Authors: Lisa Hilton
Froissart gives a touching account of the first meeting between Edward III and his betrothed during Queen Isabella’s visit to Valenciennes in the summer of 1326, but there is some doubt as to whether Edward did in fact accompany his mother to the Count of Hainault’s court. If not, then Philippa met her husband for the first time just before their wedding at York, where she stayed for a week at Isabella’s lodgings. There is also some uncertainty about her age, her birth year being variously given as 1311 or 1314. Back in 1319, when an alliance with Hainault was first discussed, Walter Stapledon visited Valenciennes and left a detailed pen portrait of the ‘daughter of the Count of Hainault
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he had been sent to insPect The girl was reported as being ‘nine years old on St John’s day to come, as her mother says’, which would tally with the earlier date. In 1326, the Count and Countess had three unmarried daughters, Philippa, Isabelle and
Jeanne, as well as a son, but their eldest girl, Sybella, had died some time between 1319 and 1326, and it is possible that Stapledon’s description applies to her, in which case the 1314 date would be more plausible. His examination of the prospective bride is notable for the attention given to every physical feature: hair, forehead, eyes, nose, lips, teeth (her adult teeth are whiter than her milk teeth) and her ‘brown’ complexion; his assessment of her figure, which, ‘so far as a man may see’, was acceptable, suggests that the bishop was required to take his investigations as far as modesty would permit. If this checklist applies to Sybella, then it cannot of course be assumed that Philippa possessed her sister’s black hair, dark eyes and satisfactory figure, but the girl was ‘well taught in all that becomes her rank’, and upbringing and education was presumably one attribute that was shared by both girls and their sisters.
In any event, Philippa was at most seventeen when she was married, to a boy about her own age whom she may well never have seen. Her husband’s unconventional domestic set-up was very different from the atmosphere in which she had grown up. The Count and Countess of Hainault had a successful marriage by contemporary standards in that they produced children, co-operated in government and lived together until Count William’s death in 1337, when Countess Jeanne retired to a convent. Philippa and her sisters are described as having been ‘sensibly brought up by a sensible mother’,
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thoush this maybe no more than an extrapolation from the characteristics of Philippa herself which, in the eyes of her Edwardian biographer, were deemed ‘sensible’. She certainly had a head for figures, perhaps unsurprisingly, since she had grown up in the Low Countries in the period of their ascendance into the greatest trading centre in the world. Hainault, though small, was hugely rich, and Valenciennes in the south of the province (in modern-day France), along with towns such as Lille and St Omer, was a meeting point for traders from all over Europe. For the wealthy, eastern silks, Spanish figs, raisins and leather, dates and spices from north Africa, the latest luxuries from Italy and even furs and ivory from Russia and the Baltic were available to make everyday life more exotic and beautiful. Philippa was very interested in clothes and food and, despite her pedigree, is often presented as something of a ‘bourgeois’ queen — solid, comfortable, domestic. While this image has much to do with Edward’s need to reorient the royal family after the scandal of the regency crisis, it also colours the sparse picture of a girl brought up in a loving, secure family in a wealthy provincial city, a far cry from Mortimer’s rackety court and Isabella’s vicious glamour.
During her childhood at the palace of Salle-le-Comte and her family’s
summer residence ofBeaumont, Philippa was exposed to an increasingly French-directed literary culture, part of the Valois influence of her mother, Jeanne. Jeanne was a keen reader of romances, as was Philippa’s aunt the Duchesse de Bourbon, while her Hainault ancestors, Count Jean and Countess Philippine, were enthusiastic collectors and sponsors of illuminated books. As Queen, Philippa employed her own illuminator, Master Robert, and her accounts record payments to his wife. The owner of two illuminated psalters, she clearly shared her family’s interest in elaborate books, and her betrothal gift to Edward was a compilation of Latin and French prayers and romances, including a translation of a pseudo-Aristotelian text,
De Secretis Secretorum
. The book features a picture of a woman displaying the arms of Hainault presenting the text to a man in a coat worked with those of England. Philippa’s new husband shared her enthusiasm for reading: the Tower inventory for the period 1322—41 shows 160 volumes in the keeping of the privy wardrobe, a royal library that was augmented and shared through regular exchanges of books within the royal circle. Philippa’s interest in learning is also attested by the licence granted in January 1341 to her chaplain, Robert de Eglesfield, for the foundation of a college for scholars in the Oxford parish of St Peter, to be known as the Queen’s Hall.
