{7} The Weakest Link in Jane Seymour's Royal Descent: Mary Clifford, Dame Wentworth

Jane (née Seymour), Queen of England
(1508-1537)

It's often remarked in peerage works that all six wives of Henry VIII descended from Edward I of England. Three of his wives - Katherine of Aragon, Jane Seymour, and Katherine Parr - are also descended from Edward III. Jane Seymour's 8-generation descent is given as:

Edward III of England, had
1. Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence, who had
2. Lady Philippa Plantagenet of Clarence m. Edmund Mortimer, 3rd Earl of March, & had
3. Lady Elizabeth Mortimer m. 1) Sir Henry 'Hotspur' Percy, and had
4. Lady Elizabeth Percy, m. 1) John, 7th Lord Clifford (a descendant of Edward I), and had
5. Mary Clifford, m. Sir Philip Wentworth of Nettlestead Hall, and had
6. Sir Henry Wentworth of Nettlestead Hall m. 1) Anne Say, and had
7. Margery Wentworth m. Sir John Seymour of Wolf Hall, and had
8. Jane Seymour, Queen of England

Of the eight generations above, there is 15th-century evidence for all save Generation #5: Mary Clifford and Sir Philip Wentworth. There is plenty enough evidence for Sir Philip, who was a knight of the household of Henry VI, a M.P., a flunky of the notorious William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, and an ardent Lancastrian executed by Edward IV in 1464. He even appears in the Paston Letters [*1]. But in none of the many published 15th-century references to Sir Philip do we find out anything about his wife. All Complete Peerage says of her is: "Sir Philip Wentworthe, by Mary, da. of John (de Clifford), Lord Clifford” [*2]. Though it cites no source for her identification, the authority of that prestigious peerage series has been enough for subsequent 20th-century genealogists to present the Wentworth/Clifford marriage without question or reservation.

Wentworth/Clifford impalement
[Image from a 19th-century window in the Great Hall of Hampton Court Palace]

But back in 1850, Agnes Strickland had the following to say about Jane Seymour's royal descent: "Through Margaret Wentworth, the mother of Jane Seymour, a descent from the blood-royal of England was claimed, from an intermarriage with a Wentworth and a daughter of Hotspur and Lady Elizabeth Mortimer, grand-daughter to Lionel, duke of Clarence. This Lady Percy is stated by all ancient heralds to have died childless. Few persons, however, dared dispute a pedigree with Henry VIII.; and it appears that on this ground Cranmer granted a dispensation for nearness of kin between Henry VIII. and Jane Seymour; rather a work of supererogation, since, even if the Wentworth genealogy held good, the parties could not be related within the forbidden degrees, viz. as fourth cousins" [*3].

Lady Elizabeth (née Mortimer)
Percy (1371-1417)

Though she was accurate as to Henry VIII and Jane not being fourth cousins (they would be fifth cousins if the Clifford-Wentworth marriage was true), she was mistaken in claiming that ancient heralds had Lady Percy as childless. The true difficulty in the descent was that many of the earlier heralds, including Sir William Dugdale, did not assign any daughters to John, 7th Lord Clifford and his wife, the daughter of Lady Percy. But Strickland did provide a great clue: the fact that the Seymours were claiming such a royal descent in the 1530s is the earliest evidence that exists for a Wentworth/Clifford marriage. In 1853 William Hardy corrected Miss Strickland, providing the descent as given above, and cited manuscripts in the Harleian collection in the British Library as his sources [*4]. He went on to point out that Dugdale, in his 1675 opus, The Baronage of England, did not give John, 7th Lord Clifford and Elizabeth Percy any daughters, and instead made the wife of Sir Philip Wentworth a daughter of Roger, 5th Lord Clifford (which removes any descent from Edward I and Edward III). Collins's Peerage followed Dugdale in making Mary, the wife of "Sir Philip Wentworth, of Wentworth-Woodhouse," a daughter of Roger, 5th Lord Clifford, and said that the only child of John the 7th Lord and Elizabeth Percy was their son and heir, Thomas, 8th Lord Clifford [*5]. Hardy pointed out that in the Wentworth account in Collins's Peerage, though, the wife of Sir Philip Wentworth is said to be a daughter of the 7th Lord Clifford. He then argued that on chronological grounds, Mary Clifford would have to have been the daughter of the 7th, not the 5th, Lord Clifford, to be the wife of Sir Philip Wentworth [*6].

Wentworth pedigree from 1612 Visitation of Essex, published by the Harlan Society in 1878

The pedigree Hardy worked out in 1853 was based on chronological deduction and various Harleian manuscripts. Many of the manuscripts were subsequently published by the Harleian Society, and turned out to be notes and pedigrees compiled by 16th and 17th century heralds from the College of Arms as they made visitations to the gentry throughout the counties of England and Wales. Many of the visitation manuscripts were published later in the 19th and throughout the 20th centuries by the Harleian Society and privately by individual editors. The earliest mention I can find of a Wentworth/Clifford marriage in the published visitations is in the Wentworth pedigree in the 1558 Visitation of Essex, where "Richard Wentworth of West Bretton in Yorksh. 2 sonne" [of "John Wentworth of Elmeshall in Yorkshire = Elizabeth da. to Rich. Beaumont of Whitbye Hall in Yorksh."], had two wives: "Mawde da. to Thom. Lord Clifford", by whom he had a son "Mathew Wentworth of West Bretton in Yorkshire"; and "Margery da. to Sr Phillip le Spencer Kt widow to the L. Roose", by whom he had "Henry Wentworth 2 sonne of Codham in Essex," with Margery also having married the brother of Richard, "Roger Wentwoorth of Nettlested in Suff." In 1612, the Wentworth pedigree had some changes and additions. "Richard Wentworth, of Westbretton in com. Yorksh. 2d sonne[of "John Wentworth of Elmeshall in com. Yorksh. = .... daugh. to Beaumont of Whitby hall in Yorkshr. esquier"] mar. Mawde dau. to Thomas Lord Clifford." Richard's elder brother was "Roger Wentworth of Nettellsted in com. Suffolke ar. = Margarett, dau. & coheire to Phillip, Lord Spencer, wydow to ye Lord Roose whoe died wtowt issue", and they were shown as parents of "Sir Phillip Wentworth of Nettellsted in com. Suffolke, Knight, sonne and heire = Mary daugh. to John Lord Clifford", who in turn were parents of "Sir Henry Wentworth of Nettellsted in com. Suffolke, Knight, sonne and heire = Ann, dau. to Sr John Saye Knight." [*7]. In the Visitation of Suffolk in 1561, there was a Wentworth pedigree in which "Sir Philip Wentworth of Nettlested, co. Suff., Kt., son and heir to Roger, mar. Mary, da. of John, Lord Clifford, and by her had issue,--Sir Henry, son and heir" [*8].

Gateway of Nettlestead Hall, Suffolk
[All that remains of the original manor house of the Wentworths]

Finally, in three Wentworth pedigrees presented by Charles B. Norcliffe in 1881, we have Richard Wentworth of West Bretton married to Maud, Countess of Cambridge, with his younger brother Roger Wentworth and wife Margery Despenser, Lady Ros, the parents of Sir Philip Wentworth, whose wife is not given [*9]. In the Clifford pedigree in the same volume, no daughter is shown for John, 7th Lord Clifford and Elizabeth Percy, nor is there any marriage to a Wentworth. In a footnote to one of the Wentworth pedigrees, Norcliffe states that the name of Maud, Countess of Cambridge, was scratched out in one version, and that genealogist Joseph Hunter, in his work South Yorkshire, stated that the wife of Richard Wentworth of West Bretton was Cecilia, daughter and heir of John Tansley of Everton.

Lords Clifford coat of arms

Is there any sign from the Cliffords that they held the tradition of a marriage with the Wentworths some time in the past? William Hardy found one in The Pembroke MS., an account of the lives of the Lords Clifford and Earls of Cumberland, compiled in the 1600s for descendant Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, from original documents and family records. The family of the 7th Lord Clifford is described: "This Elizabeth Percy was one of the greatest women of her time, both for her birth and her marriages, &c. Their eldest son, Thomas de Clifford, succeeded his father both in his lands and honours. Henry, their second son, died without issue, but is mentioned in the articles of his brother's marriage. Mary Clifford, married to Sir Philip Wentworth, Kt., of whom descended the Lords Wentworth that are now living, and the Earl of Strafford, and the Earl of Cleveland." It should be noted that even this family account is not without error for daughters, younger sons and their marriages when it comes to the medieval Lords Clifford, but at least we get the mention of Mary and Sir Philip Wentworth, and in the proper generation given Sir Philip's known chronology.

