This will be my last post till 1 June or thereabouts.
I'm delighted to see the results of my 'Fate of Edward II' poll, in the sidebar - fully 39% of you don't believe in the infamous 'red-hot poker' death. That's great, considering it's usually presented as the definitive truth!
I'm slightly less delighted with the 'least favourite king' poll, which Edward is leading. Grrr. Still, he's in second place behind Richard III in the 'favourite king' poll, so I suppose a lot of people have strong feelings about him - which I'm happy about, even if they're negative!
I updated my website a few days ago with some spiffy new colours - it's looking a lot better, I think...;) Still thinking about what else to put there...
Joanne Renaud (aka Suburbanbeatnik) has done a great illustration of Edward II and Piers Gaveston. Doesn't Piers look brilliantly handsome and haughty? Joanne says in the comments below the illustration that Edward and Piers need lots of love - I couldn't agree more! ;) This site, at least, is overflowing with Ned and Perot adoration. [Edward called Piers 'my brother Perot']. *Hugs them both*
Finally, take a look at Realm of Conjecture, a new blog by GeorgeD. You probably wouldn't guess from her name and her astonishingly good English that she's a native speaker of German. She's written a great first post about Jane Austen.
Talking about Germany, I'm always surprised to see that around 10% or 12% of my blog visitors come from there. Germany, a hotbed of Edward II interest! Who knew?!
17 May, 2007
13 May, 2007
Two New Novels of Edward II's Reign (2)
Part two of my post on Virginia Henley's Notorious and Edith Felber's Queen of Shadows: A Novel of Isabella, Wife of King Edward II. The first part is directly below this one, or you can read it here.
This part also includes some comments on Alison Weir's Isabella, She-Wolf of France, Queen of England.
**Warning: plot spoilers!**
Characterisation and Stereotyping
Virginia Henley's depiction of Edward II in Notorious is just horrible. He's presented as "flabby...soft...his mouth is weak and petulant, like that of a spoiled woman". He's a worm of a man who makes women shudder with distaste whenever they see him, including Isabella, who by contrast is depicted as perfect in every respect. There's so much hatred and contempt for Edward in the novel that I actually felt quite ill reading it - even his lover Hugh Despenser despises him and watches him with "veiled contempt". Edward doesn't have a single redeeming feature; he doesn't even care about his children, and only "grudgingly agreed to pay for the children's nursemaids". Isabella says that Edward gives her no money to pay for her household, which isn't correct - although her income was drastically reduced, she certainly had enough money to pay her servants. And this reduction occurred in 1324, not 1321 or earlier as shown in Notorious.
And, offensively, Edward is highly feminised. Once more, in Notorious we're fed the stereotype that 'a man who loves men = feminine and weak'. Even the non-fictional biography of Isabella by Alison Weir is guilty of this. Weir describes Roger Mortimer as "everything that Edward II was not: strong, manly, unequivocally heterosexual, virile..."
Weir also describes Despenser's presumed sexual dominance over Edward as "perverted"; however, Mortimer's presumed sexual dominance over Isabella is proof of his manliness and strength, and also provides a convenient excuse for Isabella not to be responsible for any of their unpleasant deeds. Such depictions of non-heterosexual men are pretty nasty and offensive, especially given that we're in the 2000s - and notice that the excuse of 'sexual dominance' doesn't apply to Edward II, who's held completely responsible for his misdeeds and for allowing Despenser to rule him. In the Introduction to the biography, Weir even describes Isabella as "the victim, not of her own wickedness, but of circumstances, unscrupulous men and the sexual prejudices of those who chose to record her story." Given the negative attitude on display towards Edward II's non-heterosexuality, complaining about 'sexual prejudices' strikes me as deeply ironic.
And ah yes, those useful unscrupulous men, who often crop up to take the rap when a woman does something 'bad'. I'm not sure whether the "sexual prejudices" belong to fourteenth-century chroniclers, or historians of more recent times, or both, but yet again, here's the 'woman as perpetual victim' theme. Am I the only one getting really sick of it? "She's a strong, empowered woman...but ooooh, she did something horrid! Blame a man, quick! It can't possibly be her fault! She's not strong after all, a nasty man made her do it, poor ickle thing! But look, now she's doing something praiseworthy! Suddenly she's strong and empowered again, and the man had nothing to do with it!"
Much of Weir's biography has the effect of making Isabella seem weak, not strong - apparently, men are responsible for their own actions, whereas women are not. This attitude reduces women to the level of children. And almost every time Isabella does something that's less than perfect, Weir jumps in to defend and justify her actions. Edward's mistakes and misdeeds are evidence of his incompetence and weakness, and are frequently exaggerated; Isabella's are merely an understandable reaction to her long 'suffering' and are minimised as much as possible. Weir is at least honest enough to admit that the 1326 executions of the Earl of Arundel and his friends were "acts of tyranny, and Isabella was a party to them"; she also acknowledges Isabella's role in the judicial murder of her brother-in-law the Earl of Kent.
Weir does, however, ignore some of Isabella's more spiteful actions, such as the forced veiling of three of Hugh Despenser's young daughters, and her shabby treatment of Alice de Lacy, Countess of Lincoln, her aunt by marriage, by allowing Roger Mortimer to take over her most valuable lands. Although Weir states that Isabella "had sworn on the soul of her father that she would have justice" and had ordered the bailiffs of Winchester to execute Kent without delay, on the next page she states that Isabella was "deeply in thrall" to her lover, "[b]linded by her lust or love for him", and "tainted by association with him". Right at the end of the book, she comments "Isabella's downfall lay in her involvement with the rapacious Mortimer". To me, all this makes her sound passive, tolerating Mortimer's actions rather than sharing full responsibility for them, or even instigating them. Paul Doherty in Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II agrees, saying that "Isabella was a remarkable queen, a woman of outstanding ability, flawed by her infatuation with Mortimer."
However, the mother of all one-sided depictions of Isabella is Katherine Allocco's PhD thesis, which is less an evaluation of Isabella's life and roles than it is a demand for her immediate canonisation.
I get that Isabella was vilified as 'the She-Wolf' for centuries, and a more balanced, sympathetic view of her was long overdue. But why do we have to go so far in the other direction? Isabella wasn't a she-wolf. But neither was she a long-suffering much-wronged saint, or an empowered feminist icon. She was a complex character with some great qualities, and a few flaws too - just like everyone else, including Edward II.
In the comments on my first part of this post, Susan pointed out the analogy with Richard III - for nearly five centuries, until around 1970, he was seen as practically the epitome of evil; these days, he's viewed by many people as the exact opposite, a hero with no discernable flaws, with several recent novels implausibly portraying him as the next best thing to a saint. But surely it's far more interesting to show people's flaws, too?
As I wrote a few months ago in a comment on Susan's post on Isabella, the modern re-telling of Isabella's life strikes me as a twenty-first century narrative, not a medieval one. A popular theme of recent years has been of people suffering through terrible situations, such as abuse, grinding poverty, drug addiction, etc, and overcoming them. And also, women finding the strength to get out of a bad, abusive marriage and take control of their own destiny, discovering happiness and fulfilment with lovers who are far superior to their husbands.
Isabella's story is made to fit into this category, which involves exaggerating her sufferings (and I'm not at all denying here that Edward II and Hugh Despenser treated her badly) and glossing over her faults - and also glossing over the fact that Mortimer himself was married. Weir barely mentions Joan de Geneville, and neither does Edith Felber in Shadows; I talk briefly about Henley's depiction of her in Notorious, below.
Rather belatedly coming back to the main topic of the post: Edith Felber, to her immense credit, doesn't go the route of feminising Edward II in Shadows. I read a review of the novel somewhere which said that Edward's homosexuality [bisexuality, surely?] is "clumsily handled." I don't agree. There's nothing remotely feminine about Edward here; in fact, he's described as an image of "masculine perfection" and called "a beautiful man" on several occasions. He's "tall, but lithe and graceful and perfect in every proportion." He's also courteous, "an intelligent man, and, according to his lights, a good one." Even in 1321, he makes Isabella's breath catch when she sees him, and she shivers in pleasure as she remembers the feel of his soft hair on her skin when they made love, a nicely erotic image. Even Gwenith, his "mortal enemy" (why??), thinks he's "beautiful and bright, clever and astonishingly charming". He's rather wonderful, in fact. ;)
And although Isabella recalls an occasion when she saw Edward and Piers Gaveston making love together, and knows full well that Hugh Despenser shares her husband's bed, there's not a hint that the reader is meant to be disgusted by this, and, again to Felber's great credit, she doesn't use Edward's sexuality as an easy way to garner sympathy for Isabella. It's Hugh Despenser's political power and disrespect towards Isabella that she hates and refuses to tolerate any longer.
So I was even more disappointed when I saw that I wouldn't be getting the balanced, sympathetic view of Edward and Isabella I expected from the early part of the novel. At times later in the novel, Edward is witty, sparkling, often very likeable, and near the end, there's a nice scene where he acknowledges his faults and his infatuation with Hugh Despenser, which he describes "like a high fever...leaving me weak and foolish". But nooo, for the most part, the usual clichés of Isabella The Great Victim are trotted out, such as 'losing' her children, and Edward running away and abandoning her "behind your enemy's lines" (an oddly modern-sounding phrase) in Scotland. Not to mention the atrocities he didn't commit in Wales and the Jewish people he didn't murder.
And coming back to unbalanced portrayals, everyone and everything in Notorious is totally black or white. Edward II and Hugh Despenser are totally bad, while Isabella and Roger Mortimer are perfectly good. I've enjoyed some of Henley's other romances, and she can write much more nuanced characterisation than she shows here. Her Marriage Prize, which I really enjoyed, is much more historically accurate than this one, and the characters are not nearly so stereotyped and one-dimensional. In Notorious, Edward is reduced to nothing more than a feeble, pathetic caricature, whereas Roger Mortimer is such a big manly hunk of manly chivalrous manly macho manly testosterone-ridden manly manliness as to be totally unbelievable. All the female characters swoon over him, while shuddering over Edward. Everything Roger is and does in the novel is over-valued - for example, the fact that many of the English nobility are his cousins is somehow proof of his "shrewdness". Umm, how? Did he go back in time and order his ancestors to make advantageous marriage alliances?
Roger's wife Joan de Geneville is an unsympathetic, rather pathetic figure in Notorious, despite being the hero's mother. She's very overweight and unattractive, presumably to ensure that she's not a rival to Isabella -who's incredibly beautiful, naturally - in any way. At the end, we learn that Joan is happy to put up with her husband's infidelity with Isabella because she gets her lands back. Which conveniently absolves Perfect Isabella and Perfect Roger from having to feel any guilt. Roger grants his and Joan's son Wolf the lands and possessions of his late uncle, Mortimer of Chirk - Henley conveniently forgetting to mention Chirk's grandson John Mortimer, who was disinherited by his cousin in 1330 (Roger claimed he was illegitimate, and took over his lands. Hugh Despenser would have been proud.)
In Queen of Shadows, Roger Mortimer never came to life for me at all. We're often told that he's handsome and brave, but somehow I never really felt it. Then there's the problematic expository dialogue, which does nothing to improve his characterisation.
By contrast, Hugh Despenser is by far the most vivid character in the novel, which improves immeasurably every time he gets a scene. He knows exactly what he is and why he does what he does; this self-insight makes him rather appealing, although he's a total lecher, with men and women - as well as greedy, ruthless and cruel. But kudos to Felber for not having him rape Isabella in the story, as Paul Doherty and Alison Weir have recently suggested (with zero evidence) he might have done. He desires her, but says that he'd never touch her without her permission.
On the subject of lechers, I found the hero of Notorious, Wolf Mortimer, pretty creepy. Henley dusts off another useful cliché, that of the Celtic character with the gift of second sight and other advanced mental powers - this time, it's Wolf. Mostly, he doesn't use his talents for anything useful - like warning his father that Edward is going to arrest him - but to spy on Brianna, watching her (in his mind) undressing. Eww.
Notorious has a pretty abrupt ending. We don't see the successful 1326 invasion of England, or Hugh Despenser's execution, or Edward's deposition, but only read it about before it happens through one of Wolf's numerous visions. The final scene takes place in June 1327, Perfect Isabella and Perfect Roger are being perfect, and everyone (except Edward II, one presumes) is deliriously happy - including Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who's looking pretty good for a man who's been dead for twelve years. He's even partially regained his lost sight, but I suppose that's a minor miracle for a man who's been animating a corpse for more than a decade.
The ending of Shadows is so abrupt I looked for the missing chapters, then wondered if Felber had a pressing deadline from her publisher, or if she'd reached her word count and just put her pen down. It doesn't end, it just - stops, when the story is starting to get really exciting. Isabella is coming to realise what a horrible mistake she's made and how wrong she was about Roger - there's a nice bit where she sees Hugh Despenser sitting on the throne, then realises it's her lover. He has imprisoned Edward III (which didn't happen historically) and is proving to be every bit as tyrannical as Despenser. You turn the page and - suddenly it's 1355. The whole story is wrapped up in a couple of pages. Mortimer's fate is dealt with in a paragraph - apparently Isabella, who's overthrown a king, inexplicably becomes unable to deal with a mere baron and has to wait for her teenage son to save her.
Then there's the odd lines "Her beloved grandson Edward was the image of his father. God willing, he'd never know that." How would Edward of Woodstock, who lived to his mid forties, not know if he looked like his father Edward III or not?? I can only assume that 'grandson' is a mistake for 'son', and Felber meant to say that Edward III looks just like his real father - whoever he may be. Even right at the end, we never learn the identity of Isabella's mysterious lover.
In both novels, even the Author's Note/Afterword at the end contain historical errors. Henley says that "most historians" agree that Edward II suffered the 'red-hot poker' death. Wish she'd tell me one historian who believes it to be totally, definitively true, never mind 'most'. Felber says that Edward III moved against Roger Mortimer "almost immediately" after his marriage to Philippa; it was nearly three years later. The Earl of Lancaster didn't die of plague in 1345, as it hadn't reached England then. Edward III didn't have "many mistresses" and "many illegitimate children" that anyone knows of (only one acknowledged mistress, Alice Perrers, and three illegitimate children). And it's disengenuous of Henley to claim that Isabella only became known as 'the She-Wolf' because of her marital infidelity. That's part of it, but I'd imagine that invading her husband's country, imprisoning him, deposing him, executing his friends, not allowing him to see his children, and (just possibly) being responsible for his murder comes into it too.
Probably a lot of people would say "But this is fiction, not a history book!" Of course, and I should point out that I don't think it's possible to write historical fiction without some errors. I'm not looking for perfection. But there are many gaps in our knowledge, and that's where historical novels can really come into their own. In the fourteenth century, we know what people did, but for the most part we have no idea why, or how they felt or what they thought. How Isabella really felt about her husband before the 1320s is anyone's guess. Maybe she truly loved him, or maybe she was dissatisfied in her marriage but made the best of it, or maybe she took the decision to depose him reluctantly and at the last minute, or maybe she had long despised him and plotted his downfall...there's no way of knowing, and this is something historical fiction can explore.
But if you choose to write about real people, I think you have a duty to stay as close to the known facts as possible. If you don't want to do that, why not invent your own characters? Then you can do anything you like with them! If Isabella was known not to be in Scotland in 1312 - and she certainly wasn't - then you shouldn't put her there. In Paul Doherty's Death of a King, he changes Edward III's date of birth from November 1312 to March 1312, so that he can work in the plot device that Roger Mortimer was his real father [which, in fact, still doesn't work, as Mortimer was in Ireland]. Maybe lots of readers would say 'March, November, what's the difference?' But I think that changing a historical date which is not in doubt or dispute to hang a major plot point on it, without acknowledging the fact, is, simply, cheating. Doherty was awarded a DPhil from Oxford for his thesis on Queen Isabella; obviously, he knows Edward III's correct date of birth.
Personally, I much prefer Sharon Penman's approach. She sticks closely to the facts, rounds out her characters brilliantly, and mentions in her Author's Note when she changes something, which are only ever small details. For example, in Falls the Shadow, she changes the date of a meeting by a few weeks, to accommodate the birth of Eleanor and Simon de Montfort's son Harry - which is a pretty minor change anyway.
Ultimately, I found Notorious and especially Queen of Shadows terribly frustrating, because both authors are capable of so much better. Some of Henley's other romances are far superior to this stereotypical, one-dimensional, melodramatic, totally inaccurate effort - and Brianna's often-repeated credo "I shouldn't...but I shall!" is even more irritating than Jory's "I've quite made up my mind!" in Infamous.
In much of Queen of Shadows, you can see what a good writer Edith Felber is, and there are occasional glimpses of what a terrific novel this could have been - but isn't. Some scenes sparkle and crackle with tension, some are pretty moving, and Hugh Despenser is such a well-developed and well-written character he comes right off the page. But Felber lets herself down with most of her dialogue, the endless repetition, the silly coy hints of Isabella's affair, the many historical inaccuracies, and the bizarrely abrupt ending. A good edit would have made this an infinitely better novel, and would have left a lot more space to explore Isabella's actions and feelings during the most eventful phase of her life, 1327-30.
Throughout much of the post, I found myself wanting to write a disclaimer about Notorious - something along the lines of "well, it's only a romance". But that sounds pretty insulting to the romance genre, which I don't mean at all. I've read and enjoyed some damn good romances, and I don't see why their characterisation, dialogue etc shouldn't be judged in the same way as other genres. Maybe Henley's fans would argue that the romance is key - which of course it is - and that the background doesn't matter. But if Henley chooses to write about real people and events rather than invented ones, she should make a much greater effort to get them correct. If she chooses real political events to serve as the backdrop to her novel, then I think I have the right to point out all her errors.
If an author wants complete control over her characters, then she should invent them. If she writes about real people, she shouldn't change most of the details of their lives to suit her story. And if she wants to write about people who lived 700 years ago, she shouldn't give them modern attitudes, ideas, and freedoms - especially when the sympathetic characters hold twenty-first century, politically correct opinions, while the unsympathetic ones hold views compatible with their time and society. That's just dishonest.
This part also includes some comments on Alison Weir's Isabella, She-Wolf of France, Queen of England.
**Warning: plot spoilers!**
Characterisation and Stereotyping
Virginia Henley's depiction of Edward II in Notorious is just horrible. He's presented as "flabby...soft...his mouth is weak and petulant, like that of a spoiled woman". He's a worm of a man who makes women shudder with distaste whenever they see him, including Isabella, who by contrast is depicted as perfect in every respect. There's so much hatred and contempt for Edward in the novel that I actually felt quite ill reading it - even his lover Hugh Despenser despises him and watches him with "veiled contempt". Edward doesn't have a single redeeming feature; he doesn't even care about his children, and only "grudgingly agreed to pay for the children's nursemaids". Isabella says that Edward gives her no money to pay for her household, which isn't correct - although her income was drastically reduced, she certainly had enough money to pay her servants. And this reduction occurred in 1324, not 1321 or earlier as shown in Notorious.
And, offensively, Edward is highly feminised. Once more, in Notorious we're fed the stereotype that 'a man who loves men = feminine and weak'. Even the non-fictional biography of Isabella by Alison Weir is guilty of this. Weir describes Roger Mortimer as "everything that Edward II was not: strong, manly, unequivocally heterosexual, virile..."
Weir also describes Despenser's presumed sexual dominance over Edward as "perverted"; however, Mortimer's presumed sexual dominance over Isabella is proof of his manliness and strength, and also provides a convenient excuse for Isabella not to be responsible for any of their unpleasant deeds. Such depictions of non-heterosexual men are pretty nasty and offensive, especially given that we're in the 2000s - and notice that the excuse of 'sexual dominance' doesn't apply to Edward II, who's held completely responsible for his misdeeds and for allowing Despenser to rule him. In the Introduction to the biography, Weir even describes Isabella as "the victim, not of her own wickedness, but of circumstances, unscrupulous men and the sexual prejudices of those who chose to record her story." Given the negative attitude on display towards Edward II's non-heterosexuality, complaining about 'sexual prejudices' strikes me as deeply ironic.
And ah yes, those useful unscrupulous men, who often crop up to take the rap when a woman does something 'bad'. I'm not sure whether the "sexual prejudices" belong to fourteenth-century chroniclers, or historians of more recent times, or both, but yet again, here's the 'woman as perpetual victim' theme. Am I the only one getting really sick of it? "She's a strong, empowered woman...but ooooh, she did something horrid! Blame a man, quick! It can't possibly be her fault! She's not strong after all, a nasty man made her do it, poor ickle thing! But look, now she's doing something praiseworthy! Suddenly she's strong and empowered again, and the man had nothing to do with it!"
Much of Weir's biography has the effect of making Isabella seem weak, not strong - apparently, men are responsible for their own actions, whereas women are not. This attitude reduces women to the level of children. And almost every time Isabella does something that's less than perfect, Weir jumps in to defend and justify her actions. Edward's mistakes and misdeeds are evidence of his incompetence and weakness, and are frequently exaggerated; Isabella's are merely an understandable reaction to her long 'suffering' and are minimised as much as possible. Weir is at least honest enough to admit that the 1326 executions of the Earl of Arundel and his friends were "acts of tyranny, and Isabella was a party to them"; she also acknowledges Isabella's role in the judicial murder of her brother-in-law the Earl of Kent.
Weir does, however, ignore some of Isabella's more spiteful actions, such as the forced veiling of three of Hugh Despenser's young daughters, and her shabby treatment of Alice de Lacy, Countess of Lincoln, her aunt by marriage, by allowing Roger Mortimer to take over her most valuable lands. Although Weir states that Isabella "had sworn on the soul of her father that she would have justice" and had ordered the bailiffs of Winchester to execute Kent without delay, on the next page she states that Isabella was "deeply in thrall" to her lover, "[b]linded by her lust or love for him", and "tainted by association with him". Right at the end of the book, she comments "Isabella's downfall lay in her involvement with the rapacious Mortimer". To me, all this makes her sound passive, tolerating Mortimer's actions rather than sharing full responsibility for them, or even instigating them. Paul Doherty in Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II agrees, saying that "Isabella was a remarkable queen, a woman of outstanding ability, flawed by her infatuation with Mortimer."
However, the mother of all one-sided depictions of Isabella is Katherine Allocco's PhD thesis, which is less an evaluation of Isabella's life and roles than it is a demand for her immediate canonisation.
I get that Isabella was vilified as 'the She-Wolf' for centuries, and a more balanced, sympathetic view of her was long overdue. But why do we have to go so far in the other direction? Isabella wasn't a she-wolf. But neither was she a long-suffering much-wronged saint, or an empowered feminist icon. She was a complex character with some great qualities, and a few flaws too - just like everyone else, including Edward II.
In the comments on my first part of this post, Susan pointed out the analogy with Richard III - for nearly five centuries, until around 1970, he was seen as practically the epitome of evil; these days, he's viewed by many people as the exact opposite, a hero with no discernable flaws, with several recent novels implausibly portraying him as the next best thing to a saint. But surely it's far more interesting to show people's flaws, too?
As I wrote a few months ago in a comment on Susan's post on Isabella, the modern re-telling of Isabella's life strikes me as a twenty-first century narrative, not a medieval one. A popular theme of recent years has been of people suffering through terrible situations, such as abuse, grinding poverty, drug addiction, etc, and overcoming them. And also, women finding the strength to get out of a bad, abusive marriage and take control of their own destiny, discovering happiness and fulfilment with lovers who are far superior to their husbands.
Isabella's story is made to fit into this category, which involves exaggerating her sufferings (and I'm not at all denying here that Edward II and Hugh Despenser treated her badly) and glossing over her faults - and also glossing over the fact that Mortimer himself was married. Weir barely mentions Joan de Geneville, and neither does Edith Felber in Shadows; I talk briefly about Henley's depiction of her in Notorious, below.
Rather belatedly coming back to the main topic of the post: Edith Felber, to her immense credit, doesn't go the route of feminising Edward II in Shadows. I read a review of the novel somewhere which said that Edward's homosexuality [bisexuality, surely?] is "clumsily handled." I don't agree. There's nothing remotely feminine about Edward here; in fact, he's described as an image of "masculine perfection" and called "a beautiful man" on several occasions. He's "tall, but lithe and graceful and perfect in every proportion." He's also courteous, "an intelligent man, and, according to his lights, a good one." Even in 1321, he makes Isabella's breath catch when she sees him, and she shivers in pleasure as she remembers the feel of his soft hair on her skin when they made love, a nicely erotic image. Even Gwenith, his "mortal enemy" (why??), thinks he's "beautiful and bright, clever and astonishingly charming". He's rather wonderful, in fact. ;)
And although Isabella recalls an occasion when she saw Edward and Piers Gaveston making love together, and knows full well that Hugh Despenser shares her husband's bed, there's not a hint that the reader is meant to be disgusted by this, and, again to Felber's great credit, she doesn't use Edward's sexuality as an easy way to garner sympathy for Isabella. It's Hugh Despenser's political power and disrespect towards Isabella that she hates and refuses to tolerate any longer.