Such patronage lay in the future. For several years, the new Queen was largely subordinate to the Queen Dowager. On 15 May, at Northampton, Edward agreed to assign Philippa’s dower lands within a year, but they remained largely in Isabella’s hands until 1331. The 3,000 pounds-worth of lands and rents agreed upon at her betrothal were not available, and Philippa received only a series ofpiecemeal grants until her estates could be fully provided. She did, however, attempt to act her part. Soon after her wedding, as she and Edward journeyed south, she made a traditional gesture of intercession at Stamford, on behalf of Agnes, the daughter of one Alice de Penrith, who had been convicted of robbery and sent to Marshalsea Prison. Philippa sued for a pardon on the grounds that the girl was less than eleven years old. Other interventions were less successful. In 1328, her request to place Joanna de Tourbeuyle as a lay sister in a convent was met with an indignant response from the prioress:
No Queen has ever asked such a thing of our little house before, and if it may please of your debonaire Highness to know of our simple state, we are so poor, as God and everybody knows, that what we have would not suffice for our little necessities in performing the service of God day and night if by the aid of our friends we were charged with seculars
without lessening the number of our Religious, thus to the belittling of our service to God and to the perpetual prejudice of our poor House.
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Such meagre attempts at influence constitute most of what is known about Philippa for the first years of her marriage. Even her coronation was delayed to the point of embarrassment.
The fifteenth-century chronicle of John Hardyng gives a hint at why Edward selected Philippa over her sisters to become queen of England. ‘We will have her with good hips, I wean/For she will bear good sons at mine intent? To which they all accorded with one assent/And chose Philippa that was full feminine.’ Philippa’s rather plump figure may have been the consequence rather than the cause of her success as a mother, but she was definitely a great breeder. She had almost as many children as Eleanor of Castile, except that many of Philippa’s lived into adulthood, a difference which was to have revolutionary effects on the succession in the next century. Her sons — Edward, two Williams, Lionel, John, Edmund and Thomas — and her daughters — Isabella, Joan, Blanche, Mary and Margaret — were born between 1330 and 1355. It was the arrival of the first, Edward, who would become known as the Black Prince, that finally shamed Isabella into organising Philippa’s coronation, which had been put off for two years. The Queen Dowager was patently reluctant to relinquish any part of her status, but by the time Philippa was six months’ pregnant, in early 1330, there could be no delaying it any longer. The ceremony, which took place at Westminster on 4 March, had to be shortened so as not to exhaust the new Queen and, after a spring tour of Windsor, Guildford and Winchester, she retired to Woodstock for her first lying-in. It was typical of the financial insecurity with which Philippa had to contend all her married life that the expenses for her birthing chamber were in arrears even as she entered it.
The birth of a son on 15 June was the perfect confirmation of Philippa’s queenship. Her valet Thomas, who brought the news to the King, was rewarded with an annuity of forty marks and the baby’s cradle-rocker, Martha Plympton, his wetnurse, Joan ofOxenford, and Philippa’s nurse, Lady Katherine Haryngton, all received gifts. The Queen had happy memories of this first birth at Woodstock and chose to deliver three more of her children there. The Pope wrote to congratulate her on Edward’s arrival and, just months later, in the aftermath of Mortimer’s execution, he was corresponding with her again, this time commending her for her treatment of her imprisoned mother-in-law and encouraging her to ‘aim at restoring the good fortune of the Queen Mother, which has been undeservedly
injured’. Philippa never did anything to contradict the official line on Isabella’s position, even, it has been suggested, naming her first daughter after the Dowager Queen in 1332 in a show of family solidarity (though this could be reading too much into the gesture: Isabelle was also her sister’s name), but 1331 markedanewbeginningforherandEdward. Contrite, Isabella had voluntarily’ handed over her lands to her son in December, and Philippa’s dower could now be settled. Increasing mentions in the Rolls of the royal household demonstrate that Philippa was finally stepping into the role which had been prepared for her five years before.