So, summing up the evidence so far:

• Nothing from the 15th century to indicate the identity of the wife of Sir Philip Wentworth of Nettlestead Hall.
• A tradition from the Seymours in the 1530s that they had a royal descent through the Cliffords via the Wentworths, and a dispensation being granted to Henry VIII and Jane Seymour to marry though related.
• A pedigree from the Wentworths in Essex claiming a Richard Wentworth of West Bretton marriage to Maud, daughter of Thomas, Lord Clifford, but no mention of Sir Philip Wentworth.
• A pedigree from the Wentworths in Suffolk in 1561 stating that the wife of Sir Philip Wentworth was Mary, daughter of John, Lord Clifford.
• A pedigree from the Wentworths in Essex in 1612 claiming both the Richard Wentworth/Maud Clifford marriage and Sir Philip Wentworth's marriage to Mary, daughter of John, Lord Clifford.
• No mention of a Sir Philip Wentworth/Mary Clifford marriage in either Clifford or Wentworth pedigrees from a compilation of 16th-century Yorkshire Visitations, though there is reference to a marriage of Richard Wentworth of West Bretton and Maud (Clifford), Countess of Cambridge, in Wentworth pedigrees.
• An account of the Clifford family from the early 17th-century which mentions Mary, daughter of John, 7th Lord Clifford & Elizabeth Percy, and wife of Sir Philip Wentworth.
• The statement by Dugdale in 1675 that the wife of Sir Philip Wentworth was the daughter of Roger, 5th Lord Clifford - a statement later shown by Hardy in 1853 to be chronologically impossible.

Seymour/Wentworth impalement
[Image from a 19th-century window in the Great Hall of Hampton Court Palace]

Given the evidence, it's fair to say, despite the lack of corroborating 15th-century documentation, that the wife of Sir Philip Wentworth was Mary, daughter of John, 7th Lord Clifford and Elizabeth Percy, and that Jane Seymour's family was correct to claim a royal descent in the 1530s. In a follow-up post, I'll look more closely at the Cliffords and the Wentworths and try to piece together when, how and why the marriage between the two families came about.

Notes

Agnes Strickland, historian (1796-1874)

[*1] Oddly, given the fact that he was a rather influential player in the Wars of the Roses, Sir Philip Wentworth doesn't have an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). The most thorough account of him to date is his entry in Josiah C. Wedgwood, The History of Parliament Vol. I: Biographies of the Members of the Commons House, 1439-1509 (1936), pp. 934-935. Complete Peerage was the only source Wedgwood used for Sir Philip's genealogical facts, however.
[*2] Complete Peerage, Volume 4 (1916), p. 292 (sub Despenser).
[*3] Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, New Edition, Volume 4 (1850), p. 217.
[*4] William Hardy, "Descent of the Queen From John of Gaunt", Notes and Queries, Volume 7 (January-June 1853), pp. 41-43.
[*5] Sir Egerton Brydges (ed.), Collins’s Peerage of England, Volume 6 (1812), pp. 515-516 (sub Lord de Clifford).
[*6] William Hardy, "Lady Percy, Wife of Hotspur (Daughter of Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March), and Jane Seymour's Royal Descent", Notes and Queries, Volume 8 (July-December 1853), pp. 251-252.
[*7] Walter C. Metcalfe (ed.), The Visitations of Essex by Hawley, 1552; Hervey, 1558; Cooke, 1570; Raven, 1612; and Owen and Lilly, 1634, Part One (Harleian Society Publications 13, 1878), pp. 124-125 (Wentworth pedigree of 1558); 313-314 (Wentworth pedigree of 1612).
[*8] Walter C. Metcalfe (ed.), The Visitations of Suffolk made by Hervey, Clarinceux, 1561, Cooke, Clarenceux, 1577, and Raven, Richmond Herald, 1612 (1882), p. 77 (Wentworth of Nettlested pedigree).
[*9] Charles Best Norcliffe (ed.), The Visitation of Yorkshire in the Years 1563 and 1564, made by William Flower, Esquire, Norroy King of Arms (Harleian Society Publications 16, 1881): "Richard Wentworth of Bretton a second sone out of the howsse of Emsall = Mawde Countess of Cambrydge" (Wentworth of Bretton pedigree p. 339); "Rychard Wentworth 2 son (his descent in the leaf folowing) = Mawde Countess of Cambrydge" and "Roger Wentworth 3 son of whom is descended the Lord Wentworth = Margery Lady Rosse doter & heyre of Phelyp Lord Spenser" (Wentworth pedigree, p. 340); "Rychard Wentworth of Breton = Mawde Countess of Cambrydge" and "Roger Wentworth 3 son = Margaret doughter & on of theyres to Phelype Lord Spenser, and the wedoo of the Lord Roos", parents of "Sir Phelyp Wentworth of Netelsted in Suffolk of whom the Lord Wentworth & others be descended" (Wentworth pedigree, p. 342).

{6} Katherine Plantagenet (1261/2-1264), Firstborn Child of Edward I

St Katherine of Alexandria
[An original early 14th-century
illumination by Simone Martini]

The exact number of children born to Edward I and his first wife Eleanor of Castile is far from certain. Through 13th-century administrative records, the existence of twelve can be proven by name: Katherine, Joan, John, Henry, Eleanor, Joan of Acre, Alphonso, Margaret, Berengaria, Mary, Elizabeth, Edward. In his thoroughly researched 1984 article on the subject [*1], historian John Carmi Parsons speculated on the existence of additional children, from various pieces of evidence. Thirteenth-century administrative records, specifically the Calendar of Liberate Rolls, refer to Eleanor's confinement in December 1264 and churching in February 1265 [*2]. Dr. Parsons concluded that this January 1265 birth was of Joan, a daughter referred to eight months later in September 1265 as being entombed in Westminster Abbey. This allowed him to associate the unnamed daughter mentioned in a Patent Roll entry of June 1264 [*3], whose burial in Westminster Abbey is referred to in the Liberate Rolls in October that year [*4], with Katherine, a daughter of King Edward, whose obit of September 5th is given in the necrology of Christ Church, Canterbury, written sometime after Edward's accession to the throne in 1272 [*5].

Katherine was the only child of Lord Edward and Eleanor of Castile to appear on record in the first ten years of their marriage. Eleanor was just turning thirteen when she married the fifteen-year-old Lord Edward in November 1254. On leaving Castile, the young couple went to Gascony, a territory that Edward had been granted earlier that year. There they held court until October 1255, when Eleanor traveled to England. Dr. Parsons mentions previous speculation that a daughter of the couple known to have been buried at the Dominican priory in Bordeaux, could have died due to a premature birth during the spring that the youthful Edward and Eleanor were newlyweds in Gascony [*6]. But that assumes their marriage was immediately consummated and Eleanor conceived quickly. Thirteen would have been viewed as dangerously young for an important princess such as Eleanor to begin a sexual marriage. Childbirth for a young woman just entering puberty could be fatal, or harm the womb, preventing any future children, bringing to naught the efforts put forward by both families to achieve the sacred alliance.

Because Eleanor’s own mother, Jeanne of Ponthieu, was in her later teen years when she married Ferdinand III of Castile, that marriage was immediately consummated and the first child, Ferdinand, born within twenty months of the wedding. But Eleanor of Provence was thirteen when she married Henry III of England, and it took three years for her first child, Lord Edward, to be born, implying sexual co-habitation with her husband was delayed until she was fifteen. It’s very likely the same pattern followed for Eleanor of Castile, with her marriage to Lord Edward not becoming sexual until about 1257.

London Bridge in the 13th-century
[Image from The London Bridge Museum]

It was almost a year after her marriage - in October 1255 - that Eleanor first arrived in England and finally met the parents and younger siblings of her new husband. Henry III had planned for her arrival in London to coincide with the feast day of his beloved saint, Edward the Confessor, on 13 October. But her London entry was delayed because the Castilian princess arrived at Dover so poorly arrayed that purchases had to be made to equip her for a proper ceremony. She didn't arrive in London and offer at St. Edward's shrine in Westminster Abbey until October 17th [*7]. It's also noteworthy that Lord Edward was not with her. He didn't arrive in England until some weeks later, and had wished to remain in Gascony, only returning on his father's orders [*8].

