Daughters of Edward I

Kathryn Warner

• Publisher: Pen and Sword History
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526750280
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

In 1254 the teenage heir to the English throne married a Spanish bride, the sister of the king of Castile, in Burgos, and their marriage of thirty-six years proved to be one of the great royal romances of the Middle Ages. Edward I of England and Leonor of Castile had at least fourteen children together, though only six survived into adulthood, five of them daughters. Daughters of Edward I traces the lives of these five capable, independent women, including Joan of Acre, born in the Holy Land, who defied her father by marrying a second husband of her own choice, and Mary, who did not let her forced veiling as a nun stand in the way of the life she really wanted to live. The women's stories span the decades from the 1260s to the 1330s, through the long reign of their father, the turbulent reign of their brother Edward II, and into the reign of their nephew, the child-king Edward III.

Chapter 1

A Spanish Wedding

Lord Edward, 15-year-old son and heir of the king of England, met Doña Leonor, half-sister of the king of Castile and Leon and aged almost 13, a few days before their wedding on 1 November 1254. The venue was the magnificent abbey of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas just outside the city of Burgos in northern Spain, founded sixty-three years earlier in 1187 by King Alfonso VIII of Castile (r. 1158–1214) and his wife Eleanor of England, Doña Leonor’s great-grandparents.1

Edward’s great-uncle Richard Lionheart, king of England from 1189 to 1199, had also married a Spanish bride, Berengaria of Navarre, in 1191, because her brother King Sancho VII of Navarre was believed to be a useful ally for the king of England in his capacity as duke of Aquitaine in southern France. Sancho’s kingdom lay next to Richard’s duchy, which would help to protect Richard’s borders, and Navarre was usefully located for trade routes across the Pyrenees. The reasons behind Lord Edward and Doña Leonor’s union were somewhat different. For more than 500 years, since 711, a large part of the Iberian Peninsula had been ruled by Muslims from Arabia and North Africa, firstly the Umayyad caliphate then the Nasrid dynasty, and, beginning in the second half of the twelfth century, the Almohad caliphate of Morocco. The area of Spain and Portugal conquered in and after 711 was called al-Andalus. The Christian rulers of the much-diminished Iberian kingdoms – Portugal, Castile, Leon, Aragon and Navarre – waged war against the Muslim rulers of al-Andalus for centuries, and their decisive victory over the Almohad caliphate at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in July 1212 proved a decisive turning-point in the centuries-long Reconquista or ‘Reconquest’ of Spain. The Almohads were severely weakened, and their opponents saw their chance.

Fernando III, born probably in 1201, was the grandson and heir of Alfonso VIII of Castile, one of the victors of Las Navas de Tolosa. Fernando became the ruler of the powerful kingdom of Castile as a 16-year-old in 1217 when his mother Queen Berenguela, Alfonso VIII’s eldest daughter, surrendered her rights to the throne in his favour, and he also inherited the much smaller kingdom of Leon in northern Spain when his father died in 1230. From the early 1220s to the late 1240s, Fernando and his armies swept through al-Andalus, and his fellow Christian kings also took the opportunity to expand their territories at the expense of the weakened Almohads until all that remained to them was a small vassal state known as the Emirate of Granada (which finally fell to King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile, the ‘Catholic Monarchs’, in 1492). Fernando III captured town after town during his brilliantly successful campaigns in al-Andalus over more than a quarter of a century, including Jaén, Córdoba, Murcia, Badajoz, Cartagena and Alicante. In November 1248, he captured the finest prize of all: the great city of Seville, in the twenty-first century still the largest city in southern Spain and the fourth largest in the country. Fernando III died in Seville on 30 May 1252, leaving his eldest son Alfonso X (b. 1221), from his first marriage to Beatriz of Swabia, as his successor. He was outlived by his much younger second wife, the French noblewoman Jeanne de Dammartin, who had become countess of Aumale and Ponthieu in her own right on the deaths of her parents Simon and Marie in 1239 and 1250.

