Edward II's Castilian Cousins (2)

The second part of my post (the first part is directly below, or here) about some of Edward II's Castilian first cousins.

Juan, lord of Valencia de Campos and Biscay (1264-25 June 1319)

Infante Don Juan was born in Seville in 1264 as the eighth of the eleven children of Alfonso X of Castile and his queen Violante, daughter of King Jaime I 'el Conquistador' of Aragon. (Violante's sister Isabel married Philip III of France, so Juan and his siblings were first cousins of Philip IV as well as of Edward II.) Juan married twice: on 17 February 1281 to Margherita, daughter of Guillermo, marquis of Montferrat by his first wife Isabel de Clare, eldest sister of Edward II's brother-in-law Gilbert 'the Red', earl of Gloucester, and secondly on 10 January 1287 to Doña María Díaz de Haro, heiress of Biscay and daughter of the Don Lope Díaz de Haro whom Sancho IV murdered in 1288.

Juan was knighted at a young age by his eldest brother Fernando de la Cerda (1255-1275), at the latter's wedding to Louis IX of France's daughter Blanche in Burgos in November 1269. Fernando also knighted another brother of theirs, Pedro (d. 1283), but not the second brother the future Sancho IV, then aged eleven, who refused to be knighted by Fernando and declared that only his father could do it; an early indication of the conflict that was to consume their family. [1] When he was older, Infante Don Juan threw himself with great energy into the maelstrom of Castilian politics and his family's power struggles, and spent most of his life switching sides from one relative to another. At first he supported his brother Sancho against their father Alfonso X and their de la Cerda nephews in the matter of the succession to the throne, though was later reconciled to Alfonso, who shortly before death bequeathed him the kingdoms of Seville and Badajoz (which Juan never received). Juan was nineteen or twenty when his father died in April 1284 and - not entirely unexpectedly, in this family - rebelled against his brother Sancho IV soon afterwards, joined by his and Sancho's mother the dowager queen Violante, who supported the rights of her de la Cerda grandsons and fled with them to her homeland of Aragon and the protection of her brother Pedro III. Sancho imprisoned Juan until 1292.

After Sancho IV's death, apparently of tuberculosis, in Toledo on 25 April 1295 - their cousin Edward of Caernarfon's eleventh birthday - Infante Don Juan was one of those who claimed the throne of Castile on the grounds that his nine-year-old nephew Fernando IV was illegitimate, and also, with the support of his ally the king of Granada, unsuccessfully attempted to seize the crown of Leon and the kingdom of Galicia. He temporarily made peace with Fernando in 1300, and a papal bull of 1301 declaring that Sancho IV's marriage to María de Molina had been legitimate also helped to calm the situation somewhat. [2] (Although as late as December 1306, it appears that the magnates of Castile, perhaps sick of all the in-fighting, wished to offer the Castilian throne to Edward of Caernarfon should Fernando IV die without a son.) This was not the end of Infante Don Juan's struggles with his nephew, however. When Fernando unsuccessfully besieged the Moorish-held town of Algeciras in 1309/10 - his son Alfonso XI finally took it in 1344 - Juan and his cousin Don Juan Manuel (from the last post) deserted him. A furious Fernando attempted to kill him in revenge and was only prevented from doing so by the intervention of his mother Queen María de Molina. [3] Juan was appointed one of the regents for his great-nephew Alfonso XI, Fernando IV's baby son, in 1312.

Infante Don Juan was killed at the battle of Vega de Granada on 25 June 1319, when he and his nephew and fellow regent Infante Don Pedro, the late Fernando IV's brother, were surprised by a large Muslim army and foolishly allowed their forces to become separated. Pedro was thrown from his horse during the battle and fatally injured. The panicking Castilian soldiers fled the field; Juan managed to escape but died shortly afterwards. [4] Their deaths left as regents Don Juan Manuel, Infante Don Felipe, another brother of Fernando IV, and various others. Juan's capable widow Doña María Díaz de Haro and their son Don Juan el Tuerto, 'the One-Eyed', rose to take his place. Edward II addressed Juan el Tuerto in letters of April 1324 as 'Sir John, son of the Infant John de Ispania, lord of Biscaye, the king's nephew' (actually they were first cousins once removed). [5] In September 1324, Edward told Infante Don Juan's widow Doña María Díaz de Haro, with reference to the betrothal of Alfonso XI and Eleanor of Woodstock, of his "rejoicing at the clinging together of such progeny sprung from his and her common stock, whilst they applaud each other with mutual honours and cherish each other with mutual counsel and aid." A few months later, he gave £100 from the sale of goods taken from a shipwreck in Cornwall to Lupus Urtyz, servant of María, "the king’s kinswoman." [6] Juan el Tuerto was murdered on the orders of Alfonso XI, who had just turned fifteen, in August 1326; his mother Doña María retired to the monastery of Perales and died in November 1342. Infante Don Juan, killed in battle in 1319, also had a son, Alfonso, by his first wife Margherita of Montferrat (who through her mother was the first cousin of Edward II's nephew the earl of Gloucester). Alfonso's son Alfonso became bishop of Zamora, and his son Fernando married an illegitimate daughter of Afonso IV of Portugal.

Beatriz, marchioness of Montferrat (1254-1286)

Infanta Doña Beatriz was the daughter of Alfonso X by his queen, Violante of Aragon (so was the sister of Infante Don Juan above and of King Sancho IV), and bore the same name as her illegitimate half-sister the queen of Portugal, from the last post. She was born in late 1254 as the second child of Alfonso and Violante; her sister Berenguela, who never married and founded the convent of Santa Clara de Toro, was a year older and was officially recognised as successor to the Castilian throne from May 1255 until the birth of their brother Fernando de la Cerda in October that year.

In 1271, the seventeen-year-old Beatriz married Guillermo, marquis of Montferrat, who had attended the wedding of her brother Fernando de la Cerda to Blanche of France two years earlier. Guillermo was born around 1240 as the son of Boniface II, marquis of Montferrat, and Margaret of Savoy; he was Edward I's second cousin via the Savoy connection (Edward's mother Eleanor of Provence was the daughter of Beatrice of Savoy). Guillermo's only child from his first marriage to Isabel de Clare, Margherita, married Doña Beatriz's younger brother Juan in 1281, in a double marriage alliance: their father Alfonso X of Castile was a very useful ally for Guillermo against his enemy Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX of France and king of Sicily from 1266.

Doña Beatriz died in about 1280, still only in her mid-twenties; her husband Guillermo de Montferrat died in Alessandria, Piedmont on 6 February 1292, having been imprisoned in an iron cage by the angry citizens for the previous year. Beatriz and Guillermo's only son, Giovanni, died childless in 1305, leaving as his heir his sister Yolande (or Violante, c. 1274-1317), who married the Byzantine emperor Andronikus II Palaiologus (1259-1332), widower of Anna of Hungary, in 1284. As empress, Yolande was renamed Eirene and bore her husband seven children, including Simonis Palaiologina, who married the decades-older Stefan Milutin, king of Serbia; Theodore, marquis of Montferrat; and Demetrios, whose daughter Irene married the Byzantine emperor Matthaios Kantakouzenos.

In October 1313, Edward II wrote to Empress Eirene, her husband Andronikus, her son Theodore, marquis of Montferrat, and her stepson Michael, co-emperor, asking them to help procure the release of the famous English knight Giles Argentein, being held in prison in Thessalonika. [7] Edward addressed Eirene "his most serene lady, and his dearest lady in Christ, by the grace of God empress of Constantinople." I didn't realise until I researched this post that Eirene and Edward were first cousins once removed!

Sources

1) H. Salvador Marta-Nez and H. Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned: A Biography, pp. 185-186, 376.

2) Teófilo F. Ruiz, Spain's Centuries of Crisis 1300-1474, pp. 53-55.

3) Simon R. Doubleday, The Lara Family: Crown and Nobility in Medieval Spain, p. 95.

4) Josep-David Garrido i Valls, 'Enemies and Allies: The Crown of Aragon and al-Andalus in the Twelfth Century', in Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon, eds., Crusaders, Condottieri and Cannon: Medieval Warfare in Societies around the Mediterranean, p. 217.
5) Calendar of Close Rolls 1323-1327, pp. 175-176.
6) Close Rolls 1323-1327, pp. 253, 344, 350-351.

7) Close Rolls 1313-1318, p. 76; Foedera 1307-1327, p. 229.

Edward II's Castilian Cousins (1)

I've already written posts about Edward II's Castilian uncles and cousin Sancho IV, his Castilian grandfather Fernando III and his great-grandmother Queen Berenguela and her siblings - here's the first part of a part about two of his Castilian first cousins.

Juan Manuel, lord of Peñafiel, Escalona and Villena (5 May 1282-13 June 1348)

It's a little-known fact that a first cousin of Edward II was one of the greatest Spanish writers of the Middle Ages, author of, among much else, El Conde Lucanor (available on Amazon), El Libro de los Estados and El Libro del Cavallero et del Escudero. Don Juan Manuel was born in Escalona on 5 May 1282 as the son and heir of Infante Don Manuel, seventh son of Fernando III of Castile and then in his late forties, by his second wife Beatrice of Savoy. Beatrice was the first cousin of Edward II's grandmother Eleanor of Provence, so Juan Manuel was Edward's second cousin once removed through that connection as well as his first cousin. Juan Manuel succeeded his father as a baby - the Infante Manuel died on Christmas Day 1283, several months before the death of his eldest brother Alfonso X - and grew up at the court of his and Edward II's cousin Sancho IV. (On the subject of whom, Edward may have had a vile temper and been vindictive, but he never went nearly as far as Sancho, who in 1286 clubbed to death a royal judge who had disobeyed him and murdered his kinsman and supporter Don Lope Díaz de Haro in a fit of rage in 1288.) [1]

Don Juan Manuel became politically and militarily active at the tender age of twelve in 1294, when the Moors invaded his lands in Murcia, the frontier between the Christian and Muslim kingdoms in Spain. [2] The death of his cousin Sancho IV the following year triggered massive unrest in Castile: Sancho had seized the throne in 1284 from the young sons of his dead elder brother Fernando de la Cerda ('of the Bristle'), for which his father Alfonso X cursed him on his deathbed, and it was said that Sancho's marriage to María de Molina was irregular and that his nine-year-old son and successor Fernando IV was therefore illegitimate; Sancho and María were first cousins once removed and do not seem to have received a papal dispensation for consanguinity. Juan Manuel was one of those who claimed the throne of Castile in the subsequent struggle over the succession, and it was only thanks to the strenuous efforts of Fernando IV's remarkable mother Queen María, one of the great women of the age, that the boy-king kept his throne.