Princess Katherine Plantagenet (1253-1257),
youngest child of Henry III

Well aware that her own childbearing would be expected to begin in the near future, Eleanor likely took a special interest in the infant Katherine, the youngest child of the English king and queen. She was a small miracle to her royal parents, for eight years of barrenness passed between the birth of the next youngest sibling Edmund in 1245, and Katherine's birth in 1253. But the little princess, who turned age two a month after Eleanor's arrival, would prove to be deaf, a disability which would have become evident to the Plantagenet royals about this time. As Eleanor began to form her personal relationships with the members of her husband's family, much of the focus would be on this afflicted toddler. She died in May 1257, seventeen months after Eleanor’s arrival.

How close were Edward and Eleanor in the early years of their marriage? Most historians, including the couple's modern-era biographers Michael Prestwich and Dr. Parsons, agree that the union was a great success on a personal level, with Eleanor accompanying Edward on Crusade, and on his military campaigns in Wales in the 1280s. It's a completely valid assumption when their marriage is viewed in its entirety. The evidence from the 1250s and early 1260s, however, paints a different picture. In their first ten years of marriage (eight of which were appropriate for sexual relations), administrative records show that only two children were conceived, the latter conception not occurring until April 1264. Eleanor's fertility from that point forward, with children coming regularly on an average of every two years, shows that biology was not the issue. Edward, and not his wife, must then be the reason for there only being one conception for the couple prior to 1264.

Unlike his father Henry III, who was twenty-eight when he married, and his grandfather King John, who was twenty-three at his first marriage, Lord Edward was only fifteen. He needed the opportunity to sow wild oats, and could not be expected to view his marriage with a princess just entering puberty with the same level of maturity as his father had viewed his own marriage. In order to fulfill the terms Alfonso X of Castile had set for the marriage, Henry III had granted Lord Edward several territories - Gascony, Ireland, the earldom of Chester and Bristol Castle - in the months preceding the ceremony. The teenaged prince would have been as excited (if not more so) about familiarizing himself with the officials and extents of his new territories than about familiarizing himself with a new bride whom he was not yet able to touch, and whose upbringing had been in a faraway court, with customs and ceremonies to which he only had a brief exposure. The fact that he wished to stay behind in Gascony when she made her first trip to England in October 1255, indicates he didn't have a very strong desire for her companionship at that point.

Knight in training - early 14th-century

For the first few years of his marriage, Lord Edward would be in extensive training as a knight and military commander. He fought in his first tournament, at Blythe, when he was seventeen, and embarked on his first military campaign in Wales at about the same time [*9]. He was starting to make his own alliances, primarily with the barons of the Welsh Marches, and promote a political identity for himself independent of his royal parents. These were years of male-bonding, feats of arms, carousing and wenching. It may have been easier for Lord Edward to view his wife as a virginal princess than as a partner with whom he could share his plans and ideas for the future. She likely was settled in the court of his parents, especially the household of the queen from whom she would be receiving training, than accompanying her husband on his knightly adventures. The administrative record backs this up, with Eleanor appearing in it during the years 1255-1259 associated with her royal in-laws rather than her young husband [*10]. Though no doubt each strongly felt the expectation that they should produce an heir, their youth may have made it difficult to develop the familiarity and trust that would be the ingredients of the mature years of their marriage.

Dr. Parsons suggests that Eleanor and Lord Edward’s daughter Katherine may have been born in April 1261, as there is a passage in one manuscript of the Flores historiarum that states Henry III’s daughter Katherine died on 21 April 1261 when about eight years old. As administrative records prove that Katharine actually died on 3 May 1257, Parsons surmises that the Flores may have confused the younger Katherine’s birth with the death of the elder one. If so, Katherine was born at a time when there were rifts between her father Lord Edward and his own royal parents, caused by Edward’s public support for his father’s kinsmen the Lusignans over the Savoyards, the favored kinsmen of his mother, as well as his enthusiastic support for Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, and the other barons pushing for reform in the royal administration. Henry III even came to believe, while he was in France from November 1259 to April 1260, that back in England his twenty-year-old heir was trying to depose him. It took some time for father and son to be reconciled that year, one of the conditions being that Edward remove himself from the stormy political situation in England, which he did by leaving in November to participate in tournaments in France [*9].

If Katherine was born in April 1261, then the royal family would have been aware of Eleanor of Castile’s pregnancy when she accompanied Lord Edward to France in November 1260, and his return to England from April to July 1261 to deal with the growing crisis there around the reforms the barons were trying to impose on the king (and Lord Edward’s) administrations might have immediately followed the birth of his first child. It is not certain if Eleanor returned to England with him in 1261, or remained on the continent. It is certain that they both returned to England in late February 1262, and accompanied Henry III and Eleanor of Provence to France in July that year [*11]. With Eleanor went Alice de Luton, who had been one of Lord Edward’s nurses in his early years, a possible indication that Eleanor either already had, or was expecting, her first child [*12]. The king and queen returned to England in the fall of 1262, but Edward and Eleanor remained on the continent, recruiting for a campaign in Wales against Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, whose position had strengthened so much it threatened the English commander there. Eleanor proved her loyalty and worth to her husband, by helping to provide him mercenary soldiers from Ponthieu [*13]. When Lord Edward returned to England late in February 1263 for the Welsh campaign that spring, he brought with him his wife, the Ponthevin mercenaries she’d helped him to recruit, and, most important of all from a dynastic perspective, a daughter. No English chronicle records the birth of a child to Edward and Eleanor until their firstborn son in 1266. As there is no record of Henry III rewarding the messenger who brought him the news of the birth of his first Plantagenet grandchild, he must have been nearby when Eleanor of Castile gave birth. The likeliest date for her first child to have been born then is during the latter half of 1262, when Henry III, Queen Eleanor, Lord Edward and his wife were all together in France.

Lord Edward's choice of the name of Katherine for his firstborn child was a symbolic display of his commitment to his parents, who had greatly mourned the death of their daughter Katherine, and to the future of the Plantagenet dynasty. Eleanor of Provence had a special devotion to the medieval cult of St. Katherine of Alexandria, viewed as the most important of the virgin-martyrs in heaven, and as a paradigm for young noblewomen to be learned and chaste. A phial of oil from her monastery on Mount Sinai was brought to England by Edward the Confessor, and housed at Westminster Abbey. Most importantly, Queen Eleanor’s youngest child had been born on the 25th of November, the feast day of St. Katherine [*14], and from that point on, the queen revered the saint, taking a direct personal interest in the hospital of St. Katherine by the Tower, dedicated to the saint and traditionally one of the institutions under the patronage of England’s queen consorts. Katherine was not a name used by the Plantagenets until Eleanor of Provence, nor was it used at all by either the paternal or maternal families of Eleanor of Castile. By naming her first daughter Katherine, the younger Plantagenet wife was showing symbolic respect to both the saint herself, and to England’s queen at a time when the latter was at her lowest popularity.