King Fernando and Queen Jeanne married in September or October 1237, when Fernando was a 36-year-old widower with ten children and Jeanne was an heiress of about 17 or 18 who had made the long journey south to Spain from her home in northern France. Jeanne had in fact been married by proxy to King Henry III of England (r. 1216–72) in 1235, and Henry wrote to her father Simon de Dammartin, Count of Aumale, to arrange a date for her to arrive in England and to be crowned its queen.2 The powerful Blanche (née Blanca) of Castile, however, regent of France for her son Louis IX (r. 1226–70) and Louis’s chief adviser for many years, did not wish the English king to gain a foothold in the county of Ponthieu, which lay next to the rich duchy of Normandy and was held by Jeanne’s mother Marie. Henry III’s father King John had lost possession of Normandy to Queen Blanche’s father-in-law Philip II Augustus of France in 1204, and Blanche had no mind for Henry to attempt to take it back. She threatened Simon and Marie that a French army would invade Ponthieu if they married their daughter and heir to the king of England, and, on the advice of her eldest sister Queen Berenguela, suggested Berenguela’s recently-widowed son Fernando III of Castile and Leon as a husband for the young woman instead.

Although she was heir merely to two fairly small French counties, Jeanne de Dammartin was, via her maternal grandmother Alix, countess of Vexin and Ponthieu, a great-granddaughter of Louis VII of France and a great-great-granddaughter of Alfonso VII of Castile and Leon, and hence was both a distant cousin of Fernando III and of suitably illustrious birth to marry him.3 Deprived of his bride, meanwhile, Henry III of England married Eleanor of Provence, whose elder sister Marguerite was already married to Blanche of Castile’s son Louis IX of France, in January 1236. Their eldest child Lord Edward was born at Westminster on 17 June 1239, and was heir to the English throne from the moment of his birth. Henry III and Eleanor of Provence’s son would marry the daughter of Henry’s former fiancée in 1254.

King Fernando III and Queen Jeanne’s first child, Infante Don Fernando, was probably born in the winter of 1238/39, and their second, Infanta Doña Leonor, almost certainly in November 1241. Leonor’s biographer Sara Cockerill has suggested 23 November 1241, a date which would make Leonor exactly twenty years, to the day, younger than her eldest half-brother King Alfonso X. Doña Leonor was probably conceived in Toledo in central Spain in late February or early March 1241 after her parents were reunited following King Fernando’s long sojourn in the far south of Spain, and she may have been born in Valladolid, where her father was based in the winter of 1241/42. Leonor was most probably named in honour of her great-grandmother Eleanor of England, Queen of Castile. Infante Don Luis, the third child of King Fernando and Queen Jeanne, was born before the end of March 1243, and their fourth and fifth children, Don Ximen and Don Juan, followed in 1244 and 1245.4 Ximen, named after his maternal grandfather Simon de Dammartin, and Juan both died in infancy; Ximen was buried in Toledo and Juan in Córdoba.5 In total, from his two marriages, King Fernando III had eleven sons and four daughters.

Infanta Doña Leonor of Castile was 10 years old when her father died at the end of May 1252 and her half-brother Alfonso X succeeded him as king. Leonor was present at King Fernando’s deathbed in Seville, and until 1254 lived with her mother, the dowager queen, but Jeanne de Dammartin quarrelled with her stepson Alfonso over her dower, and decided to leave Spain for good and return to her native Ponthieu. This was a county which no longer exists on the political map of France, but which covered much of the modern departments of Somme and Pas de Calais in the far north of the country (the tiny county of Aumale which Jeanne also held now lies in the Seine-Maritime department, also in the far north of France). Some years after her return to her homeland, Queen Jeanne married her second husband, Jean de Nesle, lord of Falvy. Her two eldest Spanish children also left their homeland: Leonor married and moved to England, and Don Fernando succeeded his mother as count of Aumale and married a French noblewoman called Laure de Montfort. Don Luis, Fernando III’s youngest surviving child, spent all his life in Spain and became lord of Marchena, but he and his children were all already dead when Queen Jeanne died in 1279. Don Fernando also died before his mother and Doña Leonor was the only one of Jeanne’s five children who outlived her, and from her French mother and her grandmother Marie inherited the county of Ponthieu, which passed to her English son after her own death.6