Don Juan Manuel continued to claim the Castilian throne and cause as much trouble for the young king as possible, and an exasperated Fernando IV, at one point, ordered his death. Teófilo F. Ruiz has described Juan Manuel as "an ambitious and perennial troublemaker" who spent more than four decades in open rebellion against his kinsmen Fernando IV and Fernando's son Alfonso XI. [3] In 1303, he allied himself with King Jaime II of Aragon against Fernando, and was betrothed to Jaime's daughter Constanza to seal the alliance. Constanza of Aragon was born on 1 April 1300, so the wedding had to wait for a few years: she married Juan Manuel the day after her twelfth birthday, 2 April 1312. Fernando IV died on 7 September that year, not yet twenty-seven, leaving a thirteen-month-old son to succeed him as Alfonso XI (if you find all these Castilian kings confusing, I wrote a list of them here), which plunged Castile into anarchy. In 1319 Juan Manuel was appointed one of the regents for the young Alfonso, but the regents found it impossible to work together and spent more time fighting each other and engaging in power struggles than ruling Castile. The political situation deteriorated still further in 1321 with the death of the dowager queen María de Molina, Alfonso XI's grandmother.

Edward II wrote to his Castilian relatives fairly frequently in 1324/26; he was then at war with his brother-in-law Charles IV of France and the Spanish kingdoms were useful allies, and Edward's letters demonstrate that he and his advisors had a pretty good handle on the political chaos reigning in his mother's homeland and who was regent at any given time. The king betrothed his elder daughter Eleanor of Woodstock to Alfonso XI, his elder son the future Edward III to Alfonso's sister Leonor, and his younger daughter Joan of the Tower to the future Pedro IV of Aragon, grandson of the reigning king Jaime II, in 1324/25. (None of the marriages went ahead.) Edward addressed Juan Manuel in letters of March 1324 and February 1325 as 'Sir John Manuel, son of the Infant Manuel de Ispania, the king's kinsman'. On the latter occasion, Edward wrote rather effusively "The king has received his [Juan Manuel's] letters with joy, from which the king knows that the due of John's nature is fully acknowledged, since he not only shows himself ready and prepared for the king's will and pleasure, but also asserts that nothing more pleasing or desirable could be offered to him than to perfect and and execute those things that are to the king's advantage or honour, according to the king's desire." In the same letter Edward apologised for not sending to Juan Manuel his 'pupil' Bernard Peregrini, Edward's sergeant-at-arms, "as the king has sent him to other parts for other of the king's affairs." Edward also wrote, rather intriguingly, that he was "sending to John shortly certain of his most special interpreters to explain to John certain of his secrets, to whom John is desired to give credence." [4]

Although Alfonso XI was betrothed to Edward II's daughter Eleanor of Woodstock, Juan Manuel appears to have arranged a match between the young king and his even younger daughter Constanza in 1325; the FMG site says that the couple actually married in November that year and that their marriage was later annulled. (I haven't found any reaction of Edward II's to the news of this supposed betrothal or marriage.) Alfonso XI declared himself of age when he turned fourteen in August 1325, and subsequently, in 1327 or 1328 - so after Edward II's deposition when the political situation in England had altered completely - infuriated Juan Manuel by repudiating Constanza and marrying instead his first cousin Maria of Portugal, with whom he had all four grandparents in common (his father Fernando IV of Castile and her mother Beatriz were siblings; his mother Constança and her father Afonso IV of Portugal were siblings). Juan Manuel, probably understandably, was furious and spent most of the next few years in open rebellion against the king, though they were finally reconciled in 1340 and Juan Manuel led the Castilian army into Algeciras after it fell to Alfonso in 1344. Edward II's kinsman Henry of Grosmont, later the first duke of Lancaster, was with Alfonso during the siege.

Don Juan Manuel died on 13 June 1348, aged sixty-six. Two of his daughters were queens: Juana married Alfonso XI's illegitimate son Enrique of Trastamara, who killed his half-brother King Pedro the Cruel in 1369 and became king of Castile, and Constanza, Alfonso XI's spurned fiancée, married Pedro I of Portugal. (Who preferred his mistress Doña Ines de Castro and supposedly had her dead body dug up and crowned queen of Portugal.) Don Juan Manuel was thus the grandfather of King Juan II of Castile and King Fernando I of Portugal. Somehow he found the time in the middle of all the fighting against his kinsmen to write numerous works of literature, some of which are still widely read today. To quote Clayton J. Drees, many of Juan Manuel's stories "were fantastic farces derived from Eastern (probably oral) sources and reflect the sort of practical morality Don Juan exemplified. Many scholars today consider Don Juan Manuel a precursor of both Geoffrey Chaucer and Niccolò Machiavelli." [5]

Beatriz, queen of Portugal (1242-27 October 1303)

Edward II's first cousin though a whopping forty-two years his senior, Queen Beatriz was the illegitimate daughter of King Alfonso X, Eleanor of Castile's eldest half-brother, and was born in 1242 (so was only slightly younger than her aunt Eleanor) when her father was twenty-one. Her mother was a Castilian noblewoman named Doña María (or Mayor) Guillén de Guzmán. Alfonso X had several other illegitimate children, including the abbot of Valladolid, and a daughter from an incestuous relationship with his half-aunt María, one of the many illegitimate children of his grandfather Alfonso IX of Leon. The daughter was named Berenguela after Alfonso IX's wife, Edward II's great-grandmother.

Beatriz was married, in 1253 when she was only eleven, to King Afonso III of Portugal, who was born on 5 May 1210 and thus was forty-three at the time of the wedding. His first marriage to Mathilde de Dammartin, countess of Boulogne and Mortain and the great-granddaughter of Stephen, king of England, had been annulled earlier that year. (Mathilde's first cousin Jeanne de Dammartin, countess of Ponthieu and Aumale, married Beatriz's grandfather Fernando III of Castile in 1237 and was the mother of Eleanor of Castile.) Beatriz and Afonso III's eldest child Branca, later abbess of Las Huelgas in Castile, was born on 25 February 1259 when Beatriz was sixteen or seventeen, her eldest son Fernando was born in 1260 and died young, and her second son King Diniz I of Portugal was born on 9 October 1261. Beatriz bore eight children in total, of whom at least three died in infancy.

Afonso III of Portugal died in Lisbon on 18 May 1279 in his late sixties, leaving his teenaged son Diniz as his successor. Beatriz, then thirty-seven, returned to Castile for several years, attempting to reconcile her father Alfonso X and her warring brothers. She died on 27 October 1303 and was buried at the monastery of Santa Maria de Alcobaça in central Portugal. King Diniz, who lived until January 1325, is known to history as Rei Lavrador, the Farmer King; something which might have endeared him to his kinsman Edward II, had the two men ever met. Diniz's son Afonso IV (1291-1357) married another Castilian cousin of Edward II, also Beatriz, daughter of Sancho IV and thus Queen Beatriz's niece. Afonso IV was keen to arrange a marriage alliance between his daughter Maria, born in February 1313, and Edward II's son the future Edward III, in 1325/26; Edward had to explain to Afonso and the younger Queen Beatriz in April 1326 that his son was betrothed to Alfonso XI of Castile's sister Leonor, but as he "desires a treaty of perpetual friendship to be established between his house and that of Alfonsus," he was willing to arrange another marriage between their children. [6] Maria of Portugal ended up marrying her first cousin Alfonso XI of Castile, as above.

I'll post the second part of this, with lots more info about some of Edward II's other Castilian first cousins, in a couple of days!

Sources

1) H. Salvador Marta-Nez and H. Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned: A Biography, pp. 376-377; Malcolm Vale, 'Ritual Ceremony and the 'Civilising Process': The Role of the Court, c. 1270-1400', in Steven J. Gunn and A. Janse, eds., The Court as a Stage, p. 27; Teófilo F. Ruiz, The City and the Realm: Burgos and Castile 1080-1492, p. 144.

2) Clayton J. Drees, The Late Medieval Age of Crisis and Renewal, 1300-1500: A Biographical Dictionary, p. 319.

3) Teófilo F. Ruiz, Spain's Centuries of Crisis 1300-1474, p. 59.
4) Calendar of Close Rolls 1323-1327, pp. 175-176, 350-351; Foedera 1307-1327, pp. 549, 587.
5) Drees, Late Medieval Age, p. 320.
6) Close Rolls 1323-1327, pp. 556-557.

Books

Ian Mortimer's Medieval Intrigue: Decoding Royal Conspiracies, a collection of ten essays, came out a few days ago in the UK (and is due out on 18 November in the US) and I'm currently happily immersed in it. The book "examines some of the most controversial questions in medieval history, including whether Edward II was murdered, his possible later life in Italy, the weakness of the Lancastrian claim to the throne in 1399 and the origins of the idea of the royal pretender. Central to this book is Mortimer's ground-breaking approach to medieval evidence. He explains how an information-based method allows a more certain reading of a series of texts. He criticises existing modes of arriving at consensus and outlines a process of historical analysis that ultimately leads to questioning historical doubts as well as historical facts, with profound implications for what we can say about the past with certainty."