So I was even more disappointed when I saw that I wouldn't be getting the balanced, sympathetic view of Edward and Isabella I expected from the early part of the novel. At times later in the novel, Edward is witty, sparkling, often very likeable, and near the end, there's a nice scene where he acknowledges his faults and his infatuation with Hugh Despenser, which he describes "like a high fever...leaving me weak and foolish". But nooo, for the most part, the usual clichés of Isabella The Great Victim are trotted out, such as 'losing' her children, and Edward running away and abandoning her "behind your enemy's lines" (an oddly modern-sounding phrase) in Scotland. Not to mention the atrocities he didn't commit in Wales and the Jewish people he didn't murder.
And coming back to unbalanced portrayals, everyone and everything in Notorious is totally black or white. Edward II and Hugh Despenser are totally bad, while Isabella and Roger Mortimer are perfectly good. I've enjoyed some of Henley's other romances, and she can write much more nuanced characterisation than she shows here. Her Marriage Prize, which I really enjoyed, is much more historically accurate than this one, and the characters are not nearly so stereotyped and one-dimensional. In Notorious, Edward is reduced to nothing more than a feeble, pathetic caricature, whereas Roger Mortimer is such a big manly hunk of manly chivalrous manly macho manly testosterone-ridden manly manliness as to be totally unbelievable. All the female characters swoon over him, while shuddering over Edward. Everything Roger is and does in the novel is over-valued - for example, the fact that many of the English nobility are his cousins is somehow proof of his "shrewdness". Umm, how? Did he go back in time and order his ancestors to make advantageous marriage alliances?
Roger's wife Joan de Geneville is an unsympathetic, rather pathetic figure in Notorious, despite being the hero's mother. She's very overweight and unattractive, presumably to ensure that she's not a rival to Isabella -who's incredibly beautiful, naturally - in any way. At the end, we learn that Joan is happy to put up with her husband's infidelity with Isabella because she gets her lands back. Which conveniently absolves Perfect Isabella and Perfect Roger from having to feel any guilt. Roger grants his and Joan's son Wolf the lands and possessions of his late uncle, Mortimer of Chirk - Henley conveniently forgetting to mention Chirk's grandson John Mortimer, who was disinherited by his cousin in 1330 (Roger claimed he was illegitimate, and took over his lands. Hugh Despenser would have been proud.)
In Queen of Shadows, Roger Mortimer never came to life for me at all. We're often told that he's handsome and brave, but somehow I never really felt it. Then there's the problematic expository dialogue, which does nothing to improve his characterisation.
By contrast, Hugh Despenser is by far the most vivid character in the novel, which improves immeasurably every time he gets a scene. He knows exactly what he is and why he does what he does; this self-insight makes him rather appealing, although he's a total lecher, with men and women - as well as greedy, ruthless and cruel. But kudos to Felber for not having him rape Isabella in the story, as Paul Doherty and Alison Weir have recently suggested (with zero evidence) he might have done. He desires her, but says that he'd never touch her without her permission.
On the subject of lechers, I found the hero of Notorious, Wolf Mortimer, pretty creepy. Henley dusts off another useful cliché, that of the Celtic character with the gift of second sight and other advanced mental powers - this time, it's Wolf. Mostly, he doesn't use his talents for anything useful - like warning his father that Edward is going to arrest him - but to spy on Brianna, watching her (in his mind) undressing. Eww.
Notorious has a pretty abrupt ending. We don't see the successful 1326 invasion of England, or Hugh Despenser's execution, or Edward's deposition, but only read it about before it happens through one of Wolf's numerous visions. The final scene takes place in June 1327, Perfect Isabella and Perfect Roger are being perfect, and everyone (except Edward II, one presumes) is deliriously happy - including Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who's looking pretty good for a man who's been dead for twelve years. He's even partially regained his lost sight, but I suppose that's a minor miracle for a man who's been animating a corpse for more than a decade.
The ending of Shadows is so abrupt I looked for the missing chapters, then wondered if Felber had a pressing deadline from her publisher, or if she'd reached her word count and just put her pen down. It doesn't end, it just - stops, when the story is starting to get really exciting. Isabella is coming to realise what a horrible mistake she's made and how wrong she was about Roger - there's a nice bit where she sees Hugh Despenser sitting on the throne, then realises it's her lover. He has imprisoned Edward III (which didn't happen historically) and is proving to be every bit as tyrannical as Despenser. You turn the page and - suddenly it's 1355. The whole story is wrapped up in a couple of pages. Mortimer's fate is dealt with in a paragraph - apparently Isabella, who's overthrown a king, inexplicably becomes unable to deal with a mere baron and has to wait for her teenage son to save her.
Then there's the odd lines "Her beloved grandson Edward was the image of his father. God willing, he'd never know that." How would Edward of Woodstock, who lived to his mid forties, not know if he looked like his father Edward III or not?? I can only assume that 'grandson' is a mistake for 'son', and Felber meant to say that Edward III looks just like his real father - whoever he may be. Even right at the end, we never learn the identity of Isabella's mysterious lover.
In both novels, even the Author's Note/Afterword at the end contain historical errors. Henley says that "most historians" agree that Edward II suffered the 'red-hot poker' death. Wish she'd tell me one historian who believes it to be totally, definitively true, never mind 'most'. Felber says that Edward III moved against Roger Mortimer "almost immediately" after his marriage to Philippa; it was nearly three years later. The Earl of Lancaster didn't die of plague in 1345, as it hadn't reached England then. Edward III didn't have "many mistresses" and "many illegitimate children" that anyone knows of (only one acknowledged mistress, Alice Perrers, and three illegitimate children). And it's disengenuous of Henley to claim that Isabella only became known as 'the She-Wolf' because of her marital infidelity. That's part of it, but I'd imagine that invading her husband's country, imprisoning him, deposing him, executing his friends, not allowing him to see his children, and (just possibly) being responsible for his murder comes into it too.
Probably a lot of people would say "But this is fiction, not a history book!" Of course, and I should point out that I don't think it's possible to write historical fiction without some errors. I'm not looking for perfection. But there are many gaps in our knowledge, and that's where historical novels can really come into their own. In the fourteenth century, we know what people did, but for the most part we have no idea why, or how they felt or what they thought. How Isabella really felt about her husband before the 1320s is anyone's guess. Maybe she truly loved him, or maybe she was dissatisfied in her marriage but made the best of it, or maybe she took the decision to depose him reluctantly and at the last minute, or maybe she had long despised him and plotted his downfall...there's no way of knowing, and this is something historical fiction can explore.
But if you choose to write about real people, I think you have a duty to stay as close to the known facts as possible. If you don't want to do that, why not invent your own characters? Then you can do anything you like with them! If Isabella was known not to be in Scotland in 1312 - and she certainly wasn't - then you shouldn't put her there. In Paul Doherty's Death of a King, he changes Edward III's date of birth from November 1312 to March 1312, so that he can work in the plot device that Roger Mortimer was his real father [which, in fact, still doesn't work, as Mortimer was in Ireland]. Maybe lots of readers would say 'March, November, what's the difference?' But I think that changing a historical date which is not in doubt or dispute to hang a major plot point on it, without acknowledging the fact, is, simply, cheating. Doherty was awarded a DPhil from Oxford for his thesis on Queen Isabella; obviously, he knows Edward III's correct date of birth.
Personally, I much prefer Sharon Penman's approach. She sticks closely to the facts, rounds out her characters brilliantly, and mentions in her Author's Note when she changes something, which are only ever small details. For example, in Falls the Shadow, she changes the date of a meeting by a few weeks, to accommodate the birth of Eleanor and Simon de Montfort's son Harry - which is a pretty minor change anyway.
Ultimately, I found Notorious and especially Queen of Shadows terribly frustrating, because both authors are capable of so much better. Some of Henley's other romances are far superior to this stereotypical, one-dimensional, melodramatic, totally inaccurate effort - and Brianna's often-repeated credo "I shouldn't...but I shall!" is even more irritating than Jory's "I've quite made up my mind!" in Infamous.
In much of Queen of Shadows, you can see what a good writer Edith Felber is, and there are occasional glimpses of what a terrific novel this could have been - but isn't. Some scenes sparkle and crackle with tension, some are pretty moving, and Hugh Despenser is such a well-developed and well-written character he comes right off the page. But Felber lets herself down with most of her dialogue, the endless repetition, the silly coy hints of Isabella's affair, the many historical inaccuracies, and the bizarrely abrupt ending. A good edit would have made this an infinitely better novel, and would have left a lot more space to explore Isabella's actions and feelings during the most eventful phase of her life, 1327-30.
Throughout much of the post, I found myself wanting to write a disclaimer about Notorious - something along the lines of "well, it's only a romance". But that sounds pretty insulting to the romance genre, which I don't mean at all. I've read and enjoyed some damn good romances, and I don't see why their characterisation, dialogue etc shouldn't be judged in the same way as other genres. Maybe Henley's fans would argue that the romance is key - which of course it is - and that the background doesn't matter. But if Henley chooses to write about real people and events rather than invented ones, she should make a much greater effort to get them correct. If she chooses real political events to serve as the backdrop to her novel, then I think I have the right to point out all her errors.
If an author wants complete control over her characters, then she should invent them. If she writes about real people, she shouldn't change most of the details of their lives to suit her story. And if she wants to write about people who lived 700 years ago, she shouldn't give them modern attitudes, ideas, and freedoms - especially when the sympathetic characters hold twenty-first century, politically correct opinions, while the unsympathetic ones hold views compatible with their time and society. That's just dishonest.
12 May, 2007
Two New Novels of Edward II's Reign (1)
Part one of some comments on two recent novels set in Edward II's reign: Virginia Henley's Notorious (published May 2007) is a romance novel, the sequel to Infamous, which I reviewed here. Edith Felber's Queen of Shadows (published November 2006) is a straight historical, subtitled A Novel of Isabella, Wife of King Edward II.
**WARNING: post contains plot spoilers!**
Notorious tells the story of the romance between the fictional Brianna de Beauchamp, daughter of the real Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and the fictional Wolf Mortimer, son of the real Roger Mortimer.
Roughly half of Queen of Shadows is told from the viewpoint of Queen Isabella, the rest from that of her fictional Welsh handmaiden Gwenith de Percy. The novels have some similarities: both take place in the 1320s, and both feature a young woman heavily involved in Roger Mortimer's escape from the Tower in 1323. Both have very abrupt endings. And both contain zillions of historical errors.
In contrast with some of Henley's other medieval romances, in Notorious the cast of made-up, main characters is huge: Brianna and Rickard de Beauchamp, Jory, Jane and Lincoln Robert de Warenne, Lynx de Warenne (Earl of Surrey), Wolf Mortimer, Blanche Fitzalan...
They intermingle uneasily with the historical characters, such as Edward II and Isabella, Roger Mortimer, Hugh Despenser, Robert the Bruce, Thomas of Lancaster, Roger Damory, etc. In addition, many of the details of the historical characters are wrong: Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, is still alive in the 1320s, though historically he died in August 1315. We see a 'James Audley', son of Hugh Audley and Margaret de Clare - who didn't exist - and the first names of the Earls of Hereford and Arundel are also wrong: Henley calls them Henry and Richard respectively, instead of Humphrey and Edmund. Whether this is a mistake on Henley's part, or whether they're also fictional characters, I don't know. Guy Beauchamp's son Thomas is renamed 'Guy Thomas' here. Henley likes giving her characters two first names: Guy Thomas, Lincoln Robert, Margaret Eleanor (Infamous) and Margaret Katherine Plantagenet (The Dragon and The Jewel). I wish someone would tell her middle names didn't exist back then - and that the name Plantagenet wasn't used till the fifteenth century.
The huge number of made-up characters and the countless historical errors gave me the feeling that I was reading a novel set in a parallel universe that bears some vague resemblance to early fourteenth-century England. But only a very vague resemblance.
Likewise, the fictional Gwenith in Shadows plays a huge role in the novel and drives some of the action, such as introducing Isabella and Roger Mortimer (because of course they'd never have met before). Gwenith is an OK character, reasonably sympathetic, but Shadows is subtitled A Novel of Isabella, and that's what I thought I was getting - not a novel partly about Isabella and partly about a made-up Welsh 'handmaiden' and her silly attempts to kill her "mortal enemy, the despised Edward" because of the atrocities his father committed against the Welsh, and some that Edward II himself is supposedly responsible for. (Number of atrocities Edward II actually committed in Wales: none.)
On the other hand, Gwenith switches immediately from hating Roger Mortimer and calling him a "beast" - in the first scene of the novel, his uncle Mortimer of Chirk triumphantly bears the head of her relative Prince Dafydd to Edward I - to liking him and helping him escape from the Tower, apparently for no other reason than it serves the plot.
Dialogue
Both novels contained some Americanisms that jolted me right out of them - like Brianna saying to Isabella "it's good that you got mad" (she's insane?) and Isabella complaining to Edward in Shadows that he'd patted Hugh's "ass". (Hugh has a donkey?!) And Henley's purple prose rears its ugly head again - in Infamous, we got "honeyed sheath", and here she goes one better and uses "sugared sheath". Bad. Mental. Images.
Virginia Henley, as usual, writes very melodramatic, over-the-top and clichéd dialogue and monologue (e.g., "Beneath her fiery temperament, she has a heart of gold" and "Don't try crawling back to me...I wouldn't lower myself to spit on you!") as well as a fair bit of 'As you know, Bob' dialogue - which is, however, not as bad as in Infamous.
Edith Felber chooses to do most of her exposition through dialogue, which leads to some amusing 'As you know, Bob' moments of her own, such as Edward II taking an entire paragraph to explain Hugh Despenser's piracy to Hugh himself ("...You lay in wait in the channel, near our shores. Two loaded merchant ships and their cargo, one after the other, snatched up by you.") and Isabella saying to Margaret de Clare "Why not ask your sister Eleanor, who is wed to Hugh Despenser? She sits right next to you."
Later in the novel, this expository dialogue has the unfortunate and presumably unintended effect of making Roger Mortimer look a bit thick, as Isabella has to keep explaining things to him, e.g., "There are no kings in Holland...William, Count of Holland and Hainault, is as powerful and rich as any king."
On the plus side, there are some cracking lines of dialogue in Shadows: Isabella says to her husband's lover Hugh Despenser "I don't get down on my knees to do anything but pray to my God. Now that is a sight more than can be said for you." That's probably my favourite bit of the whole novel, and there are some great conversations too, usually when Isabella and Hugh Despenser are bantering. But too much of Felber's dialogue is rather awkward, such as "I know, too well, that you pray for my ouster" and a couple of pages later, "I do seek Hugh Despenser's ouster". I get what she means, but it reads very awkwardly. The dialogue is often stilted and repetitive, and sometimes the meaning is hard to grasp - such as Hugh Despenser saying to Isabella "A man on the side is no better or holier than one on either side of you. At least not in the eyes of the church." I don't know how to interpret that statement. Something to do with the medieval church condoning threesomes?
Isabella constantly, and I mean constantly, reminds everyone that she's queen, just in case they've forgotten in the last five pages. Much of her dialogue consists of "How dare you say that to me? I am queen!" with seemingly endless variations. She's said to be a strong woman, but mostly just wanders around complaining about her husband and men in general.
Historical inaccuracies
It's the numerous historical inaccuracies that really put me off both novels, however. Both authors have a reasonable grasp of the events of the 1320s; Henley describes the Despenser War and Marcher campaign of 1321/22 with at least some degree of accuracy, and Felber covers many of the later events of Edward II's reign, though many of the dates are wrong: e.g., Roger Mortimer's escape from the Tower took place in August 1323, not 1324; Isabella left England for France in March 1325, not June; her son joined her in September 1325, not August 1326; Edward II's funeral took place in December 1327, not October. [Small points, maybe, but to get so many dates wrong gives an impression of sloppiness.]
There are so many historical errors in Notorious that it would take me an entire post to detail them. I felt like applauding on the rare occasions when Henley actually gets something right - such as realising that the woman in charge of Edward II's daughters from 1324 was the Younger Despenser's sister. And surprisingly in Shadows, Felber is aware of Edward's illegitimate son, Adam.
However, Felber makes most of the usual historical errors. A small sample: Edward II arranged the marriage of Eleanor de Clare and Hugh Despenser after Hugh had become his favourite, which led to a deep groan on my part and a book-wall interface; Roger Mortimer is misidentified as the 'Earl of Wigmore'; Isabella's brother Philip V is older than their brother Louis X, when it should be the other way round; the description of Hugh Despenser the Elder's execution of Llywelyn Bren in 1318 is obviously confused with his son's seizure of Tonbridge Castle in 1315, and in fact it was the Younger Despenser who had Bren executed; Edward and Isabella married at Boulogne, not Vincennes as stated; and Edward II was born in April 1284, not August. There are many others.
Oddly, the Kings are always called 'King Edward Second', 'King Philip Sixth', and Henry of Lancaster is called 'Henry Plantagenet, Third Earl Lancaster'. Probably the best mistake in either novel is Felber's statement that Edward II's niece Elizabeth de Clare founded the religious order of the Poor Clares - who were in fact founded in 1212 by St Clare (Chiara) of Assisi. Bit of a difference.
Both authors' grasp of fourteenth-century politics is shaky, to say the least. Felber uses the bizarre plot device that Parliament has ordered Edward II to "share his throne" with the Despensers. That's as nonsensical as the House of Commons nowadays ordering the Prime Mininster to share his premiership with another person of their choosing. Utterly ridiculous.
Henley states that Hugh Despenser the Elder used his influence with Edward II to make his son royal Chamberlain. I bet Despenser wished he had that kind of power, but it was Parliament who elected Hugh the Younger as Chamberlain, in 1318.
The theme of Scotland brings up some major inaccuracies. Henley's foreword to Notorious states that Edward II "loses Scotland to Robert Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn". He didn't 'lose' Scotland, because Scotland had never been won, and certainly not "conquered and subdued" by Edward I, as Henley states. [And if anyone in this period can be said to have 'lost' Scotland, it's Isabella and Roger Mortimer, who signed the Treaty of Northampton in 1328 recognising Scottish independence and Bruce's right to be King.]
I can't reconcile the criticism Edward gets in the novel for 'losing' Scotland with the boasts of his nobles that they refused to fight for him there - and especially with the way some of the English characters bang on about how wonderful and beloved Robert Bruce is. Near the end of Notorious, Bruce makes an alliance with Isabella, promising that after Edward's deposition, he won't invade England. Shame that he did then, within months of Edward's deposition in 1327. Long-term peace between England and Scotland is hinted at, with Isabella the prime instigator, naturally, because she's a woman and women love peace, you know? Edward III definitely did not "approve wholeheartedly" of his sister Joan's marriage to Bruce's son David II - he refused to attend the wedding - and emphatically did not desire a "lasting peace" between England and Scotland; he repudiated the Treaty of Northampton as soon as he was able to do so.
Scotland plays a very puzzling role in Shadows. Felber frequently drops coy hints that Isabella took a lover while in Scotland in 1312, abandoned by Edward, and that her lover fathered Edward III. As I've pointed out, this is complete nonsense, and it doesn't work as fiction either, as we never learn the identity of Isabella's lover and he plays no role in the novel. It seems utterly pointless. Is Felber perhaps planning a prequel? Why tell half the novel from Isabella's point of view but never reveal who her lover is?
Felber's placing Isabella in Scotland in 1312 so she can have another man father Edward III is just strange. Isabella's and Edward II's itineraries are well-known, and they definitely weren't in Scotland in 1312. Felber must have done a lot of research for her novel, and I assume she must know that.
Anachronisms
However, perhaps my biggest problem with the novels, Notorious in particular, lies in the attitudes displayed by the characters. The people in Notorious are not medieval. They're modern people, dropped into a medieval setting, in fancy dress and on horseback. Shadows is rather better in that respect, but even so, Isabella's rants owe a great deal to modern feminism and notions of sexual equality. In both novels, the amount of freedom the women possess is ridiculous. Brianna in Notorious spends much of the novel gallivanting around the country by herself - she just rides her horse off wherever and whenever she feels like it. For an Earl's daughter in the fourteenth century to go anywhere without her ladies and an escort was unthinkable, and so ludicrous I found myself laughing out loud.
Other modernisms: Brianna's parents insist that she is not to be married until she's at least eighteen. She's stunned when her fiancé Lincoln Robert tells her that noble titles and a good marriage alliance are more important to him than love. Why would a fourteenth-century noblewoman believe any different? Lincoln asks Brianna to marry him without consulting their parents - possibly the most ludicrous thing in the novel. [And anyway, first cousins didn't marry in the English nobility at this time.] Brianna manages to have pre-marital sex, with a man who isn't her fiancé. And when her fiancé Lincoln makes a young serving girl pregnant, his parents are furious because of the "dishonour" to Brianna. Why would they consider that their teenaged nobleman son having sex with a servant, betrothal or not, is a "dishonour"?
In Shadows, Isabella is so enlightened that she secretly consults a Jewish physician, although her father-in-law Edward I had expelled all Jewish people from England in 1290 (her father Philip IV did the same thing in France in 1306). Felber gets in a nice bit of ahistorical criticism of Edward II by stating that he 'murders' any Jewish people found in England. In fact, there were several occasions when he gave Jewish traders safe-conducts to visit England, and - astonishingly! - not a single recorded occasion when he had one murdered. Poor Edward II - as though he doesn't get enough criticism, without inventing slurs to throw at him.
In both novels, Isabella manages to have sex with Roger Mortimer while he's imprisoned in the Tower, without anyone noticing, although she had a household of close to 200 people and spent every minute of every day surrounded by servants, guards, ladies-in-waiting, courtiers...As I wrote in a previous post, she must have become invisible.
I realise that fourteenth-century restrictions on women's lives place limitations on the plots you can use, especially if you want to write about female adultery, but that being the case, why write historical fiction in the first place? Why give your characters such anachronistic attitudes? Either accept the limitations placed on women in your chosen time period and write around them, or write contemporary fiction. Or at the very least, show that the women are aware of breaking the rules and the harsh penalties imposed - for Isabella, the punishment for adultery would possibly have been execution, as it was treason, or at the very least, life-long imprisonment (as happened to her sisters-in-law in 1314). For Brianna, her behaviour would have meant disgrace, shame, and possibly being sent to a convent for the rest of her days. Certainly, it would have drastically limited her ability to make a good marriage. Of course, Queen Isabella did commit adultery, but the circumstances were exceptional - her marriage had irretrievably broken down, and she was in Paris and beyond Edward's reach. The notion that she could have had sex with Mortimer in the Tower in total privacy - well, I keep using the words 'ludicrous' and 'ridiculous', but that's what it is.
To depict women casually breaking the rules without a second thought, barely even acknowledging that there were strict rules, makes a mockery of the reality of women's lives, as though breaking your society's norms of behaviour was easy and consequence-free. This excellent article by Anne Scott MacLeod makes these points far more eloquently than I ever could, especially in the last few paragraphs.
[I'll post the second part of this tomorrow.]
**WARNING: post contains plot spoilers!**
Notorious tells the story of the romance between the fictional Brianna de Beauchamp, daughter of the real Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and the fictional Wolf Mortimer, son of the real Roger Mortimer.
Roughly half of Queen of Shadows is told from the viewpoint of Queen Isabella, the rest from that of her fictional Welsh handmaiden Gwenith de Percy. The novels have some similarities: both take place in the 1320s, and both feature a young woman heavily involved in Roger Mortimer's escape from the Tower in 1323. Both have very abrupt endings. And both contain zillions of historical errors.
In contrast with some of Henley's other medieval romances, in Notorious the cast of made-up, main characters is huge: Brianna and Rickard de Beauchamp, Jory, Jane and Lincoln Robert de Warenne, Lynx de Warenne (Earl of Surrey), Wolf Mortimer, Blanche Fitzalan...
