27 March, 2015

Hugh, Lord Despenser (c. 1309-1349)

A post today about Hugh, Lord Despenser, the eldest son of Hugh Despenser the Younger and Eleanor de Clare, and grandson of Hugh Despenser the Elder, earl of Winchester.  As was the case with many noble families of the Middle Ages, the Despensers were none too creative when it came to naming their children; the chancery rolls of the 1320s, when all three generations of Hugh Despensers were active, contain a few confusing references to 'Hugh, son of Hugh le Despenser the son'.  Hrrrrrm.  Edward II's last chamber journal of 1325/26 refers to Hugh by the short form Huchon, and the Anonimalle chronicle calls him Hughelyn or 'little Hugh', both of which I think are absolutely delightful.  In this post, I'll call him Huchon to save any confusion with his father and grandfather, and because this seems to have been how he was known by his great-uncle Edward II.  I've also been known, along with Susan Higginbotham, to call him Hugh Despenser the Even Younger or HDEY for short.

Huchon's date of birth is unknown, but judging by the evidence of his mother's Inquisition Post Mortem took place sometime between 1308 and 1310.  He was the eldest great-grandchild of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile and the eldest great-nephew of Edward II, and was only two or three years younger than his great-aunt, Edward I's youngest child Eleanor, who was born in May 1306 (and who died in the late summer or early autumn of 1311).  Huchon's mother was Eleanor de Clare, Edward I's eldest granddaughter and second grandchild, born in October or November 1292 as the daughter of Gilbert 'the Red' de Clare, earl of Gloucester and Hertford (1243-1295) and the king's second daughter Joan of Acre (1272-1307).  Eleanor was between fifteen and seventeen when she gave birth to Huchon, depending on when exactly in 1308 or 1310 he was born, and Huchon's father Hugh Despenser the Younger was probably about twenty or twenty-one at the time; the couple had married in May 1306, when Eleanor was thirteen and a half, in the presence of her grandfather Edward I.  Huchon's lineage was prestigious: first great-grandchild of Edward I and grandchild of Gilbert 'the Red', the greatest English nobleman of the day, and in 1322 his other grandfather Hugh Despenser the Elder was made earl of Winchester.  On the Despenser side, Huchon was the great-grandson of both William Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1298) and of Aline Basset, countess of Norfolk (d. 1281).  His uncle Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, was killed at Bannockburn in June 1314, leaving Huchon's mother Eleanor and aunts Margaret and Elizabeth as heirs to the great de Clare inheritance.  As the eldest child, Huchon was the heir of both his parents, and could look forward to receiving his mother's third of the de Clare lands and his paternal grandfather's Despenser lands.

Huchon was born a year or two into the reign of his great-uncle Edward II (Edward I didn't live quite long enough to see the birth of his first great-grandchild), and thus grew up in an England racked by civil war and the general turmoil of Edward's disastrous reign.  He was about five or six when the king lost the battle of Bannockburn and Huchon's uncle, the greatest nobleman in the realm after the earl of Lancaster, was killed; possibly this was one of Huchon's earliest and most abiding memories.  Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Huchon's mother regularly gave birth to his siblings: he had younger brothers Edward, Gilbert and John plus a baby boy who died in 1321, and younger sisters Isabella, Joan, Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth.  His first cousins included William Donn de Burgh, earl of Ulster, and Margaret Audley, countess of Stafford.  When he was about ten or so, in the late 1310s, his father Hugh became the 'favourite' and perhaps the lover of Huchon's great-uncle the king; the annals of Newenham Abbey in the 1320s refer to the two men as 'the king and his husband', rex et maritus eius.  I would give a great deal to know what that felt like for Huchon.  Bizarrely, Huchon's mother Eleanor de Clare was said by a Flemish chronicle also in the 1320s to have had an incestuous affair with her uncle Edward II and to have been imprisoned after her uncle and her husband's downfall in 1326 in case she might be pregnant by the king, and certainly my own research indicates that the two were remarkably close at the end of Edward's reign.  Whether or to what extent any of this is true is impossible to know for certain, but it may be that both of Huchon Despenser's parents were Edward II's lovers.  Can't have been boring to be a Despenser child, that's all I can say.

