Book Review: "Daughters of Chivalry: The Forgotten Princesses of King Edward Longshanks"
In her new book, Kelcey Wilson-Lee shines a much-needed light on five extraordinary medieval women.
In the annals of English monarchical history, there are few kings quite as (in)famous as Edward I, known as Longshanks. He is, after all, the primary villain in the epic film Braveheart, where he makes life miserable for our hero, William Wallace. What most viewers probably don’t realize, however, is that Edward’s daughters by his wife Eleanor of Castile were just as independent—and sometimes as reckless—as their father. Fortunately for all of us, their fascinating lives and personalities have been given the biographical treatment by Kelcey Wilson-Lee in her debut book, Daughters of Chivalry: The Forgotten Princesses of King Edward Longshanks.
Edward I and his wife produced numerous children, of which five daughters survived to adulthood and played major roles in their father’s reign and diplomacy: Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, Mary, and Elizabeth. Like other royal women of the time, each of them had a part to play in their father’s ambitions, whether that was through marriage to other royal (or at least noble) or by being placed in a religious house. What’s more, each of them found a way of using their royal position to advance their own interests, as well as those of their favored retainers, their spouses, and their children.
Wilson-Lee deserves a lot of credit for ably crafting a biography that doesn’t feel disjointed, despite the fact that she’s covering the lives of five different women. Indeed, each of Edward’s daughters emerges from the obscurity of history into the full light of day, revealed in all of their regal complexity.
Though each of Edward’s daughters inherited a large measure of their father’s pride and independent streak, Joanna probably deserves pride of place. Her first marriage was to Gilbert de Clare, whose power as one of the Marcher Lords gave her the sort of independence that she had always craved. When Gilbert’s interests conflicted with those of her father, she largely took her husband’s side. It was her second marriage, to the commoner Ralph de Monthermer, that really aroused her father’s anger. You can’t help but admire the sheer spirit it must have taken this young woman to embark on a marriage that she knew would enrage her father (who yearned for control over all aspects of his life and those of his children).
Several of Joanna’s sisters were likewise women of the world: Margaret became Duchess of Brabant; Elizabeth became a countess twice over (first through her marriage to the Count of Holland and second through her marriage to the Earl of Hereford), and Eleanor became Countess of Bar.
While Joanna and her sisters were very much women in the world, the same wasn’t quite as true of their sister Mary, who entered Amesbury as a nun. Unsurprisingly, Mary was determined to make the most out of her royal status, even behind the walls of a convent. In addition to the fine furnishings that appointed her chambers, she also indulged in a rather notorious vice: gambling. As Wilson-Lee demonstrates, she inherited the family trait of doing what she wanted without a lot of thought to the consequences, and you can’t help but admire her for doing everything she could to make the most out of a profession that she probably had very little choice in pursuing.
Wilson-Lee also does an exemplary job immersing us in the material world that these women inhabited, without getting lost in the weeds (if you’ve ever read the biographies of Alison Weir, you know how tedious it can be to read a book that focuses too much on material culture). She describes the sorts of things that the daughters would have worn and eaten, and in her capable hands you can almost feel that you’re standing there, bearing witness to all of the pageant and power that were such a hallmark of medieval English royalty.
Daughters of Chivalry also gives us a thorough look at the geopolitical circumstances of their world. Edward was a man who believed in his own absolute right to rule over not only his domains in England but also those in Scotland and Wales. His daughters frequently traveled with him as he went north, and Joanna’s second husband Ralph actually endeared himself to his father-in-law by being a valued warrior in his campaigns against the Scots. All of the daughters knew how to make the most out of their relationship to him, particularly when it came to submitting petitions to him on behalf of others.
Unfortunately, as the book also demonstrates, this closeness to power didn’t work so well during the reign of their brother, Edward, whose two decades on the English throne were marred by constant feuding with his nobles, particularly over the issue of his favorites (the most infamous of which was Piers Gaveston). In the years that followed their father’s death, his daughters, and their children, would find themselves steadily drawn into the conflict between Edward II and his nobles, with unfortunate consequences for almost everyone. Only Mary and Margaret seemed able to avoid the worst of it, the former because she spent the rest of her life in her religious house and the latter because she was across the Channel. As so often, the lives of royal women were impacted, for good or for ill, by the tides of political fortune.
All too often, it’s easy to lose sight of medieval women, whose lives and experiences were often overshadowed by the powerful men in their life. This is especially true for the daughters of Edward I, who are largely obscured by the larger-than-life nature of their powerful father and by the scandals that plagued the reign of their brother (who was ultimately overthrown by his own wife). Their presence in both the material and the historical record is at times spotty at best, and we don’t even know the death dates for several of them. Fortunately for all of us, there are historians like Wilson-Lee, who do an exemplary job of bringing these extraordinarily powerful women to life in the written word.