They intermingle uneasily with the historical characters, such as Edward II and Isabella, Roger Mortimer, Hugh Despenser, Robert the Bruce, Thomas of Lancaster, Roger Damory, etc. In addition, many of the details of the historical characters are wrong: Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, is still alive in the 1320s, though historically he died in August 1315. We see a 'James Audley', son of Hugh Audley and Margaret de Clare - who didn't exist - and the first names of the Earls of Hereford and Arundel are also wrong: Henley calls them Henry and Richard respectively, instead of Humphrey and Edmund. Whether this is a mistake on Henley's part, or whether they're also fictional characters, I don't know. Guy Beauchamp's son Thomas is renamed 'Guy Thomas' here. Henley likes giving her characters two first names: Guy Thomas, Lincoln Robert, Margaret Eleanor (Infamous) and Margaret Katherine Plantagenet (The Dragon and The Jewel). I wish someone would tell her middle names didn't exist back then - and that the name Plantagenet wasn't used till the fifteenth century.
The huge number of made-up characters and the countless historical errors gave me the feeling that I was reading a novel set in a parallel universe that bears some vague resemblance to early fourteenth-century England. But only a very vague resemblance.
Likewise, the fictional Gwenith in Shadows plays a huge role in the novel and drives some of the action, such as introducing Isabella and Roger Mortimer (because of course they'd never have met before). Gwenith is an OK character, reasonably sympathetic, but Shadows is subtitled A Novel of Isabella, and that's what I thought I was getting - not a novel partly about Isabella and partly about a made-up Welsh 'handmaiden' and her silly attempts to kill her "mortal enemy, the despised Edward" because of the atrocities his father committed against the Welsh, and some that Edward II himself is supposedly responsible for. (Number of atrocities Edward II actually committed in Wales: none.)
On the other hand, Gwenith switches immediately from hating Roger Mortimer and calling him a "beast" - in the first scene of the novel, his uncle Mortimer of Chirk triumphantly bears the head of her relative Prince Dafydd to Edward I - to liking him and helping him escape from the Tower, apparently for no other reason than it serves the plot.
Dialogue
Both novels contained some Americanisms that jolted me right out of them - like Brianna saying to Isabella "it's good that you got mad" (she's insane?) and Isabella complaining to Edward in Shadows that he'd patted Hugh's "ass". (Hugh has a donkey?!) And Henley's purple prose rears its ugly head again - in Infamous, we got "honeyed sheath", and here she goes one better and uses "sugared sheath". Bad. Mental. Images.
Virginia Henley, as usual, writes very melodramatic, over-the-top and clichéd dialogue and monologue (e.g., "Beneath her fiery temperament, she has a heart of gold" and "Don't try crawling back to me...I wouldn't lower myself to spit on you!") as well as a fair bit of 'As you know, Bob' dialogue - which is, however, not as bad as in Infamous.
Edith Felber chooses to do most of her exposition through dialogue, which leads to some amusing 'As you know, Bob' moments of her own, such as Edward II taking an entire paragraph to explain Hugh Despenser's piracy to Hugh himself ("...You lay in wait in the channel, near our shores. Two loaded merchant ships and their cargo, one after the other, snatched up by you.") and Isabella saying to Margaret de Clare "Why not ask your sister Eleanor, who is wed to Hugh Despenser? She sits right next to you."
Later in the novel, this expository dialogue has the unfortunate and presumably unintended effect of making Roger Mortimer look a bit thick, as Isabella has to keep explaining things to him, e.g., "There are no kings in Holland...William, Count of Holland and Hainault, is as powerful and rich as any king."
On the plus side, there are some cracking lines of dialogue in Shadows: Isabella says to her husband's lover Hugh Despenser "I don't get down on my knees to do anything but pray to my God. Now that is a sight more than can be said for you." That's probably my favourite bit of the whole novel, and there are some great conversations too, usually when Isabella and Hugh Despenser are bantering. But too much of Felber's dialogue is rather awkward, such as "I know, too well, that you pray for my ouster" and a couple of pages later, "I do seek Hugh Despenser's ouster". I get what she means, but it reads very awkwardly. The dialogue is often stilted and repetitive, and sometimes the meaning is hard to grasp - such as Hugh Despenser saying to Isabella "A man on the side is no better or holier than one on either side of you. At least not in the eyes of the church." I don't know how to interpret that statement. Something to do with the medieval church condoning threesomes?
Isabella constantly, and I mean constantly, reminds everyone that she's queen, just in case they've forgotten in the last five pages. Much of her dialogue consists of "How dare you say that to me? I am queen!" with seemingly endless variations. She's said to be a strong woman, but mostly just wanders around complaining about her husband and men in general.
Historical inaccuracies
It's the numerous historical inaccuracies that really put me off both novels, however. Both authors have a reasonable grasp of the events of the 1320s; Henley describes the Despenser War and Marcher campaign of 1321/22 with at least some degree of accuracy, and Felber covers many of the later events of Edward II's reign, though many of the dates are wrong: e.g., Roger Mortimer's escape from the Tower took place in August 1323, not 1324; Isabella left England for France in March 1325, not June; her son joined her in September 1325, not August 1326; Edward II's funeral took place in December 1327, not October. [Small points, maybe, but to get so many dates wrong gives an impression of sloppiness.]
There are so many historical errors in Notorious that it would take me an entire post to detail them. I felt like applauding on the rare occasions when Henley actually gets something right - such as realising that the woman in charge of Edward II's daughters from 1324 was the Younger Despenser's sister. And surprisingly in Shadows, Felber is aware of Edward's illegitimate son, Adam.
However, Felber makes most of the usual historical errors. A small sample: Edward II arranged the marriage of Eleanor de Clare and Hugh Despenser after Hugh had become his favourite, which led to a deep groan on my part and a book-wall interface; Roger Mortimer is misidentified as the 'Earl of Wigmore'; Isabella's brother Philip V is older than their brother Louis X, when it should be the other way round; the description of Hugh Despenser the Elder's execution of Llywelyn Bren in 1318 is obviously confused with his son's seizure of Tonbridge Castle in 1315, and in fact it was the Younger Despenser who had Bren executed; Edward and Isabella married at Boulogne, not Vincennes as stated; and Edward II was born in April 1284, not August. There are many others.
Oddly, the Kings are always called 'King Edward Second', 'King Philip Sixth', and Henry of Lancaster is called 'Henry Plantagenet, Third Earl Lancaster'. Probably the best mistake in either novel is Felber's statement that Edward II's niece Elizabeth de Clare founded the religious order of the Poor Clares - who were in fact founded in 1212 by St Clare (Chiara) of Assisi. Bit of a difference.
Both authors' grasp of fourteenth-century politics is shaky, to say the least. Felber uses the bizarre plot device that Parliament has ordered Edward II to "share his throne" with the Despensers. That's as nonsensical as the House of Commons nowadays ordering the Prime Mininster to share his premiership with another person of their choosing. Utterly ridiculous.
Henley states that Hugh Despenser the Elder used his influence with Edward II to make his son royal Chamberlain. I bet Despenser wished he had that kind of power, but it was Parliament who elected Hugh the Younger as Chamberlain, in 1318.
The theme of Scotland brings up some major inaccuracies. Henley's foreword to Notorious states that Edward II "loses Scotland to Robert Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn". He didn't 'lose' Scotland, because Scotland had never been won, and certainly not "conquered and subdued" by Edward I, as Henley states. [And if anyone in this period can be said to have 'lost' Scotland, it's Isabella and Roger Mortimer, who signed the Treaty of Northampton in 1328 recognising Scottish independence and Bruce's right to be King.]
I can't reconcile the criticism Edward gets in the novel for 'losing' Scotland with the boasts of his nobles that they refused to fight for him there - and especially with the way some of the English characters bang on about how wonderful and beloved Robert Bruce is. Near the end of Notorious, Bruce makes an alliance with Isabella, promising that after Edward's deposition, he won't invade England. Shame that he did then, within months of Edward's deposition in 1327. Long-term peace between England and Scotland is hinted at, with Isabella the prime instigator, naturally, because she's a woman and women love peace, you know? Edward III definitely did not "approve wholeheartedly" of his sister Joan's marriage to Bruce's son David II - he refused to attend the wedding - and emphatically did not desire a "lasting peace" between England and Scotland; he repudiated the Treaty of Northampton as soon as he was able to do so.
Scotland plays a very puzzling role in Shadows. Felber frequently drops coy hints that Isabella took a lover while in Scotland in 1312, abandoned by Edward, and that her lover fathered Edward III. As I've pointed out, this is complete nonsense, and it doesn't work as fiction either, as we never learn the identity of Isabella's lover and he plays no role in the novel. It seems utterly pointless. Is Felber perhaps planning a prequel? Why tell half the novel from Isabella's point of view but never reveal who her lover is?
Felber's placing Isabella in Scotland in 1312 so she can have another man father Edward III is just strange. Isabella's and Edward II's itineraries are well-known, and they definitely weren't in Scotland in 1312. Felber must have done a lot of research for her novel, and I assume she must know that.
Anachronisms
However, perhaps my biggest problem with the novels, Notorious in particular, lies in the attitudes displayed by the characters. The people in Notorious are not medieval. They're modern people, dropped into a medieval setting, in fancy dress and on horseback. Shadows is rather better in that respect, but even so, Isabella's rants owe a great deal to modern feminism and notions of sexual equality. In both novels, the amount of freedom the women possess is ridiculous. Brianna in Notorious spends much of the novel gallivanting around the country by herself - she just rides her horse off wherever and whenever she feels like it. For an Earl's daughter in the fourteenth century to go anywhere without her ladies and an escort was unthinkable, and so ludicrous I found myself laughing out loud.
Other modernisms: Brianna's parents insist that she is not to be married until she's at least eighteen. She's stunned when her fiancé Lincoln Robert tells her that noble titles and a good marriage alliance are more important to him than love. Why would a fourteenth-century noblewoman believe any different? Lincoln asks Brianna to marry him without consulting their parents - possibly the most ludicrous thing in the novel. [And anyway, first cousins didn't marry in the English nobility at this time.] Brianna manages to have pre-marital sex, with a man who isn't her fiancé. And when her fiancé Lincoln makes a young serving girl pregnant, his parents are furious because of the "dishonour" to Brianna. Why would they consider that their teenaged nobleman son having sex with a servant, betrothal or not, is a "dishonour"?
In Shadows, Isabella is so enlightened that she secretly consults a Jewish physician, although her father-in-law Edward I had expelled all Jewish people from England in 1290 (her father Philip IV did the same thing in France in 1306). Felber gets in a nice bit of ahistorical criticism of Edward II by stating that he 'murders' any Jewish people found in England. In fact, there were several occasions when he gave Jewish traders safe-conducts to visit England, and - astonishingly! - not a single recorded occasion when he had one murdered. Poor Edward II - as though he doesn't get enough criticism, without inventing slurs to throw at him.
In both novels, Isabella manages to have sex with Roger Mortimer while he's imprisoned in the Tower, without anyone noticing, although she had a household of close to 200 people and spent every minute of every day surrounded by servants, guards, ladies-in-waiting, courtiers...As I wrote in a previous post, she must have become invisible.
I realise that fourteenth-century restrictions on women's lives place limitations on the plots you can use, especially if you want to write about female adultery, but that being the case, why write historical fiction in the first place? Why give your characters such anachronistic attitudes? Either accept the limitations placed on women in your chosen time period and write around them, or write contemporary fiction. Or at the very least, show that the women are aware of breaking the rules and the harsh penalties imposed - for Isabella, the punishment for adultery would possibly have been execution, as it was treason, or at the very least, life-long imprisonment (as happened to her sisters-in-law in 1314). For Brianna, her behaviour would have meant disgrace, shame, and possibly being sent to a convent for the rest of her days. Certainly, it would have drastically limited her ability to make a good marriage. Of course, Queen Isabella did commit adultery, but the circumstances were exceptional - her marriage had irretrievably broken down, and she was in Paris and beyond Edward's reach. The notion that she could have had sex with Mortimer in the Tower in total privacy - well, I keep using the words 'ludicrous' and 'ridiculous', but that's what it is.
To depict women casually breaking the rules without a second thought, barely even acknowledging that there were strict rules, makes a mockery of the reality of women's lives, as though breaking your society's norms of behaviour was easy and consequence-free. This excellent article by Anne Scott MacLeod makes these points far more eloquently than I ever could, especially in the last few paragraphs.
[I'll post the second part of this tomorrow.]
07 May, 2007
My Edward II Website
I finally got round to setting up my Edward II website! I've been meaning to do it for months and months. (I am not a woman of swift action.) And here it is.
The site's not terribly thrilling at the moment - so far, I've just transferred some essays from the blog, and the template etc needs a lot of work. But still, I have a website! *Is delighted*.
One new feature: I've added a page of some fictional extracts I've written on Edward and Isabella, etc. And I'm intending to do a page on 'Images of Edward II's Reign' - illustrations from contemporary psalters, manuscripts etc. (But given my tendency to procrastination, don't hold your breath.)
If there's anything you'd like to see on the site, please let me know, here on or the 'Comments' page of the site.
EDIT: I've updated my Fictional Extracts page with some more snippets - hope you enjoy them! :)
The site's not terribly thrilling at the moment - so far, I've just transferred some essays from the blog, and the template etc needs a lot of work. But still, I have a website! *Is delighted*.
One new feature: I've added a page of some fictional extracts I've written on Edward and Isabella, etc. And I'm intending to do a page on 'Images of Edward II's Reign' - illustrations from contemporary psalters, manuscripts etc. (But given my tendency to procrastination, don't hold your breath.)
If there's anything you'd like to see on the site, please let me know, here on or the 'Comments' page of the site.
EDIT: I've updated my Fictional Extracts page with some more snippets - hope you enjoy them! :)
05 May, 2007
Hugh Despenser the Younger's siblings
A post on the lesser-known members of the notorious family...
Hugh Despenser 'the Elder' was born on 1 March 1261, the son of Hugh Despenser the Even Elder, Justiciar of England, who was killed at the side of Simon de Montfort at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, when his son was four years old. In 1271, Hugh's mother Aline Basset married Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk. She had no more children, though Hugh had three sisters, or possibly a sister and two half-sisters by his father's (unknown) first wife.
Aline, only child and heiress of Philip Basset, died before 11 April 1281, and although he wasn't yet twenty-one, Hugh received livery of his Despenser and Basset lands that year. Despite - or because of - his father's rebellion against Henry III, Hugh would be intensely loyal to both Edward I and Edward II all his life.
Hugh's wife was Isabel Beauchamp, widowed from Patrick de Chaworth in July 1283, and the mother of Maud de Chaworth, who was born on 2 February 1282. Isabel was the daughter of William Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (c. 1237-1298) and Maud FitzJohn (also called Fitzgeoffrey, died 1301), who was one of the four sisters and co-heiresses of John and Richard FitzJohn, who both died childless. Through her mother, Isabel Beauchamp was the first cousin of Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster (1259-1326) and of Robert, Lord Clifford (born 1274, killed at Bannockburn 1314). Isabel's date of birth is not known, but was sometime in the 1260s. Her younger brother Guy, Earl of Warwick, was probably born in 1272. He kidnapped Piers Gaveston in 1312, and was one of Edward II's most implacable enemies.
The date of Hugh and Isabel's wedding is not known either, but in the Highworth Hundred Rolls of 10 September 1285, Isabel was still referred to by her married name, which places their marriage after this date. In 1286, they were fined 2000 marks for marrying without royal licence. Isabel died shortly before 30 May 1306, which was appalling timing as far as her elder son Hugh the Younger was concerned: he was knighted on 22 May, and married Eleanor de Clare on the 26th.
Hugh the Elder never married again. At the beginning of Edward III's reign, on 15 February 1327, the Calendar of Miscellaneous Inquisitions records the complaint of William de Odyham, keeper of Odiham park, that he "was removed therefrom [from his keepership] by Hugh le Despenser the younger because he levied hue and cry upon Isabel the said Hugh's mother, who was taking 5 bucks in the park without warrant."
Which tells us that: Isabel was a keen huntswoman, not too bothered about breaking the law, and that her son felt enough affection for her that he remembered the incident many years later, and used his influence to remove the man from his position.
Isabel and Hugh the Elder had two sons and four daughters. Their dates of birth are not recorded, and what follows is just my best guess.
Aline (or Alina) was named after her paternal grandmother Aline Basset; her elder half-sister Maud de Chaworth was named after their maternal grandmother Maud FitzJohn. I assume Aline was the eldest of the Despenser children, as her marriage was arranged in 1302, and her brother Hugh's in 1306. Her parents married in late 1285 or 1286, so I'd tentatively place Aline's birth in 1287, and therefore fifteen or close to it when she married.
Aline married Edward Burnell, who became Lord Burnell on 19 December 1311. Edward was probably born on 22 July 1286, the son of Philip, Lord Burnell and the great-nephew of the famous Robert Burnell, Bishop of Bath and Wells and Chancellor of England. Edward's mother Maud was the sister of Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel (died 1302), which makes Edward a first cousin of Edmund, Earl of Arundel, beheaded in 1326. As the great-grandson of Roger Mortimer Senior and Maud de Braose, he was also the first cousin once removed of Roger Mortimer. Edward was the ward of Joan de Munchesni (or Munchesney, Munchensey, etc), Countess of Pembroke, and grew up in her household.
Edward and Aline married shortly after 3 May 1302. Edward paid homage to Edward II for his lands on 6 December 1307, was summoned to Parliament in 1311 and 1315, and fought in Scotland, probably also at Bannockburn. The couple had no children, and Edward died on 23 August 1315, only twenty-nine. Although only in her late twenties herself, Aline never re-married. This probably means that she took a vow of chastity, generally the only way noble widows could remain single and not have to enter a convent.
Her father Hugh the Elder granted her the manor of Martley in Worcestershire, which he had inherited from his uncle John Despenser. Aline held dower lands in Warwickshire, Somerset, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Shropshire, and was later granted further lands in Shropshire by her nephew, Hugh the Even Younger.
On 30 January 1326, presumably through the influence of her all-powerful brother, Aline was made Constable of the great Conwy Castle: "Appointment during pleasure of Aline Burnel to the custody of the castle of Coneweye, so that she answer for the safe custody thereof at her peril; she taking for the custody the same as other keepers."
This was an extremely rare honour for a woman. I only know of one other contemporary example: Edward I made Isabella de Vescy Constable of Bamburgh in 1304, and Edward II confirmed the appointment as one of his first acts as King (Isabella was his mother's cousin). However, Aline was replaced by Sir William Ercalowe (or Erkalowe or Erkalewe) on 20 October that year. At this time, Edward and Hugh Despenser were in South Wales, fleeing from Isabella and Roger Mortimer, and probably decided that they needed a man with military experience to hold such a strategic stronghold.
After the downfall of Edward II and Hugh Despenser, Isabella and Mortimer, to their credit, left Aline in peace -something she might not have expected, given her relationship to Hugh, and his own treatment of the female relatives of his enemies. On 15 November 1329, 24 April 1330 and 3 February 1331, she was granted protection for a pilgrimage to Santiago. In the records, she's always called 'Aline (or Alina) late the wife of Edward Burnel'.
On 26 April 1338, Aline was granted "alienation in mortmain...to two chaplains to celebrate divine service daily in the chapel of St Giles, Lolleseye [Lulsley, Worcestershire] for the souls of the said Edward [Burnell] and Alina, Hugh le Despenser, her brother, and Hugh le Despenser, her cousin [nephew], William de Ercalewe and Walter de Lench."
Ercalewe was the man who had replaced her as Constable of Conwy Castle in 1326, and her nephew Hugh the Even Younger's steward. Born in 1284 or 1285, and a former Sheriff of Staffordshire and Shropshire, Ercalewe and his father were closely connected with the Burnells as well as the Despensers.
Walter de Lench was a landowner in Worcestershire, where Aline also held lands, so was probably a neighbour and associate. Aline's inclusion of her brother Hugh might signify that she thought his soul needed all the intercession it could get, or might point to a genuine sisterly affection. None of her other siblings, or other nieces and nephews, are included.
Aline died shortly before 24 May 1353, well into her sixties, having lived as a widow for nearly four decades. Her Inquisition Post Mortem gives the year of her death as '37 Edward III' which is 1363, but this seems to be a mistake for '27 Edward III', as a Patent Roll entry of 28 November 1353 refers to her death. Her heir was her great-nephew, Hugh the Younger's grandson Edward Lord Despenser (born 1336), and she also left lands to Edward Burnell's nephew Nicholas Burnell.
Hugh the Younger: I'd estimate Hugh's birth year as 1288 or 1289, making him four or five years younger than Edward II and seventeen or eighteen at the time of his wedding on 26 May 1306 (Eleanor de Clare was thirteen and a half).
Given Edward II's later infatuation with him, it's interesting to note that, for the first half of his reign or thereabouts, he barely seems to have noticed Hugh's existence. Hugh received the manor of Sutton in Norfolk on 14 May 1309, was granted licence to hunt "with his dogs by himself, or any person whom by his letters he shall depute to do so...foxes, hares, cats and badgers" on 8 September 1312, and received the wardship and marriage of Roger Huntingfield on 9 October 1313. And that's about it, apart from a handful of requests and pardons, and an exemption made at his request in April 1313 "to the provost and chaplains of St Elizabeth by Winchester of the service of rendering every year a sore sparrow-hawk for the manor of St Valery..." ('Sore' means the reddish-brown plumage of a sparrow-hawk in the first year of its life, untrained and therefore less valuable.)
Isabel(la), the third Despenser child, was probably born around 1290/91, and like her brother, married a de Clare. Hugh's marriage to Eleanor is recorded as it took place in the presence of the King; the date of Isabel's wedding is not known, but probably took place around the same time, in a double de Clare-Despenser marriage alliance. As girls usually married a little earlier than boys, it's highly likely that she was younger than Hugh and about fifteen when she married.
Her husband was Gilbert de Clare, Lord of Thomond, son of Gilbert 'the Red' de Clare's brother Thomas and a first cousin of Eleanor de Clare and the Earl of Gloucester. He was a former ward of Joan of Acre, who may have been instrumental in arranging the two de Clare-Despenser marriages. Gilbert was born on 3 February 1281 and was one of the young men selected to grow up in the household of the future Edward II, who was three years his junior. Gilbert is often confused with his cousin of the same name, the Earl of Gloucester. He died before 16 November 1307, childless; his marriage to Isabel is often overlooked by authorities.
In 1308 or 1309, Isabel married John, Lord Hastings, a former claimant to the throne of Scotland. Born on 6 May 1262, John was only a year younger than Isabel's father, and had been widowed from the Earl of Pembroke's sister Isabel de Valence since October 1305. John Hastings junior, son of John and Isabel de Valence, was born in 1286, and was several years older than his stepmother - which has confused some historians, most notably Natalie Fryde, who assume it was the younger John who married Isabel Despenser (in fact, he married Juliana de Leyburne). The elder John was a close associate of the Elder Despenser from the mid-1290s onwards, if not earlier, and served on Despenser's council. In 1308, he and Despenser were two of the few barons who stayed at Edward II's side during the Gaveston crisis.
Despite the huge gap, Isabel bore John Hastings three children. Their elder son Thomas died childless on 11 January 1333, and their daughter Margaret married William, Lord Martin, only to be widowed in 1326 when she can't have been more than about sixteen. She married Sir Robert Wateville soon afterwards, and died in 1359. (There were two men in England at the time called Sir Robert de Wateville, confusingly, and separating their careers is difficult. One, presumably this one, served in the younger Despenser's retinue). John and Isabel's second son Hugh Hastings married Margery Foliot, and was very active in the Hundred Years War with his half-nephew Laurence Hastings, Earl of Pembroke. He also served as Queen Philippa's steward in the mid-1340s and was appointed Seneschal of Gascony in May 1347, a position he never took up, as he died a few weeks later. His tomb in Elsing, Norfolk, was opened in 1978, revealing that he had been five feet ten inches tall, had osteoarthritis in his shoulders and elbows, and had at some point suffered a severe blow to the mouth.
John, Lord Hastings, died in February 1313. Sometime in 1318, Isabel Despenser married for the third time, to Ralph de Monthermer, who had made a secret marriage to Joan of Acre in 1297. He had been widowed since April 1307, and was also much older than Isabel, probably born in 1262. Letters of Edward II written before he became King reveal that he was on very good terms with Ralph; however, Ralph didn't play a big role in Edward's reign, though he fought for the King at Bannockburn, where he was captured (and released without ransom). Isabel and Ralph married without the necessary royal licence, for which they received a pardon on 12 August 1319.