One of the earliest, or perhaps the earliest, refs to Huchon I know of comes on 21 July 1322, when he was at the beginning of his teens, and sent by his great-uncle the king to "diverse parts of the realm" (no fewer than twenty-three counties are named, as far apart as Dorset and Yorkshire) with huntsmen and dogs in order to "take fat venison of this season" in the royal forests and parks.  [Patent Rolls 1321-4, p. 184; Close Rolls 1318-23, p. 577.]  The nine men accompanying him are named on the Close Roll, and they had twelve greyhounds, thirty-four buck-hounds and eight harriers.  This sounds like it must have been a most enjoyable escapade for the boy, travelling all over the country to hunt.  Huchon appears on record again in May 1323, when Edward II signed a thirteen-year peace treaty with Robert Bruce, king of Scotland.  Bruce's associate Thomas Randolph, earl of Moray, travelled to England to negotiate the terms, and Edward sent several noblemen to Scotland as hostages, as it were, to assure Bruce of Moray's safe return.  They included Huchon, John, Lord Hastings (nephew and one of the co-heirs of Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke) and his three-year-old son Laurence, and the northern lords Henry Percy and Thomas Wake.  [Patent Rolls 1321-4, pp. 277-8; Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland 1307-57, p. 150.]  All went well; Edward II and his advisers and Moray negotiated the treaty, Bruce ratified it a week later and sent the hostages back to England shortly afterwards, having promised to treat them honourably during their sojourn in his kingdom and to return them home in peace should the earl of Moray die a natural death while in England.  Huchon is also mentioned several times in his great-uncle the king's last chamber account of 1325/26: in December 1325 Edward II paid ten shillings for some material, including wool, linen and 'camoka' (a kind of silk, I think), to make clothes for him, and also bought him an aketon, which was a padded defensive jacket.  Around the same time, the king's armourer was paid for repairing the arms of Huchon le Despens' fuitz le fuitz, 'Huchon Despenser son of the son' (haha).

Huchon's world fell apart in 1326/27, when Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer invaded the realm.  His great-uncle the king was deposed and imprisoned.  His grandfather the earl of Winchester was executed, and mere weeks later his father Hugh Despenser the Younger also, and horribly.  His mother Eleanor de Clare was imprisoned.  Three of his five younger sisters were forcibly veiled as nuns, despite being mere children at the time (the two who escaped were fourteen-year-old Isabella, already married to the earl of Arundel's son, and Elizabeth, only a baby or still in utero).  Huchon himself remained at his father's great South Wales castle of Caerphilly (built in the 1270s by Huchon's maternal grandfather Gilbert 'the Red'), which his father and great-uncle had left in early November 1326, leaving numerous possessions and a great deal of money behind under Huchon's care.  They were captured on 16 November, and Hugh was executed eight days later.  At some point probably in November, Isabella and Roger Mortimer ordered Caerphilly to be besieged, offering free pardons on several occasions to the garrison inside and promising that their lives would be spared and their goods not forfeited if they surrendered, but pointedly excluding Huchon by name: in short, they wanted to have him executed.  It is hard to discern any real reason for this beyond vindictiveness and a desire to execute the third man in England named Hugh Despenser.  Huchon was only seventeen or eighteen at the end of 1326 and had committed no crime except to be the eldest son and heir of the loathed Hugh the Younger.  Fortunately for the young man, the Caerphilly garrison under the command of Sir John Felton refused to give him up to execution, and held out under siege until 20 March 1327, when Isabella and Roger gave in and promised to spare Huchon's life.  The garrison thus finally surrendered, and Huchon received a "[p]ardon to Hugh son of Hugh le Despenser the younger of the forfeiture of his life, without restitution of his lands."  [Patent Rolls 1327-30, p. 14.]  Huchon is briefly mentioned in the Anonimalle chronicle at Christmas 1326: En cel men temps Hughelyn le Despenser ficz au dist sire Hugh se tint el chastel de Kerfily, 'At this same time Hughelyn le Despenser son of the said Sir Hugh remained at the castle of Caerphilly'.