Included are Ian's important and thought-provoking article 'The Death of Edward II in Berkeley Castle', which was originally published in the English Historical Review and which I'm delighted to see made accessible to a much wider audience. There are other articles about Edward and his survival after 1327, including one about the earl of Kent's plot to free the former king in 1330, one about Edward's reputation as a sodomite and the development of this accusation as a political weapon against him, and one about the Fieschi family (as in Manuele Fieschi, who told Edward II's son in the 1330s that he had survived Berkeley) and their relationship with Edward III. For more info, see Ian's website, and the publishers, Continuum History. If you're at all interested in Edward II, fourteenth-century history and the nature of historical evidence and analysis, you really, really need to read this one.

I'm sure I must have mentioned Seymour (J.R.S.) Phillips' massive new biography of Edward II here before, which I've thoroughly enjoyed - though I can't help wishing that Professor Phillips had been a little more open-minded to the notion that Edward lived past September 1327 and had engaged more with, for example, the archbishop of York's statement to the mayor of London in January 1330 that "my liege lord Edward of Caernarfon is alive and in good health of body." (Professor Phillips is not alone in easily dismissing this piece of evidence: Roy Martin Haines, in his 2009 English Historical Review article 'Sumptuous Apparel for a Royal Prisoner: Archbishop Melton's Letter, 14 January 1330', states that Melton was "misled" and "easily convinced, or should one say deceived?" into believing that Edward II was still alive in 1330, without attempting to explain how a man of Melton's intelligence and experience could have been deceived to the extent that he was willing to commit his belief in Edward's survival to writing.)

Anyway, Professor Phillips' book is a sympathetic portrayal of Edward that doesn't whitewash him, with lots and lots of gorgeous details about him and his life. See this great review by Steve Donoghue. (And from the same site, check out this review of Emma Campion's recent novel about Alice Perrers with its awesome line that Edward III "combined the muscular vitality of his grandfather Edward I and the long-haired sensuousness of his father Edward II.") There's a review of Professor Phillips' biography in The Tablet which says that Edward II "wasn't quite as loathsome or ludicrous as we have always imagined" - hmmmm - one by Nigel Saul in History Today, and one by Chris Given-Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement which I can't link to but which is mentioned here. (There's also a shoddy 'review' I refuse to link to, written by a young man with an enormous talent for self-promotion and questionable taste in friends; any of you who are friends of mine on Facebook or who regularly read my Edward II page there will know who I'm talking about.)

I haven't read or ordered it yet, but Jeffrey (J.S.) Hamilton, biographer of Piers Gaveston, has a book out called The Plantagenets: History of a Dynasty, aimed at a more general audience than his usual academic work. I was extremely disappointed by Professor Hamilton's recent article 'The Uncertain Death of Edward II?' in the History Compass journal - numerous rhetorical questions and airy dismissals of anything that doesn't fit the traditional narrative do not a convincing argument against Edward's post-1327 survival make - but this overview of the fascinating Plantagenet dynasty looks entertaining and worth a read. Nancy Goldstone, who wrote Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe about Edward II's grandmother Eleanor of Provence and her sisters, has Joanna: The Notorious Queen of Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem coming out in the UK on 11 November (it was published last autumn in the US; that's quite a delay). Queen Joanna (1326-1382) was a kinswoman of Edward II, a descendant of Edward I's sister Beatrice and also of Eleanor of Provence's sister the queen of Sicily. And finally, I'm looking forward to Helen Castor's She-Wolves: The Women who Ruled England before Elizabeth, which is due out in a few weeks. I hate the title, which is too similar to Elizabeth Norton's She-Wolves: The Notorious Queens of England and Alison Weir's Isabella: She-Wolf of France, Queen of England (and can we please stop calling powerful women 'she-wolves'?), but the book looks pretty good.

Arthur and Eleanor of Brittany

No, not that Arthur and Eleanor of Brittany - King John's nephew almost certainly killed in 1203, and Arthur's sister the Fair Maid of Brittany, imprisoned until her death in 1241 - but a later generation, Edward II's first cousins Duke Arthur II of Brittany and Eleanor, abbess of Fontevraud.

Arthur and Eleanor were the children of Duke John II of Brittany and Beatrice of England. Beatrice was born in Bordeaux in June 1242 as the third child of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence, was the younger sister of Edward I (born June 1239) and Margaret, queen of Scotland (born September 1240), and married John of Brittany in 1260 when she was eighteen, a pretty advanced age by the standards of the time. John was born in 1239 as the son of Duke John I of Brittany, and through his mother Blanche was the grandson of Thibaut I, king of Navarre and count of Champagne. (Duke John I was the son of Alix de Thouars, duchess of Brittany in her own right and younger half-sister of the ill-fated Arthur and Eleanor mentioned above.)

As far as one can tell, Duke John II and Beatrice seem to have had a happy marriage, and John, although he was widowed in his mid-thirties and outlived Beatrice by three decades, never re-married. Beatrice died at the age of only thirty-two on 24 March 1275, less than a month after the death of her sister Queen Margaret, and was buried at her own request at the Franciscan friary in London, where her husband later made many benefactions. Her heart was buried at the abbey of Fontevrault. John and Beatrice's mother Eleanor of Provence were executors of her will. [1] John had to wait until 1286, when he was forty-seven, to succeed his long-lived father as duke of Brittany, and died on 18 November 1305 at the age of sixty-six in possibly the strangest freak accident of the era: a wall fell on him as he was leading the horse of the new pope, Clement V, around Avignon during his coronation (if that's the right word for popes, or do I mean inauguration?). John and Beatrice had six children: Arthur and Eleanor, of whom more below; John, earl of Richmond (died 1334), who spent most of his life in England and was known in childhood by the pet name Brito, which I think is very sweet; Marie, countess of St Pol (d. 1339), mother of, among many others, the countess of Pembroke, the count of St Pol and the countess of Valois; Pierre, viscount of Leon (d. 1312); and Blanche (d. 1327), who married Philippe d'Artois and was the mother of the countesses of Évreux, Fois and Aumale and of Robert d'Artois, of Les Rois Maudits fame. As well as being Edward II's first cousins, the Brittany siblings were second cousins of his wife Isabella of France, also a great-grandchild of Thibaut of Navarre.

Duke Arthur II, John and Beatrice's eldest child, was born on 2 July 1262 (and was possibly the second-eldest grandchild of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence after his cousin Margaret of Scotland). Arthur was married twice: firstly to Marie, viscountess of Limoges (d. 1291), mother of his successor Duke John III and another son, Guy; and secondly to Yolande de Dreux (d. 1330), countess of Montfort in her own right and dowager queen of Scotland as the widow of Alexander III. Arthur and Yolande - who sadly failed to fulfil Scottish hopes in 1286 and bear a posthumous child to King Alexander - had seven children, including Duke John IV.

Arthur was forty-three when he succeeded his father in 1305 following Duke John's unfortunate encounter with a wall, and attended the coronation of his first cousin Edward II at Westminster Abbey in February 1308, with his brother-in-law Guy, count of St Pol. His tenure as duke of Brittany was fairly short, and he died aged fifty on 27 August 1312 - nineteen days after his cousin Edward II sent him a letter requesting that he deal with an assault in Brittany on two English merchants [2] - leaving eight living children, including his twenty-six-year-old eldest son and successor John III. John was then married to Isabel, daughter of King Sancho IV of Castile and, like John himself, a first cousin once removed of Edward II; she had been proposed as a bride for Edward in 1303 by the regent of Castile, Edward's uncle Enrique. John III's first wife, another Isabelle who died in 1309, had been the eldest child of Philip IV of France's brother Charles de Valois, and after Duchess Isabel's death in 1328 John married Joan of Savoy, but was destined to die childless in April 1341. This led to the decades-long War of the Breton Succession between John III's niece Jeanne de Penthièvre - only child of his full brother, Guy - and her husband Charles de Blois (nephew of Philip VI of France) on one side, and John III's half-brother John, who eventually succeeded as John IV. (John III hated his half-siblings, tried to have them made illegitimate by having his father Duke Arthur's second marriage to Queen Yolande retrospectively annulled, and strongly favoured the succession of his niece Jeanne, though he changed his mind at the end of his life and declared his half-brother John to be his heir; on his deathbed he famously muttered "For God's sake leave me alone and do not trouble my spirit with such things.") [3]

Eleanor of Brittany (Alianore/Alienor de Bretagne) was the youngest child of Duke John II and Beatrice of England. She was born shortly before her mother's death in 1275 and was named after her maternal grandmother, the dowager queen of England. When Eleanor of Provence retired to the priory of Amesbury in 1285, she requested, or insisted, that two of her granddaughters accompany her and be veiled as nuns: Eleanor, and Edward I's fourth surviving daughter Mary. Unlike Mary, who had no vocation whatsoever and spent much time at the courts of her father and brother Edward II, Eleanor took well to religious life. She was veiled on 25 March 1285 at the age of ten, her six-year-old cousin Mary following on 15 August that year in a ceremony attended by Edward I, Eleanor of Castile and possibly the baby Edward of Caernarfon. [4] To provide for her granddaughter Eleanor, Eleanor of Provence granted the Berkshire manor of Chaddleworth to Amesbury. [5] The two girls were, however, not fully professed as nuns until late 1291, several months after their grandmother's death (Mary's seven-year-old brother Edward of Caernarfon attended).