Isabel continued to use the name Hastings throughout her third marriage and widowhood. In September 1324, she was put in charge of the household of Edward II and Queen Isabella's daughters Eleanor and Joan, aged six and three - an act inevitably described as 'stealing' Isabella's children from her, though it was usual for royal children to have their own households from a very young age, and royal/noble women in the Middle Age rarely brought up their own children. Eleanor de Clare took charge of the household of John of Eltham, Edward II's younger son.
Ralph de Monthermer died on 5 April 1325, leaving two sons and two daughters by his marriage to Joan of Acre. Isabel continued to take care of Edward II's daughters. In October 1326, she was (presumably) with them in Bristol Castle when Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer and their followers took the town. She was probably inside the castle when her father was hanged in his armour outside; the chronicler Jean Froissart wrote later that little Eleanor and Joan saw the execution out of the window.
Like her sister Aline, Isabel was mostly left in peace by Roger Mortimer and Isabella, though in June 1328, she acknowledged a debt of just under £300 to Isabella - whether a real debt or not, I don't know. (Her brother Hugh had forced people to bind themselves to him by acknowledging fake debts).
In December 1327, Edward II's niece Elizabeth de Clare left her young children in Isabel's care while she attended her uncle's funeral - a nice gesture on Elizabeth's part, given all that she had suffered at the hands of Isabel's brother.
Isabel Despenser Hastings died on 4 or 5 December 1334, leaving lands in Huntingdonshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Suffolk and Hampshire to her son Hugh Hastings and her step-grandson Laurence Hastings. She had outlived three husbands, and lived as a widow for just under a decade, but was probably still only about forty-four years old.
Philip, the fourth child, was probably born about 1292/93. He was certainly born by 1294, when a letter patent of his father apointed the rector of 'Louctheburg' as his guardian. On 12 April 1306, in Edward I's reign, Philip's uncle Guy Beauchamp received a "licence for Guy de Bello Campo, earl of Warwick, to enfeoff Philip son of Hugh le Despenser of all his lands in England which are held of the king". Guy was unmarried and childless at this time (he would later have two sons and five daughters) and decided to make Philip his heir.
Philip's wife Margaret Goushill was born on 12 May 1294, the only child and heiress of Ralph Goushill. She inherited lands in Shropshire, Yorkshire, Essex and Lincolnshire. The date of their wedding is not known, but was probably around 1310. Their only child, also Philip, was born on 6 April 1313, and Philip died on 24 September of the same year, aged probably about twenty, and long before his brother became the real ruler of England.
Margaret Goushill married her second husband John Ros sometime before 22 April 1314, less than seven months after Philip's death. He was the second son of William, Lord Ros; his elder brother William was one of the delegates sent to depose Edward II in January 1327. His mother Maud de Vaux was the sister of Petronilla, the mother of Maud de Nerford, the Earl of Surrey's mistress.
On Sunday 22 February 1316, in the cathedral church of Lincoln, Hugh Despenser the Younger attacked Ros in the middle of Parliament, in the presence of the King. He strode up to him and punched him in the face until he drew blood, "and inflicted other outrages on him...to the terror of the people present at the said parliament."
The reason for the attack - according to Hugh himself - was that Ros had tried to arrest Sir Ingelram Berenger, a knight long in the service of the Elder Despenser, whom Hugh had probably known most of his life. However, I can't help wondering if Ros's marriage to Philip's widow had something to do with it, too. Ros and Margaret married less than seven months after Philip's death, which was very fast, and perhaps Hugh was angry at the implied insult to his brother, and the attempted arrest of Berenger was the final straw.
Hugh, amusingly, defended himself by claiming that Ros had attacked him first, "heaping outrageous insults on the same Hugh [and] taunted him with insolent words, and putting his hand to his knife he menaced the same Hugh, and made a rush towards the said Hugh as if he wanted to strike him with his knife..." Hugh claimed that he had merely stretched out his hand to prevent Ros from striking him, and accidentally hit him in the face. You'd think he could have come up with a better story, especially as just about everyone in Parliament had witnessed the attack, not least Edward II himself. Hugh was fined the staggeringly huge sum of £10,000, many millions in modern values, which needless to say he never paid. Four years later, after he had become Edward's favourite, the King "of his special grace pardoned the aforesaid Hugh the aforesaid trespass".
Margaret Goushill died on 29 July 1349, aged fifty-five. She had outlived her son Sir Philip Despenser by three months; he died on 23 April 1349, just past his thirty-sixth birthday, leaving a six-year-old son, also Philip. (This Philip grew up to have a son, and the son grew up to have a son. Bet you can't guess what they were called.)
Margaret was the fifth Despenser child. Her father arranged her marriage to John de St Amand in 1313, paying St Amand a dowry of 1000 marks (£666), a standard amount for the nobility at the time. The date of her marriage places Margaret's birth around 1296/98.
John, Lord de St Amand, was probably born around 1280, so was a few years older than his wife. He was the third son of Amaury de St Amand, who supported Henry III in the Barons' Wars and died in 1285. John's elder brothers Guy (1267-1287) and Amaury (1268-July 1310), the Governor of Bordeaux, died childless, so John had become his father's heir by the time of his marriage. He was a doctor of canon law and acted as his father-in-law's attorney, and held lands in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Sussex, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. He was first summoned to Parliament in 1313. [There's an excellent article on the St Amand family here.]
John and Margaret's son Amaury (or Amauri, or Almaric or Almeric) de St Amand was probably born in early 1314; he proved his age on 16 March 1335, and did homage for his lands. He served as Justiciar of Ireland, fought in Scotland and France, and married, before 3 November 1329, Maud Burnell, niece of Edward Burnell [above]. John and Margaret also had a daughter Isabel, who married Richard de Haudlo; Richard was the son of John de Haudlo, an adherent of the Despensers since 1299, and was either the half-brother or stepbrother of Maud Burnell. Amaury de St Amand lived until 11 September 1381.
The date of Margaret Despenser de St Amand's death is not known, but as she didn't play any role in the regime of her father and brother as her elder sisters did, it's possible that she died young. John de St Amand died on or shortly before 25 January 1330, having been Commissioner of the Peace in Bedfordshire in 1329. He doesn't seem to have played any role in supporting his father-in-law and brother-in-law in 1326.
Elizabeth was the sixth and youngest Despenser child. Sometime before 20 May 1316, she married the widowed Ralph, Lord Camoys, which would place her birth around 1299/1301. I should point out that Ralph's second wife is usually said to have been an Elizabeth Rogate, not Elizabeth Despenser. However, this Google thread sets out the case that Elizabeth was in fact a daughter of Hugh Despenser the Elder.
Ralph was another long-term follower of the Despensers, probably born around 1280. He was a member of the Elder Despenser's retinue as early as 1299, though he wasn't knighted until the great Feast of the Swan of 22 May 1306. In 1303, he married Margaret de Braose, and had a son Thomas. He was apparently taken prisoner at Bannockburn, and made two pilgrimages to Santiago.
Elizabeth and Ralph had five children: John, Hugh, Ralph, Isabel and Elizabeth. The names Hugh and Isabel, almost certainly named after Hugh the Elder and Isabel Beauchamp, are a strong indicator that Elizabeth was a Despenser, not a Rogate. Likewise, Ralph Camoys was the first cousin of Margaret Goushill's mother Ela Camoys; Margaret Goushill married Elizabeth's brother Philip, yet another inter-marriage among the Despenser affinity.
Ralph Camoys was closely associated with the Despensers, his father-in-law and brother-in-law; in the charges against them in Parliament in 1321, he is named as one of their 'evil and corrupt counsellors'. However, he survived their downfall; on 19 February 1327, there's a record of a "[p]ardon to Ralph de Camoys, knight, for adherence to Hugh le Despenser the younger, lately a rebel." Ralph crops up occasionally in the records of Edward III's reign - for example, on 12 March 1334, he and other men were accused of carrying away four tuns of wine, worth £20, and other goods, from a shipwreck in Sussex, and also of carrying away the deer and assaulting the servants of John, Lord Mowbray.
Ralph died before 24 June 1336. The date of Elizabeth Despenser Camoys' death is not known; an 'Elizabeth, widow of Ralph Camoys' mentioned in 1370 and sometimes assumed to be her was in fact her granddaughter-in-law. William, Lord Hastings, executed by Richard III in 1483, was their great-great-grandson (his mother was Alice Camoys). Ralph and Elizabeth's daughter Isabel Camoys was Abbess of Romsey from 1352-1396. In 1344, their son Hugh Camoys and his first cousin Hugh Despenser the Even Younger went abroad with Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel who got a divorce from Hugh the Even Younger's sister Isabel that year. There's a great site on the Camoys family here.
Hugh Despenser the Elder and Isabel Beauchamp had more than twenty grandchildren, and Isabel had seven others, through her daughter Maud de Chaworth. The Despensers are an interesting example of how marriage was used by the nobility at this time to bind their adherents and supporters to them, and to strengthen their affinity - though the Despensers' connections couldn't save them from the consequences of their greed and tyranny.
Hugh Despenser 'the Elder' was born on 1 March 1261, the son of Hugh Despenser the Even Elder, Justiciar of England, who was killed at the side of Simon de Montfort at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, when his son was four years old. In 1271, Hugh's mother Aline Basset married Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk. She had no more children, though Hugh had three sisters, or possibly a sister and two half-sisters by his father's (unknown) first wife.
Aline, only child and heiress of Philip Basset, died before 11 April 1281, and although he wasn't yet twenty-one, Hugh received livery of his Despenser and Basset lands that year. Despite - or because of - his father's rebellion against Henry III, Hugh would be intensely loyal to both Edward I and Edward II all his life.
Hugh's wife was Isabel Beauchamp, widowed from Patrick de Chaworth in July 1283, and the mother of Maud de Chaworth, who was born on 2 February 1282. Isabel was the daughter of William Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (c. 1237-1298) and Maud FitzJohn (also called Fitzgeoffrey, died 1301), who was one of the four sisters and co-heiresses of John and Richard FitzJohn, who both died childless. Through her mother, Isabel Beauchamp was the first cousin of Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster (1259-1326) and of Robert, Lord Clifford (born 1274, killed at Bannockburn 1314). Isabel's date of birth is not known, but was sometime in the 1260s. Her younger brother Guy, Earl of Warwick, was probably born in 1272. He kidnapped Piers Gaveston in 1312, and was one of Edward II's most implacable enemies.
The date of Hugh and Isabel's wedding is not known either, but in the Highworth Hundred Rolls of 10 September 1285, Isabel was still referred to by her married name, which places their marriage after this date. In 1286, they were fined 2000 marks for marrying without royal licence. Isabel died shortly before 30 May 1306, which was appalling timing as far as her elder son Hugh the Younger was concerned: he was knighted on 22 May, and married Eleanor de Clare on the 26th.
Hugh the Elder never married again. At the beginning of Edward III's reign, on 15 February 1327, the Calendar of Miscellaneous Inquisitions records the complaint of William de Odyham, keeper of Odiham park, that he "was removed therefrom [from his keepership] by Hugh le Despenser the younger because he levied hue and cry upon Isabel the said Hugh's mother, who was taking 5 bucks in the park without warrant."
Which tells us that: Isabel was a keen huntswoman, not too bothered about breaking the law, and that her son felt enough affection for her that he remembered the incident many years later, and used his influence to remove the man from his position.
Isabel and Hugh the Elder had two sons and four daughters. Their dates of birth are not recorded, and what follows is just my best guess.
Aline (or Alina) was named after her paternal grandmother Aline Basset; her elder half-sister Maud de Chaworth was named after their maternal grandmother Maud FitzJohn. I assume Aline was the eldest of the Despenser children, as her marriage was arranged in 1302, and her brother Hugh's in 1306. Her parents married in late 1285 or 1286, so I'd tentatively place Aline's birth in 1287, and therefore fifteen or close to it when she married.
Aline married Edward Burnell, who became Lord Burnell on 19 December 1311. Edward was probably born on 22 July 1286, the son of Philip, Lord Burnell and the great-nephew of the famous Robert Burnell, Bishop of Bath and Wells and Chancellor of England. Edward's mother Maud was the sister of Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel (died 1302), which makes Edward a first cousin of Edmund, Earl of Arundel, beheaded in 1326. As the great-grandson of Roger Mortimer Senior and Maud de Braose, he was also the first cousin once removed of Roger Mortimer. Edward was the ward of Joan de Munchesni (or Munchesney, Munchensey, etc), Countess of Pembroke, and grew up in her household.
Edward and Aline married shortly after 3 May 1302. Edward paid homage to Edward II for his lands on 6 December 1307, was summoned to Parliament in 1311 and 1315, and fought in Scotland, probably also at Bannockburn. The couple had no children, and Edward died on 23 August 1315, only twenty-nine. Although only in her late twenties herself, Aline never re-married. This probably means that she took a vow of chastity, generally the only way noble widows could remain single and not have to enter a convent.
Her father Hugh the Elder granted her the manor of Martley in Worcestershire, which he had inherited from his uncle John Despenser. Aline held dower lands in Warwickshire, Somerset, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Shropshire, and was later granted further lands in Shropshire by her nephew, Hugh the Even Younger.
On 30 January 1326, presumably through the influence of her all-powerful brother, Aline was made Constable of the great Conwy Castle: "Appointment during pleasure of Aline Burnel to the custody of the castle of Coneweye, so that she answer for the safe custody thereof at her peril; she taking for the custody the same as other keepers."
This was an extremely rare honour for a woman. I only know of one other contemporary example: Edward I made Isabella de Vescy Constable of Bamburgh in 1304, and Edward II confirmed the appointment as one of his first acts as King (Isabella was his mother's cousin). However, Aline was replaced by Sir William Ercalowe (or Erkalowe or Erkalewe) on 20 October that year. At this time, Edward and Hugh Despenser were in South Wales, fleeing from Isabella and Roger Mortimer, and probably decided that they needed a man with military experience to hold such a strategic stronghold.
After the downfall of Edward II and Hugh Despenser, Isabella and Mortimer, to their credit, left Aline in peace -something she might not have expected, given her relationship to Hugh, and his own treatment of the female relatives of his enemies. On 15 November 1329, 24 April 1330 and 3 February 1331, she was granted protection for a pilgrimage to Santiago. In the records, she's always called 'Aline (or Alina) late the wife of Edward Burnel'.
On 26 April 1338, Aline was granted "alienation in mortmain...to two chaplains to celebrate divine service daily in the chapel of St Giles, Lolleseye [Lulsley, Worcestershire] for the souls of the said Edward [Burnell] and Alina, Hugh le Despenser, her brother, and Hugh le Despenser, her cousin [nephew], William de Ercalewe and Walter de Lench."
Ercalewe was the man who had replaced her as Constable of Conwy Castle in 1326, and her nephew Hugh the Even Younger's steward. Born in 1284 or 1285, and a former Sheriff of Staffordshire and Shropshire, Ercalewe and his father were closely connected with the Burnells as well as the Despensers.
Walter de Lench was a landowner in Worcestershire, where Aline also held lands, so was probably a neighbour and associate. Aline's inclusion of her brother Hugh might signify that she thought his soul needed all the intercession it could get, or might point to a genuine sisterly affection. None of her other siblings, or other nieces and nephews, are included.
Aline died shortly before 24 May 1353, well into her sixties, having lived as a widow for nearly four decades. Her Inquisition Post Mortem gives the year of her death as '37 Edward III' which is 1363, but this seems to be a mistake for '27 Edward III', as a Patent Roll entry of 28 November 1353 refers to her death. Her heir was her great-nephew, Hugh the Younger's grandson Edward Lord Despenser (born 1336), and she also left lands to Edward Burnell's nephew Nicholas Burnell.
Hugh the Younger: I'd estimate Hugh's birth year as 1288 or 1289, making him four or five years younger than Edward II and seventeen or eighteen at the time of his wedding on 26 May 1306 (Eleanor de Clare was thirteen and a half).
Given Edward II's later infatuation with him, it's interesting to note that, for the first half of his reign or thereabouts, he barely seems to have noticed Hugh's existence. Hugh received the manor of Sutton in Norfolk on 14 May 1309, was granted licence to hunt "with his dogs by himself, or any person whom by his letters he shall depute to do so...foxes, hares, cats and badgers" on 8 September 1312, and received the wardship and marriage of Roger Huntingfield on 9 October 1313. And that's about it, apart from a handful of requests and pardons, and an exemption made at his request in April 1313 "to the provost and chaplains of St Elizabeth by Winchester of the service of rendering every year a sore sparrow-hawk for the manor of St Valery..." ('Sore' means the reddish-brown plumage of a sparrow-hawk in the first year of its life, untrained and therefore less valuable.)
Isabel(la), the third Despenser child, was probably born around 1290/91, and like her brother, married a de Clare. Hugh's marriage to Eleanor is recorded as it took place in the presence of the King; the date of Isabel's wedding is not known, but probably took place around the same time, in a double de Clare-Despenser marriage alliance. As girls usually married a little earlier than boys, it's highly likely that she was younger than Hugh and about fifteen when she married.
Her husband was Gilbert de Clare, Lord of Thomond, son of Gilbert 'the Red' de Clare's brother Thomas and a first cousin of Eleanor de Clare and the Earl of Gloucester. He was a former ward of Joan of Acre, who may have been instrumental in arranging the two de Clare-Despenser marriages. Gilbert was born on 3 February 1281 and was one of the young men selected to grow up in the household of the future Edward II, who was three years his junior. Gilbert is often confused with his cousin of the same name, the Earl of Gloucester. He died before 16 November 1307, childless; his marriage to Isabel is often overlooked by authorities.
In 1308 or 1309, Isabel married John, Lord Hastings, a former claimant to the throne of Scotland. Born on 6 May 1262, John was only a year younger than Isabel's father, and had been widowed from the Earl of Pembroke's sister Isabel de Valence since October 1305. John Hastings junior, son of John and Isabel de Valence, was born in 1286, and was several years older than his stepmother - which has confused some historians, most notably Natalie Fryde, who assume it was the younger John who married Isabel Despenser (in fact, he married Juliana de Leyburne). The elder John was a close associate of the Elder Despenser from the mid-1290s onwards, if not earlier, and served on Despenser's council. In 1308, he and Despenser were two of the few barons who stayed at Edward II's side during the Gaveston crisis.
Despite the huge gap, Isabel bore John Hastings three children. Their elder son Thomas died childless on 11 January 1333, and their daughter Margaret married William, Lord Martin, only to be widowed in 1326 when she can't have been more than about sixteen. She married Sir Robert Wateville soon afterwards, and died in 1359. (There were two men in England at the time called Sir Robert de Wateville, confusingly, and separating their careers is difficult. One, presumably this one, served in the younger Despenser's retinue). John and Isabel's second son Hugh Hastings married Margery Foliot, and was very active in the Hundred Years War with his half-nephew Laurence Hastings, Earl of Pembroke. He also served as Queen Philippa's steward in the mid-1340s and was appointed Seneschal of Gascony in May 1347, a position he never took up, as he died a few weeks later. His tomb in Elsing, Norfolk, was opened in 1978, revealing that he had been five feet ten inches tall, had osteoarthritis in his shoulders and elbows, and had at some point suffered a severe blow to the mouth.
John, Lord Hastings, died in February 1313. Sometime in 1318, Isabel Despenser married for the third time, to Ralph de Monthermer, who had made a secret marriage to Joan of Acre in 1297. He had been widowed since April 1307, and was also much older than Isabel, probably born in 1262. Letters of Edward II written before he became King reveal that he was on very good terms with Ralph; however, Ralph didn't play a big role in Edward's reign, though he fought for the King at Bannockburn, where he was captured (and released without ransom). Isabel and Ralph married without the necessary royal licence, for which they received a pardon on 12 August 1319.
Isabel continued to use the name Hastings throughout her third marriage and widowhood. In September 1324, she was put in charge of the household of Edward II and Queen Isabella's daughters Eleanor and Joan, aged six and three - an act inevitably described as 'stealing' Isabella's children from her, though it was usual for royal children to have their own households from a very young age, and royal/noble women in the Middle Age rarely brought up their own children. Eleanor de Clare took charge of the household of John of Eltham, Edward II's younger son.
Ralph de Monthermer died on 5 April 1325, leaving two sons and two daughters by his marriage to Joan of Acre. Isabel continued to take care of Edward II's daughters. In October 1326, she was (presumably) with them in Bristol Castle when Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer and their followers took the town. She was probably inside the castle when her father was hanged in his armour outside; the chronicler Jean Froissart wrote later that little Eleanor and Joan saw the execution out of the window.
Like her sister Aline, Isabel was mostly left in peace by Roger Mortimer and Isabella, though in June 1328, she acknowledged a debt of just under £300 to Isabella - whether a real debt or not, I don't know. (Her brother Hugh had forced people to bind themselves to him by acknowledging fake debts).
In December 1327, Edward II's niece Elizabeth de Clare left her young children in Isabel's care while she attended her uncle's funeral - a nice gesture on Elizabeth's part, given all that she had suffered at the hands of Isabel's brother.
Isabel Despenser Hastings died on 4 or 5 December 1334, leaving lands in Huntingdonshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Suffolk and Hampshire to her son Hugh Hastings and her step-grandson Laurence Hastings. She had outlived three husbands, and lived as a widow for just under a decade, but was probably still only about forty-four years old.
Philip, the fourth child, was probably born about 1292/93. He was certainly born by 1294, when a letter patent of his father apointed the rector of 'Louctheburg' as his guardian. On 12 April 1306, in Edward I's reign, Philip's uncle Guy Beauchamp received a "licence for Guy de Bello Campo, earl of Warwick, to enfeoff Philip son of Hugh le Despenser of all his lands in England which are held of the king". Guy was unmarried and childless at this time (he would later have two sons and five daughters) and decided to make Philip his heir.
Philip's wife Margaret Goushill was born on 12 May 1294, the only child and heiress of Ralph Goushill. She inherited lands in Shropshire, Yorkshire, Essex and Lincolnshire. The date of their wedding is not known, but was probably around 1310. Their only child, also Philip, was born on 6 April 1313, and Philip died on 24 September of the same year, aged probably about twenty, and long before his brother became the real ruler of England.
Margaret Goushill married her second husband John Ros sometime before 22 April 1314, less than seven months after Philip's death. He was the second son of William, Lord Ros; his elder brother William was one of the delegates sent to depose Edward II in January 1327. His mother Maud de Vaux was the sister of Petronilla, the mother of Maud de Nerford, the Earl of Surrey's mistress.
On Sunday 22 February 1316, in the cathedral church of Lincoln, Hugh Despenser the Younger attacked Ros in the middle of Parliament, in the presence of the King. He strode up to him and punched him in the face until he drew blood, "and inflicted other outrages on him...to the terror of the people present at the said parliament."
The reason for the attack - according to Hugh himself - was that Ros had tried to arrest Sir Ingelram Berenger, a knight long in the service of the Elder Despenser, whom Hugh had probably known most of his life. However, I can't help wondering if Ros's marriage to Philip's widow had something to do with it, too. Ros and Margaret married less than seven months after Philip's death, which was very fast, and perhaps Hugh was angry at the implied insult to his brother, and the attempted arrest of Berenger was the final straw.
Hugh, amusingly, defended himself by claiming that Ros had attacked him first, "heaping outrageous insults on the same Hugh [and] taunted him with insolent words, and putting his hand to his knife he menaced the same Hugh, and made a rush towards the said Hugh as if he wanted to strike him with his knife..." Hugh claimed that he had merely stretched out his hand to prevent Ros from striking him, and accidentally hit him in the face. You'd think he could have come up with a better story, especially as just about everyone in Parliament had witnessed the attack, not least Edward II himself. Hugh was fined the staggeringly huge sum of £10,000, many millions in modern values, which needless to say he never paid. Four years later, after he had become Edward's favourite, the King "of his special grace pardoned the aforesaid Hugh the aforesaid trespass".
Margaret Goushill died on 29 July 1349, aged fifty-five. She had outlived her son Sir Philip Despenser by three months; he died on 23 April 1349, just past his thirty-sixth birthday, leaving a six-year-old son, also Philip. (This Philip grew up to have a son, and the son grew up to have a son. Bet you can't guess what they were called.)
Margaret was the fifth Despenser child. Her father arranged her marriage to John de St Amand in 1313, paying St Amand a dowry of 1000 marks (£666), a standard amount for the nobility at the time. The date of her marriage places Margaret's birth around 1296/98.
John, Lord de St Amand, was probably born around 1280, so was a few years older than his wife. He was the third son of Amaury de St Amand, who supported Henry III in the Barons' Wars and died in 1285. John's elder brothers Guy (1267-1287) and Amaury (1268-July 1310), the Governor of Bordeaux, died childless, so John had become his father's heir by the time of his marriage. He was a doctor of canon law and acted as his father-in-law's attorney, and held lands in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Sussex, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. He was first summoned to Parliament in 1313. [There's an excellent article on the St Amand family here.]
