Joan of Kent: The First Princess of Wales Read online

  For Pete, David and Richard

  First published 2015

  Amberley Publishing

  The Hill, Stroud

  Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

  www.amberley-books.com

  Copyright © Penny Lawne, 2015

  The right of Penny Lawne to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781445644653 (PRINT)

  ISBN 9781445644714 (eBOOK)

  Typesetting and Origination by Amberley Publishing.

  Printed in the UK.

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 - A Royal Inheritance, 1301–1330

  2 - The Changing Fortunes of the Kent Family, 1330

  3 - Growing up in the Royal Household, 1330–1338

  4 - A Clandestine Marriage, 1338–1340

  5 - A Bigamous Marriage, 1341–1349

  6 - Lady Holand: A Wife at Last, 1350–1352

  7 - A Soldier’s Wife, 1352–1360

  8 - A Royal Bride, 1361–1363

  9 - Princess of Aquitaine, 1363–1371

  10 - Return to England/In Sickness and in Health, 1371–1376

  11 - Princess in Politics, 1376–1377

  12 - The King’s Mother, 1377–1385

  Conclusion: Joan’s Legacy

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  List of Illustrations

  Joan’s family tree.

  The Wake family tree.

  Introduction

  Jean Froissart, probably the most famous of the fourteenth-century chroniclers, described Joan as ‘in her time the most beautiful woman in all the realm of England and the most loved’ (‘en son temps la plus belle dame de tout le roiaulme d’Engleterre et la plus amoureuse’).1 His description has proved remarkably enduring, and it is by her posthumously bestowed sobriquet of ‘Fair Maid of Kent’ that Joan is best known.2 Successive chroniclers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were fascinated by the legend of her beauty and desirability, and by the seventeenth century Joan had been identified as the blushing beauty rescued from embarrassment at the ball by Edward III in Vergil’s account of the founding of the Order of the Garter.3 Although historians have rejected the Garter story, it is the view of Joan that generally remains. Yet this description is misleading, and belies the significance of Joan’s life. Joan was Princess of Wales for twenty-four years, and one of the most important and influential women of her age. A granddaughter of Edward I, in 1361 she married Edward III’s eldest son, Prince Edward (after his death better known as the Black Prince), and became Princess of Wales, the first member of the English royal family to have that title.4 Until the prince’s death in 1376, Joan was expected to succeed her mother-in-law, Queen Philippa, as the next queen. For seven years she helped Prince Edward preside over the principality of Aquitaine, and bore him two sons. When Edward III died, a year after the prince’s death, Joan’s son Richard became king at the age of ten. As Richard’s mother, Joan was in a position of considerable power and authority up to her death in 1385. Despite her distinction, there has been no full-length biography of her life, and her story remains largely untold. This book is an attempt to tell her story and examine the real woman behind the legend.

  There are obvious difficulties in looking at Joan’s life. There is no surviving collection of private correspondence by or to Joan, and there are no family or personal papers. None of the records kept for her, such as household accounts, administrative records, wardrobe accounts, livery rolls and estate accounts, have survived. Without such accounts, much that could be known about Joan is lost. The dearth of archive material relating to Joan is a serious handicap for a biographer, and partly explains why historical writing on her is lamentably limited. In addition, histories of the fourteenth century have traditionally been male dominated. The contemporary chroniclers and later historians concentrated their attention on war, politics and government, all areas from which women were largely excluded as they could not hold office, or go to war, and although they were allowed to own land they had no independent legal standing unless widowed. The law, reinforced by the Church’s attitude, stressed the subordination of women. Inevitably the official records contain far more about the men in Joan’s life (in particular the prince and Richard II) than they do about her, despite her rank and status. A biographer therefore also has to draw on the lives of those closest to Joan to help provide some of the missing details of her life.