At some point, Eleanor transferred to Amesbury's mother house of Fontevraud, where her mother's heart had been buried in 1275 [7] - Mary stayed behind in England - and became its abbess in 1304 when she was not yet thirty. There is much evidence that she was well-suited to the position: Berenice M. Kerr says that Eleanor was "determined to assert her authority" as abbess, and "[w]eak abbesses there may have been in the history of Fontevraud, but Eleanor of Brittany was not one of them. She was not prepared to have her authority or her decisions challenged." [6] Eleanor was, for example, not afraid to hallenge her royal cousin, Mary, who was accustomed as acting as the 'visitor' of Amesbury, the people who travelled around the manors controlled by the abbey to check their issues, audit their accounts, order any necessary repairs, and so on. In 1315, Eleanor appointed two Fontevraud brothers to act as the Amesbury visitors in Mary's place; Mary must have complained to her brother the king, as on 6 May 1317 Edward II wrote to the dean of Angers, saying that he had sent letters to Eleanor "requesting her to commission Mary, the king's sister, a nun of Aumbresbury [Amesbury], to visit and correct the houses of that order in England, and requesting him [the dean of Angers] to induce the abbess to put into effect the king's request, as she has delayed doing so, at which the king is surprised, especially as she has not been wont to make such corrections and visitations in person, and the king does not believe that any other lady of religion of that order in England or anyone else could execute the office more usefully than his sister..." [7] Edward wrote to Eleanor in rather more conventional and amicable fashion in January and March 1322, requesting that she would admit as nuns of Fontevraud women named 'Feidita Pellegrina, daughter of Elias Pelegrin' and Perotta de Beaumond. [8]

Eleanor of Brittany died in 1342 - I don't know on which date - at the age of sixty-seven, having served as abbess of Fontevraud for almost forty years. She was wealthy in her own right, receiving £700 from the estate of her father Duke John II, and bequeathed to Fontevraud numerous precious objects including manuscripts, tapestries, relics, vessels of gold, silver and crystal, and crosses set with precious stones. [9] An illuminated manuscript which she owned, containing chants of the liturgical year, has been set to music: the Graduel d'Alienor de Bretagne.

Sources

1) Margaret Howell, Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth-Century England, p. 103.
2) Calendar of Close Rolls 1307-1313, p. 544.
3) Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War: Trial By Battle, p. 371.
4) Howell, Eleanor of Provence, p. 300.
5) Howell, Eleanor of Provence, p. 301; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1281-1292, p. 128.
6) Berenice M. Kerr, Religious Life for Women, c. 1100-c. 1350: Fontevraud in England, pp. 133, 137.

7) Close Rolls 1313-1318, p. 470; Kerr, Religious Life, pp. 136-137.
8) Close Rolls 1318-1323, pp. 510, 535.
9) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Yet More Edward II Myths

Some myths I've seen posted as 'fact' about Edward II and Piers Gaveston online recently (truly, the crap never stops):

Myth 1) Isabella of France was buried with Roger Mortimer's heart in 1358, and was buried next to him at the Franciscan church in London.

I've seen this repeated at least three times in the last week or two. Mortimer was not buried in London but in Coventry, and Isabella was not buried with his heart but with her husband Edward II's. The queen's tomb, with all the others in the Franciscan church in London, was sold at the time of the Reformation - in the autumn of 1547, to be precise - and its subsequent fate is unclear, and the church itself was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. To quote Professor F.D. Blackley, Isabella's tomb "appears to have been a raised tomb of alabaster situated in the middle of the choir. On it was an effigy in the breast of which was placed the heart of Edward II. About the tomb were four archangels." [1] Isabella's body, lying at Hertford Castle for several months following her death in August 1358, was dressed in the clothes she had worn for her wedding to Edward on 25 January 1308: to quote Professor Blackley again, "The queen's body was clothed with a mantle of red samite lined with yellow sindon in which she had been married. The tunic and mantle, now over fifty years old, had been carefully preserved...It may be that burial in them was the wish of Isabella, as the preservation would suggest." [2] This implies that Isabella's husband was much on her mind before her death. Maybe Roger Mortimer was too, but there is no evidence to suggest it.

Myth 2) Piers Gaveston's mother was burned alive as a witch.

The hoary old chestnut of Piers' Mum The Burned Witch simply refuses to die, with the result that a whole horde of authors have inflicted sensationalist novels where Piers is a Goddess Worshipper and At One With Nature on us. Yaaaawwwn, what a tedious old cliché it's become. Claramonde de Marsan died shortly before 4 February 1287, of natural causes as far as anyone - 'anyone' in the sense of 'people who actually know stuff about the late thirteenth century and have done a lot more research on it than just flicking through a couple of crappy novels', that is - knows. The story first appeared in John Stow's Annales, or a General Chronicle of England from Brute... at the end of the sixteenth century: "that the father of this Piers was a traitor to the king of France, and was for the same executed, and that his mother was burned for a witch, and that the said Piers was banished for consenting to his mother's witchcraft..." [3] Piers' father Sir Arnaud de Gabaston died in England in 1302, also apparently of natural causes, and was buried in Winchester Cathedral; he was certainly not executed for treason against Philip IV. (He was Gascon, and thus not a French subject.) There is no contemporary evidence I know of to suggest that Piers Gaveston was not as conventionally devout as anyone else, and obviously that whole 'being banished for consenting to his mother's witchcraft' story of Stow's cannot be true given that he was probably no more than about five when she died.

Myth 3) Edward II confined Isabella to the Tower in the 1320s.

Can't remember now where I saw this one - probably on one of the forums that endlessly and breathlessly repeat utter crap about poor Edward as though it's fact (see below for more examples) - so I don't have the exact quotation, but this scores a big, resounding 'Huh???' from me. Edward never 'confined' Isabella to the Tower or anywhere else; what a very odd notion. Elizabeth Norton's book She-Wolves: The Notorious Queens of England includes a bizarrely inaccurate story about Isabella being besieged in the Tower by the earl of Pembroke in the summer of 1321. Isabella was then living in the Tower - which lots of people seem to forget was a royal residence as well as a prison - to give birth to her youngest child Joan, Pembroke was her husband's ally and would never have besieged the queen, and - seriously, how on earth did Norton come up with that story? Baffling.

Myth 4) "...Edward II, who within hours of his birth in 1284, was proclaimed as the first English Prince of Wales...in later years, the second Edward proved to be a great disappointment. Edward II was weak, lazy and perverted."

Edward was created prince of Wales and earl of Chester on 7 February 1301, when he was almost seventeen. [4] His ten-year-old brother Alfonso was still alive when he was born in April 1284 and for four months afterwards, so it's hard to see why Edward I would have made a new-born baby the prince of Wales, a vast territorial endowment, rather than the heir to the throne. Weak and lazy? OK, you could make a case for that if you wanted. (Not physically weak, obviously; "one of the strongest men of his realm" [5] was never that.) But 'perverted'? Was Edward a rapist or a child abuser or a sex pest? Er, no. Hmmm, I wonder why someone would call him 'perverted' then? Someone who lives in our supposedly enlightened society in the twenty-first century? I. Just. Can't. Imagine...

Myth 5) "Edward II died as dishonourably as he lived. Spending more time with his lovers (he called his wife, Isabella, the 'she-wolf of France') than he did attending to affairs of state, he was murdered while in captivity."

The epithet 'she-wolf' was invented by Shakespeare for Margaret of Anjou and was first applied to Isabella in a 1757 poem by Thomas Gray.

Myth 6) "Edward III...had his mother sent to a convent for the rest of her life [in 1330]."

Yeah, and she went mad and was a mad evil mad old madwoman locked up at Castle Rising for nearly three decades and her ghost still haunts the castle - no, wait, she wasn't sent there, was she? She was sent to a convent. Hmm, it's tough to keep these contradictory old myths straight, isn't it? In fact, Edward III most certainly did not send his mother to a convent or imprison her at Castle Rising or treat her in any way that was inconsistent with the respect he owed to his mother and the dowager queen. Edward II didn't imprison Isabella and Edward III didn't either, so please, people, stop saying they did.

Myth 7) "The sweet little woman depicted in the movie [Braveheart] is quite unlike the actual Isabella, called the 'She-wolf of France', who personally murdered her husband with a poker so it would leave no marks on the body."

I have no words. None. Frankly it's beneath my and my readers' contempt to even bother to refute that one, so I'll merely point out that Isabella was in Lincoln, about 150 miles away, on the day (21 September 1327) that Edward II was supposedly murdered at Berkeley.

Myth 8) Question: "The story of the 3 Edwards is always fascinating--the second always coming off as weak and (ahem) unmanly. And of course, the 3rd Edward the strong, capable one. Did he have his father killed?"

Answer: "Legend is that Edward II was murdered in a most unpleasant fashion, but not, near as I can tell, by his son. Yet another murder unfairly pinned on Edward III?"

I had no idea that anyone had ever tried to pin Edward's alleged murder on his son. And again, Edward II is said to be 'unmanly'. I think we can all guess why. People really do love to hold onto these old-fashioned, stereotyped notions of sexuality, don't they?

Running a search for Edward II on Yahoo Answers is an amusing, though ultimately depressing, experience. Behold the crapness:

"He was a fairly weak king who seemed to have court favourites (who may have also been his lovers) and did not listen to his regular court. He did have a child with Katherine [sic] of France (afterwords known as the Shewolf of France) and was somewhat estranged from her husband."

(That reads as though Edward was 'estranged from her husband'.)

Q: "Was Edward II of England really gay?

He was known to favour male friends over his child bride Isabella?"

A: "I know that Sir Hugh le Despenser the son was allegedly the ''lover '' of King Edward II. What became of Hugh le Despenser.. I know he died in 1426 [sic] and Isabella of France went to France on a mission to meet her brother Charles de Valois [sic] VI [sic] and negotiate to regain some of the land the French had taken over from Britain [sic].. I know she was in love with Roger Mortimer but that he was later executed somehow... and King Edward II was executed [sic] in 1427 [sic] I believe on orders from the French [sic].. they called Isabella of Spain [sic] the French She Devil [sic] but was she really that bad considering what her husband Edward II had done [huh??]"

"Everyone knows that King Edward II of Great Britian was a very gay closeted man. It has been said through-out history. What if for example, gay-marriage existed in those days. Because of the British Government. That would not be allowed. He could not have a hubby like a Queen and name him a Prince Consort...would he? For example, lets say a man became King in the future. It would not be allowed for him to marry a man. He would have to abdicate the thrown. And loose his HRH status. As well as his peerage? Please help me set my friend straight that the U.K. or any other country would not allow that. She seems to think so."