John and Margaret's son Amaury (or Amauri, or Almaric or Almeric) de St Amand was probably born in early 1314; he proved his age on 16 March 1335, and did homage for his lands. He served as Justiciar of Ireland, fought in Scotland and France, and married, before 3 November 1329, Maud Burnell, niece of Edward Burnell [above]. John and Margaret also had a daughter Isabel, who married Richard de Haudlo; Richard was the son of John de Haudlo, an adherent of the Despensers since 1299, and was either the half-brother or stepbrother of Maud Burnell. Amaury de St Amand lived until 11 September 1381.
The date of Margaret Despenser de St Amand's death is not known, but as she didn't play any role in the regime of her father and brother as her elder sisters did, it's possible that she died young. John de St Amand died on or shortly before 25 January 1330, having been Commissioner of the Peace in Bedfordshire in 1329. He doesn't seem to have played any role in supporting his father-in-law and brother-in-law in 1326.
Elizabeth was the sixth and youngest Despenser child. Sometime before 20 May 1316, she married the widowed Ralph, Lord Camoys, which would place her birth around 1299/1301. I should point out that Ralph's second wife is usually said to have been an Elizabeth Rogate, not Elizabeth Despenser. However, this Google thread sets out the case that Elizabeth was in fact a daughter of Hugh Despenser the Elder.
Ralph was another long-term follower of the Despensers, probably born around 1280. He was a member of the Elder Despenser's retinue as early as 1299, though he wasn't knighted until the great Feast of the Swan of 22 May 1306. In 1303, he married Margaret de Braose, and had a son Thomas. He was apparently taken prisoner at Bannockburn, and made two pilgrimages to Santiago.
Elizabeth and Ralph had five children: John, Hugh, Ralph, Isabel and Elizabeth. The names Hugh and Isabel, almost certainly named after Hugh the Elder and Isabel Beauchamp, are a strong indicator that Elizabeth was a Despenser, not a Rogate. Likewise, Ralph Camoys was the first cousin of Margaret Goushill's mother Ela Camoys; Margaret Goushill married Elizabeth's brother Philip, yet another inter-marriage among the Despenser affinity.
Ralph Camoys was closely associated with the Despensers, his father-in-law and brother-in-law; in the charges against them in Parliament in 1321, he is named as one of their 'evil and corrupt counsellors'. However, he survived their downfall; on 19 February 1327, there's a record of a "[p]ardon to Ralph de Camoys, knight, for adherence to Hugh le Despenser the younger, lately a rebel." Ralph crops up occasionally in the records of Edward III's reign - for example, on 12 March 1334, he and other men were accused of carrying away four tuns of wine, worth £20, and other goods, from a shipwreck in Sussex, and also of carrying away the deer and assaulting the servants of John, Lord Mowbray.
Ralph died before 24 June 1336. The date of Elizabeth Despenser Camoys' death is not known; an 'Elizabeth, widow of Ralph Camoys' mentioned in 1370 and sometimes assumed to be her was in fact her granddaughter-in-law. William, Lord Hastings, executed by Richard III in 1483, was their great-great-grandson (his mother was Alice Camoys). Ralph and Elizabeth's daughter Isabel Camoys was Abbess of Romsey from 1352-1396. In 1344, their son Hugh Camoys and his first cousin Hugh Despenser the Even Younger went abroad with Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel who got a divorce from Hugh the Even Younger's sister Isabel that year. There's a great site on the Camoys family here.
Hugh Despenser the Elder and Isabel Beauchamp had more than twenty grandchildren, and Isabel had seven others, through her daughter Maud de Chaworth. The Despensers are an interesting example of how marriage was used by the nobility at this time to bind their adherents and supporters to them, and to strengthen their affinity - though the Despensers' connections couldn't save them from the consequences of their greed and tyranny.
29 April, 2007
Queen Isabella's Pregnancies and Children
Edward II and Queen Isabella married in January 1308, and conceived their first child a little over four years later. The long delay was because of Isabella's youth - she was only twelve years old at the time of her wedding. Exactly when the royal couple first consummated their marriage cannot of course be known, but may not have taken place before Isabella was fourteen. Early marriage, and a gap of several years between marriage and first conception, was normal in the royal family at this time. Edward II's de Clare nieces all married at thirteen, and didn't conceive for several years: Eleanor was fifteen or sixteen, Elizabeth sixteen, and Margaret seventeen or close to it. Edward's grandmother Eleanor of Provence married Henry III when she was twelve or thirteen, and didn't give birth to her first child for three and a half years.
It's very likely that Edward delayed consummating his marriage until Isabella was old enough to carry and give birth to a child without danger to her developing body. John Carmi Parsons, biographer of Eleanor of Castile, believes that Eleanor gave birth to a stillborn daughter in 1255, seven months after her marriage, when she was only thirteen years old. If Edward had heard that story - of a sister twenty-nine years his senior - it may have encouraged him to delay consummation. Rather than condemn him for 'ignoring' and 'neglecting' his young wife in favour of Piers Gaveston, as many novelists and historians do, perhaps we should be applauding him for taking his wife's youth and physical immaturity into consideration, although, like all kings, he desperately needed a son and heir.
The future Edward III was born on 13 November 1312. A full-term pregnancy is thirty-eight weeks from the date of conception, which takes us back to Monday 21 February 1312. On that day, Edward II was in York with Piers Gaveston and Margaret de Clare, celebrating the birth of Piers' and Margaret's daughter Joan. Isabella's Household Book shows that on the 21st, she was at Copmanthorpe or Bishopthorpe, three or four miles outside York, where her belongings were put on a barge to be taken along the river Ouse into the town. She had been travelling the approximately 210 miles from Windsor since early February, to join her husband; on 17 February, she sent him a basket of lampreys from Doncaster, and the two kept in close contact via messengers. [Four days to travel the forty miles from Doncaster to just south of York: an interesting illustration of the slowness of medieval travel.]
Edward III was probably conceived within a week or so of Isabella's arrival in York on the 21st or 22nd. I'm pointing all this out in detail to make it perfectly clear that Edward and Isabella WERE together at the right time to conceive Edward III - although many people still try to argue that their marriage can't have been consummated, as this silly thread from the 2003 archives of the Richard III Society Yahoo group shows. Even if Edward III was premature, Edward and Isabella were together in York until the beginning of April 1312. Easter Sunday fell on 26 March that year, so they evidently conceived their son during Lent, when intercourse was forbidden. Tsk.
I'll also point out that there isn't even the most oblique hint in any contemporary or later source that Edward II might not have fathered Edward III; as far as I can tell, it was the late twentieth century before that occurred to anyone. Whatever Edward II's contemporaries thought of his sexuality, nobody ever doubted that Edward III and his siblings were Edward's children. And to put paid to the theory that Roger Mortimer was Edward III's real father (also put forward in Paul Doherty's Death of a King), Roger was in Ireland in 1312, a country Isabella never visited. Neither was she in Scotland in 1312, abandoned by Edward, as in Edith Felber's 2006 novel Queen of Shadows - which constantly drops coy hints that some mysterious Scotsman fathered Edward III without ever revealing who it was, a plot device I find pointless and irritating. [Robert the Bruce? The ghost of William Wallace? Who knows?]
Isabella was four months pregnant when Piers Gaveston was killed in June 1312 - proof, if nothing else, that whatever the nature of Edward's close relationship with Piers, it wasn't an impediment to his marital relations with Isabella (or to Piers' with Margaret, for that matter - or to both men's relations with other women, as they both fathered illegitimate children).
Edward III was born on Monday 13 November 1312, at Windsor Castle. Edward spent a few weeks at Windsor with Isabella late in her pregnancy, from mid-September to 25 October. He left, then returned on 30 October, and left again on 9 November for Sheen, another royal palace, about twenty miles away. He hurried back on 12 November, probably because he'd received a message that Isabella had gone into labour. The ecstatic Edward rewarded John and Joan Launge, who brought him the message, with £20 and the vast sum of £80 a year for life, which gave them a higher income than some knights.
Isabella sent a letter to the Mayor and aldermen of London proclaiming the birth (it's quoted in the sidebar on the left) and the Londoners went mad with joy. The Mayor himself led the dancing in the streets and ordered tuns of free wine to be provided for the citizenry. The festivities continued for a full week.
Isabella was probably just seventeen, or close to it, and Edward II was twenty-eight. The birth of his son helped to assuage his terrible grief for Piers, while for Isabella, becoming the mother of the heir to England dramatically enhanced her status. The young Edward, created Earl of Chester when he was eight days old, had six godfathers, including Isabella's uncle the Count of Evreux and Hugh Despenser the Elder. A little less than fourteen years later, young Edward would watch his godfather executed at Bristol.
The fortunate survival of an apothecary's account of November 1313, which mentions two purchases of pennyroyal for Isabella, tells us that the Queen had probably suffered a miscarriage. The traditional medicinal use of pennyroyal is to stimulate uterine activity; it increases uterine contractions and menstrual flow, and can be used to induce abortion. [In modern times, pennyroyal is considered too dangerous to be used in this way, because of the adverse side effects.]
Alison Weir says that Isabella suffered no known miscarriages or stillbirths, but she doesn't mention the pennyroyal purchases, and besides, it suits her purposes to say that Edward rarely visited Isabella's bed, to portray the Queen as a long-suffering and neglected wife. But certainly the long gap between Isabella's and Edward's first and second children - November 1312 to August 1316 - suggests that a miscarriage or stillbirth, or even more than one, is possible. Poor Isabella was in a bad way in 1313: when she and Edward were visiting France in June that year, the silken pavilion where they were sleeping caught fire one night, and Edward had to scoop up Isabella and rush outside with her to safety. She suffered burns to her arm, bad enough that they were still being treated two years later. All their possessions were destroyed.
On Friday 15 August 1316, Edward and Isabella's second son John - the 'spare' part of 'the heir and the spare' - was born at Eltham Palace south-east of London, which Edward had given to Isabella. Again, approximately thirty-eight weeks prior to the birth, in November 1315, Edward and Isabella were together, at the royal hunting lodge of Clipstone in Sherwood Forest. [Roger Mortimer was in Ireland.]
Edward was in York when his son was born, and rewarded Isabella's steward Ebulo de Montibus with the huge sum of £100 for bringing him the news. He paid £40 for the boy's baptism, which took place on 20 August, and gave Isabella gifts of jewellery and land. She and the little Lord John joined Edward in York in late September.
On Sunday 18 June 1318, Edward and Isabella's elder daughter Eleanor was born at Woodstock Palace near Oxford. Edward arrived at Woodstock on the day of Eleanor's birth, and spent ten days there. The likely conception date of mid to late September 1317 puts Edward and Isabella together at Lincoln, Tickhill Castle and York; in fact, they spent most of 1317 together, and Roger Mortimer was in Ireland for the entire year. Edward paid £333 for a feast to celebrate the birth, his first daughter after three sons (including his illegitimate son Adam).
Isabella and Edward spent most of the year 1319 in York. The chronicler Robert of Reading claims that Isabella gave birth to a daughter, Joan, sometime this year. No other source mentions this birth, and it's likely that the chronicler made a mistake and placed the birth of their later daughter Joan during this year. Although it's possible that he was correct, and a daughter was born who presumably died shortly after birth, given the absence of any commemoration for a dead child, it's more likely that Robert made a mistake.
Isabella gave birth to their second (third?) daughter Joan on Sunday 5 July 1321, at the Tower of London, in the middle of the Despenser crisis. Edward was thirty-seven at the time of his youngest child's birth, Isabella probably twenty-five. The Tower was rather run-down and dilapidated, and rain came in on Isabella's bed while she was in labour - a furious Edward later dismissed the Constable of the Tower from his post.
Edward's son Adam is presumed to have died in 1322, as he never appears in any records after this year. That Edward and Isabella had no more children after 1321 is probably indicative of the breakdown of their relationship after the younger Despenser's return from exile and piracy, but it's also possible that Isabella miscarried, or suffered stillbirths. Despenser himself certainly fathered several children after 1321: Eleanor de Clare is known to have given birth in 1323 and late 1325, and may also have borne Hugh's posthumous child after November 1326. [At least four or five of Despenser's ten children by Eleanor were born after he became Edward's favourite. Nicholas de Litlyngton, Abbot of Westminster 1362-1386, may have been his illegitimate son.]
Isabella's affair with Roger Mortimer began in Paris in late 1325. The chronicler Jean Froissart reports that, not too long before their downfall in October 1330, "it was reported that she was with child by Mortimer". Froissart wasn't even born in 1330, and his chronicle is often unreliable and heavily based on hearsay, but he knew Edward III and Queen Philippa very well, so it seems unlikely that he would have written down scurrilous unsubstantiated gossip about Edward's mother if he wasn't sure it was true.
Froissart's allegation is given substance by Isabella's making a kind of will that settled some of her properties on Roger in September 1329, and again in July 1330 - something she had previously done only once before, when pregnant in 1312. Ian Mortimer postulates that Isabella gave birth in December 1329, when she and Roger spent many weeks at Kenilworth; Alison Weir's theory is that she was pregnant at the time of Roger Mortimer's arrest in October 1330, and either miscarried, suffered a stillbirth, or the child died shortly after birth. It's unclear, but certainly there was no living child of Isabella and Roger, which was probably a source of great relief to Edward III; any son would be his half-brother, and Roger Mortimer would be linked to the King by blood. Given Isabella and Roger's five-year relationship, perhaps the only surprising aspect is that she hadn't conceived earlier (again, it's possible that she did, but no records survive.)
In conclusion, there's no reason at all to doubt that Isabella's children were Edward II's. Although she had a relationship with Mortimer, this happened in France when she was beyond Edward's reach, and after she had already borne Edward's children. Anyone who believes that Isabella took a previous lover must explain how the Queen of England, with a household of 180 people and surrounded by servants and courtiers every minute of her life, with a lack of privacy modern Western people can scarcely comprehend, could have conducted an affair without anyone noticing. Amusingly, in Queen of Shadows, Isabella 'escapes' from court and manages to have sex with Mortimer, her husband's enemy imprisoned in the Tower, by the simple expedient of wearing a hood - apparently a magical hood that renders her invisible. Two of Isabella's sisters-in-law in Paris did commit adultery, but inevitably they were found out - they were imprisoned for life, and their lovers grotesquely executed. If Isabella had taken a previous lover, we would know all about it, because it would be one of the great scandals of the Middle Ages.
It's very likely that Edward delayed consummating his marriage until Isabella was old enough to carry and give birth to a child without danger to her developing body. John Carmi Parsons, biographer of Eleanor of Castile, believes that Eleanor gave birth to a stillborn daughter in 1255, seven months after her marriage, when she was only thirteen years old. If Edward had heard that story - of a sister twenty-nine years his senior - it may have encouraged him to delay consummation. Rather than condemn him for 'ignoring' and 'neglecting' his young wife in favour of Piers Gaveston, as many novelists and historians do, perhaps we should be applauding him for taking his wife's youth and physical immaturity into consideration, although, like all kings, he desperately needed a son and heir.
The future Edward III was born on 13 November 1312. A full-term pregnancy is thirty-eight weeks from the date of conception, which takes us back to Monday 21 February 1312. On that day, Edward II was in York with Piers Gaveston and Margaret de Clare, celebrating the birth of Piers' and Margaret's daughter Joan. Isabella's Household Book shows that on the 21st, she was at Copmanthorpe or Bishopthorpe, three or four miles outside York, where her belongings were put on a barge to be taken along the river Ouse into the town. She had been travelling the approximately 210 miles from Windsor since early February, to join her husband; on 17 February, she sent him a basket of lampreys from Doncaster, and the two kept in close contact via messengers. [Four days to travel the forty miles from Doncaster to just south of York: an interesting illustration of the slowness of medieval travel.]
Edward III was probably conceived within a week or so of Isabella's arrival in York on the 21st or 22nd. I'm pointing all this out in detail to make it perfectly clear that Edward and Isabella WERE together at the right time to conceive Edward III - although many people still try to argue that their marriage can't have been consummated, as this silly thread from the 2003 archives of the Richard III Society Yahoo group shows. Even if Edward III was premature, Edward and Isabella were together in York until the beginning of April 1312. Easter Sunday fell on 26 March that year, so they evidently conceived their son during Lent, when intercourse was forbidden. Tsk.
I'll also point out that there isn't even the most oblique hint in any contemporary or later source that Edward II might not have fathered Edward III; as far as I can tell, it was the late twentieth century before that occurred to anyone. Whatever Edward II's contemporaries thought of his sexuality, nobody ever doubted that Edward III and his siblings were Edward's children. And to put paid to the theory that Roger Mortimer was Edward III's real father (also put forward in Paul Doherty's Death of a King), Roger was in Ireland in 1312, a country Isabella never visited. Neither was she in Scotland in 1312, abandoned by Edward, as in Edith Felber's 2006 novel Queen of Shadows - which constantly drops coy hints that some mysterious Scotsman fathered Edward III without ever revealing who it was, a plot device I find pointless and irritating. [Robert the Bruce? The ghost of William Wallace? Who knows?]
Isabella was four months pregnant when Piers Gaveston was killed in June 1312 - proof, if nothing else, that whatever the nature of Edward's close relationship with Piers, it wasn't an impediment to his marital relations with Isabella (or to Piers' with Margaret, for that matter - or to both men's relations with other women, as they both fathered illegitimate children).
Edward III was born on Monday 13 November 1312, at Windsor Castle. Edward spent a few weeks at Windsor with Isabella late in her pregnancy, from mid-September to 25 October. He left, then returned on 30 October, and left again on 9 November for Sheen, another royal palace, about twenty miles away. He hurried back on 12 November, probably because he'd received a message that Isabella had gone into labour. The ecstatic Edward rewarded John and Joan Launge, who brought him the message, with £20 and the vast sum of £80 a year for life, which gave them a higher income than some knights.
Isabella sent a letter to the Mayor and aldermen of London proclaiming the birth (it's quoted in the sidebar on the left) and the Londoners went mad with joy. The Mayor himself led the dancing in the streets and ordered tuns of free wine to be provided for the citizenry. The festivities continued for a full week.
Isabella was probably just seventeen, or close to it, and Edward II was twenty-eight. The birth of his son helped to assuage his terrible grief for Piers, while for Isabella, becoming the mother of the heir to England dramatically enhanced her status. The young Edward, created Earl of Chester when he was eight days old, had six godfathers, including Isabella's uncle the Count of Evreux and Hugh Despenser the Elder. A little less than fourteen years later, young Edward would watch his godfather executed at Bristol.
The fortunate survival of an apothecary's account of November 1313, which mentions two purchases of pennyroyal for Isabella, tells us that the Queen had probably suffered a miscarriage. The traditional medicinal use of pennyroyal is to stimulate uterine activity; it increases uterine contractions and menstrual flow, and can be used to induce abortion. [In modern times, pennyroyal is considered too dangerous to be used in this way, because of the adverse side effects.]
Alison Weir says that Isabella suffered no known miscarriages or stillbirths, but she doesn't mention the pennyroyal purchases, and besides, it suits her purposes to say that Edward rarely visited Isabella's bed, to portray the Queen as a long-suffering and neglected wife. But certainly the long gap between Isabella's and Edward's first and second children - November 1312 to August 1316 - suggests that a miscarriage or stillbirth, or even more than one, is possible. Poor Isabella was in a bad way in 1313: when she and Edward were visiting France in June that year, the silken pavilion where they were sleeping caught fire one night, and Edward had to scoop up Isabella and rush outside with her to safety. She suffered burns to her arm, bad enough that they were still being treated two years later. All their possessions were destroyed.
On Friday 15 August 1316, Edward and Isabella's second son John - the 'spare' part of 'the heir and the spare' - was born at Eltham Palace south-east of London, which Edward had given to Isabella. Again, approximately thirty-eight weeks prior to the birth, in November 1315, Edward and Isabella were together, at the royal hunting lodge of Clipstone in Sherwood Forest. [Roger Mortimer was in Ireland.]
Edward was in York when his son was born, and rewarded Isabella's steward Ebulo de Montibus with the huge sum of £100 for bringing him the news. He paid £40 for the boy's baptism, which took place on 20 August, and gave Isabella gifts of jewellery and land. She and the little Lord John joined Edward in York in late September.
On Sunday 18 June 1318, Edward and Isabella's elder daughter Eleanor was born at Woodstock Palace near Oxford. Edward arrived at Woodstock on the day of Eleanor's birth, and spent ten days there. The likely conception date of mid to late September 1317 puts Edward and Isabella together at Lincoln, Tickhill Castle and York; in fact, they spent most of 1317 together, and Roger Mortimer was in Ireland for the entire year. Edward paid £333 for a feast to celebrate the birth, his first daughter after three sons (including his illegitimate son Adam).
Isabella and Edward spent most of the year 1319 in York. The chronicler Robert of Reading claims that Isabella gave birth to a daughter, Joan, sometime this year. No other source mentions this birth, and it's likely that the chronicler made a mistake and placed the birth of their later daughter Joan during this year. Although it's possible that he was correct, and a daughter was born who presumably died shortly after birth, given the absence of any commemoration for a dead child, it's more likely that Robert made a mistake.
Isabella gave birth to their second (third?) daughter Joan on Sunday 5 July 1321, at the Tower of London, in the middle of the Despenser crisis. Edward was thirty-seven at the time of his youngest child's birth, Isabella probably twenty-five. The Tower was rather run-down and dilapidated, and rain came in on Isabella's bed while she was in labour - a furious Edward later dismissed the Constable of the Tower from his post.
Edward's son Adam is presumed to have died in 1322, as he never appears in any records after this year. That Edward and Isabella had no more children after 1321 is probably indicative of the breakdown of their relationship after the younger Despenser's return from exile and piracy, but it's also possible that Isabella miscarried, or suffered stillbirths. Despenser himself certainly fathered several children after 1321: Eleanor de Clare is known to have given birth in 1323 and late 1325, and may also have borne Hugh's posthumous child after November 1326. [At least four or five of Despenser's ten children by Eleanor were born after he became Edward's favourite. Nicholas de Litlyngton, Abbot of Westminster 1362-1386, may have been his illegitimate son.]
Isabella's affair with Roger Mortimer began in Paris in late 1325. The chronicler Jean Froissart reports that, not too long before their downfall in October 1330, "it was reported that she was with child by Mortimer". Froissart wasn't even born in 1330, and his chronicle is often unreliable and heavily based on hearsay, but he knew Edward III and Queen Philippa very well, so it seems unlikely that he would have written down scurrilous unsubstantiated gossip about Edward's mother if he wasn't sure it was true.
Froissart's allegation is given substance by Isabella's making a kind of will that settled some of her properties on Roger in September 1329, and again in July 1330 - something she had previously done only once before, when pregnant in 1312. Ian Mortimer postulates that Isabella gave birth in December 1329, when she and Roger spent many weeks at Kenilworth; Alison Weir's theory is that she was pregnant at the time of Roger Mortimer's arrest in October 1330, and either miscarried, suffered a stillbirth, or the child died shortly after birth. It's unclear, but certainly there was no living child of Isabella and Roger, which was probably a source of great relief to Edward III; any son would be his half-brother, and Roger Mortimer would be linked to the King by blood. Given Isabella and Roger's five-year relationship, perhaps the only surprising aspect is that she hadn't conceived earlier (again, it's possible that she did, but no records survive.)
In conclusion, there's no reason at all to doubt that Isabella's children were Edward II's. Although she had a relationship with Mortimer, this happened in France when she was beyond Edward's reach, and after she had already borne Edward's children. Anyone who believes that Isabella took a previous lover must explain how the Queen of England, with a household of 180 people and surrounded by servants and courtiers every minute of her life, with a lack of privacy modern Western people can scarcely comprehend, could have conducted an affair without anyone noticing. Amusingly, in Queen of Shadows, Isabella 'escapes' from court and manages to have sex with Mortimer, her husband's enemy imprisoned in the Tower, by the simple expedient of wearing a hood - apparently a magical hood that renders her invisible. Two of Isabella's sisters-in-law in Paris did commit adultery, but inevitably they were found out - they were imprisoned for life, and their lovers grotesquely executed. If Isabella had taken a previous lover, we would know all about it, because it would be one of the great scandals of the Middle Ages.