King Henry III Tower, Windsor Castle

Whatever the date of her birth, Katherine was the only child in the nursery of her parents for the entire span of her short life. That nursery was Windsor Castle, the royal residence beloved by her grandfather the king, who had established it as the nursery for his own children. The last few months of Katherine’s life were the lowest point in the reign of her grandfather Henry III. The barons of the kingdom, led by Simon de Montfort, where pushing for reforms as laid out in the Provisions of Oxford. Henry III was not about to give up an iota of the authority that his ancestors had given their blood to achieve, and that God had sanctioned as theirs by right, and received a papal bull in 1261 that absolved him from the Provisions. Lord Edward was summoned back to England by his father the king to deal with the crisis caused in the Welsh Marches by Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, set up his wife and little daughter in Windsor Castle in February 1263, and embarked on a military campaign in the Marches in April and May, though little was achieved. Meanwhile, Simon de Montfort had returned to England that spring and the crisis the royal family was facing with the barons was increasing dramatically. Henry III and the Queen were forced to take refuge in the Tower, while Edward was at Clerkenwell outside London. Desperate for funds, Edward and a gang of knights gained entry into the New Temple and ransacked its treasure. This caused the furious Londoners to rise in rebellion, forcing Edward to retreat to Windsor. When his mother the Queen tried to join her son, her boat was pelted by a mob on London Bridge and she had to turn back to the Tower. Henry III agreed to the baronial terms in July 1263, but the 24-year-old Lord Edward defiantly refused to capitulate and moved to his castle at Bristol, where his bullying gang of knights caused the townspeople there to rise in arms and besiege the castle. The bishop of Worcester negotiated a truce [*15]. Lord Edward set himself up as the military arm of the royal family, leaving negotiation and diplomacy to his father the King and his uncle Richard of Cornwall. Hot-headed young knights, with lordships in the Welsh Marches, flocked to his side. They set up headquarters at Windsor Castle, where Eleanor of Castile and little Katherine had remained. It was the favorite residence of Henry III and he had established the nursery for his children there. Little Katherine was no doubt enjoying the royal nursery, but the castle itself was in full military mode, far different from the childhood her father Lord Edward had experienced there. Mercenary soldiers from Ponthieu and her father’s household knights mingled with the steward, John de Weston, and damsels of her mother’s household. The threat of military conflict filled the air, and strategies were discussed endlessly.

Lord Edward accompanied his father the King to Amiens in France in January 1264. Simon de Montfort and the barons had given their consent to French arbitration. Louis IX of France was not about to have the royal authority of his brother-in-law inhibited by one iota, and his decision was to completely annull the Provisions of Oxford. Little attention was paid by the barons however to the French king’s edict, and civil war became inevitable. Henry III issued a summons for the feudal host to meet him at Oxford, ostensibly for a campaign against Llywelyn of Wales, but in reality to muster a force to fight Montfort and the other rebellious barons. Lord Edward left Windsor Castle in early April to join his father’s host, ordering Eleanor of Castile not to leave the castle under any condition [*16]. He would never again see his firstborn child, little Katherine.

Battle of Lewes

The Battle of Lewes on 14 May 1264 was devastating for the Plantagenets. Lord Edward conducted himself well, but was forced to surrender himself and his father the king when Montfort and the barons threatened to execute Richard of Cornwall, Philip Basset and other captured royalist leaders. Edward’s one hope was that his giving himself up as a hostage allowed his Marcher allies to go free [*17]. When news reached Eleanor of Castile at Windsor that the King, Lord Edward, Richard of Cornwall and his son Henry of Almain were all now hostages of Montfort and the barons, and that the Queen and her younger son Lord Edmund had fled England for the continent, she must have felt isolated and panicked. She and her daughter were the only Plantagenets on English soil not in Montfort’s hands.

Orders were issued in June for the garrison Edward had left at Windsor to surrender and vacate the castle, and for Eleanor to take her daughter, her steward, and her household and remove to Westminster Palace [*3]. The orders were under the seal of Henry III, but Eleanor and the garrison were not fooled. They knew the King was in Montfort’s hands and that it was the baronial leader who wanted Eleanor and her daughter, who could be seen as rallying points for royalists, not to mention Eleanor’s continental relatives in Ponthieu and Castile, more firmly under his thumb in London, his seat of power. With Eleanor at Windsor Castle was Joan, the heavily pregnant wife of Henry III’s half-brother William de Valence. She was ordered to go to a nearby religious house and await her delivery. What was likely only known to Eleanor and her attendants in June 1264 was that she too was pregnant. The orders were re-issued a week later, which shows that Eleanor and the garrison tried to delay surrendering Windsor, but Montfort was at the height of his power and could not be denied [*18].

Medieval London was a very unsanitary city, and a cauldron for contagion. The Plantagenets raised their children far away from it, in the cleaner air of Windsor Castle and other country royal residences. Eleanor no doubt dreaded taking her young daughter to a city that had proven itself not only hostile to the Plantagenets, but carried the ever-present threat of disease as well. The date of her arrival at Westminster is not known, nor can it be determined if she was able to see her royal father-in-law before Simon de Montfort moved the king and the royal household to Canterbury in August in order to consult with the bishops in the cross-channel negotiations being conducted with the papal legate and the French king. Whatever Eleanor’s fears for her child’s safety, they were fully realized when young Katherine died in September at Westminster Palace.

Great Hall of Westminster Palace, as it would appear in the 14th-century

God had once again shown his displeasure with the Plantagenets. For Eleanor of Castile, the death of her only child while her husband was still a prisoner of the barons, and the future of the entire dynasty was in question, was a heavy blow. Her only consolation would be the knowledge that she was again with child. Lord Edward received the news in captivity at Wallingford Castle, for an attempt by some of his knights to free him from there had failed [*19]. For King Henry III, the death of his first grandchild was a direct blow from God. The king had spent most of his days since Montfort had taken control of the government, in prayers to his favourite saint, Edward the Confessor. He managed to interrupt this long enough while in Canterbury during the month of September, to insure that the obituary of his granddaughter Katherine was entered in the necrology of Christ Church. Katherine was buried in Westminster Abbey by the third of October. She was only the second Plantagenet to be interred there, following her namesake toddler aunt.

Eleanor of Castile would have had no choice as to where her daughter was buried: Henry III was placing his bloodline in the hands of the Confessor, and the family would lie as close to his shrine as possible until the Second Coming. But the fact that, out of the many subsequent daughters Eleanor of Castile would go on to bear, none bore the name Katherine, may indicate Eleanor’s personal feelings regarding the responsibility of her royal in-laws as to the danger the Plantagenet dynasty faced in the dark months of 1264. Eleanor of Castile supported the cult of St. Katherine with far less vigour than that of her mother-in-law Eleanor of Provence. Over a hundred years passed before a Plantagenet princess was again given the name of the virgin saint: in 1372, John of Gaunt gave the name Katherine to his fourth daughter (who, incidentally, went on to be Queen of Castile), though his reasons for doing so were personal and had little to do with the saint.

Notes
[*1] John Carmi Parsons, "The Year of Eleanor of Castile’s Birth and Her Children by Edward I", Medieval Studies, Volume 46 (1984).
[*2] Calendar of Liberate Rolls [CLR] 1260-1267, pp. 150, 160.
[*3] 17 June 1264, St. Paul’s, London. “To Eleanor, consort of Edward the king’s son. As the king wishes that she shall retire by all means from the castle of Windesor where she now is, he commands her to go out with her daughter, John de Weston, her steward, William Charles, her knight, her ladies, donzels (’domicellis’) and the rest of her household, harness and goods, and to come to Westminster to stay there, until the king shall make further order; and not to fail as the king undertakes to excuse her to E. her lord and will keep her harmless, and receives them into his safe conduct" [Calendar of Patent Rolls [CPR] 1258-1266 (1910): 325.]
[*4] Oct. 1264, Canterbury. “Allocate to William son of Richard, keeper of the exchanges of London and Canterbury, in the issues thereof, 113s. 4d..................delivered in the wardrobe at Canterbury to the said master Henry [de Gaunt] on Wednesday after St. Faith, 14s. delivered the same day for 12 gold obols (obol de murc’a) and 15s. delivered on Wednesday after the Nativity of St. Mary for the like; and 4 marks in payment for two cloths of gold (’pannorum ad aurum’) adorned with wheels (rotatorum), delivered to Robert de Anne the king’s almoner to the use of Katherine the deceased daughter of Edward the king’s firstborn; and 40l. delivered to the said almoner to make offerings on the day of [the said Katherine’s] burial” [CLR 1260-1267 (1961): 142-143.]
[*5] This necrology manuscript is now housed in the British Library: British Library Arundel 68, fol. 40v. I haven't examined the original manuscript.
[*6] Parsons, "The Year of Eleanor of Castile’s Birth and Her Children by Edward I", p. 257. Interestingly, the only source for this daughter is an administrative entry from 1287 which shows that the queen provided a gold cloth for the anniversary of her daughter on 29 May at the Dominican priory in Bordeaux, where the child was buried (P.R.O. E 36/201).
[*7] John Carmi Parsons, Eleanor of Castile: Queen and Society in Thirteenth-Century England (1995), pp. 17, 262 n. 30.
[*8] Michael Prestwich, Edward I (Yale English Monarchs Series, 1988), p. 15.
[*9] Michael Prestwich, "Edward I (1239–1307)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).
[*10] Parsons, Eleanor of Castile, pp. 17, 262 n. 32.
[*11] Prestwich, Edward I, pp. 37-38; Parsons, Eleanor of Castile, pp. 23, 264 n. 46.
[*12] Parsons, “The Year of Eleanor of Castile’s Birth and Her Children by Edward I”, p. 258.
[*13] Parsons, Eleanor of Castile, pp. 23-24, 264 n. 47.
[*14] Mary Anne Everett Green, The Lives of the Princesses of England from the Norman Conquest, Volume 2 (1857), p. 270.