"Why do english monarchs have the same names (henry, edwards, etc.) b/c if there were direct linage shouldnt edward III follow edward II...y then are there huge gaps between them"

"Isn't it a funny coincidence that the Hundred Years War started when...?

...Princess Isabella of France married King Edward II of England? You know, sort of like in Twilight?"

"Is it possible I inherited the genes from a king that lived hundreds of years ago?

I can trace my royal ancestry back to Edward I. I looked at several paintings of him and I noticed that I look exactly like him. I was more convinced when I watched Braveheart and the actors playing Edward I and Edward II looked like the paintings that I saw, and I realized I looked more like Edward II. I also read about how they acted. I am always ready for a fight like Edward I and I have an extremely quick temper, I am obsessed with military, and I admit I am somewhat dictator-like. How could this be? Could it be because of the DNA we share?"

And if you've ever wondered why I have a blog, a website and a Facebook page about Edward II, the errors above are just some of the many, many reasons...

Sources

1) F.D. Blackley, 'Isabella of France, Queen of England (1308-1358) and the Late Medieval Cult of the Dead', Canadian Journal of History, 14 (1980), p. 29.

2) Ibid., p. 26.

3) Cited in Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman, eds., Christopher Marlowe: the plays and their sources, p. 373.

4) Calendar of Charter Rolls 1300-1326, p. 6.

5) Description of Edward II from the Scalacronica ("de soun corps vn dez plus fortz hom de soun realme"): Scalacronica: By Sir Thomas Gray of Heton, knight. A Chronicle of England and Scotland From A. D. MLXVI to A. D. MCCCLXII, ed. J. Stevenson, p. 136.

Margaret of Scotland, Queen of Norway

A new blog feature, where I look at the lives of some of Edward II's first cousins. Today, it's Margaret of Scotland, queen of Norway (February 1261 - April 1283). I hope the post isn't too confusing, with three successive generations of women named Margaret!

Margaret was the eldest child of Alexander III, king of Scotland (September 1241 - March 1286) and Margaret of England (September 1240 - February 1275), daughter of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence and sister of Edward I. Alexander and Margaret (who was probably named after her aunt Marguerite of Provence, queen of France) married in York on 26 December 1251, when he was ten and she eleven; he had succeeded his father Alexander II in July 1249, and his kingdom was being ruled by a squabbling group of regents during his minority. The Lanercost chronicler calls Margaret of England, queen of Scotland, "a woman of great beauty, chastity, and humility." [1] Henry III and Queen Eleanor, a couple I otherwise find it very hard to warm to, were, for all their numerous faults, devoted parents: on learning that Margaret was deeply miserable, kept apart from her youthful husband and little more than a prisoner of Alexander's regents, they themselves rode up to Edinburgh to set matters to rights. Her natal family, which also included her younger siblings Beatrice and Edmund, appears to have been devoted to each other and to have spent as much time together as possible, and at some point Margaret received a "cup of gold with feet" from her brother Edward I, which was apparently returned to him after her death, as it appears in his Wardrobe account of 1276/77. [2]

Alexander III and Queen Margaret visited England in the autumn of 1260; Margaret was met at St Albans by her fifteen-year-old brother Edmund (who eighteen or so years later became the father of Thomas of Lancaster), and was reunited not only with her parents but with her uncle Richard of Cornwall, king of Germany, and his second wife, Eleanor of Provence's sister Sanchia. (The Flores Historiarum waxes lyrical about this meeting of three kings and three queens.) [3] Margaret discovered during the trip that she was several months pregnant, and asked her husband for permission to stay in England with her parents until after she gave birth. Alexander agreed, but, understandably reluctant to leave his newborn child, possibly the future king of Scotland, under the control of the king of England - father-in-law or no - requested on 30 September 1260 that Henry III make the following oath:

"Should the mother [Queen Margaret] die, he promises to return the child, and should the child die, to let the mother return freely. Should the king its father die, or other unforeseen event occur to him, the king [Henry] promises that the bishops of St Andrews, Aberdeen, Dunblane and Whithorn, the earls of Fife, Buchan, Strathearn, Dunbar and Mar, and John Comyn, Alexander the Steward of Scotland, Alan Doorward and Hugh Abernethy, barons, or any four or three of them, shall receive and take the child to Scotland, the state of neither country being taken into consideration." [4]

And so Margaret of Scotland was born at Windsor Castle on 28 February 1261, her mother then twenty and her father, who had returned to his kingdom the previous November, nineteen. Henry III had promised to return Queen Margaret and her child to Scotland by Easter Sunday, 24 April 1261, but in the end - perhaps because of complications or an illness after childbirth or the young queen's reluctance to leave her parents and her homeland - they remained in England until the end of May. Margaret of Scotland was probably the eldest of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence's grandchildren (precisely when Edward I and Eleanor of Castile's first child was born is unclear, though they certainly had a daughter by 1264). Inevitably, little is known of her childhood. Her brother, named after their father and the heir to the Scottish throne, was born on 21 January 1264, and after a very long gap, another brother, David, was born on 20 March 1273, four months after the death of their grandfather Henry III. The two elder children met their uncles Edward and Edmund in the summer of 1267, when the young men visited Scotland; this was Longshanks' first visit to that country, though most definitely not his last, as decades later he was to turn his late brother-in-law's kingdom into a war zone. Marion Campbell says "There was no protocol for English state visits to Scotland - most such visitations had not been of a social nature - and Edward and Edmund came informally." [5]

Margaret of Scotland lost her mother just before her fourteenth birthday: Margaret of England, queen of Scotland, died on 26 February 1275 at the age of only thirty-four. By unhappy coincidence, her younger sister Beatrice, wife of the duke of Brittany's heir, also died less than a month later, to the grief of their mother Eleanor of Provence. The Lanercost chronicler, who although frequently a useful source for Scottish events was unfortunately also prone to writing rubbish on occasion, wrote "Richard of Inverkeithing, bishop of Dunkeld, departed from the world, treacherously poisoned, and it is believed by many that the aforesaid queen [Margaret] perished in the same manner." [6] Although the cause of Margaret's death is unknown, there is absolutely no reason to give credence to this allegation. King Alexander III remained a widower for the next decade, which would prove with hindsight to have been a most unwise decision.

King Magnus VI of Norway, whose father Haakon IV Alexander III had defeated at the battle of Largs in 1263, died on 9 May 1280, and within weeks Alexander had opened negotiations for Magnus's grandson and heir Erik II to marry Margaret. Erik was born sometime in 1268, so was at least seven years younger than Margaret and at the time of the wedding negotiations only eleven or twelve to her nineteen; despite his striking nickname of 'Priest-Hater', he seems to have grown up to be a rather mild and ineffectual young man. Here's how the Lanercost chronicle reports the negotiations: "At this time the king of Norway died, leaving as successor his son called Magnus [sic]; who hearing that the king of Scotland had an amiable, beautiful and attractive daughter, a virgin, of suitable age for himself (being a handsome youth of about eighteen [sic] years) could not rest until a formal mission, divines as well as nobles, had been sent twice to obtain her as his spouse and consort on the throne." [7] Margaret's feelings about marrying a boy a few years her junior are a matter for speculation, though she did send a letter (in French) to her "very dear uncle" Edward I sometime in 1280 - whether before or after the marriage negotiations is hard to say, as she didn't date the letter - telling him that she was "healthy and cheerful" (saine et haite) by God's mercy. She ended by wishing Edward "a thousand greetings," mile saluz, and requested that he constantly inform her of his own health and his wishes towards her. [8]

The wedding negotiations were completed on 25 July 1281, and Margaret sailed from Leith on 11 August with a huge dowry of 14,000 marks, arriving in Bergen on 15 August; among those accompanying her were the earl and countess of Menteith and the abbot of Balmerino. She was greeted in her new land with "demonstrations of great joy." Her wedding to thirteen-year-old Erik, and her coronation as queen of Norway, both took place at the Mariakirken in Bergen on 31 August; a wedding hymn in Latin has fortuitously survived, the first stanza of which Marion Campbell translates as: "From you has risen, o gentle Scotland, a light which gleaming Norway truly acknowledges, at whose transit you sigh deeply because your king's daughter is taken from you." Little can be said about Margaret's rather brief tenure as queen of Norway, though she appears to have been very popular, and was said in her new country to be "she who made our king a man." [9] She became pregnant in the summer of 1282; one might speculate that Erik's fourteenth birthday, at which age he would have been considered old enough to consummate his marriage, had recently passed.

Tragedy struck in early 1283: Margaret of Scotland, queen of Norway, died on 9 April (or 28 February, her birthday, according to Lanercost), aged twenty-two, shortly after giving birth to a daughter. King Erik II was now a father and a widower at the age of only fourteen or fifteen. Their daughter was named Margaret after Margaret herself and her mother the queen of Scotland - Erik's daughter by his second wife, Robert Bruce's sister Isabel, was named Ingiborg after his own mother - and is known to history as the Maid of Norway. The Lanercost chronicler, who for some reason really had it in for poor Alexander III - who has always struck me as a very pleasant and likeable man, as well as a strong and excellent king - blames Margaret's death on her father and says that it came about "in order that God's long-suffering should by many afflictions soften to a proper degree of penitence the heart of the father through whose wrong-doing these things came to pass." He also blames the early deaths of Alexander's queen and his sons on Alexander's "sin." [10] Strange.

Further tragedy struck Alexander III, and Scotland, in January 1284, when his elder son Alexander died a few days after his twentieth birthday (the king's younger son David had died aged only eight in 1281). Young Alexander was married to yet another Margaret, one of the many daughters of Guy de Dampierre, count of Flanders, but left no children. (Guy's daughter Philippa was betrothed to the future Edward II some years later, with her sister Isabella as 'back-up'.) Edward I granted Margaret, called the widow of 'Monseignur Alexandre', a safe-conduct to return through England to Flanders on an unspecified date, at the request of her father Count Guy. [11] According to Lanercost, young Alexander prophesied shortly before he died that "My uncle [Edward I] shall fight three battles; twice he will conquer; in the third he will be overthrown." [12] I bet lots of people, then and now, wish that prophecy had come true.