On the northern border of the large Spanish territories inherited by Alfonso X stood the great duchy of Aquitaine, and Alfonso began casting a covetous eye on it within months of his accession. He claimed that Aquitaine had been the dowry which his great-grandmother Eleanor of England brought with her on marriage to Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1177. Alfonso VIII had invaded and occupied much of the duchy in and after 1204 following the death of his mother-in-law Eleanor of Aquitaine, dowager queen of England, though his grandson and successor Fernando III had been too preoccupied with his decades-long and highly successful campaigns against the Almohads to pay much attention to the Castilian claims to the duchy.7 Freed from the Almohad threat, Alfonso X decided to promote a rebellion in Aquitaine in 1252/53 with a view to invading, occupying and taking over the duchy as his ancestor had done nearly half a century earlier, and this decision was to bring about the English-Castilian royal marriage.

Far away in England, Henry III, who had inherited the duchy of Aquitaine from his father King John (r. 1199–1216, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s youngest child and heir, and Richard Lionheart’s brother), watched events with alarm. To avoid going to war against a powerful king and to avert the risk of losing his large French territory, Henry proposed a solution in May 1253: a marriage between his elder son and heir Lord Edward, then coming up 14, and a female relative of Alfonso X. By May 1253, Alfonso’s 11-year-old half-sister Leonor was the only daughter of Fernando III left available; her older half-sisters Leonor the elder and María had died young, and her other half-sister Berenguela had become a nun at the abbey of Las Huelgas. Alfonso X married Violante of Aragon in January 1249, but she was many years his junior and not yet old enough to bear children, and their eldest child (another Berenguela) was not born until October or November 1253. Leonor was, therefore, the only real option as a bride for King Henry’s son, and conveniently, she and Edward were close to the same age. Leonor would become queen-consort of England and duchess of Aquitaine when her father-in-law died and her half-Castilian son would be the next king of England and duke of Aquitaine, and Henry III hoped that this would persuade Alfonso to give up his claims to the duchy.

Fortunately, Alfonso X decided that the arrangement made good sense, agreed to the English marriage, and withdrew his claim to the duchy of Aquitaine. Henry III’s fury at the Castilian ruler’s behaviour is, however, apparent in his comments that Alfonso had encouraged Henry’s subjects in Gascony to ‘set up the horns of their pride against’ him, and that they had ‘made a crafty treaty’ with Alfonso. He further stated that ‘the enemy grows madder every day and opposes the king [Henry] and his [people] more often and more bitterly than before’. Whether correctly or not, Henry suspected Alfonso of wishing to invade England and Ireland ‘with an army of Christians and Saracens’, i.e. Muslims, as well, once he was done with Aquitaine. For all his undoubted satisfaction at the success of his diplomatic strategy, on a personal level Henry III had no great reason to feel much affection for Alfonso X, and furthermore, his son’s impending marriage into the royal family of Castile caused envy and suspicion in the powerful kingdom of France. According to the Westminster Abbey chronicler, Louis IX ‘demanded that a daughter of the same king of Castile should be given as a wife to his son, in order that he might thus place himself in a better condition, inasmuch as he obtained a daughter, while the king of England had only obtained a sister’.8 Alfonso X and Queen Violante’s eldest child Doña Berenguela was duly betrothed to Louis and Queen Marguerite’s eldest son Louis of France (b. 1244), though he died in 1260 before the wedding took place and did not succeed his father as king.