25 April, 2007
Birthday Wishes, Mortimer Ancestry, and Joan de Geneville
Yes, it's the 25th of April again, which means it's a heartfelt 'Happy Birthday, Sire!' to King Edward II, born in Caernarfon Castle on this day in 1284, a mere 723 years ago.
Also, a Happy Birthday (somewhat less heartfelt, admittedly) to Roger Mortimer, born 720 years ago today, probably in Wigmore Castle. This post is about Roger's family, and his wife Joan de Geneville.
Roger's father Sir Edmund Mortimer, Lord of Wigmore, was born in about 1251, and was originally intended to become a clerk; he studied theology at Oxford. However, the death of his elder brother Ralph in 1276 made him heir to his father, and he had to give up his studies and return to the Welsh Marches, where he and his younger brothers played a big role in the capture and death of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, Prince of Wales, in 1282. Edmund married Margaret de Fiennes in September 1285.
Edmund Mortimer's mother Maud de Braose is one of those brilliant medieval women someone really should write a novel about. She was born, probably in the late 1220s, as one of the four daughters of William de Braose, who was hanged by Llywelyn the Great in 1230 for his adulterous affair with Llywelyn's wife Joanna, illegitimate daughter of King John (fans of Sharon Penman will be familiar with the story, recounted in Here Be Dragons). Maud's mother Eva was one of the daughters of the great William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke and Regent of England (died 1219). Maud de Braose, Lady Mortimer, died in 1301, in her seventies.
Edmund's father Roger Mortimer Senior, born in about 1230 or 1232, was himself the grandson of Llywelyn the Great: Roger's mother was Gwladys Ddu ('the Dark-Eyed') one of Llywelyn's daughters - either by Joanna or, more likely, by Llywelyn's mistress Tangwystl. Roger the grandfather was an intensely loyal supporter of Henry III and the Lord Edward (later Edward I) in the Barons' Wars of the 1260s. After the Battle of Evesham in 1265, Roger sent Simon de Montfort's severed head to his wife Maud. I can't help wondering what the heck she did with it ("We've enlarged the windows to make the place a bit brighter, over there on the wall you'll see some lovely Castilian tapestries sent to us by the Lady Eleanor, and on the table, there's the rotting skull of the Earl of Leicester. It adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the solar, don't you think?")
During the battle of Evesham, Roger killed Hugh Despenser, one of de Montfort's greatest supporters and father and grandfather of the notorious Hugh Despensers of Edward II's reign. Decades later, Despenser the grandson swore revenge on Roger Mortimer the grandson for this act. Roger Mortimer the grandfather, who crops up fairly often as a character in Sharon Penman's The Reckoning, died in 1282.
The younger Roger Mortimer's mother was Margaret de Fiennes, probably born sometime in the 1260s. Her father was William de Fiennes, who was killed at the Battle of the Golden Spurs (Battle of Courtrai/Kortrijk) on 11 July 1302. Margaret's brother John married Isabelle, who was, you guessed it, yet another child of Guy de Dampierre, the many-daughtered Count of Flanders of my previous post. Margaret's sister Joan married Baron Wake of Liddell and was the grandmother of Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, and her aunt Maud de Fiennes was the mother of Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, Edward II's brother-in-law.
Margaret de Fiennes' mother Blanche de Brienne (c. 1245-1302), Roger Mortimer's grandmother, was the excellently-named "Dame de Louplande". Blanche's father Jean de Brienne (c. 1221-1296) was the half-brother of Yolande, Queen of Jerusalem, who was the second wife of Emperor Friedrich II. Jean's mother Berenguela was the daughter of King Alfonso IX of Leon and Queen Berenguela of Castile, which makes Jean the nephew of Fernando III of Castile, Edward II's grandfather. In 1256/57, Jean married his second wife Marie de Coucy, widow of Alexander II of Scotland - so Roger Mortimer's great-grandfather was the stepfather of King Alexander III.
Both of Roger's grandmothers, who died in 1301 and 1302, his grandfather William de Fiennes, who died in 1302, and his great-grandfather Jean de Brienne, who died in 1296, lived well into Roger's lifetime. I can imagine that he must have heard some wonderful stories from them.
Roger Mortimer's siblings were: John, king's yeoman, who died in 1318; Maud, who married Theobald de Verdon; and Joan and Elizabeth, who became nuns. Hugh Audley, who married Piers Gaveston's widow Margaret de Clare, was the son of Isolde Mortimer, who's often said to have been Edmund's daughter. However, Audley was born around 1290, so obviously can't have been the grandson of Edmund Mortimer and Margaret de Fiennes, who married in 1285. Isolde may have been a daughter of Edmund by an unknown first wife, but as he was a clerk, it's more likely that she was his sister, making Hugh Audley Roger's cousin, not his nephew.
Edmund Mortimer died in July 1304, of wounds sustained at the battle of Builth, when Roger was seventeen. At the request of the Lord Edward, Prince of Wales, King Edward I granted Roger's wardship to Piers Gaveston, who wasn't too much older (in his early twenties).
Margaret de Fiennes lived long enough to see her son become the lover of a queen, overthrow a king, and suffer death by hanging. She died in 1334, probably in her seventies.
In September 1301, fourteen-year-old Roger Mortimer married Joan de Geneville, aged fifteen, maybe sixteen - she was born on 2 February 1286, or possibly 1285. Joan was the eldest of three daughters. Her father Piers died in 1292, and her grandfather Geoffrey de Geneville, anxious to avoid the break-up of his estates, placed her sisters Beatrice and Maud at Aconbury Priory. [The law of primogeniture, 'the eldest son inherits', did not apply to women, so in the absence of a male heir, sisters inherited equal portions of land. Placing women in convents was the only way they could be disinherited at this time.] The Geneville inheritance comprised vast estates in England, Wales and Ireland.
Joan also inherited lands in France from her mother Jeanne de Lusignan, or Jeanne de la Marche (died 1323), who was the daughter of Hugh XII de Lusignan, Count of La Marche and grandson of Isabelle d'Angoulême, widow of King John and Edward II's great-grandmother.
Geoffrey de Geneville, Joan's grandfather, was a French baron of Champagne who inherited estates in England, Wales and Ireland around 1250. Geoffrey was another loyal supporter of the Lord Edward in the Barons' Wars, and acted as Justiciar of Ireland and as a mediator between Edward I and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd. He died in 1314, in his eighties. Joan de Geneville's paternal grandmother was Maud de Lacy (died 1304), granddaughter of the earl of Norfolk and also granddaughter and co-heiress of Walter de Lacy.
For twenty years, Roger and Joan enjoyed a close and successful relationship. Twelve children survived into adulthood, four sons and eight daughters, and Joan accompanied Roger to Ireland during his successful career there as King's Lieutenant and Justiciar. All that changed in early 1322, when Roger submitted to Edward II during the king's successful campaign against the Marchers, and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Joan herself was imprisoned in Hampshire; three of her elder daughters and three of her sons were also imprisoned, in convents (the girls) and castles (the boys).
In February 1323, Queen Isabella and Eleanor de Clare both petitioned Edward II in an apparently unsuccessful attempt to improve Joan's living conditions. Isabella referred to Joan as 'our dear and well-beloved cousin'. One the men-at-arms acompanying Joan during her imprisonment was William Ockley, later one of Edward II's jailers at Berkeley Castle - proof that what goes around comes around, I suppose.
[Edward II's harsh and unnecessarily vindictive treatment of the wives and children of his enemies is, for me, by far the most unpleasant aspect of his reign, and impossible to justify. As Edward had never before shown cruelty to women, you could argue that the women's treatment was an initiative of the Despensers, but Edward certainly condoned it, and as the king, has to be held responsible. The fact that some of the women he allowed to be so badly mistreated were close members of his family - e.g., his nieces Margaret and Elizabeth de Clare - makes his behaviour even more reprehensible.]
Roger Mortimer and Joan de Geneville didn't see each other again for nearly five years. When exactly they did see each other again is unclear, but may have been in November 1326, when Roger visited his manor of Pembridge, where he and Joan had married twenty-five years earlier. By this time, Roger had been the lover of Queen Isabella for a year or so. What they had to say to each other can of course never be known. How Joan, now forty years old, felt about having to watch her husband conduct an affair with the Queen of England is equally unknowable.
Poor Joan's existence is often ignored by historians and novelists, who focus more or less exclusively on Edward II and Isabella's dysfunctional relationship and ignore the woman who bore Roger Mortimer twelve children, and who was, from the limited evidence available, his supportive and loyal partner for many years. The modern trend of lauding Isabella's 'courage' and 'empowerment' in 'getting out of a bad marriage' doesn't sound quite so impressive when you remember that she deprived Joan of her husband. Somehow, though, Joan de Geneville has always struck me as a dignified woman who would have made the best of the difficult situation.
Whether Joan ever visited Edward III's court, where her husband held power, is unknown. Roger occasionally travelled to the Marches unaccompanied by Isabella or the court, which may have been visits to Joan. In early June 1328, after the wedding of two of their daughters, Roger and Isabella stayed with Joan at Ludlow Castle, which was part of Joan's inheritance from her grandfather. As Isabella was the (dowager) Queen, Joan would have been forced to give precedence to her husband's mistress in her own castle. I'd love to write a fictional scene about that - and I'd give a great deal to know where Roger slept that night!
1328 was an eventful year for the Mortimers - two daughters married, two sons died (John and Roger), and they became grandparents, when Elizabeth Badlesmere, wife of their eldest son Edmund, gave birth to yet another Roger (1328-1360). Edmund had been born in 1302 or 1303, when Roger was only fifteen or sixteen.
It's also possible that their eldest daughter Margaret made them grandparents in the late 1320s - her eldest surviving son Maurice Berkeley was probably born in 1330, but she also had a daughter Joan, who may have been older.
In December 1328, Roger paid for nine chaplains to sing daily masses for the souls of Roger himself, Edward III, Queens Isabella and Philippa, Joan, and their children. In August 1329, two more of Roger and Joan's daughters were married at Wigmore, where Roger held a great Round Table tournament. Presumably Joan was present, with Isabella and Edward III. It's just possible that Queen Isabella was pregnant by Roger at this time, which is pretty intriguing.
After Roger's execution in 1330, Joan's lands were taken into royal hands, and some were not restored until 1336, when she was finally granted a full pardon. This seems to suggest that Edward III was not entirely convinced of her innocence, which he surely would have been if she'd had no contact with Roger during the 'Isabella Years'. It also suggests that Roger and Joan had maintained some kind of relationship - which is, to me, far more interesting than the usual portrayal of Joan as colourless, sexless, unnecessary, abandoned in favour of a younger and far more beautiful woman.
In 1332, Joan petitioned Edward III to have Roger's body removed from the Greyfriars church at Coventry, presumably to be re-buried at Wigmore. This also suggests that she still retained much affection for her husband. She never re-married, or entered a convent.
Joan de Geneville survived Roger by more than a quarter of a century and died at the age of seventy or seventy-one, on 19 October 1356. Her husband's mistress Queen Isabella outlived her by a mere twenty-two months. In 1354, Edward III had reversed all the charges against Roger, so Joan died as the Dowager Countess of March, with her twenty-eight-year-old grandson Roger Mortimer high in the King's favour, and the second Earl of March.
Shortly before she died, Joan may have heard the news that another of her grandsons, twenty-six-year-old Maurice Berkeley - son of Lord Berkeley and Joan's eldest daughter Margaret Mortimer - had distinguished himself at the Battle of Poitiers on 19 September, but had been badly wounded and taken prisoner.
At the time of her death, Joan was the grandmother of the Earls of Pembroke and March, and the mother-in-law of the Earl of Warwick and Lords Berkeley, Charlton and Braose. She had lived long enough to be a great-grandmother several times over:
- Her eldest great-grandchild, Sir John Tuchet, may have been born as early as 1347, but certainly by 1350 - he was the grandson of Joan's daughter Joan and her husband James Audley.
- Edmund Mortimer, later the third Earl of March, son of Roger Mortimer and Philippa Montacute, was born in 1352. Edmund was to marry Edward II's great-granddaughter, Philippa of Clarence.
- Thomas Berkeley, son of Maurice Berkeley and his wife Elizabeth Despenser - daughter of Hugh the Younger - was born in 1353. One or more of Maurice and Elizabeth's three daughters Katherine, Agnes and Elizabeth may have been older than their brother Thomas, but their dates of birth are not recorded. Near the end of the fourteenth century, Thomas Berkeley's daughter Elizabeth, great-great-granddaughter of Roger Mortimer and Joan de Geneville and great-granddaughter of Hugh Despenser the Younger, married the Earl of Warwick, another great-grandson of Roger and Joan.
Only four of Joan's twelve children outlived her: Beatrice Lady Braose, Agnes Countess of Pembroke, Katherine Countess of Warwick, and Geoffrey, who inherited Joan's French lands. (The date of death of Joan's daughter Maud, Lady Charlton, is not known, but she was still alive in 1345.)
Joan de Geneville, Lady Mortimer and Countess of March, great heiress, 1286-1356: a woman with a fascinating life and a fascinating family, who deserves to be remembered as far more than a colourless, abandoned nonentity.
Also, a Happy Birthday (somewhat less heartfelt, admittedly) to Roger Mortimer, born 720 years ago today, probably in Wigmore Castle. This post is about Roger's family, and his wife Joan de Geneville.
Roger's father Sir Edmund Mortimer, Lord of Wigmore, was born in about 1251, and was originally intended to become a clerk; he studied theology at Oxford. However, the death of his elder brother Ralph in 1276 made him heir to his father, and he had to give up his studies and return to the Welsh Marches, where he and his younger brothers played a big role in the capture and death of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, Prince of Wales, in 1282. Edmund married Margaret de Fiennes in September 1285.
Edmund Mortimer's mother Maud de Braose is one of those brilliant medieval women someone really should write a novel about. She was born, probably in the late 1220s, as one of the four daughters of William de Braose, who was hanged by Llywelyn the Great in 1230 for his adulterous affair with Llywelyn's wife Joanna, illegitimate daughter of King John (fans of Sharon Penman will be familiar with the story, recounted in Here Be Dragons). Maud's mother Eva was one of the daughters of the great William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke and Regent of England (died 1219). Maud de Braose, Lady Mortimer, died in 1301, in her seventies.
Edmund's father Roger Mortimer Senior, born in about 1230 or 1232, was himself the grandson of Llywelyn the Great: Roger's mother was Gwladys Ddu ('the Dark-Eyed') one of Llywelyn's daughters - either by Joanna or, more likely, by Llywelyn's mistress Tangwystl. Roger the grandfather was an intensely loyal supporter of Henry III and the Lord Edward (later Edward I) in the Barons' Wars of the 1260s. After the Battle of Evesham in 1265, Roger sent Simon de Montfort's severed head to his wife Maud. I can't help wondering what the heck she did with it ("We've enlarged the windows to make the place a bit brighter, over there on the wall you'll see some lovely Castilian tapestries sent to us by the Lady Eleanor, and on the table, there's the rotting skull of the Earl of Leicester. It adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the solar, don't you think?")
During the battle of Evesham, Roger killed Hugh Despenser, one of de Montfort's greatest supporters and father and grandfather of the notorious Hugh Despensers of Edward II's reign. Decades later, Despenser the grandson swore revenge on Roger Mortimer the grandson for this act. Roger Mortimer the grandfather, who crops up fairly often as a character in Sharon Penman's The Reckoning, died in 1282.
The younger Roger Mortimer's mother was Margaret de Fiennes, probably born sometime in the 1260s. Her father was William de Fiennes, who was killed at the Battle of the Golden Spurs (Battle of Courtrai/Kortrijk) on 11 July 1302. Margaret's brother John married Isabelle, who was, you guessed it, yet another child of Guy de Dampierre, the many-daughtered Count of Flanders of my previous post. Margaret's sister Joan married Baron Wake of Liddell and was the grandmother of Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, and her aunt Maud de Fiennes was the mother of Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, Edward II's brother-in-law.
Margaret de Fiennes' mother Blanche de Brienne (c. 1245-1302), Roger Mortimer's grandmother, was the excellently-named "Dame de Louplande". Blanche's father Jean de Brienne (c. 1221-1296) was the half-brother of Yolande, Queen of Jerusalem, who was the second wife of Emperor Friedrich II. Jean's mother Berenguela was the daughter of King Alfonso IX of Leon and Queen Berenguela of Castile, which makes Jean the nephew of Fernando III of Castile, Edward II's grandfather. In 1256/57, Jean married his second wife Marie de Coucy, widow of Alexander II of Scotland - so Roger Mortimer's great-grandfather was the stepfather of King Alexander III.
Both of Roger's grandmothers, who died in 1301 and 1302, his grandfather William de Fiennes, who died in 1302, and his great-grandfather Jean de Brienne, who died in 1296, lived well into Roger's lifetime. I can imagine that he must have heard some wonderful stories from them.
Roger Mortimer's siblings were: John, king's yeoman, who died in 1318; Maud, who married Theobald de Verdon; and Joan and Elizabeth, who became nuns. Hugh Audley, who married Piers Gaveston's widow Margaret de Clare, was the son of Isolde Mortimer, who's often said to have been Edmund's daughter. However, Audley was born around 1290, so obviously can't have been the grandson of Edmund Mortimer and Margaret de Fiennes, who married in 1285. Isolde may have been a daughter of Edmund by an unknown first wife, but as he was a clerk, it's more likely that she was his sister, making Hugh Audley Roger's cousin, not his nephew.
Edmund Mortimer died in July 1304, of wounds sustained at the battle of Builth, when Roger was seventeen. At the request of the Lord Edward, Prince of Wales, King Edward I granted Roger's wardship to Piers Gaveston, who wasn't too much older (in his early twenties).
Margaret de Fiennes lived long enough to see her son become the lover of a queen, overthrow a king, and suffer death by hanging. She died in 1334, probably in her seventies.
In September 1301, fourteen-year-old Roger Mortimer married Joan de Geneville, aged fifteen, maybe sixteen - she was born on 2 February 1286, or possibly 1285. Joan was the eldest of three daughters. Her father Piers died in 1292, and her grandfather Geoffrey de Geneville, anxious to avoid the break-up of his estates, placed her sisters Beatrice and Maud at Aconbury Priory. [The law of primogeniture, 'the eldest son inherits', did not apply to women, so in the absence of a male heir, sisters inherited equal portions of land. Placing women in convents was the only way they could be disinherited at this time.] The Geneville inheritance comprised vast estates in England, Wales and Ireland.
Joan also inherited lands in France from her mother Jeanne de Lusignan, or Jeanne de la Marche (died 1323), who was the daughter of Hugh XII de Lusignan, Count of La Marche and grandson of Isabelle d'Angoulême, widow of King John and Edward II's great-grandmother.
Geoffrey de Geneville, Joan's grandfather, was a French baron of Champagne who inherited estates in England, Wales and Ireland around 1250. Geoffrey was another loyal supporter of the Lord Edward in the Barons' Wars, and acted as Justiciar of Ireland and as a mediator between Edward I and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd. He died in 1314, in his eighties. Joan de Geneville's paternal grandmother was Maud de Lacy (died 1304), granddaughter of the earl of Norfolk and also granddaughter and co-heiress of Walter de Lacy.
For twenty years, Roger and Joan enjoyed a close and successful relationship. Twelve children survived into adulthood, four sons and eight daughters, and Joan accompanied Roger to Ireland during his successful career there as King's Lieutenant and Justiciar. All that changed in early 1322, when Roger submitted to Edward II during the king's successful campaign against the Marchers, and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Joan herself was imprisoned in Hampshire; three of her elder daughters and three of her sons were also imprisoned, in convents (the girls) and castles (the boys).
In February 1323, Queen Isabella and Eleanor de Clare both petitioned Edward II in an apparently unsuccessful attempt to improve Joan's living conditions. Isabella referred to Joan as 'our dear and well-beloved cousin'. One the men-at-arms acompanying Joan during her imprisonment was William Ockley, later one of Edward II's jailers at Berkeley Castle - proof that what goes around comes around, I suppose.
[Edward II's harsh and unnecessarily vindictive treatment of the wives and children of his enemies is, for me, by far the most unpleasant aspect of his reign, and impossible to justify. As Edward had never before shown cruelty to women, you could argue that the women's treatment was an initiative of the Despensers, but Edward certainly condoned it, and as the king, has to be held responsible. The fact that some of the women he allowed to be so badly mistreated were close members of his family - e.g., his nieces Margaret and Elizabeth de Clare - makes his behaviour even more reprehensible.]
Roger Mortimer and Joan de Geneville didn't see each other again for nearly five years. When exactly they did see each other again is unclear, but may have been in November 1326, when Roger visited his manor of Pembridge, where he and Joan had married twenty-five years earlier. By this time, Roger had been the lover of Queen Isabella for a year or so. What they had to say to each other can of course never be known. How Joan, now forty years old, felt about having to watch her husband conduct an affair with the Queen of England is equally unknowable.
Poor Joan's existence is often ignored by historians and novelists, who focus more or less exclusively on Edward II and Isabella's dysfunctional relationship and ignore the woman who bore Roger Mortimer twelve children, and who was, from the limited evidence available, his supportive and loyal partner for many years. The modern trend of lauding Isabella's 'courage' and 'empowerment' in 'getting out of a bad marriage' doesn't sound quite so impressive when you remember that she deprived Joan of her husband. Somehow, though, Joan de Geneville has always struck me as a dignified woman who would have made the best of the difficult situation.
Whether Joan ever visited Edward III's court, where her husband held power, is unknown. Roger occasionally travelled to the Marches unaccompanied by Isabella or the court, which may have been visits to Joan. In early June 1328, after the wedding of two of their daughters, Roger and Isabella stayed with Joan at Ludlow Castle, which was part of Joan's inheritance from her grandfather. As Isabella was the (dowager) Queen, Joan would have been forced to give precedence to her husband's mistress in her own castle. I'd love to write a fictional scene about that - and I'd give a great deal to know where Roger slept that night!
1328 was an eventful year for the Mortimers - two daughters married, two sons died (John and Roger), and they became grandparents, when Elizabeth Badlesmere, wife of their eldest son Edmund, gave birth to yet another Roger (1328-1360). Edmund had been born in 1302 or 1303, when Roger was only fifteen or sixteen.
It's also possible that their eldest daughter Margaret made them grandparents in the late 1320s - her eldest surviving son Maurice Berkeley was probably born in 1330, but she also had a daughter Joan, who may have been older.
In December 1328, Roger paid for nine chaplains to sing daily masses for the souls of Roger himself, Edward III, Queens Isabella and Philippa, Joan, and their children. In August 1329, two more of Roger and Joan's daughters were married at Wigmore, where Roger held a great Round Table tournament. Presumably Joan was present, with Isabella and Edward III. It's just possible that Queen Isabella was pregnant by Roger at this time, which is pretty intriguing.
After Roger's execution in 1330, Joan's lands were taken into royal hands, and some were not restored until 1336, when she was finally granted a full pardon. This seems to suggest that Edward III was not entirely convinced of her innocence, which he surely would have been if she'd had no contact with Roger during the 'Isabella Years'. It also suggests that Roger and Joan had maintained some kind of relationship - which is, to me, far more interesting than the usual portrayal of Joan as colourless, sexless, unnecessary, abandoned in favour of a younger and far more beautiful woman.
In 1332, Joan petitioned Edward III to have Roger's body removed from the Greyfriars church at Coventry, presumably to be re-buried at Wigmore. This also suggests that she still retained much affection for her husband. She never re-married, or entered a convent.
Joan de Geneville survived Roger by more than a quarter of a century and died at the age of seventy or seventy-one, on 19 October 1356. Her husband's mistress Queen Isabella outlived her by a mere twenty-two months. In 1354, Edward III had reversed all the charges against Roger, so Joan died as the Dowager Countess of March, with her twenty-eight-year-old grandson Roger Mortimer high in the King's favour, and the second Earl of March.
Shortly before she died, Joan may have heard the news that another of her grandsons, twenty-six-year-old Maurice Berkeley - son of Lord Berkeley and Joan's eldest daughter Margaret Mortimer - had distinguished himself at the Battle of Poitiers on 19 September, but had been badly wounded and taken prisoner.
At the time of her death, Joan was the grandmother of the Earls of Pembroke and March, and the mother-in-law of the Earl of Warwick and Lords Berkeley, Charlton and Braose. She had lived long enough to be a great-grandmother several times over:
- Her eldest great-grandchild, Sir John Tuchet, may have been born as early as 1347, but certainly by 1350 - he was the grandson of Joan's daughter Joan and her husband James Audley.