Roger Mortimer and Isabella kept their word and spared Huchon's life, but he was imprisoned for the rest of their regime.  (On what charge, I have no idea.)  At first Huchon was in the custody of Roger Mortimer himself - perhaps at Wigmore or at Ludlow, I don't know - and on 15 December 1328 was transferred to prison at Bristol Castle, where his jailer was Sir Thomas Gurney, who was convicted by parliament two years later of the murder of Edward II at Berkeley Castle in September 1327. [Close Rolls 1327-30, p. 352.]  This surely can't have been a pleasant experience for Huchon.  His great-uncle Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent - youngest son of Edward I and only about seven or eight years older than Huchon himself - was arrested in March 1330 and convicted of treason after attempting to free the supposedly dead Edward II from captivity.  Kent's confession as recorded in the chronicle of the royal clerk Adam Murimuth names Huchon as one of his adherents: Kent stated that one Sir (or Brother) William Cliff "came unto him from Hugues le Despenser, who told him that he would be well pleased to be with him; for he said that he [Kent] would be sure of the deliverance [of Edward II] in short time."  [Adae Murimuth Continuatio Chronicarum, ed. E. M. Thompson, pp. 255-7.]  William Cliff, from my own research, appears to have been the man of this name who was a clerk of both Edward II and the Despensers and whom Huchon's father Hugh the Younger appointed as his attorney in July 1322.  Whether Huchon truly believed that his great-uncle Edward II was still alive in 1330 is impossible to know, but certainly he must have been more than willing to do anything which might bring down the regime of Isabella and Roger Mortimer.

Huchon was finally released from prison in or a little before September 1331, a few months after Edward III took over the governance of his own realm, and in April 1332 was granted permission to go on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.  [Patent Rolls 1330-4, pp. 246, 273, 277.]  He was now about twenty-four or so.  Life must have been strange for him in many ways: he was a close kinsman of Edward III (his mother Eleanor de Clare was the king's much older first cousin), of high birth and related to most of the nobility of England, but was also the son and grandson of two notorious and despised traitors, whose name he bore.  Edward III, not a vindictive man or one to visit the sins of the father on the son, granted him various manors throughout the 1330s in fulfillment of 200 marks of land he had promised him (see e.g. Patent Rolls 1330-4, pp. 267, 377, 462). The Despenser lands of Huchon's grandfather were forfeit to the Crown as Hugh Despenser the Elder had been executed for treason, and remained so until restored by Richard II to Hugh the Younger's great-grandson Thomas in 1397, but Huchon was heir to his mother Eleanor de Clare and her vast inheritance.  When Eleanor died on 30 June 1337, aged forty-four, her lands passed by right to Huchon, who was then said to be twenty-six, twenty-eight or twenty-nine.  [Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem 1336-46, pp. 78-80.]  The most important part of the inheritance was the great lordship of Glamorgan in South Wales.  Huchon was a knight and soldier: he fought for Edward III at Halidon Hill in 1333 and at the battle of Morlaix in 1342, where his younger brother Edward - second of the four surviving sons of Hugh the Younger and Eleanor de Clare - was killed.

In 1341, Huchon received permission from Pope Benedict XII to marry Elizabeth, daughter of William Montacute, earl of Salisbury and close friend of Edward III [Calendar of Papal Letters 1305-41, p. 553].  Permission was needed as Elizabeth's first husband Giles Badlesmere, who died in 1338, was related to Huchon in the third degree of affinity; Giles' mother Margaret de Clare was the first cousin of Huchon's mother Eleanor de Clare.  Elizabeth's parents William Montacute and Katherine Grandisson married in about 1327, and their eldest son William was born in 1328, so Elizabeth can hardly have been more than nine when her first husband died and twelve when she married Huchon, who was about twenty years her senior.  One of Elizabeth's sisters married Huchon's nephew Edmund Fitzalan, son of his sister Isabella and Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, and another married Roger Mortimer's grandson Roger Mortimer, second earl of March, and was the mother of Edmund, third earl.  Sadly, the marriage of Huchon and Elizabeth remained childless.

