in France to - presumably - have Isabella killed are the source of her claims that her life was in danger from him.
Of course, there's no way of proving that Hugh Despenser didn't rape or otherwise sexually assault Isabella, but there's no reason to think that he did, or that he had any sexual interest in her. Before accusing someone of such a serious and awful crime, we should have more evidence than assumptions by a couple of modern writers that his 'dishonour' of the queen might possibly, perhaps, maybe, have meant something sexual. Hugh behaved extremely unpleasantly in many ways, but whatever his track record there is no evidence that he was a rapist, and just because he is so often written nowadays as a one-dimensional cartoonish moustache-twirling villain is no excuse to ascribe serious sexual crimes to him just because an unpleasant person 'might' have committed them. I've noticed a trend in some modern historical fiction to make certain characters highly unsympathetic to the reader by having them commit sexual offences: William, Lord Hastings is written as a rapist and killer of young girls in one novel which portrays the future Richard III, who had Hastings executed without trial in 1483, as not far removed from a saint; the earl of Buchan (d. 1308) is a rapist and beater of his wife Isobel MacDuff, who has what the author obviously considers a deeply romantic affair with Robert Bruce; John Morton, close ally and chancellor of Henry VII, is said to have a taste for young boys. It's bad enough in fiction to see the posthumous reputations of people who really lived trashed in a blatant attempt to make their opponents more sympathetic and 'tragic' to readers. I don't want to see it in non-fiction too.
12 April, 2012
Novel Review: The Vows Of The Peacock
Author, Alice Walworth Graham; published in 1955 by Eyre and Spottiswoode.
The novel is narrated in the first person by Elisabeth (spelt with a 's' for some reason) Beauchamp, one of the daughters of Guy Beauchamp, earl of Warwick - the man who abducted Piers Gaveston in June 1312 - and Alice Toeni. Elisabeth is selected in early 1308 to be one of the companions of Isabella, the new queen of England, when she (Elisabeth) is said to be a little younger than the queen and eleven years old, which would place her birth in 1296 or early 1297. The immediate problem with this is that Earl Guy and Alice didn't actually marry until 1309; Alice's first husband Thomas Leyburne, father of her daughter Juliana, died in the summer of 1307. So the choice of narrator is somewhat odd. Perhaps fifty-odd years ago it was assumed that Guy and Alice's marriage had taken place much earlier than it did. Anyway, it gives the author a narrator close to Isabella and Edward II who can see and report on the events and personalities of his reign, though (as sometimes happens when writers choose first-person narrators, especially female ones) events are often reported to her afterwards rather than her experiencing them personally, which can make the narrative seem distant and uninvolving, particularly when the battle of Bannockburn and Edward III's arrest of Roger Mortimer in 1330 are explained to Elisabeth at rather tedious length after they happen.
The novel is extremely descriptive and contains little action; it's a pretty traditional re-telling of Edward II's reign, beginning with Isabella's arrival in England in 1308 and ending - as Edward II novels almost invariably do - with the arrest of Roger Mortimer in October 1330. The novel's title refers to Edward and Isabella's long visit to the court of her father Philip IV in 1313, when the royals swore vows to, variously, go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, defeat Robert Bruce once and for all, promote good relations between England and France, and so forth. Much of the novel is about Elisabeth's marriage to Thomas Astley, and it often feels as though the real story is happening elsewhere while she talks about feasts and hunts and spending time with her in-laws and the endless minutiae of her daily life. (The couple didn't actually marry until the 1330s, and at least one of their children lived into the 1400s.) Piers Gaveston barely appears, except to sneer at the queen and Elisabeth in very sneery fashion, and is described as 'graceless' and 'of low birth', which doesn't sound like the Piers I know. The narrative moves so fast that one minute we're in 1308, then suddenly it's 1312 and Piers is dead, then we're in 1314 and Edward loses at Bannockburn, and a few pages later it's suddenly 1321. Edward II is at first described as extremely handsome, but he soon 'loses his youth' and gains a 'thickened' body and features, and is kind of gross and overweight. (Yes, the sporty athletic Edward II who spent a lot of time outdoors swimming and digging and so on.) He's contrasted unfavourably with the very manly and wonderful Roger Mortimer, with whom Elisabeth is obsessed, who is often talked about in the narrative off doing very manly and wonderful things in Ireland and elsewhere while Edward II drinks and behaves pettishly and very little else. Isabella is a far more complex character than her husband, depicted sympathetically though not uncritically. She despises her husband - not surprising, given the way Walworth Graham has written Edward as astonishingly dislikeable - and falls madly in love or lust with Mortimer. In this novel, you can see why, and they're described several times as lions, fierce, 'snarling and snatching'. Edward, Hugh Despenser, Piers Gaveston, Thomas of Lancaster, in fact all the characters apart from Isabella, Roger Mortimer and the weirdly too-old Elisabeth Beauchamp, are enigmas, barely characterised beyond the absolute basics.