The Queen’s household was expanding rapidly. Childbirth, like coronation, was a rite ofpassage in which the expectations of the state were ritually enacted on the queen’s person in a series of ceremonies which by the fifteenth century had coalesced into elaborate and lengthy protocols. Some weeks before the birth of a child, the pregnant queen would elect to ‘take her chamber’, attending a special Mass before processing to a splendidly prepared birthing suite where she would be served with wine and spices, as she had been at her coronation. When her attendants progressed to the inner rooms, all the men would be dismissed, confirming their secondary role in the mystic, sacred period of confinement. Traditionally male offices, such as that of butler, would be filled by the queen’s women, who would receive supplies from the household at the chamber door. The queen’s isolation was a fiction, ‘part of the very public role of kingship’,
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serving focus all attention on the magnitude of the event occurring in the womb-within-the-palace, where the sounds of the outside world were muffled in the folds of rich draperies. Once the child was born, she participated, as we have seen, in the similarly theatrical ritual of churching, in which she was presented to the court reclining on a bed of state. Afterwards she would be offered a candle and proceed to Mass with her women, priests and musicians. At the church door she was sprinkled with holy water before hearing the service and making offerings. As with the ceremony of confinement, the king did not attend. After a solemn, women-only banquet, the queen would re-enter court life. The significance of the churching ritual was understood by many as one of purification (with roots perhaps in Jewish ceremonies surrounding menstruation and childbirth), but it could also be seen as one of blessing and thanksgiving, an opportunity to give praise after an often deadly ordeal. Churching after a successful confinement emphasised and celebrated the centrality of queenly fertility to the sacred sanction of royal continuity.
Philippa gave birth to Princess Isabella in 1332, preferring Woodstock to Clarendon, which her husband had had prepared. For the formal
reception of the court after her churching, tiny Isabella wore a fur-trimmed robe of Lucca silk, while her mother was dazzling in red and purple pearl-embroidered velvet, seated on a green velvet bed adorned with mermaids bearing the arms of England and Hainault. Later churching regalia featured hangings of red cloth decorated with gold leaf and a tunic for Philippa embellished with golden birds in a circle of pearls, worn over a dark blue costume. Isabella, as was customary, was given her own household, with John Bromley, her tailor, Joan Gambon, her rocker, and Joan Pyebrook, her nurse, but the children’s bills were met through the central organisation of Philippa’s own wardrobe. In the first of many money-spinning schemes, Edward granted his wife the right to cut down any leafless oaks in her dower parks to the value of 1,000 pounds to keep up with expenses. The previous year, Philippa had also been granted some of Mortimer’s seizures, in the form of the issues of the county of Chester, for the maintenance of her son, who held the earldom, and her thirteen-year-old sister-in-law Eleanor, who had joined her household after Dowager Queen Isabella’s ‘retirement’.
Preparations were made that summer for Eleanor’s marriage to Reginald IS, Count of Gueldres and Zutphen, and Philippa had the pleasure of welcoming her mother, Countess Jeanne, who was instrumental in negotiating the betrothal. Edward staged tournaments for the entertainment of his guests at Dartmouth, Stepney and Cheapside, where a wooden tower was built to accommodate the royal party and Edward and his retinue appeared in exciting ‘Tartar’ costumes, with fur cloaks and tall hats. Unfortunately the ‘sensible’ proportions of the Flemish ladies proved too much for the tower, which collapsed. Eleanor set off to join her bridegroom at Nijmegen after Christmas at Eltham, where Edward settled her dowry of 15,000 pounds and presented her with a gold cup and her trousseau. She had a green bed, six gold altar cloths, accoutrements for her private chapel, a furred robe, a wedding outfit of cloth-of-gold and crimson, Spanish leather shoes, sugar, rice, raisins, figs and pepper and an up-to-the-minute purple chariot with a waxed-cloth rain hood. In spite of these splendid celebrations and accoutrements Eleanor’s marriage was troubled. Her husband disliked her and, after she had given him two children, tried to get an annulment by claiming she had leprosy. She refuted this charge in some style by riding into court wearing the skimpiest of shifts to display her healthy body, and Reginald was obliged to return to her.