Hugh 'Huchon', Lord Despenser, lord of Glamorgan, died on 8 February 1349 at the age of about forty, possibly of the Black Death which was then raging through England, though this is uncertain and he may have died of natural causes.  [His Inquisition Post Mortem is in Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem 1347-52, pp. 328-342.]  As he had no children, his heir when he died was his nephew Edward (1336-1375), eldest of the four sons of his second brother Edward (killed at the battle of Morlaix in 1342): "Edward son of Edward le Despenser brother of the said Hugh, aged twelve years and more, is his heir."  The younger Edward Despenser was also the heir of Huchon's long-lived aunt Aline, Lady Burnell, when she died in 1363.  Huchon's widow Elizabeth Montacute later married her third husband Sir Guy Bryan, and had children with him, so perhaps Huchon was infertile.

Below: the tomb of Huchon and Elizabeth Montacute can be seen to this day in Tewkesbury Abbey, Gloucestershire,which happily survived the Dissolution.  Huchon's parents, his uncle the earl of Gloucester (d. 1314), grandfather Gilbert 'the Red', nephew Edward (d. 1375) and great-nephew Thomas, earl of Gloucester (d. 1400) are also buried in the abbey, along with numerous other members of the de Clare and Despenser families.




20 March, 2015

Edward II Makes Out With His Boyfriend And Isabella Makes Out With Everyone

Can't believe I'm having to say this again, but when you see stuff like this online...I mean really!

(Click to enlarge. I had to laugh at the missing apostrophe in the last sentence and how it changes the meaning.)
It was written as part of a book review (not of my book, as it happens).  I'd be extremely keen to know the identity of these professors who allegedly are telling their students that Edward II and Isabella never had intercourse.  I very much doubt that part is true; it'd be absurdly unprofessional and foolish, unless the professors are claiming to have sent a webcam back 700 years into Edward and Isabella's bedchamber.  (Though I do remember seeing a couple of people on soc.genealogy.medieval a while ago claiming that their own professors had told them much the same thing.  If it's true, then Double-Yoo Tee Eff is going on at some universities?)  I love the anachronistic bit 'Edward was making out with his boyfriend the entire time'.  Gosh, I wonder if any of the numerous fourteenth-century sources which say 'our lord king makes out with his boyfriend all the time' - because obviously they totally and completely do say that - got pictures of it as well?  Because I would love to see them.  Maybe there are screengrabs from Edward's Bedcam.  Also love the bit about 'each of their fathers'.  Not just one alternative father, folks, several of them!  Isabella would just be delighted to read that, I'm sure.  And ell-oh-ell at the bit about Piers being around for Edward and Isabella's entire marriage. *facepalm*

It really shouldn't need pointing out that Isabella had only recently turned twelve when she married Edward II on 25 January 1308, so yeah, obviously she didn't become pregnant for several years.  I would have thought it was something to applaud that a girl of twelve, thirteen, fourteen wasn't forced to go through the trauma of pregnancy and childbirth before her body was properly developed, but that's never stopped Edward's detractors from moaning that he 'neglected' Isabella in the early years of their marriage.  From the records, you can actually see Edward II becoming more interested in and affectionate towards his young queen as she got older and more mature, and was able to become his wife in more than name only.  Again, you'd think that Edward not being interested in a pre-pubescent or barely pubescent girl, but becoming a heck of a lot keener as she matured, would be something positive, but apparently not.

That's a weird comment too about Edward III being conceived after Edward and Isabella were 'living apart'.  The timeline here is completely up the spout.  Edward II and Isabella were certainly together at the right times to conceive all their children, and their relationship didn't start going wrong until 1322 at the earliest, after all their children were born.  Even then, I'm not sure you could say they were 'living apart'.  It's as though people in the fourteenth century were so stupid and ignorant they wouldn't have noticed and commented if the queen had become pregnant when she and the king were apart for months on end.