Vows of the Peacock is another of those novels that have to describe Isabella's beauty constantly, which gets really dull (at least for me). None of the other women, except Elisabeth herself, are attractive: Piers Gaveston's wife Margaret de Clare, for instance, is called 'blowsy' and 'florid' in 1308, with breasts that are already starting to sag. Poor Margaret, fourteen years old and already looking like a forty-year-old. Her sister Eleanor is a barely even one-dimensional 'sheep of a woman', and - groooooooooooan - Edward II arranges her marriage to Hugh Despenser in or after 1321 (it's hard to get a sense of the correct date in the narrative), a mere fifteen years too late. Walworth Graham appears confused about the age of the de Clare siblings, and says that the earl of Gloucester was not yet eighteen at the time of his death at Bannockburn - actually he was twenty-three - and yet describes his sister Margaret as already middle-aged shortly after her marriage to Piers a few years earlier. The novel is reasonably accurate historically, although Edward II's sister Joan of Acre is still alive at the time of her daughter Margaret's marriage to Piers, and Margaret's second marriage to Hugh Audley has already taken place in 1313, four years too early. Henry of Lancaster's wife Maud Chaworth appears unaware that she is Hugh Despenser the Younger's half-sister, while Henry himself and his brother Thomas are unaware that they are Isabella's uncles. (In fairness, a lot of writers have missed that, including someone who gained her doctorate writing about Isabella.) Did the English nobility in the 1300s really still think of themselves as solely 'Norman' and the rest of the English as 'Saxons', and the English language as 'barbarous'?
Vows of the Peacock overall is a reasonably good read if you find a copy, though the narrative manages at once to be too slow and endlessly descriptive, and too fast, by skating over most of the major events of the reign. There's a great deal about daily life in the fourteenth century, which some readers will certainly enjoy, though anyone looking for an in-depth historical study and character-driven fiction will probably be disappointed.
The novel is narrated in the first person by Elisabeth (spelt with a 's' for some reason) Beauchamp, one of the daughters of Guy Beauchamp, earl of Warwick - the man who abducted Piers Gaveston in June 1312 - and Alice Toeni. Elisabeth is selected in early 1308 to be one of the companions of Isabella, the new queen of England, when she (Elisabeth) is said to be a little younger than the queen and eleven years old, which would place her birth in 1296 or early 1297. The immediate problem with this is that Earl Guy and Alice didn't actually marry until 1309; Alice's first husband Thomas Leyburne, father of her daughter Juliana, died in the summer of 1307. So the choice of narrator is somewhat odd. Perhaps fifty-odd years ago it was assumed that Guy and Alice's marriage had taken place much earlier than it did. Anyway, it gives the author a narrator close to Isabella and Edward II who can see and report on the events and personalities of his reign, though (as sometimes happens when writers choose first-person narrators, especially female ones) events are often reported to her afterwards rather than her experiencing them personally, which can make the narrative seem distant and uninvolving, particularly when the battle of Bannockburn and Edward III's arrest of Roger Mortimer in 1330 are explained to Elisabeth at rather tedious length after they happen.