[*15] Prestwich, Edward I, pp. 38-40.
[*16] Ibid., pp. 41-43; Parsons, Eleanor of Castile, p. 24.
[*17] Prestwich, Edward I, pp. 45-47.
[*18] Parsons, Eleanor of Castile, pp. 24, 264 n. 49.
[*19] Prestwich, Edward I, p. 47.

{5} Badlesmere Part 2: Marriages of 1316

Bristol Castle in 1300
[Image by artist Chris Nolan from Bristol Past]

Bartholomew Badlesmere did well in the early years of Edward II's reign. At about age 32 in 1307, he was roughly 10 years older than the new king. Badlesmere's relationship with the respected military leader Robert, Lord Clifford (they were brothers-in-law) helped him achieve the strategic appointment of constable of Bristol Castle. In addition, Badlesmere's 20-year-old wife Margaret was a Clare, first cousin to the head of the family, the 16-year-old Earl of Gloucester. This was an important link, for Gloucester was the eldest nephew of the new King, and was being allowed to come into control of his inheritance five years sooner than the traditional age of 21. The King was symbolically and literally creating a Plantagenet/Clare/Cornwall alliance by transforming the knight he trusted most in the world, Sir Piers Gaveston, into Earl of Cornwall and marrying him to Gloucester's sister Margaret de Clare. Badlesmere was made a leading retainer of Gloucester, with the hope no doubt that his seniority and kinship would provide sound advice to the teenaged earl, whose vast inheritance made him financially and territorially the second-most powerful figure in England, after the King. The early months of 1308 proved to be a bump in this Plantagenet/Clare/Cornwall alliance, for Clifford joined the Earl of Lincoln and other barons in calling for Gaveston's exile and as a result lost his post of Marshal of England in March 1308 [*1]. Badlesmere loyally followed Clifford in this opposition, but Gaveston's exile to Ireland that summer calmed the waters.

Gilbert de Clare, 7th Earl of Gloucester
(1291-1314)

By October 1308, the witnesses to a grant to Badlesmere show him firmly in the midst of Gloucester's household (among which was the knight Sir Roger Damory, who would later have a tremendous role in the Clare inheritance) [*2]. Badlesmere led bands of knights from Gloucester's company in the Scottish campaign of 1310-1311, during at least a portion of which he also acted as deputy constable of England for the Earl of Hereford, who had chosen to work on the Ordinances in London than go on the campaign in person. As a result, Badlesmere was able to enjoy direct patronage from the King, and received favours from him in December 1310 and January 1311. When Gloucester became keeper of the realm on the death of the Earl of Lincoln, Badlesmere took an active part in Gloucester's administration [*3]. Badlesmere appears to have been the steward (chief administrator) of Gloucester, and managed to amass an impressive estate spread throughout several counties as a result. Whether this can be credited to the younger earl eagerly rewarding his senior adviser, or passively rubber-stamping the plans Badlesmere had made for himself, is open for debate. I feel somehow it more likely to be the latter. Whatever the truth, Gloucester trusted Badlesmere and worked closely with him, and the trust Clifford and Edward II had placed in the baron to shepherd the Clare dynasty was being fulfilled ... until the summer of 1314, when Badlesmere made his first of two major failures in regard to the Clares.

Bannockburn was horrific for the English, leaving the king and his surviving military leaders demoralized, and chroniclers and other non-participants scrambling for divine meaning behind the defeat. For Badlesmere the day was devastating on a personal level, for not only was his lord, the Earl of Gloucester, killed, so was his dear brother and former patron, Lord Clifford. In addition, Badlesmere also received the brand of coward, and in at least one political song of the time, was held personally responsible for the death of Gloucester, fleeing the battlefield and leaving the young earl to his fate [*4]. Care should be taken when analyzing secondhand post-battle accounts: depending on which chronicle you read, Edward II himself either fled the field shamelessly, or fought hard and had to be led away. But the fact that Badlesmere achieved this reputation, whether deserved or not, would've tarnished his image enough to knights and soldiers that he wouldn't be able to command any military expedition on his own from that point forward, and indeed, he never did.

Gloucester's Death in the Battle of Bannockburn

Badlesmere, just about forty years old, was in a unique position following the battle: as chief administrator of the now-dead Gloucester, he was the figure who best knew the daily ins and outs and workings of the vast Clare inheritance. The power vacuum caused by Gloucester's death, and the effect it had on Edward II, are great enough to be topics of their own in future posts. No matter what Edward thought of Badlesmere's actions at Bannockburn, he needed the baron to maintain continuity with the Clare retainers and tenants. Gloucester's widowed countess was pregnant, and God willing, would give birth within months to a healthy baby, which, no matter the infant's sex, would keep the Clare inheritance in one piece. Badlesmere was allowed by the King to stay on and administer important parts of it [*5]. He also was made a co-administrator (with the earl of Warwick and the northern baron Henry Percy) of the Clifford inheritance, as Clifford's son (Badlesmere's nephew) was a minor.

Seven months after Bannockburn, on 2 January 1315, Edward II held the funeral of Piers Gaveston at Langley in Hertfordshire. Badlesmere was in attendance, as were the Hugh Despensers, father and son. No doubt the three men met many times in the days surrounding the burial to discuss the Clare inheritance, for the countess had yet to give birth, and Hugh the Younger was married to Gloucester's eldest sister and stood next in line for the best part of the inheritance should no baby materialize. Their biggest concern would be Gloucester's other two sisters, Margaret and Elizabeth, both young widows and now the two hottest women on the marriage market that the nobility had seen in decades. As Gaveston's widow, Margaret was firmly under the influence of her uncle the King and a fixture at his court, but Elizabeth was far away in Ireland at the court of her father-in-law the Earl of Ulster. It was vital she be sent for and join her sister in their uncle's court. It would be in this task that Badlesmere would make his second great failure regarding the Clare dynasty.

de Ros of Helmsley coat of arms

Meanwhile a few weeks later, Edward II formally agreed in Parliament to obey all of the Ordinances, meaning Thomas of Lancaster now had effective control of the government. He began replacing all royal military posts, down to the level of the county sheriffs. In July 1315, Badlesmere was replaced as administrator of Glamorgan by Payn de Turberville, but how much this was a decision made by Lancaster as opposed to Edward II is not clear. The decision may simply have been made to focus Badlesmere on the northern marches, for he was sent along with the Earl of Pembroke (who was the same age as Badlesmere and would become a close ally) to organize the defenses of the northern march against Scotland from July to October 1315. It was in this capacity that Badlesmere first arranged a marriage for one of his children, that of his eldest daughter Margery. One of the leaders in the defense of the northern march was the elderly (then about age 60) Yorkshire baron William de Ros. He was too old for military service, but his son and heir John de Ros (who was probably Badlesmere's age or a bit younger) was an active knight, who would be made a banneret in the royal household of Edward II on 20 November 1315 [*6], likely on the recommendation of Pembroke and Badlesmere. Sir John de Ros in turn had a son and heir, William, who was about the same age as Badlesmere's daughter Margery, and so a marriage was arranged between the two families. The Ros dynasty was influential in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and would increase Badlesmere's influence in the northern marches. Later in the 14th century, the Lords Ros were Lancastrian retainers, but whether this was the case in 1315 is not clear. If so, the marriage may also have been an attempt by Badlesmere to enter the circle of Thomas of Lancaster, still holding the reins of power.

Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady of Clare
(1295-1360)

By the summer of 1315, while Badlesmere was on Pembroke's campaign in the northern marches, it would have been clear to everyone that the countess of Gloucester was not going to provide the longed-for heir. As Christmas approached, Thomas of Lancaster, who hated Hugh the Elder and had removed both Despensers from the royal household back in January, was continuing to prevent either from having any access to the King. Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady of Clare was ordered to leave Ireland and come to court. All hell had broken loose in Glamorgan due to the actions of Badlesmere's replacement there, Payn de Turberville. On top of it all, Bristol was becoming an issue Badlesmere was unable to control on his own. Then, as if to symbolize the crumbling of Badlesmere's stewardship abilities, Elizabeth de Clare, newly-arrived from Ireland, was abducted from Bristol Castle by Theobald de Verdun in January 1316. Whatever plans the King had been forming regarding the Clare inheritance had now been thwarted. Badlesmere had failed the Clare dynasty in a major way once again.

The poor baron had to work on damage control, and insure that he had influential figures watching the interests of his own back, and that of his family. The best way would be to align himself sacredly to them through marriage, as he had done with Lord Ros. Badlesmere's next two daughters, Maud, born about 1310, and Elizabeth, born about 1313, were both beneath the canonical age of marriage (which was age 7 for consent, and age 12 for consummation), but desperate times called for desperate measures. Badlesmere could be expected to move to strengthen his alliances with the earls of Pembroke and Hereford through marriage, but Pembroke was childless and Badlesmere was apparently not in the position, socially or economically, to approach Hereford for the hand of one of his half-royal children [*7]. Luckily, Badlesmere was included in the February 1316 expedition to Glamorgan to put down the rebellion of Llewellyn Bren, where he had the opportunity to initiate an alliance with one of the most powerful dynasties in the marches of Wales.

Wigmore Castle, Herefordshire

On 2 May 1316 in London, Badlesmere contracted with Robert, Lord FitzPayn, for the marriage of FitzPayn's son and heir, also named Robert, aged about ten [*8], to Badlesmere's six-year-old daughter Maud. It was agreed that Lord FitzPayn would provide Maud with a dower of 200 marks’ worth of land, and that he would not grant out any of his land, save £200 worth, without Badlesmere’s permission. Badlesmere agreed to pay FitzPayn 1,200 marks in instalments as the marriage portion, and to keep Maud in his own custody for a year after the marriage. FitzPayn also agreed to enter into a recognizance (formally entered into on 16 July 1316) to Badlesmere for 20,000 marks to guarantee the marriage (which took place by October 1316, when Maud was formally assigned her dower by FitzPayn) [*9]. One week later, on 9 May 1316, also in London, Badlesmere contracted with Roger, Lord Mortimer of Wigmore, for the marriage of Mortimer's thirteen-year-old son and heir, Edmund, to Badlesmere's three-year-old daughter Elizabeth. Mortimer would provide Elizabeth with a dower of 500 marks' worth of land (300 coming from manors under his control, with the other 200 coming from manors after the death of Mortimer's mother Margaret). Badlesmere agreed to pay Mortimer 2,000 marks as the marriage portion, and entered into a recognizance of 20,000 marks to guarantee the marriage, which took place at the Mortimer manor of Ernwood in Shropshire on 27 June 1316. Badlesmere was with the king throughout June and so did not attend, but Mortimer hosted the nuptials with several officials, including the king's knights William de Montagu and Roger Damory, and Badlesmere's nephews Bartholomew and Henry Burghersh [*10].

Badlesmere's reasons for the alliance with Lord FitzPayn remain obscure. The FitzPayn barony was in Dorset, the chief seat being the manor of Okeford Fitzpaine. The estate stretched into Somerset and Wiltshire, but remained localized in those three counties. Badlesmere would have gotten to know Lord FitzPayn's father on the Scottish campaigns of the early 1300s, and especially when Lord FitzPayn senior served as steward of Edward II's household from March 1308 to December 1310.

FitzPayn coat of arms

But compared to the Lords Mortimer of Wigmore, and even the Lords Ros, the FitzPayns of Okeford were small potatoes. Lord FitzPayn's father had died in August 1315, and he himself appeared at Edward II's court in November that year to pay homage and receive his father's lands. Since Maud, Badlesmere's elder available daughter, was given to the FitzPayns despite the fact that the Mortimers were more powerful and had an heir older in age, its likely the FitzPayn marriage had been initiated before the Mortimer one. It may have been the new Lord FitzPayn who approached Badlesmere for it, perhaps in need of money that the wealthy Badlesmere could provide. At any rate, Badlesmere clearly had the upper hand in the alliance. Lord FitzPayn was summoned for military service (but not to Council or Parliament) in February 1316, and if he joined the Llewellyn Bren campaign that month, its likely the marriage alliance with Badlesmere was already in the works at that point. The marriage would ultimately prove tragic for the FitzPayns. Lord FitzPayn held to the marriage alliance and followed Badlesmere into rebellion and the baronial camp in the 1321-22 civil war. But he may have done so reluctantly, as he was back in the King's favor by May 1322. However, it was too late. His son Robert FitzPayn, the teenaged husband of Maud Badlesmere, was killed at Boroughbridge, leaving both his father and young Maud childless [*11].

Ian Mortimer surmises that the advantages Roger Mortimer of Wigmore obtained by marrying his heir to Badlesmere's toddler-aged daughter "were not so much military as political" (p. 78), and financial. It was Badlesmere's position at court and great wealth which attracted the then cash-poor Lord Mortimer. If so, Badlesmere certainly got his money's worth: an alliance with a powerful Marcher lord and the muscle of an acclaimed military captain. The payoff was immediate: Mortimer joined Badlesmere on the Bristol campaign and took the military lead. Hopefully Kathryn Warner will have a post with full details of the Bristol incident at a future date. Meanwhile, the Wheel of Fortune would turn little Elizabeth Badlesmere around several times in the next few years, her fate intertwined with those of her father and of her new father-in-law.

Notes
[1] Conway Davies, The Baronial Opposition to Edward II (1918), p. 208, citing Cal. Patent Rolls 1307-13, p. 51, as his source.
[2] Kathryn Warner, "The Rise and Fall of a Royal Favourite: Roger Damory (1)", January 2010.
[3] Davies, Baronial Opposition to Edward II, pp. 427-428.
[4] Many thanks to Kathryn Warner for providing details of the political song. The author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi states Gloucester was abandoned to death by his knights, but doesn't name Badlesmere specifically.
[5] Ian Mortimer, in his 2006 book, The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, Ruler of England 1327-30, pp. 73-74, states Badlesmere was the overseer of the lordship of Glamorgan until July 1315, but unfortunately doesn't cite his source for this. It's likely Badlesmere was initially overseeing much more of the inheritance than just Glamorgan, but more research is needed.
[6] Colm McNamee, "Ros, William de, first Lord Ros (c.1255–1316)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Complete Peerage says only that William de Ros and Margery Badlesmere were married by December 1316. As eldest daughter though, her marriage would necessarily have been arranged before those of her sisters in May 1316. It likely was not arranged until after the birth of Badlesmere's son and heir Giles in October 1314, for until that point, Margery was Badlesmere's senior coheiress. So Badlesmere's time on the northern march in 1315 seems the likeliest time. Curiously, Sir John de Ros would be attacked a few months later by Hugh Despenser the Younger at the Lincoln Parliament of February 1316.
[7] "Item, to Monsire Bartholomew de Badlesmere the black charger which I brought from beyond the sea." From Hereford's August 1319 will, as translated by Melville M. Bigelew in "The Bohun Wills", American Historical Review, Volume 1 Number 3 (April 1896), pp. 422-426. Though Hereford thought enough of Badlesmere to bequeath him a warhorse (the only bequest to any earl or baron in Hereford's entire will) and had five young unmarried sons, no marriage alliance occurred in their lifetimes. Ironically, Badlesmere's daughter Elizabeth would eventually marry Hereford's son William, but not until 1335, and for far a different reason.
[8] As Lord FitzPayn was found to be aged 28 and more, or 30 and more, in the inquisitions taken in September and October 1315 following his father's death, so born about 1285/6, his son and heir was likely born about 1305/6.
[9] Michael Prestwich, Plantagenet England 1225-1360 (2005), p. 415. A portion of the original document (Harl. Charter, 45, F 11, in Anglo-Norman French), was transcribed by George Wentworth Watson in Complete Peerage, Volume V (1926), p. 454 n. a (sub FitzPayn).
[10] Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, pp. 77-79; George A. Holmes, The Estates of the Higher Nobility in Fourteenth Century England (1957), pp. 43-44.
[11] Watson, Complete Peerage Vol. V, pp. 448-455 (sub FitzPayn). Watson has young Robert FitzPayn dead before 10 December 1322, and surmises he may have been killed in the rout at Byland Abbey on 14 October. But as Robert was buried at the Grey Friars church in York, where the Earl of Hereford was buried after Boroughbridge, and given the fact that Lord FitzPayn had his lands restored to him by the King on 30 May, it's more likely that Badlesmere's son-in-law was killed with Hereford at Boroughbridge.