I would just like to clarify that the notion of Isabella of France's children not being the children of Edward II is an entirely modern invention.  It first appeared in 1985, in one of Paul Doherty's novels, in which he changed Edward III's date of birth by eight months from November 1312 to March 1312 in order to accommodate the fiction that the young king's real father was Roger Mortimer (which is impossible anyway as Roger was also hundreds of miles away from Isabella nine months before March 1312).  So, this idea has only been around for the last thirty years, and was popularised by Braveheart in 1995 and has been mentioned in another couple of novels of the early twenty-first century, and a few online articles, blog posts and book reviews.  There is absolutely NO evidence at all that it ever occurred to anyone in the fourteenth century, or for an extremely long time afterwards until the late twentieth century, that anyone but Edward II fathered Isabella's children.  The notion that he didn't is based entirely on modern misconceptions about sexuality - firstly that if people are not completely heterosexual, they must be completely homosexual, as though all human sexuality is a simple binary in which bisexual people are erased altogether.  And secondly, that gay men are incapable of fathering children, as though being gay makes you sterile.  It boggles my mind that someone cannot recognise that until very recently, gay people frequently had to marry a member of the opposite sex and procreate whether they wanted to or not.  Oscar Wilde fathered children, and is anyone going to claim that he wasn't gay?  I personally know several gay men who have children.  Madness.  None of Edward and Isabella's contemporaries at all doubted that he was the father of her children.  There is not even a hint of a rumour or gossip anywhere.  Just think, if there had been, how gleefully Philip VI and the French would have jumped all over it after Edward III claimed their throne.  What better way to discredit him than by having it proclaimed that he wasn't the son of a king after all, but merely of one of the queen's lovers?  But of course they didn't do this, because the idea obviously never entered their heads that Edward III wasn't the son of Edward II.  Neither did it enter the heads of the many magnates and bishops who forced Edward II to abdicate his throne to his son in 1327.  Or anyone else at all, until a fiction writer of the late twentieth century decided it would give his book more drama and excitement.

Unfortunately, it seems that the perfectly simple and obvious fact that Edward II was the father of Edward III is one which it suits a few people in the twenty-first century not to believe.  And the fact that I point this out here as often as I think it needs to be said apparently means that my book about Edward II is 'biased'.  Just LOL.

13 March, 2015

Three Queen Maries

A post about three European queens of Edward II's era, all called Marie/a, two of whom died in 1321 and the other in 1323.  They were: Marie of Brabant, queen of France; Maria de Molina, queen of Castile and Leon; Marie of Hungary, queen of Naples and Albania.

Marie of Brabant, queen of France (1254-1321)

Marie was the second queen of Philip III of France, the son of Saint Louis IX and Marguerite of Provence and the first cousin of Edward I of England.  Philip succeeded his father as king in August 1270 when he was twenty-five, and his first wife Isabel of Aragon, mother of Philip IV and Charles of Valois (and grandmother of Edward II's queen Isabella) died in January 1271 after she was thrown from her horse.  Philip and Marie of Brabant married in August 1274, and were the parents of Louis, count of Evreux (1276-1319), Marguerite, queen of England (1278/79-1318) and Blanche, duchess of Austria (early 1280s?-1305).

Marie was the daughter of a duke of Brabant and granddaughter of a duke of Burgundy, and her brother Duke John I of Brabant was the father-in-law of Edward II's sister Margaret (so Edward's brother-in-law Duke John II was Marie's nephew).  Her father was Duke Henry III of Brabant, who died in 1261 when she was a child, and her mother Adelaide was a daughter of Duke Hugh IV of Burgundy.  Adelaide's younger brother Duke Robert II of Burgundy, Marie of Brabant's uncle, married Saint Louis IX's youngest daughter Agnes of France and was the father of Marguerite of Burgundy, who married Louis X of France and Navarre and was imprisoned for adultery in 1314, and Joan of Burgundy, who married Philip VI of France (reigned 1328 to 1350).  This means that Marie of Brabant was the first cousin of the much younger Marguerite of Burgundy (born in 1290), who married Marie's step-grandson Louis X of France.  Ah, medieval family trees never fail to baffle and confuse.  Marie was also a first cousin of Blanche of Artois, queen of Navarre, mother-in-law of Philip IV and grandmother of Edward II's queen Isabella.  Marie of Brabant's paternal grandmother Maria von Hohenstaufen, duchess of Brabant and wife of Duke Henry III, after whom she was presumably named, was one of the daughters of Philip of Swabia, king of Germany, youngest son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa.  Maria von Hohenstaufen's sister Elisabeth or Beatriz was the first wife of Edward II's grandfather Fernando III of Castile and Leon, and the mother of Fernando's eldest ten children.