- Edmund Mortimer, later the third Earl of March, son of Roger Mortimer and Philippa Montacute, was born in 1352. Edmund was to marry Edward II's great-granddaughter, Philippa of Clarence.
- Thomas Berkeley, son of Maurice Berkeley and his wife Elizabeth Despenser - daughter of Hugh the Younger - was born in 1353. One or more of Maurice and Elizabeth's three daughters Katherine, Agnes and Elizabeth may have been older than their brother Thomas, but their dates of birth are not recorded. Near the end of the fourteenth century, Thomas Berkeley's daughter Elizabeth, great-great-granddaughter of Roger Mortimer and Joan de Geneville and great-granddaughter of Hugh Despenser the Younger, married the Earl of Warwick, another great-grandson of Roger and Joan.
Only four of Joan's twelve children outlived her: Beatrice Lady Braose, Agnes Countess of Pembroke, Katherine Countess of Warwick, and Geoffrey, who inherited Joan's French lands. (The date of death of Joan's daughter Maud, Lady Charlton, is not known, but she was still alive in 1345.)
Joan de Geneville, Lady Mortimer and Countess of March, great heiress, 1286-1356: a woman with a fascinating life and a fascinating family, who deserves to be remembered as far more than a colourless, abandoned nonentity.
21 April, 2007
Royal and Noble Men of the Non-English Variety, part two
In the second and final part of my posts on Edward II's male relatives, here are some biographies and facts about the men from Northern Europe. The first post is directly below this one, or you can find it here.
Duke Jan II 'the Peaceful' of Brabant, Lotharingia and Limburg: Edward II's brother-in-law.
Jan was born on 27 September 1275, the eldest surviving son of Duke Jan I and Margaretha of Flanders. His father was known as 'the Victorious', a soldier who won the Battle of Worringen in 1288, one of the biggest battles of the Middle Ages. Jan I is still well-known as the epitome of a perfect knight, chivalrous and brave. Margareta was one of the many daughters of Guy de Dampierre, Count of Flanders [see below].
Jan II had an elder brother, Godefroi, who died in 1283. His father Jan I had previously been married to Louis IX's daughter Marguerite, who died in childbirth in 1271, along with her child. His aunt Marie was the second wife of Philip III of France and the mother of Edward II's stepmother Queen Marguerite; his younger sister, also Margaretha, married the count of Luxemburg, who became Heinrich VII, King of the Romans, in 1309 and Holy Roman Emperor in 1312. Another sister, Marie, married Count Amadeo V of Savoy, who was going to marry Joan of Acre (in my previous post).
Jan II also had many half-siblings, his father's illegitimate childen.
Duke Jan I was a long-time ally of Edward I, and the younger Jan's marriage to Edward's third daughter Margaret was planned in the late 1270s, when both children were toddlers. Margaret was born on 15 March 1275, so was a few months older than her husband.
Jan was sent to live in England in 1284, when he was eight or nine. He married Margaret on 8 July 1290 at Westminster Abbey, in a magnificent ceremony that would be worth a blog post by itself! Jan was still fourteen (fifteen in late September), Margaret fifteen and a few months. Jan's retinue consisted of eighty knights and sixty ladies, wearing costumes of Brabant. Margaret's six-year-old brother Lord Edward was followed by a retinue of eighty knights, the Earl of Gloucester's retinue was 103 knights and sixty ladies, and the other earls also brought huge retinues of their own. 700 knights and 1000 citizens of London took part in the procession, and the guests were entertained by 400 minstrels and musicians. The royal family changed clothes three times during the course of the day, and the highlight was a banquet held in Westminster Hall, where Lord Edward's personal cook presented an edible replica of a castle.
In records after 1290, Jan is referred to as 'the king's son' in documents: for example, "Pardon, at the instance of John, Duke of Brabant, the king's son, to Yerevorth Voyl, a Welshman..." appears on 12 April 1296 (I've chosen that particular example because of the brilliant name. :)
In 1292/93, Jan was living in the same household as Edward I's nephews Thomas and Henry of Lancaster, and their household records are extent for this year. The young men spent a pleasant life travelling round England visiting tournaments, and the records are full of references to their horses, hawks, minstrels and games. In 1293, they stayed at Kingston with Jan's young brother-in-law, the nine-year-old Lord Edward, on their way to a joust at Fulham. Jan had thirty horses and twenty-one grooms, the Lancaster brothers thirty horses and twenty-four grooms. Edward's clerk gloomily recorded the huge expenses of their short stay.
Jan's father Duke Jan I was killed on 3 May 1294 at a tournament at Bar-le-Duc, arranged by Count Henri III of Bar [see below] to celebrate his marriage to Margaret's sister Eleanor. Jan II, aged eighteen, was taken home by merchants of Brabant, and sailed from Harwich in late June 1294. Margaret, for some reason, stayed in England, where she had her own household. She joined him in Brussels in 1297.
Jan and Margaret had only one child, a son Jan, born sometime in 1300. In addition, Jan had four illegitimate sons - who were all called Jan. (Must have been fun in the nursery.) Jan had a mistress named Elisabeth Cortygin, who was the mother of at least one of the Jans - Jan van Glymes, who was legitimised in 1344 - but I don't know who was the mother of the others.
On 25 January 1308, Jan and Margaret attended the wedding of Edward II and Isabella in Boulogne, and a month later, their coronation at Westminster. Jan had brought with him the holy oil of St Thomas of Canterbury, which had come into his possession, but for some reason it wasn't used. Edward II would later claim that the disasters of his reign were a direct consequence of his failure to be anointed by this holy oil.
Jan remained on very good terms with his brother-in-law Edward after Edward's accession, and in fact Edward's relations with Brabant were probably the friendliest he had with any country. In 1311, Edward chose Brabant as a possible haven for the exiled Piers Gaveston, and trade connections between the two countries were excellent.
On 27 September 1312, Jan signed the famous Charter of Kortenberg, described as "one of the first democratic decisions in feudal Europe." He died at Tervuren exactly a month later, on 27 October 1312, apparently of kidney stones, aged only thirty-seven.
Duchess Margaret survived her husband by many years. Unfortunately, the date of her death is not known, but she was still alive in 1333 when she sent a letter to her nephew Edward III, although many historians continue to give the date of her death as 1318. Surviving until 1333 or later makes her the longest lived of all Eleanor of Castile's children, unless Edward II wasn't murdered in 1327....;)
Duke Jan III 'the Triumphant' of Brabant, Lotharingia and Limburg: Edward II's nephew.
Duke Jan was born sometime in 1300 - around 20 October, according to his Dutch Wikipedia page - as the only child of Jan II and Margaret. He succeeded his father at the age of twelve.
In 1311, he married Marie d'Évreux, who was born in 1303. Marie was the eldest daughter of Louis, Count d'Évreux, who was the half-brother of Philip IV and the son of Marie of Brabant, sister of Duke Jan I - which makes Jan III and Marie second cousins. Louis, who died in 1319, was on good terms with Edward II, at least before Edward became king - it was to Louis that Edward addressed his funny letter in 1305 about a 'big trotting palfrey' and 'lazy dogs'.
Marie d'Évreux's mother was Marguerite d'Artois, daughter of Count Philip of Artois; Marguerite's mother Blanche was the daughter of Duke Jean II of Brittany and the granddaughter of Henry III of England. Marie was thus the first cousin of Queen Isabella and her three brothers (all kings of France), of Edward II's half-brothers Kent and Norfolk, and of the first Valois king of France, Philip VI. Her great-uncle John was Earl of Richmond, and she was also closely connected to the English royal house and many French noble houses.
In 1325, Marie's youngest sister Jeanne d'Évreux, then aged fifteen, became Queen of France by marrying Queen Isabella's youngest brother Charles IV, although they were first cousins. Charles was desperate for a son; he didn't get one, and when he died in 1328 the throne passed to their cousin Philip de Valois. In May 1326, Queen Isabella, the future Edward III and Roger Mortimer attended Jeanne's coronation, Roger carrying Edward's robes, to the great annoyance of Edward II.
Jan III continued his father's policy of friendship with England, and in 1319, was happy to accede to his uncle Edward II's request to limit Scottish trade in Brabant. However, on one occasion Edward did write him a very sharp letter, in response to Jan's request for justice for a man of Brabant who had been arrested in England: "It is not consonant with reason that what has been terminated by reasonable and due process and executed should be cancelled and revoked to the injury of another."
After the accession of Jan's cousin Edward III, Jan at first supported England during the early years of the Hundred Years War, but later switched allegiance to France. The growing power of Brabant in this period meant that Jan had made many enemies in the Low Countries.
Marie d'Evreux died on 31 October 1335, and was buried in Brussels. Jan didn't marry again, but as Marie had borne him three sons and three daughters, he probably felt that he didn't need to. He apparently had a whopping twenty illegitimate children, which probably means that plenty of people in Belgium and the Netherlands are descended from Edward I. ;)
However, when Jan died on 5 December 1355, at Brussels, his three legitimate sons had all pre-deceased him. He was succeeded by his eldest daughter Johanna, who was born in 1322 and lived until 1406. Her first marriage to Willem II, Count of Hainault - brother of Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III - was childless; after his death in 1345 she married Wenzel (Wenceslas) Count of Luxemburg. His grandfather was Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich VII [above], his father the King of Bohemia was killed at the Battle of Crecy in 1346, and his niece Anne of Bohemia married Richard II in 1382. Jan III's second daughter Margaretha (1323-1368) married Count Louis II of Flanders, the great-great-grandson of Guy de Dampierre, and his youngest daughter Marie (1325-1399) married Duke Reinald III of Geldern, son of Eleanor of Woodstock and grandson of Edward II. Funnily enough, both Margaretha and Marie's husbands were much younger than they were - Louis was almost eight years younger than Margaretha, and Reinald was about eight years younger than Marie. Count Louis of Flanders tried to wrest control of Brabant from his wife's sister Johanna, but was unsuccessful.
Count Henri III of Bar: Edward's brother-in-law.
Henri was born sometime between about 1259 and 1269, as far as I can tell. He was the eldest son of Count Thibaut II, who died in 1291, aged about seventy, and Jeanne de Montmorency, also known as Jeanne de Toucy. He had almost a dozen brothers and sisters, including a sister who was Abbess of Saint-Mauré, and two brothers who were Bishops of Liège and Metz.
On 20 September 1293, he married Edward I's eldest daughter Eleanor, who had long been betrothed to Alfonso III of Aragón, as in my previous post. The wedding took place in Bristol and was attended by her little brother the Lord Edward. After the wedding, Eleanor and Henri stayed with little Edward at Mortlake for a month, 14 October to 11 November, and left England on 14 April 1294. King Edward I saw them off at Dover. Shortly after their return to Bar, Henri held a tournament to celebrate his nuptials - Duke Jan I of Brabant was killed, on 3 May. However, an entry of 12 November 1294, granting protection to "Peter de Virduno, parson of the church of Hembury by Wycheum, going beyond seas with H. count of Bar" suggests that they'd returned to England fairly soon after leaving.
Henri and Eleanor had two children, born between 1294 and 1296: Edouard [below], and Jeanne, Countess of Surrey. Eleanor died on 29 August 1298 - there's some dispute about the date, but this is the date that appears in her sister Elizabeth's psalter, which makes it almost certainly the correct one - supposedly in Ghent. She was twenty-nine. The cause of death is unknown, but may have been related to pregnancy or childbirth.
On 18 March 1299, a reference to Henri in the Patent Rolls still calls him 'the king's son': "...and to deliver this [1915 pounds] to John de Asshy, clerk, and Richerus, yeoman of Henry, count of Bar, the king's son, in satisfaction of a debt by the king to the count to that amount."
Apparently Henri had difficult and tense relations with Philip IV of France, which was presumably why he allied himself with the King of England. A certain PhD thesis I've written about before claims that Henri invaded the lands of Jeanne, Queen of Navarre (Queen Isabella's mother), but no date or further information is given, and I can't find anything about it elsewhere. According to the thesis, Jeanne herself raised an army and led her troops against Henri, defeating him and holding him prisoner "under her own terms" (whatever that means). It seems unlikely that a woman would lead troops into battle, but who knows...
Henri's French Wikipedia page says that he was forced to render homage to Philip IV in 1301 and to give up some castles to him. He died in Naples in 1302, en route to a crusade.
Count Edouard I of Bar: Edward's nephew. Born probably in 1294 or 1295, he succeeded his father in 1302. However, a French genealogical site claims he was born in April 1296 - this is interesting, as I'd always assumed he was older than his sister, but if he was born in 1296, then Jeanne was almost certainly older. On 11 February 1310, at the Castle of Montbard, Edouard married Marie of Burgundy (Marie de Bourgogne), the granddaughter of Louis IX of France and fourth daughter of Duke Robert II of Burgundy. I've mentioned her elder sisters before - Blanche married Count Eduard of Savoy (in my previous post) and Marguerite and Jeanne la Boiteuse (the Lame) were Queens of France, married to Louis X and Philip VI respectively. Marie was born in 1298.
Edouard was declared to be of age at the time of his marriage, though he was only fourteen or fifteen.
Edward II's Wardrobe Accounts record the birth of Edouard and Marie's only son, Henri - the birth was announced to Edward on 21 May 1321: "To John de Bria, squire of the Countess of Bar, coming with letters of his said lady, with the news of the delivery of the said Countess of Henry, her first born son, of the King's gift, 6 pounds 13s 4d."
Edouard and Marie also had two daughters: Beatrice, who married Guido, Captain-General of Mantua, and had a son; and Eleonore, who died young on 15 September 1333, having married in 1329 Raoul, Duke of Lorraine, who was killed at Crecy in 1346, on the French side. Eleonore and Raoul had no children.
Edouard had briefly been taken prisoner by the Duke of Lorraine in 1313, so presumably the marriage of their children was intended to make peace between Bar and Lorraine. Edouard was appointed Regent of Lorraine on 26 October 1331 for his eleven-year-old son-in-law Raoul. (In 1337, Edouard's son Henri refused to pay homage to Raoul for some lands he held of him, and relations between Bar and Lorraine once more broke out into open conflict.)
Edouard's relations with his uncle Edward II were friendly, though they may have cooled over Edward's support of the Earl of Surrey, who was trying to divorce Edouard's sister Jeanne. In 1317, Edouard may have been complicit in the imprisonment of the Earl of Pembroke, in retaliation for Pembroke's support of Surrey. Edward II's letters to Bar on behalf of Pembroke show that he had a good knowledge of the politics and influential people of his nephew's county (or at least, that his advisors did).
Count Edouard I of Bar drowned off the coast of Famagusta in Cyprus on 11 November 1336, in his early forties. Like his father, he died on the way to crusade. His wife Marie of Burgundy, sister-in-law of King Philip VI of France, was already dead, at some unknown date.
Their son succeeded as Count Henri IV, but he died at the age of twenty-three in 1344; Henri's two sons succeeded him in turn, Edouard II (died 1352) and Robert I, who lived until 1411.
Count Jan I of Holland and Zeeland, Lord of Friesland: Edward II's brother-in-law.
Count Jan was born sometime in 1284, the son of Count Floris V of Holland and Beatrijs (died 1291), one of the many daughters of Guy de Dampierre, Count of Flanders. Jan was thus a first cousin of Duke Jan II of Brabant. He was betrothed to Edward I's daughter Elizabeth shortly after his birth. At the same time, his sister Margaretha was betrothed to Edward I's son Alfonso, who died shortly afterwards (August 1284).
His father Count Floris - known as der Keerlen God, God of the Peasants - was born on 24 June 1254 in Leiden. In the early 1290s, he put himself forward as a claimant to the Scottish throne, as a descendant of King David I. He and Beatrijs had nine or possibly eleven children, of whom only Jan (who died at fifteen) and Margaretha survived childhood - and even Margaretha seems to disappear from history after the death of Alfonso. Floris' children didn't live long, and he had no legitimate grandchildren. Floris did, however, also father seven or so illegitimate children, of whom Witte van Haamstede is the best-known. Witte's half-brother Count Jan granted him the lordship of Haamstede.
In 1296, Floris, a long-time ally of Edward I, switched sides and became an ally of Philip IV of France. Edward and Guy de Dampierre - Floris' father-in-law - conspired to have him kidnapped and taken to England (or France - reports vary), and his son installed in his place. But the kidnappers panicked and murdered him, near Muiderslot Castle, on 27 June 1296.
Jan may have grown up in England, at least partly, and if so, would have been a companion to the future Edward II, who was the same age. A Dutch site, assuming I've read it correctly, says he was sent in 1291. He was certainly in England at the time of his father's murder, when he was eleven or twelve. He returned to his home country.
In January 1297, Jan sailed to Ipswich, and married Elizabeth in the priory church on 18 January. Elizabeth was born in August 1282, so was a little older than Jan, almost fourteen and a half to his twelve. Elizabeth's twelve-year-old brother Lord Edward attended the wedding, as did most of the English and Dutch nobility; Edward gave his new brother-in-law a gold cup as a wedding present. Jan returned to Holland ten days after the wedding, attended by his many Dutch nobles, but Elizabeth - like her sister Margaret in 1294 - decided to stay in England. Possibly in irritation at her refusal to leave, Edward I ripped the coronet off his daughter's head and threw it in the fire - he later paid to have the precious stones replaced. Margaret finally left England to rejoin her husband Duke Jan II in Brussels, sailing with Count Jan.
Elizabeth, in the meantime, stayed at Windsor with her brother Edward for some time, and was at Langley when she received a message from Jan that he had reached Holland safely. On 23 August 1297, Elizabeth, with a magnificent trousseau, departed England with her father, who had with him a fleet of 500 vessels in readiness for his Flemish expedition. Apparently in no great rush to join her husband, Elizabeth stayed with her father until after Christmas 1297. She was now fifteen, Jan still only thirteen.
During Jan's minority, Holland was ruled by a regent, Wolfert van Borselen. He was murdered in August 1299, perhaps on the orders of Jan's kinsman, guardian and heir, Jan d'Avesnes, Count of Hainault, who took over control of the government.
Count Jan I, never very healthy, died in Haarlem on 10 November 1299, still only fifteen years old. Given his youth and ill health, it seems quite likely that his marriage to Elizabeth was never consummated. She returned to England and, three years later, married Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford. As late as 1316, the year of Elizabeth's death, Edward II was still chasing up his sister's dower in Holland.
Jan was succeeded as Count of Holland by his father's cousin Jan d'Avesnes, Count of Hainault, who was born in about 1247; he was the grandfather of Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III. There were rumours that Jan I was poisoned on his cousin's orders, but of course this is unprovable. With Jan II's accession, the counties of Hainault and Holland were united.
Reinald II 'de Swarte' ('the Black'), Duke of Gelderland and Count of Zutphen: Edward II's son-in-law.
Reinald was the son of Reinald I (who was captured at the Battle of Worringen in 1288) and, by a truly astonishing coincidence, yet another daughter of our old friend Guy de Dampierre, making him another first cousin of Jan II of Brabant and Jan I of Holland. To make it super confusing, Guy de Dampierre was married twice, and used the same names for the children of both marriages, so Reinald's mother was named Margaretha, like her older half-sister who was the mother of Jan II of Brabant.
The younger Margaretha was first married on 14 November 1282 to the Lord Alexander, heir to the throne of Scotland and nephew of Edward I, but he died in January 1284, and on 3 July 1286 she married Reinald I. Their son Reinald II was born between about 1287 and 1290.
On 11 January 1311, Reinald was married to Sophie/a de Berthout at Roermond; she was the heiress of Malines and niece of the Bishop of Utrecht, and bore him four daughters. Two of them, Matilda and Marie, succeeded as Duchess of Gelderland in their own right, and Elisabeth was Abbess of Gravendaal/Graefenthal. Sophie de Berthout died in 1329.
Reinald II officially succeeded his father on 9 October 1326. However, he had declared his father unfit to rule in 1316, and imprisoned him in 1318. In May 1332, now in his forties, he married Edward II's elder daughter Eleanor of Woodstock at Nijmegen. Eleanor was not yet fourteen (born June 1318). She had previously been considered as a bride for King Alfonso XI of Castile and the future King Jean II of France, so marriage to Reinald wasn't a brilliant match, especially considering her younger sister Joan was Queen of Scotland.
Professor Roy Martin Haines, in his King Edward II, recounts the legend that a non-murdered Edward II was a furtive guest at his daughter's wedding, which I'd love to believe is true. ;)
There was much rejoicing almost exactly a year later when Eleanor, not yet fifteen, gave birth to a son, also Reinald (born 13 May 1333). He was followed on 12 March 1336 by a second son, named Eduard after his grandfather. (The brothers quarrelled, civil war broke out, Eduard imprisoned his elder brother, who was known as 'Reinald the Fat'...family loyalty was definitely lacking in the Dukes of Gelderland.)
In 1339, the county of Gelderland was 'upgraded' to a duchy, in honour of Reinald's importance in European politics and the Hundred Years War. He died in Arnhem on 12 October 1243 and was succeeded by his elder son Reinald III. Eleanor of Woodstock died on 22 April 1355, not yet thirty-seven, and was buried in Deventer Abbey, which she'd founded. As her two sons died childless, both in 1371, two of her stepdaughters succeeded as Duchess of Gelderland.
***
King Eirik II 'the Priest-Hater' of Norway: Edward's potential father-in-law.
Eirik was born in 1268 as the elder son of King Magnus 'the Lawmender' and Queen Ingeborg, who was the daughter of King Erik IV 'Plovpenning' of Denmark. His mother's sister Sofia married King Valdemar I of Sweden; Valdemar had an affair with another of their sisters, Jutta, and had to travel to Rome to beg the Pope's forgiveness. Eirik's paternal grandfather Håkon Håkonsson (died 1263) fought with Alexander III of Scotland over possession of the Hebrides.
To promote peace between the countries, Eirik was married to Alexander's daughter Margaret in August 1281. She was Alexander's eldest child, born in February 1261 at Windsor, where her mother Queen Margaret was visiting her parents Henry III and Eleanor of Provence. Margaret was much older than Eirik, at least seven years. At the time of the wedding, which took place at the Mariakerke in Bergen, Margaret was twenty and Eirik thirteen, maybe still even twelve.
Despite the age gap, the marriage was consummated before too long. Queen Margaret died, either during or shortly after childbirth, on or a little before 9 April 1283. The child was a daughter, the 'Maid of Norway'. She was betrothed to Edward of Caernarfon, but died in the Orkneys in 1290 at the age of seven, thus ending Edward I's dream of a united England and Scotland.
Eirik married again in 1293, to Isabel Bruce, sister of Robert, the future King. Eirik claimed the throne of Scotland in the early 1290s as the father of the Maid, and although his claim was hopeless, Robert Bruce (or his father) probably decided that an alliance with Eirik was in order. Isabel bore Eirik a daughter, Ingeborg, who married Valdemar, Duke of Finland, brother of King Birger of Sweden.
Eirik's brilliant nickname makes him seem more interesting than he probably really was. He died in 1299, at the age of thirty or thirty-one, and was succeeded by his brother Haakon V. Haakon also had no son, and when he died in 1319, his heir was his daughter's son Magnus VII. Haakon's daughter was also called Ingeborg, and like her cousin and namesake was married to a brother of King Birger of Sweden; her son Magnus VII was King of Sweden as well as Norway. Interestingly, any son of Edward II and the Maid of Norway would have had a strong claim to the Norwegian throne in 1319.
Guy de Dampierre (or Gwijde van Dampierre), Count of Flanders: Edward's potential father-in-law.
Guy was born in about 1226, son of Guillaume de Dampierre, a nobleman of Champagne, and Margaret of Constantinople. Margaret's father Baldwin was Count of Flanders and Hainault, and the first Latin Emperor of Constantinople in 1204; her maternal grandmother Marie was the elder daughter of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Guy was a younger half-brother of Jan d'Avesnes, the father of Jan d'Avesnes who succeeded as Count Jan II of Holland, above. Their mother Margaret of Constantinople was determined that her counties of Flanders and Hainault would pass to her Dampierre sons rather than her Avesnes son, which led to years of conflict.
To cut a very long story short, Guy ceded his claims to Hainault, but became Count of Flanders in 1252, jointly with his mother Margaret, who lived until 1278. Tensions between Guy and Philip IV of France in the late 1280s led Guy to become an ally of Edward I, and after the death of the little Maid of Norway, Guy betrothed his daughter Philippa to Edward of Caernarfon. However, Philip imprisoned Guy, two of his sons, and Philippa in Paris, and the planned marriage never took place.