This left Queen Margaret of Norway's baby daughter Margaret the Maid of Norway as sole heir to her grandfather, as Alexander III acknowledged in a letter to his brother-in-law Edward I on 20 April 1284, five days before the birth of Edward II in Caernarfon: "though death has carried off all of his [Alexander's] blood in Scotland, one yet remains, the child of his own dearest daughter the king's [Edward's] niece, the late queen of Norway, now under divine providence the heir apparent of Scotland." All thirteen Scottish earls and countless barons including the Bruces, Balliols and Comyns, however reluctantly, acknowledged the Maid as heir apparent to the Scottish throne at a meeting held in Scone on 5 February 1284: "...we shall all receive our illustrious child Margaret, daughter of the daughter of our said lord king, Margaret of good memory, sometime queen of Norway, by the illustrious Lord Erik king of Norway; and as she descends with full legitimacy we shall receive her as our lady and right heir of our said lord king..." [13]

To have a baby foreigner, female to boot, as sole heir to the throne was hardly a desirable situation, and Alexander III married for a second time in October 1285, a French noblewoman named Yolande or Joleta de Dreux - his mother Marie de Coucy, second queen of Alexander II, was also French - in order to sire more children. He was riding to see Queen Yolande on 19 March 1286 during a terrible storm, when his horse fell off a cliff and he died of a broken neck. Alexander was still only forty-four, a vigorous and extremely able man in the prime of life, and his early death was to have disastrous consequences for Scotland. His little granddaughter died at the age of seven on her way to her kingdom and marriage to the future Edward II in the autumn of 1290; three centuries of conflict and bloodshed between Scotland and England were to be the tragic result.

Sources

1) The Chronicle of Lanercost 1272-1346, ed. Herbert Maxwell, p. 9.

2) Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland 1272-1307, p. 21.

3) Flores Historiarum, ed. H.R, Luard, vol. II, pp. 459-460.

4) Marion Campbell, Alexander III, King of Scots, p. 122.

5) Campbell, Alexander III, p. 172.

6) Lanercost, pp. 9-10.

7) Ibid., p. 21.

8) Cal Docs Scot, p. 60.

9) Campbell, Alexander III, pp. 214-216, for the wedding hymn, quotation and Margaret's dowry and journey.

10) Lanercost, pp. 9, 32.

11) Cal Docs Scot, p. 73.

12) Lanercost, p. 32.

13) Cal Docs Scot, p. 73; Campbell, Alexander III, pp. 219-221.

Edward II And English

Following a recent post about Edward II's use of French and Latin, here's one about his use of the language spoken by the vast majority of his subjects: English. Unfortunately, direct evidence to tell us to what extent Edward spoke and understood the language is lacking. Edward I's biographers Michael Prestwich and Marc Morris, however, say that Edward I learned English from a young age from his tutors and nurses, and Edward I's uncle Richard, earl of Cornwall, also spoke the language, as demonstrated by a statement in the chronicle of Matthew Paris - who knew Richard well - which says with reference to Richard's election as king of Germany in 1257 that he would have no problems learning German, as he already knew English. [1] Edward II's son Edward III certainly had at least some knowledge of English, as he used the language for his personal slogans at jousting tournaments far more often than he used French [2], though how well he spoke it or how often is impossible to say for sure.

Given that Edward II's father and son knew English, it is highly likely that he did too. Edward was criticised by various fourteenth-century chroniclers for enjoying the company of the lowborn, which is borne out by other evidence: he went on holiday for an entire month in the autumn of 1315 with "a great concourse of common people"; he drank in Newcastle with an unnamed but evidently lowborn woman in 1310; he dined privately in 1325 with a group of carpenters, and a group of sailors on another occasion; he went to a forge to talk to his blacksmith John Cole in 1323; he spent what seems like excessive amounts of time in the 1320s chatting to fishermen and often bought fish from them "with his own hands." There are numerous other such examples. Carpenters, fishermen, blacksmiths and the like would not have spoken French, and I find it hard to imagine that Edward would have taken as much pleasure as he obviously did in the company of the lowborn, and spent as much time with them, if he'd had to rely on interpreters to communicate with them. Although direct evidence is lacking, it seems to me that Edward II must have enjoyed a fluent command of English.

I find it interesting to see that English words occasionally crept into French texts of the early fourteenth century. I've written about Edward's Household Ordinance of 1318, where 'hackneyman' and 'cup house', among others, appear in English. In Edward I's 1306 order that the countess of Buchan should have one or two English women to attend her in her cage on the walls of Berwick Castle, the word 'English' is written in English (Englesche) rather than in French (engleis). Edward II's chamber account of 1325 records a gift of forty-seven caged goldfinches for his niece Eleanor Despenser, written in French with 'goldfinches' in English: xlvij Goldfynches en vne cage. Other English words crept into the chamber journal, such as 'shipbord' and 'shipwreghtes' (shipwrights). I wonder why; was there no equivalent French word, or did the clerk writing the journal just not know it?

The nobility of the early fourteenth century wrote their letters in French, and Edward II's letters were usually in French though sometimes (when writing to correspondents outside England) in Latin, but neither the king nor his nobles ever wrote in English, and therefore, as Seymour Phillips has pointed out, the great difficulty in establishing how much English they knew lies in 'catching them at it'. [3] I've written before about Hugh Despenser the Younger's literacy in French: various letters of his written in 1324 make clear that he read his correspondents' letters out loud to Edward II, though the extent of his literacy and ability in English remains unknown. Sometimes the concept of how bilingualism in fourteenth-century England worked in practice intrigues me; the charges against Despenser at his (so-called) trial of November 1326 in Hereford were written in French and presumably were also delivered in that language, not least because if they'd been read out in English it's doubtful that Isabella of France would have understood them. (Did Isabella learn any English? I have no idea.) Yet chroniclers record that a great roar of approval went up from the watching crowd when Despenser's death sentence was read out. As most of these people were not of the nobility and wouldn't have understood the French, does this mean that an interpreter was simultaneously translating the charges into English for their benefit?

To what extent, or whether at all, Edward II and his court used English as a means of communication among themselves is impossible to say for sure. Various scholars claim that although French was the daily language of the law courts and of baronial administration, by about the middle of the thirteenth century it had become an acquired language in England, and that most French speakers were native speakers of English; Michael Prestwich describes the French spoken in England in this period as "an increasingly artificial language, lacking the vitality to change and develop," in contrast to English. [4] The marvellous Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster, Edward II's kinsman and one of my favourite people of the fourteenth century, wrote a treatise in French called Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines, the Book of Holy Medicines, in 1354. He wrote at the beginning "if the French is not good, I must be excused, because I am English and not much accustomed to French" (si le franceis ne soit pas bon, jeo doie estre escusee, pur ceo qe jeo sui engleis et n’ai pas moelt hauntee le franceis). Obviously this was a literary device to demonstrate Henry's modesty, as his French was completely fluent, even cultured. I can only speculate as to the fluency or otherwise of Henry's English, however, and it's worth pointing out that, whether he spoke much English in his daily life or not and whether it was his first language or not, French, in the middle of the fourteenth century, was still the language he chose to write in. It's interesting to compare Hugh Despenser the Younger, whose many extant letters are all in French, with his grandson Thomas, Lord Berkeley (1353-1417), for whose benefit John Trevisa translated the Polychronicon from Latin - into English, not French.

I'm going to end this rather hotch-potchy post with a couple of paragraphs about a text called Le Tretiz, The Treatise, written by Walter de Bibbesworth in about 1250 for Dionysia (Denise) de Munchesney, the stepmother of Joan, countess of Pembroke (1230s-1307), who was the granddaughter of the great William le Marshal and married Henry III's French half-brother William de Valence. The Tretiz was intended to teach Dionysia and her children the specialised French vocabulary they would need for estate management and husbandry. To quote from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, it "consists of approximately 1134 rhyming octosyllables and survives in sixteen manuscripts...The French vocabulary denoting the practices of rural life is equipped in many of the manuscripts with English glosses, the bulk of which stem from the author." What makes the Tretiz so fascinating is the insight it gives into what Bibbesworth expected Dionysia to understand of the French language; he assumes that English is her native language and states that she is already familiar with the fraunceis ki chescun seit dire, "the French which everyone knows" ('everyone' meaning everyone of her class, not everyone in England, presumably), but that he needs to teach her the "French which is not so common," fraunceis noun pas si commoun. The text is in French, and any words which are assumed to be unfamiliar to Dionysia are glossed into English. Bibbesworth himself, a knight of Essex, says that he himself had acquired French in a similar manner. [5]

Here's an example page from the Tretiz. I love line 256, Louwe oule, chein baie, with the first two words glossed into English as wolfe (wolf) and yollez (howls) and the fourth as berkes (barks). Notice that Bibbesworth didn't feel the need to gloss the third word, chein, as 'dog', evidently assuming that Dionysia would know such an everyday word. In lines 250, 275 and 282, every French word is glossed into English, but other lines appear only in French with no English translations: a good indication of the level of French Bibbesworth expected Dionysia to know. As for Edward II a few decades later, he seems to have been entirely comfortable speaking French in public and to have been fluent, articulate and confident in the language - and for sure he must have frequently spoken it in private with the French Isabella and the Gascon Piers Gaveston - but was French his native language, or did he learn English as his mother tongue from the people around him? Was he completely bilingual? I wish I knew...

Sources

1) Michael Prestwich, Edward I, p. 6; Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain, p. 8; N. Denholm-Young, Richard of Cornwall, pp. 86-87; T.W.E. Roche, The King of Almayne, pp. 134-135.
2) Ian Mortimer, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation, pp. 199-201, 265.
3) Seymour Phillips, 'The Place of the Reign of Edward II', in The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson, p. 225, note 30.
4) C.M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England, p. 101; Michael Prestwich, Plantagenet England 1225-1360, p. 557.