Marie of Brabant, queen of France, was widowed on 5 October 1285 when Philip III died at the age of only forty, and her seventeen-year-old stepson Philip IV succeeded to the throne.  She outlived Philip IV, all three of her children, who died in 1305, 1318 and 1319, and her step-grandson Louis X.  She died on 12 January 1321 in her mid-sixties, in the reign of her second step-grandson Philip V, and was buried in the convent of the Cordeliers in Paris; she had outlived her husband by three and a half decades.  Her granddaughter Joan of Evreux became queen-consort of France as the third wife of Charles IV in 1324, another granddaughter Marie, countess of Bar, was Edward II's niece by marriage, and her grandson Philip of Evreux was king-consort of Navarre as the husband of Joan II, daughter of Louis X of France and Navarre and Marguerite of Burgundy.  Marie was also the grandmother of Edward II's half-brothers Thomas of Brotherton, earl of Norfolk and Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent, and the great-great-grandmother of Richard II of England.

Maria de Molina, queen of Castile and Leon (c. 1260/65-1321)

Maria was Edward II's first cousin once removed: she was the daughter of Alfonso, lord of Molina, younger brother of Edward's maternal grandfather Fernando III of Castile and Leon.  Alfonso of Molina, second of the two sons of Alfonso IX, king of Leon and Berenguela, queen of Castile, was born in the early 1200s and thus was in his late fifties or sixties when Maria was born, and died in 1272 when she was a child.  She was the daughter of his third wife Mayor Alfonso de Menezes.  In 1282, Maria de Molina married her first cousin once removed Sancho IV, second son of Alfonso X of Castile and grandson of her uncle Fernando III (and a first cousin of Edward II).  In 1284, Sancho succeeded to the throne of Castile and Leon, setting aside his two young nephews, the sons of his dead older brother Fernando de la Cerda, and Maria thus became queen-consort of Castile and Leon.  Maria and Sancho had two daughters: Isabel, their eldest child, born in 1283, briefly queen of Aragon then duchess of Brittany, proposed as a bride for the future Edward II in 1303, and their youngest child Beatriz, queen of Portugal, born in 1293 and the wife of Afonso IV and mother of Pedro I.  In between came five sons, two of whom died young.  Their eldest son was Fernando IV, born in 1285, who succeeded his father as king, the second surviving son was Pedro, killed at the battle of Vega de Granada in 1319, and the third was Felipe, who died in 1327.

Maria was widowed in April 1295 when Sancho IV died suddenly in his late thirties, leaving their nine-year-old son Fernando to succeed him, and chaos ensued in Castile as various members of the royal family, including Sancho IV's brother Juan, claimed the throne and Jaime II of Aragon invaded the kingdom (and repudiated his child-wife Isabel, Maria de Molina's daughter).  Maria, a canny politician, saved her son's throne and acted as his co-regent (with her late husband's uncle Enrique, son of Fernando III) until he came of age, and did the same thing again in 1312 when Fernando IV died at the age of only twenty-seven, leaving his one-year-old son Alfonso XI to succeed him.  Maria served as regent for her grandson; on her death on 1 July 1321, power was shared out among several regents.

Marie of Hungary, queen of Naples and Albania (1257/58-1323)

Marie was the daughter of Stephen or Istvan V, king of Hungary and Croatia, and Elizabeth the Cuman, the daughter of either Seyhan, a chief of the Cuman tribe who had fled to Hungary from the Mongol armies advancing across the Eurasian steppes, or Köten, another chief.  Elizabeth's family practised shamanism, and she had to convert to Christianity on marrying Stephen, a match arranged when they were children.  Stephen and Elizabeth's other children, Marie of Hungary's siblings, included King Ladislaus IV of Hungary, Elizabeth and Katherine, both queens of Serbia, and Anna, who married the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologus (to whom Edward II wrote in 1313, and whose second wife was Edward's first cousin once removed Yolande of Montferrat).