The bridegroom, Lord Edward, left England with his mother Eleanor of Provence on 29 May 1254, and 300 ships were required to carry the royal party from Portsmouth to Bordeaux. Henry III gave his son, who turned 15 three weeks after his departure from England, the duchy of Aquitaine (or rather, the part of it still ruled by the English kings and called Gascony or Guienne) and lands in England, Wales and Ireland to a total value of £10,000 annually.9 This gave Edward the landed endowment and the gravitas deemed necessary to marry a Castilian infanta. Edward and his retinue arrived in the city of Burgos on or about 18 October, and Edward was knighted personally by his soon-to-be brother-in-law Alfonso X before he married Leonor. King Alfonso had insisted on being allowed to perform this important and meaningful ceremony as a condition for the wedding to go ahead, and Edward’s father paid a messenger 100 shillings (£5) for bringing him the ‘happy report’ of the young man’s recent knighting.10

The St Albans chronicler Matthew Paris gives a long account of the Spanish royal wedding and says that the people of Burgos were impressed by the tall, handsome young Englishman – Edward in adulthood was (and still is) known by the nickname Longshanks, ‘long legs’ – who married Doña Leonor.11 (How Matthew, in distant St Albans, was able to ascertain the feelings of the townspeople of Burgos on the matter is not clear; perhaps one of the wedding guests told him.) On 1 November 1254, the day of Edward and Leonor’s wedding, Alfonso officially ceded all his rights in the duchy of Aquitaine to his new English brother-in-law.12 None of the bridal couple’s parents attended the wedding in Burgos. Fernando III was dead, Queen Jeanne had returned to her native Ponthieu some months before, and Henry III and Queen Eleanor stayed in the south of France and did not travel over the border into Castile. Jeanne spent some time with her former fiancé Henry and his wife, and her future son-in-law Edward, in Bordeaux in August 1254, on her way home to the north. Her eldest child, Don Fernando, now about 15 and heir to Jeanne’s French lands, travelled with her, and permanently moved himself and his household to the north of France at this time.13

King Alfonso X did attend Edward and Leonor’s wedding, however. He issued a charter while he was at the monastery of Las Huelgas, and wrote:

I, Don Alfonso … the first time I came to Burgos after I acceded to the throne, there also came here Don Eduardo, the first son and heir of King Enrique of England, and was knighted by me in the monastery of Santa María la Real of Burgos, and married my sister, the infanta Doña Leonor, and received the blessing there with her.

Evidently impressed with his adolescent brother-in-law and proud to have been the man who dubbed him a knight, for more than a year the Castilian king dated all the documents issued by his chancellery with the phrase ‘The year that Don Eduardo, first son and heir of King Enrique of England, was knighted at Burgos by the King Alfonso mentioned above.’14

Alfonso X and Leonor’s father Fernando III was canonised as a saint of the Catholic Church in 1671 as San Fernando (Saint Ferdinand) and is now the patron saint of the city of Seville; his feast day is 30 May, the date of his death in Seville in 1252. A valley and a city in California are just two of the many places around the world named after him. Fernando was praised for his role in maintaining the Convivencia, the peaceful co-existence of Christians, Jews and Muslims in medieval Spain, and his son and successor continued this tradition. Alfonso is known to posterity as el Sabio, ‘the Wise’ or ‘the Learned’, and was a polymath: a lawgiver, musician, writer, translator, and amateur scientist who took a particular interest in astronomy. The Alphonsus Crater on the Moon is named after him. He is still well-known today for his composition of more than 400 poems with musical notation which he called the ‘Cantigas de Santa María’; he wrote, edited and sponsored books including one about astronomy and one titled Estoria de España (‘History of Spain’); and he devised a massive and influential law code named the Siete Partidas, which Spanish explorers introduced to the New World centuries later. At least two of his brothers, Don Felipe and Don Enrique, were educated at the University of Paris. One of Alfonso’s closest friends was the Englishman Geoffrey of Eversley, who was not only the king’s ambassador to Edward and Leonor in Geoffrey’s native England, but a master of rhetoric who dedicated a treatise on the art of letter-writing to Alfonso. Fernando III and Alfonso X’s glittering, intellectual and multicultural court was the world in which the future queen of England, Doña Leonor de Castilla, was raised.15

While in and near Burgos for their wedding in early November 1254, Edw...