  Edward III’s claim to the French throne initiated the start of the Hundred Years War, and the conduct of the war, the deliberate fostering of the chivalric culture by the king and the resulting upheavals in domestic politics, with the escalating tensions that culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, have fascinated writers for centuries. The fourteenth century is rich in tales of chivalry, expounded by contemporary writers such as Froissart and Jean le Bel. Men carry out brave deeds in accordance with a knightly code of conduct, often with the aim of winning the hearts of their fair ladies, as in Froissart’s tale of the English knights at Valenciennes who vowed to wear eyepatches on one eye until they had performed feats worthy of their lady.5 Edward III consciously promoted the chivalric ethos of his court, with his creation of the Order of the Garter as its most visible symbol, to foster unity among his nobility and to ensure support for his war with France.6 His eldest son, Prince Edward, was considered by his contemporaries to be the exemplar of chivalric knighthood.7 The Church assisted in the glamorisation of war, calling knights to the aid of fellow Christians on crusade. Tales of knight errantry and worthy deeds of arms were encouraged. Romantic literature with the tales of heroes like Arthur, Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver were popular reading among the aristocracy. Chivalry was an elitist culture, restricted to the nobility, in which women were portrayed as supportive adornments, and the dividing line between reality and fairy tale sometimes deliberately blurred, as in the depiction of Joan as one of the objects of gallantry at Valenciennes, and her representation by Chandos Herald as the perfect knight’s lady.8

  Much that is known about Joan derives from the accounts of the contemporary chroniclers, who present her as a popular figure in her lifetime. Although there are no contemporary portraits, her beauty was undoubtedly a real attribute, firmly established by Froissart, and her depiction by the prince’s panegyrist, Chandos Herald, as beautiful, pleasant and wise (‘que bele fu plesant et sage’).9 The Chronique des quatre premiers Valois described her as ‘une des belle dames du monde et moult noble’.10 Froissart and Chandos Herald had first-hand knowledge; Froissart was a member of Queen Philippa’s household at the time of Joan’s marriage to the prince and stayed at their home at Berkhamsted after the marriage, and he was later a guest in their house in Aquitaine when Joan gave birth to Richard in 1367, while Chandos Herald served Sir John Chandos, one of the closest of Prince Edward’s friends and knights.11 The prince’s marriage is recorded by most of the chroniclers, and these recite Joan’s royal lineage and her marital history.12 Joan’s desirability is evident from her colourful marital history; she was Thomas Holand’s widow when she married the prince, but was known to have
gone through a form of marriage with William Montague which had been set aside. The births of her two sons by the prince are recorded, and during Richard’s reign there are more frequent references to Joan, particularly of her intercessions on behalf of John of Gaunt during the Peasants’ Revolt, and her death in 1385 is attributed to her distress at her failure to reconcile Richard with his half-brother John Holand.13

  For historians, Joan’s significance has traditionally attached to her role as the prince’s wife and Richard II’s mother. In this spirit she was included by the antiquarian Peck in his Annals of Stamford (Lincolnshire), published in 1727, and two brief biographical sketches of her appeared in articles in 1877 by Frederick Chambers, and in 1894 by Colonel Babinet.14 By the early twentieth century the definitive biographical details of her life were contained in G. E. Cokayne’s Peerage and the Dictionary of National Biography, recently updated by Richard Barber in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.15 Despite the now accepted importance of the role of women in medieval society, there has been no more detailed study of her life. Indeed, while there have been many individual studies on Edward III, the prince, John of Gaunt and Richard II, apart from biographies of Katherine Swynford, there are no major studies on their spouses: Queen Philippa; John of Gaunt’s first two wives, Blanche of Lancaster and Constance of Castile; and Richard II’s two queens, Anne of Bohemia and Isabella of France.16 Instead, a handful of articles have been written on Joan, each presenting a different view of her. The best known is the 1948 article by Margaret Galway, a Chaucerian scholar. Galway accepted Vergil’s account of the founding of the Order of the Garter, with Joan as its inspiration, and argued that Joan was also the inspiration for Chaucer’s Criseyde and Queen Alceste, and his patroness for The Legend of Good Women.17 Associating Joan with various different imaginary and fanciful persona (the heroine in the poem The Vows of the Heron; the Queen of England described by Froissart defending England against the Scots in 1346 while the king was in France; and the object of Edward III’s passion in the stories of Froissart and Jean le Bel), Galway presented Joan vividly as a beautiful woman ‘more sinned against than sinning’ who befriended the unfortunate, relieved the poor, sheltered the unpopular and was tormented by anxiety for those she loved, with a terror of insecurity enhancing rather than diminishing her romantic credentials.18 This interpretation was challenged in 1999 by Carolyn Collette, another Chaucerian scholar, who used Joan to contextualise Chaucer’s depictions of noblewomen and in doing so presented a different Joan, noting that she was perceived as a woman of power and presence in her society, and considered Joan’s life one of action, intervention and mediation, exemplifying the ideal noblewoman.19 Collette’s view in turn contrasts with Mark Ormrod’s less favourable view of Joan when using her dramatic confrontation with the rebels in the Peasants’ Revolt to discuss the possible interpretations of the chroniclers’ contrasting reports.20