{4} Marriage of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile in 1254

Las Huelgas Monastery, Burgos, Spain

While I'm researching and writing my second Badlesmere post, I figured I'd post on a topic already finished in my database: the marriage of Edward I of England and his first wife, Eleanor of Castile. Eleanor almost was Queen of Navarre, and (ironically, given the events in her son Edward II's life) owed her eventual position as Queen of England to Gascony.

Born in late 1241, Eleanor of Castile was the only daughter of the marriage of Ferdinand III, King of Castile (1201–1252) to his second wife, Jeanne de Dammartin (1216-1279), heiress to the French county of Ponthieu. Her parents took their daughter and her two surviving brothers - Ferdinand (1239-c.1263) and Louis (1243-c.1275), who became Lord of Marchena - to the South sometime after Ferdinand III permanently moved his operations to Andalucia in 1244. Eleanor received her education from the Dominican friars who were fixtures at the Castilian court in her early years, and with whose order she would have a lifelong association. Castile was a cosmopolitan royal court, with a strong literary atmosphere, and Eleanor later showed an ease with, and interest in, historical writing and classical works.

Her father took the first step toward arranging a marriage for her by applying for a papal dispensation allowing her to be wed to any man related to her in the fourth degree, and it was received from Pope Innocent IV on 5 August 1250. The likeliest candidate the king had in mind as his 8-year-old daughter’s husband was Theobald, the 13-year-old son and heir of Theobald I, King of Navarre. The kings of Castile had claimed feudal supremacy over the smaller kingdom of Navarre (nestled in the Pyrennes mountains) for more than a hundred years. A union between the two royal houses would be beneficial, politically and symbolically.

Ferdinand III died in May 1252 in Seville, and Eleanor, close to age 11, was said to have been at her father’s deathbed. Her thirty-year-old half brother (the eldest of the large brood from her father's first marriage) succeeded to the throne of Castile as Alfonso X. Though Eleanor resided with her mother, the widowed Queen Jeanne, in Seville, the responsibility for her marriage fell on the shoulders of the new king. Enter Gascony.

Iberian Peninsula in 1300

The territory of Gascony was the southernmost region of Aquitaine, a duchy in the south of France which had been held by the English royal family, the Plantagenets, since the famous Eleanor of Aquitaine (think Katharine Hepburn in 'The Lion in Winter') brought it with her in marriage to Henry II of England. The vigorous administration of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, Henry III of England’s appointed lieutenant of Aquitaine since 1248, provoked and disgruntled many of the lords and leaders in that duchy. A group of them approached the brand new king of Castile, Alfonso X, in 1252. They wanted him to raise up the Castilian royal family's long-dormant claim to Gascony. The roots of the claim went back almost fifty years, to 1204, when Alfonso VIII of Castile invaded Gascony. He claimed the territory had been pledged to him even earlier by Henry II of England, in order to secure the dowry of Eleanor, the daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom Alfonso had wed in 1170. The claim was probably bogus - Henry II would sooner have given up his blood than have given up his territories - and the Castilian king soon abandoned the Gascon invasion but never formally renounced his claim. Now, some fifty years later, Alfonso X one-upped his great-grandfather: not only did he lay claim to Gascony, he presented himself as the heir of Arthur of Brittany, the nephew and rival that Henry III’s father King John had had murdered back in 1203. He was challenging the right and legitimacy of the Plantagenet dynasty itself. Wishing to nip this pretension in the bud, and always trying to win through diplomacy and mediation rather than aggression and war, Henry III sent ambassadors to Castile in May 1253 to arrange a marriage for his son and heir Edward with Alfonso X's young half-sister Eleanor.

The death of the king of Navarre in July 1253 brought the 16-year-old Theobald II to the throne. Alfonso X quickly claimed Castile's feudal supremacy over Navarre, and moved to conclude the marriage of the new king with Eleanor. But the widowed Queen Margaret of Navarre was not a fan of either Castile or its new king Alfonso X, and wished to avoid any kind of feudal or sacred marriage alliance to it. She submitted herself and her teenaged son to the king of Aragon’s protection in August with the promise that young King Theobald would never in his life marry Eleanor of Castile. Meanwhile Henry III arrived in Gascony later that year, his royal presence being enough to restore order by the following year, weakening Alfonso X’s position regarding the territory.

Alfonso X of Castile in his Court c.1280

Alfonso X found himself in early 1254 snubbed by Navarre's widowed queen, and laying claim to a longtime Plantagenet territory where he had little true influence. To top it off his brother Henry of Castile broke out in open rebellion against him. Suddenly an alliance with England's royal dynasty became appealing to Alfonso. The terms of the Anglo-Castilian treaty agreed upon in March 1254 were that Edward of England was to be knighted by Alfonso X, marry Eleanor, raise the amount of her dower, and help to impose Castilian supremacy over Navarre. In return Alfonso X renounced all claims to Gascony based on Henry II’s promises to Alfonso VIII. On 20 July 1254, Edward assigned Eleanor dower lands worth £1,000 yearly, with 500 marks in English lands to be added when she became queen, and a Castilian embassy arrived in Gascony in August to accept the dower assignment on Eleanor's behalf.

All appeared ready to move the marriage forward. A glitch occurred with the conduct of the mother of the bride, widowed Queen Jeanne (who, before her marriage to Ferdinand III of Castile, had been put forward as a potential bride for Henry III of England, the father of the groom). She had lost the favor of her stepson Alfonso X by publicly showing herself too supportive of her rebellious other stepson, Henry of Castile, causing a scandal. The issue was solved by Alfonso packing her back to her home county, Ponthieu, apparently before the wedding. Edward arrived in Castile in October and received his knighthood from the Castlian king in a splendid symbolic ceremony. The royal wedding took place on 1 November at the monastery of Las Huelgas (pictured), near Burgos, the chief religious site for the Castilian royal family [*1].

Notes
[*1] All of the above information was taken from the incredible research of John Carmi Parsons, from his 1997 book Eleanor of Castile: Queen and Society in Thirteenth-Century England, and his entry for her in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

{3} Badlesmere Part 1: Lineage/Background

Badlesmere coat of arms
[Argent, a fesse between two gemelles gules]

[Format Note: Posts with specific genealogical information will start with the name of the family, numbered chronologically starting from the earliest post on that family to to the most recent.]

One of the individuals who will have a full biography on my eventual website Royal Descent is Elizabeth Badlesmere, Countess of Northampton, as she was the wife of Edward I's grandson, William de Bohun. In honor of the talented researcher Kathryn Warner - whose Edward II website and blog are jam-packed with detailed information about that king and the people of his reign, and are extremely fun and readable - I'm making my first genealogy post on the mid-13th- to-early-14th-century baronial family of Badlesmere (whose coat of arms is shown). Kathryn and I have exchanged comments and ideas about Bartholomew Badlesmere as a result of her recent posts on Roger Damory, and I figured now was as good a time as any to start gathering the information for the first part of his daughter Elizabeth's biography.

1316 was a pivotal year in the middle-aged Badlesmere's career. He had been constable of Bristol Castle for more than eight years, appointed just weeks after Edward II had ascended the throne. It was a post of much strategic importance, militarily and politically. Bristol was the third largest city in medieval England, following London and York. The castle itself was under royal command, but it lay within geography that was dominated by the Clare dynasty, the second most powerful in England after the ruling Plantagenets. Badlesmere owed the appointment to two factors. First, an apparent talent for administration. He certainly did not have a talent for feats of arms in battle - he was accused of fleeing the field of Bannockburn, abandoning his overlord Gloucester to his fate. Badlesmere was more Ichabod Crane than Brom Bones. Second, his marriage into the Clare dynasty.