5) Tony Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England, vol. 1, pp. 13-14.

Some Scottish Earls Of Edward II's Reign

Here's a post about six Scottish earls connected to Edward II (I've already written a post about Earl Donald of Mar, a close friend and ally of the king). Firstly, a very quick and rather simplistic overview of Scottish political history of the era: in March 1306, Robert Bruce, earl of Carrick and lord of Annandale, was crowned king of Scots at Scone, a few weeks after stabbing his greatest rival John Comyn, lord of Badenoch, to death in the Greyfriars church in Dumfries. (Comyn was the nephew of John Balliol, king of Scots from 1292 to 1296.) With little support among the Scottish nobility, Robert Bruce fled to the west of Scotland or perhaps to Ireland soon after his coronation. Edward I of England, furious, captured and executed three of Bruce's brothers, several of his brothers-in-law, and a few other Bruce adherents in 1306 and 1307. Bruce's wife Elizabeth, his sisters Mary and Christina, his young daughter Marjorie, young nephew Donald of Mar, the countess of Buchan and the bishops of Glasgow and St Andrews were captured by the earl of Ross and imprisoned in England (Mary Bruce and the countess of Buchan in cages on the walls of castles, nastily). The death of Edward I on 7 July 1307 - he died at Burgh-by-Sands near Carlisle, on his way to campaign against Robert Bruce - and the accession of Edward II made Bruce's attempts to make himself king of Scots in more than name only immeasurably easier. He spent the next few years consolidating his position, a task aided by his defeat of Edward at Bannockburn in June 1314, and the earls and lords of Scotland, over time, either submitted to him and recognised him as king, or removed themselves to England. The Scottish prisoners in England were released after Bannockburn; Donald of Mar chose to remain with Edward II.

Duncan MacDuff, earl of Fife (1289/90-1353)

Donnchadh Mac Dhuibh in Gaelic. Duncan was born in late 1289 or early 1290 as the posthumous son and heir of Earl Duncan, murdered by some of his own followers in September 1289, and through his mother Joan de Clare was the grandson of Gilbert 'the Red', earl of Gloucester (1243-1295), and his first wife Alice de Lusignan. The de Clare siblings Gilbert, Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth, children of Gilbert the Red's second marriage to Edward II's sister Joan of Acre, were thus Duncan's half-uncle and aunts, though they were younger than he was.

Duncan grew up in England, and in the early 1300s Edward I arranged a marriage for him: to the king's granddaughter Mary de Monthermer, eldest child of Ralph de Monthermer and Joan of Acre, second wife of Duncan's grandfather Gilbert the Red. (For the de Clare siblings, this meant, confusingly, that their half-nephew married their half-sister.) Edward II asked Pope Clement V to grant a dispensation for the couple to marry - they were third cousins via common descent from King John's wife Isabella of Angoulême - on 6 September 1307, and this was duly granted a few weeks later, Clement stating that "the marriage is to be contracted as a confirmation of the peace made between the English and the Scots." [1] Mary, Edward's niece, was born in October 1297 and thus was not quite ten at the time; Duncan was seventeen or eighteen. Unfortunately, I don't know when their wedding took place. Their only child, Isabella, wasn't born until around 1320.

As far as I can tell, Duncan seems to have remained in England during the Bannockburn campaign, fighting neither for Robert Bruce not for his uncle-in-law Edward II. Edward granted permission and a safe-conduct in December 1314 for Duncan ('Donkan') to go on pilgrimage to France and to return to England, at the request of his (Duncan's) father-in-law Ralph de Monthermer. [2] At the Cambuskenneth parliament in November 1314, Robert Bruce had declared that any Scottish lords who held lands in England would forfeit their lands and titles in Scotland, and thus Duncan made what must have been a momentous decision and returned, possibly by April 1315 and certainly by October 1316, to the homeland he hadn't seen for many years, to reclaim his earldom, considered the senior earldom in Scotland. [3] His wife Mary was still in England in January 1320, or at least had returned there for a while, but must have travelled to Scotland by May 1321, when Edward granted a safe-conduct for her servants to travel to England "to make purchases in London for her chamber." [4] In August 1317, Edward granted two manors in Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire formerly held by Duncan (his name here spelt 'Donegal de Fyf'), his mother Joan de Clare and stepfather Gervase Avenel to Hugh Despenser the Younger, whose wife Eleanor was Joan's decades-younger half-sister, "because they lately adhered to his [Edward's] Scots enemies." [5]

Duncan supported Robert Bruce for the rest of Bruce's life, and subsequently Bruce's son David II. He died in 1353 in his mid-sixties, leaving an only child, Isabella, and his widow Mary de Monthermer, who lived until at least 1371.

John Comyn, earl of Buchan (1250s-1308)

John was the cousin of John Comyn, lord of Badenoch, killed by Robert Bruce in 1306. His father was Alexander Comyn, earl of Buchan (d. 1289), and his mother Elizabeth was one of the three daughters and co-heirs of Roger de Quincy, earl of Winchester (d. 1285). The Comyns and Bruces were hereditary rivals, and after the murder of the lord of Badenoch, there was of course no chance that John would be anything but an implacable enemy of Robert Bruce. John's wife Isabel, however, a MacDuff by birth and either the sister or aunt of the earl of Fife above (I always thought she was his sister, but the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says she was his aunt, the daughter of Earl Colban who died c. 1270), crowned Bruce as king of Scotland, which was the hereditary right of the MacDuffs. For this 'crime', Edward I imprisoned her in a cage on the castle wall of Berwick-on-Tweed. John Comyn was the only person who might have persuaded Edward I to release her; presumably furious at her betrayal, he didn't.

John was one of the Scottish lords who swore fealty to Edward II at Dumfries, where his cousin the lord of Badenoch had been killed, in early August 1307. On 20 May 1308, Edward wrote to thank John for his "good service" to him and Edward I, but around this time, John suffered a heavy defeat to Robert Bruce at the battle of Inverurie. [6] He fled to England, and Edward welcomed him, appointing him joint warden of the western marches, that is, Annandale, Carrick and Galloway, the seat of Robert Bruce's power. [7] In John's absence, Bruce ravaged his lands, an act known as the Harrying or Herschip (hardship) of Buchan, to ensure that the Comyns - the most powerful family in Scotland in the thirteenth century - would never rise again. John did not live long after his flight to England: he was dead by 27 November 1308, when the "lands late of John Comyn, earl of Boghhan, deceased, tenant in chief" were taken into the king's hand. Edward granted custody of them, and the marriage of John's heirs, to Hugh Despenser the Elder on 5 December. [8] John left no children, and his heirs were his nieces Alice and Margaret; Alice was a lady-in-waiting of Isabella of France, and married the influential Henry Beaumont, who claimed the earldom of Buchan by right of his wife. John's widow Isabel was released from captivity into Beaumont's care in late April 1313, having been freed from the awful cage a few years before; her subsequent fate is unknown. [9] John Comyn and Isabel MacDuff are major characters in Barbara Erskine's novel Kingdom of Shadows, where John, unfortunately for him, is portrayed as an abusive, violent wife-beater.

Robert Umfraville, earl of Angus (c. 1277-1325)

Second but eldest surviving son of Gilbert Umfraville, earl of Angus (who died shortly before 13 October 1307), and, through his mother Elizabeth, the nephew of John Comyn, earl of Buchan (above) and first cousin of Patrick, earl of Dunbar (below). The Umfravilles were English barons who inherited the earldom of Angus through Robert's grandmother Maud, countess of Angus in her own right, who married Gilbert Umfraville of Northumberland. Robert's father Gilbert, who was born in about 1245, was the ward of Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester. Robert's elder brother, Gilbert III, who died childless in about 1303, was married to Margaret de Clare, later Lady Badlesmere. As his brother pre-deceased their father, Robert succeeded as earl.

Robert served Edward II faithfully throughout his reign. The king appointed him and William Ros on 8 November 1307 to "defend the county of Northumberland against the incursions of the king's enemies and to punish rebels," i.e. the Scots, and in June 1308 appointed them "to be the king's lieutenants and keepers in Scotland," a demonstration of his great trust in Robert. [10] Robert fought for Edward at Bannockburn in 1314 with his younger brother Ingram, and both of them were captured at Bothwell Castle after the battle with Edward's brother-in-law the earl of Hereford and held in Scotland for about a year. Unlike Duncan MacDuff of Fife, Robert chose to settle in England rather than Scotland after Robert Bruce's Cambuskenneth declaration of November 1314, although the earldom of Angus technically remained in his hands until near the end of Bruce's reign, when Bruce finally granted it to Sir John Stewart of Bunkle. [11]

Edward gave Robert Umfraville a silver cup as his New Year gift in 1317/18, and Robert took part in the king's unsuccessful siege of Berwick against Robert Bruce in 1319 and accompanied him to France in June 1320, when Edward performed homage to Philip V for his French lands. In November 1320, Robert and the earl of Atholl (see below) were empowered by Edward II to "receive into his peace those Scots who feel their conscience troubled by the Papal excommunication [of Robert Bruce], as secretly as he can, and to attend the king personally if he wishes further instructions." [12] Robert fought for Edward during his campaign against the Contrariants in 1321/22, and was one of the men who condemned the earl of Lancaster to death in March 1322, although he seems - rather oddly, for such a staunch supporter of Edward II - previously to have been a member of Lancaster's retinue (exactly when is unclear). [13] Earl Robert was married firstly to Lucy Kyme, an heiress in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and secondly to a woman named Eleanor who is believed to have been a member of the de Clare family, though the precise connection remains elusive. He died shortly before 12 April 1325, leaving a fifteen-year-old heir, Gilbert, a daughter and two younger sons. [14]

Patrick of Dunbar, earl of Dunbar (or of March) (c. 1285-c. 1369)

Son of Earl Patrick, who died in 1308 and was known as 'Patrick with the black beard'. Through his mother Marjorie Comyn, the younger Patrick was the nephew of John Comyn, the earl of Buchan above, and was the first cousin of Robert Umfraville, earl of Angus. He was married first to a woman named Ermigarda, who was pregnant in 1304, and secondly to Agnes, daughter of Robert Bruce's ally and friend Thomas Randolph, earl of Moray, who was known as Black Agnes, presumably because of her dark complexion. She was many years his junior, born in about 1312.