  Joan’s matrimonial history has also been used by scholars examining fourteenth-century attitudes towards marriage. The chivalric culture of Edward III’s court, with its emphasis on the dominance of men and the subordinate position of their women, is recognised as a carefully constructed façade, but it was an important social framework expressing assumptions that set a premium on the knightly values and behaviour which bound the nobility together in loyalty to their king, subsuming their own ambitions.21 Although it was a secular code, it was based on deeply Christian religious feelings. The attempt to blend the ideals of chivalry with the real world inevitably led to apparent contradictions and pragmatic compromises. This was particularly noticeable in the attitude towards marriage, where unorthodox relationships were not unknown among the higher nobility. Karl Wentersdorf examined this, using Joan’s secret marriage to Thomas Holand, the later Montague match and the subsequent papal proceedings between Holand and Montague.22 In 1996 Joanna Chamberlayne considered the values of chivalric society towards marriage, using Joan as an example, and rejected Galway’s idealistic portrayal, arguing that Joan had manipulated the contemporary lack of respect for marriage to ensure her own choice of husband.23

  Valuable though such articles are, each looks only at a particular aspect of her life to discuss an issue, and none focus on Joan herself. A study of Joan’s life reveals much that is intriguing and fascinating and it is full of contradictions. Her close relationship to the king through her father was a significant feature of her life, resulting in her being brought up within the royal household and becoming an heiress of considerable wealth. Yet her marital history is particularly unusual for a girl of her birth. When she was barely more than a child she defied convention, her family and her royal guardian by secretly marrying a man of her choice, a humble household knight named Sir Thomas Holand. She was forced into a bigamous marriage with the Earl of Salisbury’s son, William Montague, by her family, but withstood years of bullying and pressure to remain faithful to her chosen spouse. It took eight years and a decision of the Pope to restore Joan to Thomas Holand. As Thomas Holand’s wife, Joan was almost the only noblewoman of her generation to accompany her husband as he fulfilled his military duties in France. When he died she put aside her grief and made a spectacular match in marrying the prince, and in doing so secured the future of her four Holand children. All of this suggests a woman of considerable independence, intelligence and courage. Yet, after Joan became Princess of Wales and the most powerful and influential woman at court after the queen, her influence is hard to discern. As the prince’s wife, and Princess of Aquitaine, she jointly presided over their court, but the contemporary accounts detail the prince’s actions and barely mention his wife. After the prince’s death, Joan had charge of their son Richard and remained closely at his side after his accession to the throne up to her death. Unlike Edward III’s mother, Queen Isabella, and Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, Joan is not credited with exercising political influence during her son’s reign. Nor is Joan renowned as a cultural or religious patron, like Edward IV’s mother, Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, and Lady Margaret Beaufort. Yet she was not afraid to support John of Gaunt when he was at his most unpopular and fleeing for his life, and she showed that she was a natural conciliator and peacemaker, which makes her reticence curious. Did she deliberately refrain from exercising her influence? Although her posthumous sobriquet, the ‘Fair Maid of Kent’, suggests beauty and docility (or, perhaps, a more sensual and nuanced reputation due to her marital history), this is belied by the considerable independence she showed in her early life.24 Was she a woman of modesty and intelligence who understood what was expected of her, and played her role admirably? Examining Joan’s life and career reveals a more complex and interesting woman than a simple ‘Fair Maid of Kent’.

  1

  A Royal Inheritance

  1301–1330

  Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.

