Emma Campion - A Triple Knot (55 page)

And most of all, I am grateful to my husband, Charlie, for all his support behind the scenes. He is my anchor.

S
mall details shaped the story you have just read. (I hope you are not cheating and reading this before the novel. You’ll be sorry!) The project grew out of my curiosity about Joan’s wish to be buried with Thomas Holland, not Edward the Black Prince. It seemed out of place in the usually accepted story of Joan’s and Edward’s marriage being a romantic happily-ever-after union. I quickly realized I needed to understand how she came to wed Thomas Holland in the first place.

In spring 1340 a proposed betrothal was recorded between Margaret, “daughter of Edmund of Kent,” and “Armand,” the eldest son of Bernard, lord of Albret, a liaison that would benefit King Edward, creating for him a solid ally in Gascony. As there is no record of Joan having a sister, it is likely the names of Joan and her mother were confused, as they had been in another document, and it was Joan who was to be betrothed to Armand. Nothing more is ever said about this union. I was intrigued. What happened? Clearly she never married him. Why? What
if she’d found someone to hand, preferably someone she already liked very much, and convinced him to rescue her? In Thomas Holland’s later testimony before the papal committee investigating his claim to be Joan’s rightful husband, he stated that their marriage took place in spring 1340. This was something I could work with.

I connected Joan’s proposed marriage to Arnaud Amanieu (I chose to use this alternate spelling of his name in the book) to a possibility historian Anthony Goodman suggested during one of our long lunches in York, that Joan might have accompanied the royal family to the Low Countries before her betrothal to Will Montagu—“might,” because we have no firm record of Joan in those years. Sending Joan to join the royal family in Antwerp and Ghent gave me the opportunity to explore the crown’s financial difficulties and Joan’s growing understanding of her expected role as a Plantagenet as well. On foreign soil, far from her mother’s protection, Joan needed to be her own advocate. The politics became personal. Her decision to marry in secret, and so young, made far more sense to me.

Tony is also responsible for Joan’s sister-in-law’s appearance toward the end of the book. I wondered how Edward and Joan managed to find the privacy for their love affair and secret marriage; Tony said he liked to think Elizabeth’s house in Sussex might have provided a convenient love nest, and she would be in character in encouraging their liaison—after all, she had chosen to follow her heart despite having taken a vow of celibacy. And to be honest, Elizabeth of Julier’s story is one of the juiciest and most unexpected items I found in his notes toward a biography of Joan of Kent, notes he generously shared with me when I was still working on Alice Perrers. I could not resist including her.

As for the emblem of the white hart, I knew that Prince Edward was said to have had “a bed-covering that displayed the hart encircled with the arms of Kent and Wake, suggesting that the device derived from [King Richard II’s] mother,
Joan of Kent,” which became the inspiration for King Richard’s adoption of the emblem.
¹
It is said that “one of [Joan of Kent’s] ancestors (according to legend) caught a white stag in Windsor Forest.”
²
But I found nothing to suggest whether the ancestors were in her mother’s or her father’s line, so I chose her father’s.

Another famous emblem of the time is of course the garter worn by King Edward’s select Knights of the Order of the Garter. For more about the theories regarding its origin, see the two August 2011 posts on my blog,
A Writer’s Retreat
(
ecampion.wordpress.com
), “The Order of Whose Garter?”

In the end, I simply could not find a happily-ever-after for Joan. But I have gained a great deal of respect for her.

A special note on clandestine marriage: The word comes from the Latin
clandestīnus
, meaning secret, hidden. In contemporary use the word implies deception or illicit purpose. But Joan’s “clandestine” marriages were both quite legitimate from the moment she spoke her vows—or, more accurately, they were binding. In fourteenth-century England what constituted a valid matrimonial bond according to canon (Church) and civil law was the consent of the partners; the will of the parents, guardians, or lord was secondary. What was required was a verbal exchange of present consent, “I marry you,” “I take you”; if the couple exchanged words of future consent, “I will marry you,” “I will take you,” it was deemed a betrothal, but if followed by intercourse it became a validly contracted marriage. Neither a priest nor a church was necessary to create a binding matrimonial union.

That does not mean such seemingly casual contracts were encouraged or condoned. Both the Church and the state preferred

the posting of banns and a public ceremony before a priest and witnesses, but for pragmatic reasons: such public marriages went far in preventing bigamous unions or later claims of coercion or misunderstanding—“She heard what she wanted to hear before we lay together.”

So when in writing about the Church’s attitude toward clandestine marriages, James Brundage’s comment about Joan’s “bigamous” marriage is a tad misleading: “More prominent offenders, such as Joan Plantagenet, the Fair Maid of Kent, seem to have escaped … harsh treatment. Joan entered two clandestine marriages (the second one with the Prince of Wales), as well as a bigamous public marriage, which was ultimately declared invalid by the Roman Rota. While her conduct was scandalous, there is no evidence that she was ever seriously penalized for her marital adventures.”
³
Joan’s union with Will Montagu was never a legitimate marriage.

And her escape from punishment was not necessarily owing to her status. Consider: “Several examples illustrate ecclesiastical adherence to the standard of upholding clandestine nuptials despite parental wishes. Agnes Nakerer fell in love with a travelling minstrel, John Kent [no relation to our Joan!], and married him secretly in the early fourteenth century. Not only did her parents object, they forced her to deny that marriage and marry a more suitable son-in-law. The minstrel sued to enforce his prior marriage contract, and the Church officials at the ecclesiastical court at York decided against the parents in favor of the minstrel and the young woman’s first, valid, nuptials. The record provides no indication that this couple suffered ecclesiastical punishment for the marriage.”
⁴

Other European countries rejected the legitimacy of such simple vows earlier than England. But it was not until Lord Hardwicke’s Act in 1753 that English authorities criminalized clandestine marriage.
⁵

Still, Joan knew the enormity of her action when she pledged her troth with Thomas Holland, and so did he. Not only was she the granddaughter of a king, but she was the present king’s ward. And her father had been executed—she knew the price one paid for crossing royalty.

And yet she did. Therein lies the tale.

I’ve assembled an annotated bibliography as a companion to
A Triple Knot
. You can find the link on my website (
emmacampion.com
).

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