Patrick took part in the siege of Caerlaverock Castle in 1300, probably aged fifteen, on Edward I's side, and must have met the future Edward II, who was close to his own age. He remained in Scotland after Robert Bruce's rise to power, but did not submit to Bruce; on 14 December 1307, he was one of the men whom Edward II, "about to set out to Boulogne" to marry Isabella of France, requested to "keep the peace" in Scotland in his absence, along with the earls of Buchan, Ross, Angus and Lennox, two men named Gilbert Glenkarny, Dougal MacDowell, five bishops, nine abbots and several others. [15] Patrick did not fight at Bannockburn in 1314, but helped Edward II after the battle by opening Dunbar Castle to him and finding a boat for the king to sail down the coast to safety. Having - understandably - lost all confidence in Edward, Patrick submitted to Robert Bruce shortly afterwards, and was one of the men who helped take the port of Berwick-on-Tweed from English hands in 1318 and who signed the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath (as did Duncan MacDuff of Fife). Edward II made reference in January 1317 to the "rebellion of Patrick de Dunbar, a Scotsman." [16] The date of Earl Patrick's death is not certain, but he was still alive in June 1368 and had died by 1371, and therefore lived to be over eighty.

Malise of Strathearn, earl of Strathearn (early 1260s-c. 1317)

Maol Íosa in Gaelic. Son of Earl Malise and Maud, daughter of the earl of Orkney and Caithness, Malise succeeded his father as a child in 1271. His wife Agnes (or perhaps Emma) was the sister of John Comyn, earl of Buchan, who was related to absolutely everybody.

Although Malise didn't attend Robert Bruce's coronation as king of Scots, it is possible that he fought on Bruce's side at the battle of Methven in June 1306 - when Edward I's cousin Aymer de Valence, later earl of Pembroke, defeated Bruce - and certainly he was captured around this time and sent to England, where he was imprisoned at Rochester Castle. He claimed that Bruce had captured him and forced him with threats of death to perform homage to him, but to no avail, and Malise spent the rest of Edward I's reign in prison. Edward II ordered the constable of Rochester Castle to send him (his name spelt 'Malisius') to York in November 1307, "under safe custody and honourably, not in irons," and ordered the sheriff of Yorkshire to guard him "without irons." Malise's wife Agnes/Emma shared his captivity, and Edward allowed Malise two servants and two yeomen and Agnes two damsels. They were also allowed a chaplain, who had to be an Englishman. A 'Cristin de Stratherne', presumably a relative, is also mentioned as a prisoner in 1309. [17]

Malise was freed in November 1308, Edward II declaring that he had been loyal to his (Edward's) father and himself and had been acquitted of "evil fame," and judged him "legally competent in all things" (frank de sei en toutes choses). Malise was at Berwick with Edward during the king's Scottish campaign of 1310/11, and in January 1313, Edward paid him ten marks "by his own hands, to account of his allowance from the king." [18] The divided loyalties of the era are illustrated by events of later in 1313: Malise, helping to defend Perth Castle for Edward II, was captured by his own son Malise, who was loyal to Robert Bruce. Bruce spared Malise's life, but compelled him to give up his earldom to his son.

Malise died in or shortly before 1317 leaving four children, including his heir Malise (d. c. 1329) and a daughter Maud, who married the English nobleman Robert de Toeni (1276-1309), brother of the countess of Warwick and one of the men who absconded from the Scots campaign in 1306 to go jousting in France with Piers Gaveston, Roger Mortimer and Giles Argentein. Malise's widow Agnes/Emma was implicated in an unsuccessful plot to murder Robert Bruce in 1320.

David de Strathbogie (or Strabolgi), earl of Atholl (mid to late 1280s-1326)

Son of John de Strathbogie, earl of Atholl and Marjorie, sister of Gratney, earl of Mar; nephew by marriage of Robert Bruce and first cousin of Donald, earl of Mar (Bruce's first wife Isabella, mother of his daughter Marjorie and grandmother of King Robert II, was also Gratney's sister); son-in-law of John Comyn, lord of Badenoch murdered by Bruce in 1306. David's father John was a staunch supporter of Bruce, and was executed by Edward I in London on 7 November 1306. John de Strathbogie was the great-grandson of Richard, one of the illegitimate sons of King John, Edward I's grandfather, and was thus closely related to the king; a relationship which did not prevent Edward hanging John on a high gallows and having him decapitated and his head stuck on London Bridge. John was the first earl to be executed in England since Waltheof in 1076.

David de Strathbogie submitted to Edward I in May 1307 and recovered his father's earldom and lands for a payment of 10,000 marks. At first, he remained loyal to Edward II, who commended him for good service in May 1308, and joined Edward on his Scottish campaign of 1310/11. He switched sides in 1312, however: he was with Edward II in August that year, but attended Robert Bruce's parliament at Inverness three months later, and Bruce appointed him constable of Scotland. Before too long, though, David switched sides again. Supposedly, he was furious with Bruce's brother Edward (yes, yet another one) for seducing his (David's) sister and refusing to marry her, and although he did not fight for Edward II at Bannockburn, he took revenge on the Bruces by attacking the Scottish stores at Cambuskenneth on the eve of the battle; another example of the intensely personal politics of the era.

Thereafter, David remained loyal to Edward II, for which he forfeited his title and lands in Scotland. Edward addressed him affectionately as "the king's cousin Sir Davy," though like the earl of Angus he served in the earl of Lancaster's retinue at some point and was pardoned as an adherent of Lancaster in October 1318. [19] David took part in Edward's campaign against the Marcher lords in 1321/22 as constable of the king's army, and was, with the earl of Angus, one of the men who sentenced the earl of Lancaster to death in March 1322. Edward granted David in December 1321 the castle, manor and honour of Chilham in Kent, the inheritance of his ancestor Rose of Dover, who married King John's illegitimate son Richard; in return, David "binds himself to adhere to the king against all men and to maintain his quarrels against all men." Edward II granted a safe-conduct for a Scotsman with the excellent name of Tassyn de Loran to visit England to speak to David in November 1323, as long as Tassyn didn't come more than ten leagues beyond the Scottish border. [20] David and Edward's nephew-in-law John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, led Edward's army to Gascony in the spring of 1325, during the Anglo-French war of St-Sardos. He died sometime between 18 December 1326, when he was called the "surviving husband" of his wife Joan, and 11 January 1327, when Henry Beaumont was granted custody of his son; his wife Joan Comyn, one of the heirs of her maternal uncle the earl of Pembroke, had died in July 1326. [21] He left a son David, born on 1 February 1309, who married Katherine Beaumont, eldest daughter of Henry Beaumont and Alice Comyn (niece and co-heir of the earl of Buchan) and sister of the duchess of Lancaster. The younger David joined Earl Henry of Lancaster's unsuccessful rebellion against Isabella and Roger Mortimer in 1328/29. [22]

Sources

1) Foedera 1307-1327, p. 5; Calendar of Papal Letters 1305-1341, p. 30.

2) Calendar of Patent Rolls 1313-1317, p. 203; Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland 1307-1357, p. 78.
3) G.W.S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland, . pp. 390-391; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

4) Cal Pat Rolls 1317-1321, pp. 415, 587.

5) Cal Pat Rolls 1317-1321, pp. 5-6, 10.

6) Calendar of Close Rolls 1307-1313, p. 66; Foedera 1307-1327, p. 45.

7) Cal Docs Scot, p. 9; Cal Pat Rolls 1307-1313, p. 92; Cal Close Rolls 1307-1313, p. 69.

8) Calendar of Fine Rolls 1307-1319, p. 32; Cal Pat Rolls 1307-1313, p. 95; Cal Docs Scot, p. 12. The lands were first granted to Ralph de Monthermer on 3 December.

9) Cal Close Rolls 1307-1313, p. 529.

10) Cal Pat Rolls 1307-1313, pp. 14, 79, 415. Robert's father's death before 13 Oct 1307 is in Cal Fine Rolls 1307-1319, p. 4.

11) Barrow, Robert Bruce, p. 386.

12) Thomas Stapleton,'A Brief Summary of the Wardrobe Accounts of the tenth, eleventh, and fourteenth years of King Edward the Second', Archaeologia, 26 (1836), p. 344; ODNB; Cal Pat Rolls 1317-1321, p. 455; Cal Docs Scot, p. 134; Cal Close Rolls 1318-1323, p. 280.

13) G.A. Holmes, The Estates of the Higher Nobility in Fourteenth-Century England, pp. 140, 142; J.R. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster 1307-1322: A Study in the Reign of Edward II, pp. 56, 274, 312.

14) Cal Fine Rolls 1319-1327, p. 342.

15) Cal Docs Scot, pp. 5-6.

16) Cal Docs Scot, p. 103.

17) Cal Pat Rolls 1307-1313, p. 19; Cal Close Rolls 1307-1313, pp. 5, 9, 10; Cal Docs Scot, pp. 16-17.

18) Cal Docs Scot, pp. 22, 42, 59.
19) Calendar of Chancery Warrants 1244-1326, p. 427; Cal Pat Rolls 1317-1321, p. 227.
20) Cal Close Rolls 1318-1323, pp. 452, 462, 509-510, 522; Cal Docs Scot, p. 154.
21) Cal Docs Scot, p. 162; Cal Fine Rolls 1319-1327, p. 431.
22) Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous 1308-1348, p. 274; Cal Close Rolls 1327-1330, p. 529.