  Psalms, 146:3

  Joan never knew her father, as he died when she was less than two years of age. In early March 1330, Edmund, Earl of Kent, set off from the family home at Arundel Castle to attend Parliament in Winchester, leaving his pregnant young wife Margaret with their two infant children, Edmund and Joan.1 They never saw him again. On Wednesday 14 March, shortly after his arrival in Winchester, Edmund was arrested by the king’s officers and charged with treason. Two days later his confession was read out to the assembled Parliament. In the early morning of Monday 19 March he was escorted outside Winchester Castle to be executed, where he was forced to wait until an executioner was found from among the king’s marshalsea, and then, later in the day, he was beheaded.2 It was a swift and brutal end. Edmund was twenty-nine years old.

  Waiting at Arundel, Joan’s mother Margaret may have been unaware of her husband’s fate until the arrival of two of the king’s yeomen, Nicholas Langford and John Payn, who had orders to escort her from Arundel and transfer her into the custody of the sheriff of Wiltshire.3 Margaret’s shock and distress can be imagined. As Langford a
nd Payn’s orders were dated the day of Edmund’s arrest, 14 March, they may have arrived before his execution, but the news would have swiftly followed. Margaret was told that only two of her female servants could accompany her and her children; however, as she was so near to term, it was decided that she would not be moved until after her delivery. In the meantime she was kept confined in Arundel Castle, while most of her servants were dismissed, and her jewellery and other goods were taken away.

  Arundel, Joan’s first home, and for a short time also her prison, was a formidable castle, built originally by one of William the Conqueror’s henchmen, Roger de Montgomery, near the mouth of the River Arun, and it dominated the surrounding Sussex countryside. Edmund had acquired it just three years before, in February 1327.4 The castle had previously been the principal seat of Edmund Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, and had been forfeited to the Crown with the remainder of Fitzalan’s estates when he was executed in 1326 for supporting Edward II. As the largest and grandest of the properties acquired by Edmund in 1327 it would have been his principal seat, and it is possible that Joan was born there. Today, little of the original castle survives, other than the Norman motte, gatehouse, keep and curtain wall, as it was largely destroyed by Parliamentarian forces during the English Civil War and remained in ruins until the eighteenth century, when reconstruction of the castle started. In the late nineteenth century the main structure was almost completely rebuilt in the Gothic style. The present castle gives some indication of its fourteenth-century magnificence, as it is hugely imposing, with tall, grey stone buttresses and walls, and continues to dominate the town.

  Joan’s younger brother, John, was born at Arundel two and a half weeks after his father’s execution, on 7 April 1330. John’s birth, and baptism on the same day, was confirmed and noted in the records twenty-one years later when testimony was taken to prove his coming of age and his entitlement to his inheritance. With no central records of births or deaths it was customary to take evidence from witnesses who could attest to a person’s birth and so prove their age. At Steyning in Sussex on 9 April 1351 a local Sussex resident, James Byne, affirmed that John had been born at Arundel and baptised the same day on Tuesday 7 April 1330 in the church of St Bartholomew in the priory adjoining the castle, and that Edmund, Joan and the prior, John de Grenstede, had lifted John from the sacred font, as his godparents.5 Seven further witnesses confirmed the date. As Margaret and Edmund had married in the autumn of 1325 Joan and Edmund were very young children and can have been no older than eighteen months and three and a half years old. The poignant detail of Joan and Edmund’s role in their brother’s baptism is eloquent testimony of the family’s dire fortunes in the weeks after their father’s execution. Baptism was an important and indispensable rite of passage to bring children into the church, usually taking place within days of the birth, and it had become customary from the twelfth century for each child to have sponsors, or godparents, whose role included taking an interest in the child’s future welfare.6 By the fourteenth century noble families took great care to select suitably prestigious relatives or friends to act as godparents in anticipation that they would use their influence to help further their godchild’s career later in life. Siblings would not normally be considered, and it was very rare to appoint small children. But Joan’s mother had limited options. As a traitor, Edmund’s title, lands and possessions were forfeit. Margaret was isolated and alone, under close guard, and had no family or friends with her at Arundel to console her. In her haste and anxiety to arrange John’s baptism, Margaret had no choice but to appoint the only person of standing near to her, Prior John, and John’s siblings, despite their youth. The baptism must have been a hurried and awkward affair, conducted by the prior with some trepidation and possibly reluctance in view of his patron’s disgrace, while Joan and Edmund, who could have played little active part in the christening service, were probably bewildered and possibly frightened.