Guy's allies, including several of his sons and grandsons, defeated the French at the Battle of the Golden Spurs (also known as the Battle of Courtrai or Kortrijk). Guy was still in prison at Compiègne, where he died on 7 March 1304, in his late seventies. He was succeededby his eldest son Robert III, who was already in his mid fifties.
Guy first married Matilda of Bethune in 1246, and she bore him eight children, including: his successor Robert III, Jan II of Brabant's mother Margaretha, Jan I of Holland's mother Beatrijs, and Jan, Bishop of Metz and Liège. Secondly, in March 1265, he married Isabel of Luxemburg, by whom he had eight more children, including: Philippa, betrothed to Edward of Caernarfon; Margaretha, mother of Reinald II of Gelderland, and Beatrijs, who married the Count of St Pol.
Duke Jan II 'the Peaceful' of Brabant, Lotharingia and Limburg: Edward II's brother-in-law.
Jan was born on 27 September 1275, the eldest surviving son of Duke Jan I and Margaretha of Flanders. His father was known as 'the Victorious', a soldier who won the Battle of Worringen in 1288, one of the biggest battles of the Middle Ages. Jan I is still well-known as the epitome of a perfect knight, chivalrous and brave. Margareta was one of the many daughters of Guy de Dampierre, Count of Flanders [see below].
Jan II had an elder brother, Godefroi, who died in 1283. His father Jan I had previously been married to Louis IX's daughter Marguerite, who died in childbirth in 1271, along with her child. His aunt Marie was the second wife of Philip III of France and the mother of Edward II's stepmother Queen Marguerite; his younger sister, also Margaretha, married the count of Luxemburg, who became Heinrich VII, King of the Romans, in 1309 and Holy Roman Emperor in 1312. Another sister, Marie, married Count Amadeo V of Savoy, who was going to marry Joan of Acre (in my previous post).
Jan II also had many half-siblings, his father's illegitimate childen.
Duke Jan I was a long-time ally of Edward I, and the younger Jan's marriage to Edward's third daughter Margaret was planned in the late 1270s, when both children were toddlers. Margaret was born on 15 March 1275, so was a few months older than her husband.
Jan was sent to live in England in 1284, when he was eight or nine. He married Margaret on 8 July 1290 at Westminster Abbey, in a magnificent ceremony that would be worth a blog post by itself! Jan was still fourteen (fifteen in late September), Margaret fifteen and a few months. Jan's retinue consisted of eighty knights and sixty ladies, wearing costumes of Brabant. Margaret's six-year-old brother Lord Edward was followed by a retinue of eighty knights, the Earl of Gloucester's retinue was 103 knights and sixty ladies, and the other earls also brought huge retinues of their own. 700 knights and 1000 citizens of London took part in the procession, and the guests were entertained by 400 minstrels and musicians. The royal family changed clothes three times during the course of the day, and the highlight was a banquet held in Westminster Hall, where Lord Edward's personal cook presented an edible replica of a castle.
In records after 1290, Jan is referred to as 'the king's son' in documents: for example, "Pardon, at the instance of John, Duke of Brabant, the king's son, to Yerevorth Voyl, a Welshman..." appears on 12 April 1296 (I've chosen that particular example because of the brilliant name. :)
In 1292/93, Jan was living in the same household as Edward I's nephews Thomas and Henry of Lancaster, and their household records are extent for this year. The young men spent a pleasant life travelling round England visiting tournaments, and the records are full of references to their horses, hawks, minstrels and games. In 1293, they stayed at Kingston with Jan's young brother-in-law, the nine-year-old Lord Edward, on their way to a joust at Fulham. Jan had thirty horses and twenty-one grooms, the Lancaster brothers thirty horses and twenty-four grooms. Edward's clerk gloomily recorded the huge expenses of their short stay.
Jan's father Duke Jan I was killed on 3 May 1294 at a tournament at Bar-le-Duc, arranged by Count Henri III of Bar [see below] to celebrate his marriage to Margaret's sister Eleanor. Jan II, aged eighteen, was taken home by merchants of Brabant, and sailed from Harwich in late June 1294. Margaret, for some reason, stayed in England, where she had her own household. She joined him in Brussels in 1297.
Jan and Margaret had only one child, a son Jan, born sometime in 1300. In addition, Jan had four illegitimate sons - who were all called Jan. (Must have been fun in the nursery.) Jan had a mistress named Elisabeth Cortygin, who was the mother of at least one of the Jans - Jan van Glymes, who was legitimised in 1344 - but I don't know who was the mother of the others.
On 25 January 1308, Jan and Margaret attended the wedding of Edward II and Isabella in Boulogne, and a month later, their coronation at Westminster. Jan had brought with him the holy oil of St Thomas of Canterbury, which had come into his possession, but for some reason it wasn't used. Edward II would later claim that the disasters of his reign were a direct consequence of his failure to be anointed by this holy oil.
Jan remained on very good terms with his brother-in-law Edward after Edward's accession, and in fact Edward's relations with Brabant were probably the friendliest he had with any country. In 1311, Edward chose Brabant as a possible haven for the exiled Piers Gaveston, and trade connections between the two countries were excellent.
On 27 September 1312, Jan signed the famous Charter of Kortenberg, described as "one of the first democratic decisions in feudal Europe." He died at Tervuren exactly a month later, on 27 October 1312, apparently of kidney stones, aged only thirty-seven.
Duchess Margaret survived her husband by many years. Unfortunately, the date of her death is not known, but she was still alive in 1333 when she sent a letter to her nephew Edward III, although many historians continue to give the date of her death as 1318. Surviving until 1333 or later makes her the longest lived of all Eleanor of Castile's children, unless Edward II wasn't murdered in 1327....;)
Duke Jan III 'the Triumphant' of Brabant, Lotharingia and Limburg: Edward II's nephew.
Duke Jan was born sometime in 1300 - around 20 October, according to his Dutch Wikipedia page - as the only child of Jan II and Margaret. He succeeded his father at the age of twelve.
In 1311, he married Marie d'Évreux, who was born in 1303. Marie was the eldest daughter of Louis, Count d'Évreux, who was the half-brother of Philip IV and the son of Marie of Brabant, sister of Duke Jan I - which makes Jan III and Marie second cousins. Louis, who died in 1319, was on good terms with Edward II, at least before Edward became king - it was to Louis that Edward addressed his funny letter in 1305 about a 'big trotting palfrey' and 'lazy dogs'.
Marie d'Évreux's mother was Marguerite d'Artois, daughter of Count Philip of Artois; Marguerite's mother Blanche was the daughter of Duke Jean II of Brittany and the granddaughter of Henry III of England. Marie was thus the first cousin of Queen Isabella and her three brothers (all kings of France), of Edward II's half-brothers Kent and Norfolk, and of the first Valois king of France, Philip VI. Her great-uncle John was Earl of Richmond, and she was also closely connected to the English royal house and many French noble houses.
In 1325, Marie's youngest sister Jeanne d'Évreux, then aged fifteen, became Queen of France by marrying Queen Isabella's youngest brother Charles IV, although they were first cousins. Charles was desperate for a son; he didn't get one, and when he died in 1328 the throne passed to their cousin Philip de Valois. In May 1326, Queen Isabella, the future Edward III and Roger Mortimer attended Jeanne's coronation, Roger carrying Edward's robes, to the great annoyance of Edward II.
Jan III continued his father's policy of friendship with England, and in 1319, was happy to accede to his uncle Edward II's request to limit Scottish trade in Brabant. However, on one occasion Edward did write him a very sharp letter, in response to Jan's request for justice for a man of Brabant who had been arrested in England: "It is not consonant with reason that what has been terminated by reasonable and due process and executed should be cancelled and revoked to the injury of another."
After the accession of Jan's cousin Edward III, Jan at first supported England during the early years of the Hundred Years War, but later switched allegiance to France. The growing power of Brabant in this period meant that Jan had made many enemies in the Low Countries.
Marie d'Evreux died on 31 October 1335, and was buried in Brussels. Jan didn't marry again, but as Marie had borne him three sons and three daughters, he probably felt that he didn't need to. He apparently had a whopping twenty illegitimate children, which probably means that plenty of people in Belgium and the Netherlands are descended from Edward I. ;)
However, when Jan died on 5 December 1355, at Brussels, his three legitimate sons had all pre-deceased him. He was succeeded by his eldest daughter Johanna, who was born in 1322 and lived until 1406. Her first marriage to Willem II, Count of Hainault - brother of Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III - was childless; after his death in 1345 she married Wenzel (Wenceslas) Count of Luxemburg. His grandfather was Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich VII [above], his father the King of Bohemia was killed at the Battle of Crecy in 1346, and his niece Anne of Bohemia married Richard II in 1382. Jan III's second daughter Margaretha (1323-1368) married Count Louis II of Flanders, the great-great-grandson of Guy de Dampierre, and his youngest daughter Marie (1325-1399) married Duke Reinald III of Geldern, son of Eleanor of Woodstock and grandson of Edward II. Funnily enough, both Margaretha and Marie's husbands were much younger than they were - Louis was almost eight years younger than Margaretha, and Reinald was about eight years younger than Marie. Count Louis of Flanders tried to wrest control of Brabant from his wife's sister Johanna, but was unsuccessful.
Count Henri III of Bar: Edward's brother-in-law.
Henri was born sometime between about 1259 and 1269, as far as I can tell. He was the eldest son of Count Thibaut II, who died in 1291, aged about seventy, and Jeanne de Montmorency, also known as Jeanne de Toucy. He had almost a dozen brothers and sisters, including a sister who was Abbess of Saint-Mauré, and two brothers who were Bishops of Liège and Metz.
On 20 September 1293, he married Edward I's eldest daughter Eleanor, who had long been betrothed to Alfonso III of Aragón, as in my previous post. The wedding took place in Bristol and was attended by her little brother the Lord Edward. After the wedding, Eleanor and Henri stayed with little Edward at Mortlake for a month, 14 October to 11 November, and left England on 14 April 1294. King Edward I saw them off at Dover. Shortly after their return to Bar, Henri held a tournament to celebrate his nuptials - Duke Jan I of Brabant was killed, on 3 May. However, an entry of 12 November 1294, granting protection to "Peter de Virduno, parson of the church of Hembury by Wycheum, going beyond seas with H. count of Bar" suggests that they'd returned to England fairly soon after leaving.
Henri and Eleanor had two children, born between 1294 and 1296: Edouard [below], and Jeanne, Countess of Surrey. Eleanor died on 29 August 1298 - there's some dispute about the date, but this is the date that appears in her sister Elizabeth's psalter, which makes it almost certainly the correct one - supposedly in Ghent. She was twenty-nine. The cause of death is unknown, but may have been related to pregnancy or childbirth.
On 18 March 1299, a reference to Henri in the Patent Rolls still calls him 'the king's son': "...and to deliver this [1915 pounds] to John de Asshy, clerk, and Richerus, yeoman of Henry, count of Bar, the king's son, in satisfaction of a debt by the king to the count to that amount."
Apparently Henri had difficult and tense relations with Philip IV of France, which was presumably why he allied himself with the King of England. A certain PhD thesis I've written about before claims that Henri invaded the lands of Jeanne, Queen of Navarre (Queen Isabella's mother), but no date or further information is given, and I can't find anything about it elsewhere. According to the thesis, Jeanne herself raised an army and led her troops against Henri, defeating him and holding him prisoner "under her own terms" (whatever that means). It seems unlikely that a woman would lead troops into battle, but who knows...
Henri's French Wikipedia page says that he was forced to render homage to Philip IV in 1301 and to give up some castles to him. He died in Naples in 1302, en route to a crusade.
Count Edouard I of Bar: Edward's nephew. Born probably in 1294 or 1295, he succeeded his father in 1302. However, a French genealogical site claims he was born in April 1296 - this is interesting, as I'd always assumed he was older than his sister, but if he was born in 1296, then Jeanne was almost certainly older. On 11 February 1310, at the Castle of Montbard, Edouard married Marie of Burgundy (Marie de Bourgogne), the granddaughter of Louis IX of France and fourth daughter of Duke Robert II of Burgundy. I've mentioned her elder sisters before - Blanche married Count Eduard of Savoy (in my previous post) and Marguerite and Jeanne la Boiteuse (the Lame) were Queens of France, married to Louis X and Philip VI respectively. Marie was born in 1298.
Edouard was declared to be of age at the time of his marriage, though he was only fourteen or fifteen.
Edward II's Wardrobe Accounts record the birth of Edouard and Marie's only son, Henri - the birth was announced to Edward on 21 May 1321: "To John de Bria, squire of the Countess of Bar, coming with letters of his said lady, with the news of the delivery of the said Countess of Henry, her first born son, of the King's gift, 6 pounds 13s 4d."
Edouard and Marie also had two daughters: Beatrice, who married Guido, Captain-General of Mantua, and had a son; and Eleonore, who died young on 15 September 1333, having married in 1329 Raoul, Duke of Lorraine, who was killed at Crecy in 1346, on the French side. Eleonore and Raoul had no children.
Edouard had briefly been taken prisoner by the Duke of Lorraine in 1313, so presumably the marriage of their children was intended to make peace between Bar and Lorraine. Edouard was appointed Regent of Lorraine on 26 October 1331 for his eleven-year-old son-in-law Raoul. (In 1337, Edouard's son Henri refused to pay homage to Raoul for some lands he held of him, and relations between Bar and Lorraine once more broke out into open conflict.)
Edouard's relations with his uncle Edward II were friendly, though they may have cooled over Edward's support of the Earl of Surrey, who was trying to divorce Edouard's sister Jeanne. In 1317, Edouard may have been complicit in the imprisonment of the Earl of Pembroke, in retaliation for Pembroke's support of Surrey. Edward II's letters to Bar on behalf of Pembroke show that he had a good knowledge of the politics and influential people of his nephew's county (or at least, that his advisors did).
Count Edouard I of Bar drowned off the coast of Famagusta in Cyprus on 11 November 1336, in his early forties. Like his father, he died on the way to crusade. His wife Marie of Burgundy, sister-in-law of King Philip VI of France, was already dead, at some unknown date.
Their son succeeded as Count Henri IV, but he died at the age of twenty-three in 1344; Henri's two sons succeeded him in turn, Edouard II (died 1352) and Robert I, who lived until 1411.
Count Jan I of Holland and Zeeland, Lord of Friesland: Edward II's brother-in-law.
Count Jan was born sometime in 1284, the son of Count Floris V of Holland and Beatrijs (died 1291), one of the many daughters of Guy de Dampierre, Count of Flanders. Jan was thus a first cousin of Duke Jan II of Brabant. He was betrothed to Edward I's daughter Elizabeth shortly after his birth. At the same time, his sister Margaretha was betrothed to Edward I's son Alfonso, who died shortly afterwards (August 1284).
His father Count Floris - known as der Keerlen God, God of the Peasants - was born on 24 June 1254 in Leiden. In the early 1290s, he put himself forward as a claimant to the Scottish throne, as a descendant of King David I. He and Beatrijs had nine or possibly eleven children, of whom only Jan (who died at fifteen) and Margaretha survived childhood - and even Margaretha seems to disappear from history after the death of Alfonso. Floris' children didn't live long, and he had no legitimate grandchildren. Floris did, however, also father seven or so illegitimate children, of whom Witte van Haamstede is the best-known. Witte's half-brother Count Jan granted him the lordship of Haamstede.
In 1296, Floris, a long-time ally of Edward I, switched sides and became an ally of Philip IV of France. Edward and Guy de Dampierre - Floris' father-in-law - conspired to have him kidnapped and taken to England (or France - reports vary), and his son installed in his place. But the kidnappers panicked and murdered him, near Muiderslot Castle, on 27 June 1296.
Jan may have grown up in England, at least partly, and if so, would have been a companion to the future Edward II, who was the same age. A Dutch site, assuming I've read it correctly, says he was sent in 1291. He was certainly in England at the time of his father's murder, when he was eleven or twelve. He returned to his home country.
In January 1297, Jan sailed to Ipswich, and married Elizabeth in the priory church on 18 January. Elizabeth was born in August 1282, so was a little older than Jan, almost fourteen and a half to his twelve. Elizabeth's twelve-year-old brother Lord Edward attended the wedding, as did most of the English and Dutch nobility; Edward gave his new brother-in-law a gold cup as a wedding present. Jan returned to Holland ten days after the wedding, attended by his many Dutch nobles, but Elizabeth - like her sister Margaret in 1294 - decided to stay in England. Possibly in irritation at her refusal to leave, Edward I ripped the coronet off his daughter's head and threw it in the fire - he later paid to have the precious stones replaced. Margaret finally left England to rejoin her husband Duke Jan II in Brussels, sailing with Count Jan.
Elizabeth, in the meantime, stayed at Windsor with her brother Edward for some time, and was at Langley when she received a message from Jan that he had reached Holland safely. On 23 August 1297, Elizabeth, with a magnificent trousseau, departed England with her father, who had with him a fleet of 500 vessels in readiness for his Flemish expedition. Apparently in no great rush to join her husband, Elizabeth stayed with her father until after Christmas 1297. She was now fifteen, Jan still only thirteen.
During Jan's minority, Holland was ruled by a regent, Wolfert van Borselen. He was murdered in August 1299, perhaps on the orders of Jan's kinsman, guardian and heir, Jan d'Avesnes, Count of Hainault, who took over control of the government.
Count Jan I, never very healthy, died in Haarlem on 10 November 1299, still only fifteen years old. Given his youth and ill health, it seems quite likely that his marriage to Elizabeth was never consummated. She returned to England and, three years later, married Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford. As late as 1316, the year of Elizabeth's death, Edward II was still chasing up his sister's dower in Holland.
Jan was succeeded as Count of Holland by his father's cousin Jan d'Avesnes, Count of Hainault, who was born in about 1247; he was the grandfather of Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III. There were rumours that Jan I was poisoned on his cousin's orders, but of course this is unprovable. With Jan II's accession, the counties of Hainault and Holland were united.
Reinald II 'de Swarte' ('the Black'), Duke of Gelderland and Count of Zutphen: Edward II's son-in-law.
Reinald was the son of Reinald I (who was captured at the Battle of Worringen in 1288) and, by a truly astonishing coincidence, yet another daughter of our old friend Guy de Dampierre, making him another first cousin of Jan II of Brabant and Jan I of Holland. To make it super confusing, Guy de Dampierre was married twice, and used the same names for the children of both marriages, so Reinald's mother was named Margaretha, like her older half-sister who was the mother of Jan II of Brabant.
The younger Margaretha was first married on 14 November 1282 to the Lord Alexander, heir to the throne of Scotland and nephew of Edward I, but he died in January 1284, and on 3 July 1286 she married Reinald I. Their son Reinald II was born between about 1287 and 1290.
On 11 January 1311, Reinald was married to Sophie/a de Berthout at Roermond; she was the heiress of Malines and niece of the Bishop of Utrecht, and bore him four daughters. Two of them, Matilda and Marie, succeeded as Duchess of Gelderland in their own right, and Elisabeth was Abbess of Gravendaal/Graefenthal. Sophie de Berthout died in 1329.
Reinald II officially succeeded his father on 9 October 1326. However, he had declared his father unfit to rule in 1316, and imprisoned him in 1318. In May 1332, now in his forties, he married Edward II's elder daughter Eleanor of Woodstock at Nijmegen. Eleanor was not yet fourteen (born June 1318). She had previously been considered as a bride for King Alfonso XI of Castile and the future King Jean II of France, so marriage to Reinald wasn't a brilliant match, especially considering her younger sister Joan was Queen of Scotland.
Professor Roy Martin Haines, in his King Edward II, recounts the legend that a non-murdered Edward II was a furtive guest at his daughter's wedding, which I'd love to believe is true. ;)
There was much rejoicing almost exactly a year later when Eleanor, not yet fifteen, gave birth to a son, also Reinald (born 13 May 1333). He was followed on 12 March 1336 by a second son, named Eduard after his grandfather. (The brothers quarrelled, civil war broke out, Eduard imprisoned his elder brother, who was known as 'Reinald the Fat'...family loyalty was definitely lacking in the Dukes of Gelderland.)
In 1339, the county of Gelderland was 'upgraded' to a duchy, in honour of Reinald's importance in European politics and the Hundred Years War. He died in Arnhem on 12 October 1243 and was succeeded by his elder son Reinald III. Eleanor of Woodstock died on 22 April 1355, not yet thirty-seven, and was buried in Deventer Abbey, which she'd founded. As her two sons died childless, both in 1371, two of her stepdaughters succeeded as Duchess of Gelderland.
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King Eirik II 'the Priest-Hater' of Norway: Edward's potential father-in-law.
Eirik was born in 1268 as the elder son of King Magnus 'the Lawmender' and Queen Ingeborg, who was the daughter of King Erik IV 'Plovpenning' of Denmark. His mother's sister Sofia married King Valdemar I of Sweden; Valdemar had an affair with another of their sisters, Jutta, and had to travel to Rome to beg the Pope's forgiveness. Eirik's paternal grandfather Håkon Håkonsson (died 1263) fought with Alexander III of Scotland over possession of the Hebrides.
To promote peace between the countries, Eirik was married to Alexander's daughter Margaret in August 1281. She was Alexander's eldest child, born in February 1261 at Windsor, where her mother Queen Margaret was visiting her parents Henry III and Eleanor of Provence. Margaret was much older than Eirik, at least seven years. At the time of the wedding, which took place at the Mariakerke in Bergen, Margaret was twenty and Eirik thirteen, maybe still even twelve.
Despite the age gap, the marriage was consummated before too long. Queen Margaret died, either during or shortly after childbirth, on or a little before 9 April 1283. The child was a daughter, the 'Maid of Norway'. She was betrothed to Edward of Caernarfon, but died in the Orkneys in 1290 at the age of seven, thus ending Edward I's dream of a united England and Scotland.
Eirik married again in 1293, to Isabel Bruce, sister of Robert, the future King. Eirik claimed the throne of Scotland in the early 1290s as the father of the Maid, and although his claim was hopeless, Robert Bruce (or his father) probably decided that an alliance with Eirik was in order. Isabel bore Eirik a daughter, Ingeborg, who married Valdemar, Duke of Finland, brother of King Birger of Sweden.
Eirik's brilliant nickname makes him seem more interesting than he probably really was. He died in 1299, at the age of thirty or thirty-one, and was succeeded by his brother Haakon V. Haakon also had no son, and when he died in 1319, his heir was his daughter's son Magnus VII. Haakon's daughter was also called Ingeborg, and like her cousin and namesake was married to a brother of King Birger of Sweden; her son Magnus VII was King of Sweden as well as Norway. Interestingly, any son of Edward II and the Maid of Norway would have had a strong claim to the Norwegian throne in 1319.
Guy de Dampierre (or Gwijde van Dampierre), Count of Flanders: Edward's potential father-in-law.
Guy was born in about 1226, son of Guillaume de Dampierre, a nobleman of Champagne, and Margaret of Constantinople. Margaret's father Baldwin was Count of Flanders and Hainault, and the first Latin Emperor of Constantinople in 1204; her maternal grandmother Marie was the elder daughter of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Guy was a younger half-brother of Jan d'Avesnes, the father of Jan d'Avesnes who succeeded as Count Jan II of Holland, above. Their mother Margaret of Constantinople was determined that her counties of Flanders and Hainault would pass to her Dampierre sons rather than her Avesnes son, which led to years of conflict.
To cut a very long story short, Guy ceded his claims to Hainault, but became Count of Flanders in 1252, jointly with his mother Margaret, who lived until 1278. Tensions between Guy and Philip IV of France in the late 1280s led Guy to become an ally of Edward I, and after the death of the little Maid of Norway, Guy betrothed his daughter Philippa to Edward of Caernarfon. However, Philip imprisoned Guy, two of his sons, and Philippa in Paris, and the planned marriage never took place.
Guy's allies, including several of his sons and grandsons, defeated the French at the Battle of the Golden Spurs (also known as the Battle of Courtrai or Kortrijk). Guy was still in prison at Compiègne, where he died on 7 March 1304, in his late seventies. He was succeededby his eldest son Robert III, who was already in his mid fifties.
Guy first married Matilda of Bethune in 1246, and she bore him eight children, including: his successor Robert III, Jan II of Brabant's mother Margaretha, Jan I of Holland's mother Beatrijs, and Jan, Bishop of Metz and Liège. Secondly, in March 1265, he married Isabel of Luxemburg, by whom he had eight more children, including: Philippa, betrothed to Edward of Caernarfon; Margaretha, mother of Reinald II of Gelderland, and Beatrijs, who married the Count of St Pol.
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