On 6 August 1270, Marie of Hungary married Charles 'the Lame' of Naples, also sometimes called Charles of Salerno (born c. 1248/54), who was a first cousin of both Edward I of England and Philip III of France, their mothers Marguerite, Eleanor and Beatrice of Provence all being sisters.  Charles of Naples was the eldest surviving son and heir of Charles of Anjou, youngest brother of Saint Louis IX, who became king of Naples and Sicily in 1266.  Sicily was lost to the family after the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, but Charles II still became king of Naples, king of Albania, count of Provence, Forcalquier and Anjou, and prince of Salerno and Achaea.  Marie of Hungary and Charles of Naples had at least fourteen children, including Charles Martel, titular king of Hungary; Robert 'the Wise', king of Naples, titular king of Sicily and Jerusalem; Philip, king of Albania, prince of Taranto and Achaea, despot of Epirus, and titular emperor of Constantinople by his second marriage to Isabella of France's first cousin Catherine of Valois;  Louis, bishop of Toulouse, canonised as a saint by John XXII in 1317; Blanche, second queen of Jaime II of Aragon after he had his marriage to Maria de Molina's daughter Isabel of Castile annulled; Eleanor, queen of Frederick III of Sicily; Marie, queen of Sancho I of Majorca; John of Gravina, duke of Durrazzo; Peter Tempesta, meaning 'storm'; and Marguerite, countess of Anjou, first wife of Isabella of France's uncle Charles, count of Valois and ancestor of the Valois dynasty of French kings.

Marie of Hungary, queen of Naples and Albania, was widowed in 1309 and lived until 25 March 1323 when she was well into her sixties, long enough to see her numerous - fifty or so - grandchildren grow up and produce some of her great-grandchildren.  Her granddaughter Clemence of Hungary (daughter of Charles Martel) married Edward II's brother-in-law Louis X of France in 1315 and gave birth in 1316 to a son who became king of France as soon as he drew breath but who died five days later.  Maria's great-granddaughter Joanna (granddaughter and heir of Robert 'the Wise') became queen of Naples and Sicily in her own right and was murdered in 1382.  In 1328 Marie's grandson Philip of Valois (son of Marguerite, countess of Anjou) became King Philip VI of France, and in the same year her great-granddaughter Philippa of Hainault (daughter of Philip VI's sister Joan of Valois) married Edward III of England.  The blood of Elizabeth the Cuman and her shamanistic ancestors entered the English royal family: Edward III's children were Elizabeth's great-great-great-grandchildren.

06 March, 2015

Edward II is Vindictive to the Minstrel John le Boteler, aka 'Roi Bruaunt'

Edited to add, 7 March: just to say that the winner of Darren Baker's great new book With All For All is Sarah Butterfield.  Thanks to everyone who took part, and sorry you couldn't all win!

A post today which illustrates how vindictive Edward II could be.  A man called John le Boteler or le Botiller was one of the many minstrels who performed at the great Feast of the Swan after the mass knighting of Edward of Caernarfon, Hugh Despenser the Younger, Piers Gaveston, Roger Mortimer, John Maltravers and the more than 250 others at Westminster at Pentecost, Sunday 22 May 1306.  Boteler's professional name was Roi Bruaunt, which also appears as Roi Brunaund or Rey Bruant, and appears to mean 'Burning King' or 'Fiery King', or perhaps 'Booming King'.  (Possibly indicating that he performed some kind of act with fire, as two of Edward II's squires did for him at his Westminster cottage of Burgundy in February 1325 with disastrous results - they both burned their arms and one of them his thighs as well - or that he had a deep booming voice.)  Occasionally John's real name and his professional name were mixed up, and he appears on record as 'John Bruaunt'.  He was paid forty shillings for his performance entertaining the new knights on 22 May 1306, and appears on the payroll simply as 'Bruant', indicating that he was already well known then, though in a Latin record of 6 April 1306 was called by his real name, Johannes Butiler (i.e. Butler, as the name became in later centuries).  Little else is known of John and he is not found on record between 1306 and 1322, but he owned property in the Yorkshire town of Pontefract, the favourite residence of Edward II's first cousin and most hated enemy Thomas, earl of Lancaster, and may have been Lancaster's chief of heralds.