The novel is extremely descriptive and contains little action; it's a pretty traditional re-telling of Edward II's reign, beginning with Isabella's arrival in England in 1308 and ending - as Edward II novels almost invariably do - with the arrest of Roger Mortimer in October 1330. The novel's title refers to Edward and Isabella's long visit to the court of her father Philip IV in 1313, when the royals swore vows to, variously, go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, defeat Robert Bruce once and for all, promote good relations between England and France, and so forth. Much of the novel is about Elisabeth's marriage to Thomas Astley, and it often feels as though the real story is happening elsewhere while she talks about feasts and hunts and spending time with her in-laws and the endless minutiae of her daily life. (The couple didn't actually marry until the 1330s, and at least one of their children lived into the 1400s.) Piers Gaveston barely appears, except to sneer at the queen and Elisabeth in very sneery fashion, and is described as 'graceless' and 'of low birth', which doesn't sound like the Piers I know. The narrative moves so fast that one minute we're in 1308, then suddenly it's 1312 and Piers is dead, then we're in 1314 and Edward loses at Bannockburn, and a few pages later it's suddenly 1321. Edward II is at first described as extremely handsome, but he soon 'loses his youth' and gains a 'thickened' body and features, and is kind of gross and overweight. (Yes, the sporty athletic Edward II who spent a lot of time outdoors swimming and digging and so on.) He's contrasted unfavourably with the very manly and wonderful Roger Mortimer, with whom Elisabeth is obsessed, who is often talked about in the narrative off doing very manly and wonderful things in Ireland and elsewhere while Edward II drinks and behaves pettishly and very little else. Isabella is a far more complex character than her husband, depicted sympathetically though not uncritically. She despises her husband - not surprising, given the way Walworth Graham has written Edward as astonishingly dislikeable - and falls madly in love or lust with Mortimer. In this novel, you can see why, and they're described several times as lions, fierce, 'snarling and snatching'. Edward, Hugh Despenser, Piers Gaveston, Thomas of Lancaster, in fact all the characters apart from Isabella, Roger Mortimer and the weirdly too-old Elisabeth Beauchamp, are enigmas, barely characterised beyond the absolute basics.
Vows of the Peacock is another of those novels that have to describe Isabella's beauty constantly, which gets really dull (at least for me). None of the other women, except Elisabeth herself, are attractive: Piers Gaveston's wife Margaret de Clare, for instance, is called 'blowsy' and 'florid' in 1308, with breasts that are already starting to sag. Poor Margaret, fourteen years old and already looking like a forty-year-old. Her sister Eleanor is a barely even one-dimensional 'sheep of a woman', and - groooooooooooan - Edward II arranges her marriage to Hugh Despenser in or after 1321 (it's hard to get a sense of the correct date in the narrative), a mere fifteen years too late. Walworth Graham appears confused about the age of the de Clare siblings, and says that the earl of Gloucester was not yet eighteen at the time of his death at Bannockburn - actually he was twenty-three - and yet describes his sister Margaret as already middle-aged shortly after her marriage to Piers a few years earlier. The novel is reasonably accurate historically, although Edward II's sister Joan of Acre is still alive at the time of her daughter Margaret's marriage to Piers, and Margaret's second marriage to Hugh Audley has already taken place in 1313, four years too early. Henry of Lancaster's wife Maud Chaworth appears unaware that she is Hugh Despenser the Younger's half-sister, while Henry himself and his brother Thomas are unaware that they are Isabella's uncles. (In fairness, a lot of writers have missed that, including someone who gained her doctorate writing about Isabella.) Did the English nobility in the 1300s really still think of themselves as solely 'Norman' and the rest of the English as 'Saxons', and the English language as 'barbarous'?
Vows of the Peacock overall is a reasonably good read if you find a copy, though the narrative manages at once to be too slow and endlessly descriptive, and too fast, by skating over most of the major events of the reign. There's a great deal about daily life in the fourteenth century, which some readers will certainly enjoy, though anyone looking for an in-depth historical study and character-driven fiction will probably be disappointed.
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