Born about 1275 [*1], Bartholomew was the son and heir of Gunselm de Badlesmere, a banneret in the household of the King (then Edward I). The Badlesmeres were not a mighty baronial dynasty. They had a respectable knightly lineage localized in the county of Kent, taking their name from (or granting its name to) the castle and manor of Badlesmere in that county, which they held of the crown. There may also have been feudal ties to the archbishop of Canterbury [*2]. Gunselm had been a member of Simon de Montfort's opposition to the Plantagenets during the Barons' War of the 1260s. But by 1274, the year before Bartholomew's birth, the family had gone entirely pro-Plantagenet: Gunselm had proven himself enough that he was made Justice of Chester, an important geographic area with which Edward I had a strong symbolic association since his creation as Earl of Chester in 1254, eighteen years prior to becoming king. Gunselm served as Justice of Chester until the outbreak of the Welsh War in 1281, and accompanied Edward I and Eleanor of Castile on their expedition to Gascony later that decade. Bartholomew was first called to military service at age 19, in the 1294 Gascony expedition. His service on that campaign, as well as the Flanders expedition of 1297, and the Falkirk campaign in 1298, either resulted from, or earned him, his position as a knight of the household of Edward I, which we know he held by 1299 [*1]. When Gunselm died in 1301, he left a son to inherit the Badlesmere name and fortune who had followed closely in his own footsteps but had not yet done anything to further advance the family honor. That would change thanks to the patronage of Bartholomew's commander in the Scottish wars, Lord Clifford.

Gilbert 'the Red' de Clare, Earl of Gloucester
(1243-1295)

Badlesmere served as a retainer of the earl of Lincoln (one of Edward I's top commanders) in October 1300 [*1], being a little fish in a big pond in that camp, then joined the retinue of the northern magnate Robert Clifford by 1303, where he became a big fish in a smaller pond. Clifford, a strong and dynamic leader (the author of the Song of Caerlaverock stated that had he been a girl, he would have given himself, heart and body, to Clifford [*3]), sprang from a stock of Anglo-Welsh marcher lords on his father's side, and the lords of Westmorland in the northern march on his mother's side. Inheriting the family estates as a minor, he spent time as a ward in the households of Edmund, Earl of Cornwall and Gilbert 'The Red' de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, before ending up a ward in the King's household and coming into his inheritance in 1295. By then old Gilbert the Red had managed to make Clifford's alliance to the Clare dynasty sacred by marrying him to his niece Maud, the elder daughter of his late younger brother, Thomas de Clare, Lord of Thomond.

Whatever Badlesmere was doing in the Scottish wars in the early 1300s as a retainer of Lord Clifford impressed the commander enough that he decided to make a sacred bond of kinship with the knight from Kent, who was almost his exact age. Clifford shepherded Badlesmere's marriage to the childless teenaged widow Margaret de Umfraville, younger sister of his wife Maud. He was making Badlesmere his brother. Like that of her elder sister, Margaret de Clare of Thomond's first marriage, to the heir of the Umfraville earl of Angus, had been arranged in 1289 by her uncle Gilbert the Red in order to strengthen the influence of the Clare dynasty in the northern marches [*4]. By the time her first husband died in 1303, her uncle was dead, her brothers still under-aged knights cutting their military teeth in the households of the King and the Prince of Wales, and it was Clifford who was Margaret's eldest male relative. Badlesmere and Margaret were married by 1305, with their first child, daughter Margery, following in the next year or so [*5].

The death of Edward I in the summer of 1307 brought a new King to the English. Clifford, respected by Edward II, "who in August 1305 described him as ‘our dear and well loved knight’ (Letters of Edward, Prince of Wales, 92)" [*6], was appointed to the highly important military position of Marshal of England on 3 September 1307 [*7]. It would have been made known to Clifford and the other earls and barons at the time that Edward II was planning to allow his 16-year-old nephew, young Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, to gain full control of his inheritance. Clifford was too involved elsewhere to preside over the day-to-day councils of the teenaged earl, but Badlesmere no doubt was made a retainer of the earl to act as Clifford's representative in that capacity. His appointment as Constable of Bristol Castle served to give him military authority within the Clare inheritance sphere, and also placed him in a position to act as mediator between the crown and the earl of Gloucester, a symbolic union that stretched back to the Welsh wars of the 1280s.

By May 1316, Badlesmere would fail the trust placed in him to maintain the joint interests of the Plantagenet and Clare dynasties in two major ways, the details of which will appear in the next post.

Notes
[*1] Most of the facts on Badlesmere are taken from his bio by John R. Maddicott in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).
[*2] Conway Davies, in his 1918 work, The Baronial Opposition to Edward II: Its Character and Policy; a Study in Administrative History, p. 427, states that Badlesmere "held certain lands of the archbishop of Canterbury by serjeanty of being his chamberlain", but whether this was a traditional role in the Badlesmere family, or one which Bartholomew achieved himself, needs further research.
[*3] Michael Prestwich, War, Politics and Finance Under Edward I (1972), pp. 65-66.
[*4] In 1289, Gloucester gave the Earl of Angus 1,200 marks to have the marriage of Angus's son and heir for his niece. Michael Altschul, A Baronial Family in Medieval England: The Clares, 1217-1314 (1965), p. 46 n. 113, citing PRO, Coram Rege Roll Easter 17 Edward I, KB 27/118 m.21, as his source. Margaret was not yet two years old, so her uncle must have had a strong reason that year to ally his dynasty with the Umfravilles.
[*5] Margery Badlesmere's estimated birthdate of about 1306 is deduced from the fact that she herself was a mother by the early 1320s.
[*6] Henry Summerson, "Clifford, Robert, first Lord Clifford (1274–1314)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Sept 2004.
[*7] Davies, The Baronial Opposition to Edward II, p. 208, citing Cal. Patent Rolls, 1307-13, p. 6, as his source.

{2} Why Edward I?

Edward I Throne - a re-creation in the
Tower of London

So my database is an attempt to gather the descendants of Edward I of England. Why him, as opposed to, say, Henry I, or Edward IV?

It goes back to my youth, of course. I was introduced to the medieval English royal dynasty - the Plantagenets, for want of a better surname - through the 4-book series by Canadian author Thomas B. Costain, of which my favorite was The Three Edwards (more on that in another post), and through a series of historical fiction novels by Jean Plaidy, of which my favorites were Hammer of the Scots and The Follies of the King (more on those in yet another post). Because Edward I had four children (Joan of Acre, Elizabeth of Rhuddlan, Thomas of Brotherton, Edmund of Woodstock) who married and remained in England, and whose descendants interacted frequently with the Plantagenet royal line, he seemed the best place to start.

As I became an adult and started to research the genealogy of the Plantagenet and other English medieval dynasties in detail, I realized that original sources for the reigns of Edward I through Richard III were particularly strong, often transcribed in modern (or modern-enough) English, and readily available at large libraries. The original sources for pre-1300 England, and for continental royal lines were almost always in languages for which I had no fluency: Latin, Anglo-Norman French, etc. It made those lines harder to wade through. So Edward I seemed a great place to begin, falling as it did close enough to 1300, the beginning of the "calamitous fourteenth century," as historian Barbara Tuchman phrased it. Edward I became a useful cut-off point in my research. If a person/family wasn't descended from him, I happily skipped over them.

Edward I (1239-1307)

Once I discovered the internet, and the amazing research in the field of royal descent genealogy that was being shared through it, I came across a wonderful website created by genealogist Mark Humphrys: Royal Descents of Famous People. In it, he throws down the following gauntlet:

"Some more figures it would be interesting to estimate:

• Number of estimated descendants of Edward I - Roderick W. Stuart claims tens of millions of descendants in America alone. According to Brian Tompsett, it has been said that "All English descend from Edward I and all Scots from Malcolm III."
• Number of provable step by step descendants of Edward I."

I strongly disagree with the assertion that all English descend from Edward I, and doubt that there are tens of millions of Americans descended from him. The more I researched, the more I found that many American lines were incorrectly traced back to him, poorly researched, or based on wishful thinking.

What I hope to have happen with Royal Descent is a comprehensive website of the provable decendants of Edward I, at least up until the year 1500. An incredibly over-ambitious undertaking, but, hey, I gotta start somewhere!