John le Botiller/Roi Bruaunt fought against the royal army and on the side of the earl of Lancaster at the battle of Boroughbridge on 16 March 1322, and was captured (the earl of Lancaster himself was beheaded at Pontefract six days later).  When Edward II sent members of his household to round up the fleeing Contrariants and to seize their possessions, seven horses were found at 'Merston' - presumably Long Marston a few miles west of York and about seventeen miles from Boroughbridge - belonging to Rey Bruant and four other named men plus "others unknown," and "diverse armour" including aketons, bacinets, two pairs of plate gloves, four swords and, rather randomly, a pair of shoes.  On 28 October 1322, an entry on the Patent Roll records Edward II giving "the houses late of John le Botiller called 'Roi Bruaunt', late a rebel, in the town of Pontefract" to another minstrel.  He was William Morley, known professionally as Roi du North, 'King of the North', a harper who first appears on record in about 1300 and is mentioned frequently in Edward II's accounts, often called Guillot le Harpour, Master Gillot or Gillot de Morle.  He also entertained the new knights in May 1326.  In 1304, a man named John de Hoy broke into William/Gillot's house in London, stole his goods and abducted his wife Agnes; I hope she was able to return safely.  On 22 May 1326, exactly twenty years to the day after the mass knighting and the Feast of the Swan, William Morley was called Edward II's king of heralds, roi des heraux, in Edward's chamber account.

Meanwhile, in March 1322 the unfortunate John le Boteler was taken from York to imprisonment at Berkhamsted Castle in Hertfordshire.  The king, perhaps because he considered that Boteler had betrayed him, pursued him with remarkable viciousness.  As late as November 1325, Edward ordered Boteler to be moved from prison at Berkhamsted to Berkeley Castle, telling the sheriff of Berkshire to "lay aside all other matters" and conduct Boteler to Berkeley "at the king’s own cost."  More than three and a half years after the battle of Boroughbridge, Edward thought it important enough for a sheriff to 'lay aside all other matters' to take 'Roi Bruaunt' from captivity at one castle to another.  Edward II, kind and generous to people he liked, could be nastily spiteful to anyone he thought had crossed him, though he did pardon several other minstrels for adhering to Thomas of Lancaster in 1322, such as Robert le Trompor, Hugo le Harpour and John de Elend, another harper.  This is sadly the last known reference to John le Botiler/Roi Bruaunt and I don't know if he survived his imprisonment, though it would be amusing if he was still alive in 1327 and knew that Edward II himself was now in captivity at Berkeley Castle.  Ah, irony.

Sources

- Constance Bullock-Davies, Menestrellorum Multitudo: Minstrels at a Royal Feast (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1978), pp. 74-77
- Constance Bullock-Davies, A Register of Royal and Baronial Domestic Minstrels 1272-1327 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1986), pp. 51, 62, 70, 72, 125-128, 169, 220

Calendar of Patent Rolls 1321-1324, p. 210
Calendar of Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 424
Foedera 1307-1327, p. 498
Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous 1308-1348, p. 134
SAL MS 122, p. 64.

03 March, 2015

Great News

Firstly, a few days ago this blog recorded its millionth visitor!  Yes, the blog about that most disastrous of kings, Edward II, has had a million visitors.  A million.  As in, the entire population of Birmingham, and twice the number of residents of Manchester.  I'm thrilled and delighted.  Thank you, all of you, for your support and for reading!

Secondly, my book Edward II: The Unconventional King has now had eighteen reviews on Amazon UK, of which thirteen are five stars and four are four stars.  On Amazon US and Amazon India, it currently has an average five-star rating, and on Goodreads, an average of 4.67 out of five stars.

Thirdly, my next project is well underway, and I'm hard at work on it.  It's a biography of Edward II's queen and is provisionally titled Isabella of France: The Rebel Queen, and should be published in about April or May next year.  It focuses on the years 1308 to 1330, the most dramatic of Isabella's life; as in my book about her husband, I'm not really interested in exploring her childhood, or the obscure last twenty-eight years of her life, but want to write all about the real meat of the story, her marriage to Edward, how she moved into a position of opposition to him, and what happened afterwards.  There are lots of inventions told about Isabella - Edward giving her jewels to Piers Gaveston in 1308 (invented by Agnes Strickland in the nineteenth century), abandoning her while pregnant at Tynemouth in 1312 (a chronicler writing many years later getting confused with Isabella being at Tynemouth in 1322), punitively removing her children from her in 1324 (invented in a doctoral thesis in the late 1970s), and so on - and I want to tell her real story.  More info as and when!