The model set by his grandfather Edward III had been both glamorous and lauded. Happily married to a much admired queen who gave him a growing brood of royal children, Edward in his magnificent prime had presided over a new Camelot, in which valiant knights, led by the king and his sons, competed on the battlefield and at the tournament to win honour, renown, and the favour of virtuous ladies.

Richard – all the more strikingly for a king named after the crusading Lionheart – wasn’t interested in fighting, either in earnest or for chivalric fun. He was corralled into leading an army on campaign once, as a teenager in Scotland in 1385, hated it, and never did it again. On two later military expeditions to Ireland – itself a deeply unusual destination for an English king – he made sure that there was no question of him riding in the front line. Meanwhile the tournaments continued, but as a different kind of theatre arranged around a king who sat in unmoving majesty in the stands.

Nor did he appear to be interested in becoming a father. His queen, Anne of Bohemia, was pious, dutiful and silent. She died in June 1394 at the age of twenty-eight, after twelve years of marriage during which she had not become pregnant.

It’s a context in which historical attention has usually focused on the question of Richard’s sexuality, and the nature of his relationship with his favourite Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford. But de Vere died in exile in 1392; and it occurs to me that, in his absence, by the summer of 1394 the sheer strangeness of Richard’s sense of his duties to his kingdom was most publicly visible if we look at the lives of the women who were, in one sense or another, nearest to him.

With Queen Anne’s death, the first lady in the kingdom was gone, leaving the king unmarried and childless. The next ladies in rank died at almost exactly the same time: in March, Constanza of Castile, wife of Richard’s oldest uncle John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and in July Mary de Bohun, the young wife of Gaunt’s son and heir Henry, who in any case had spent little time at court. Precedence among the noblewomen of England now fell to the wife of Gaunt’s brother Edmund, duke of York. The duke was fifty-three. His duchess – his second wife Joan, with whom he was said to be besotted – was a girl of fourteen.

England’s royal family, it seemed, was no longer quite the flourishing dynasty it had once been. Its ranks were thinned, its dignity compromised, its future uncertain.

And that sense of disruption, of norms out of kilter, was reinforced in 1396 by two more royal weddings.

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I’ll come clean. This is not the post I thought I was writing. I thought it would be short and speculative; something like a provocation about the limits of historical evidence and the nature of past lives we can barely trace.

Instead, it’s taken me twice as long and got me half as far – which is, I suppose, at least an honest demonstration of how historical research often turns out.

So, friends: lend me your ears for the disappearing ballad of Henry and Alice . . .

I’ve said it before: in late medieval England, more noblewomen than you might think were kicking against the conventions that constrained their lives. Within two generations of the royal family around the turn of the 15th century, there was a shotgun wedding; a son born to an (almost certainly) adulterous wife; and a daughter born to an un-remarried widow.

In the last case, we only know about the daughter and the affair that led to her birth because of a single surviving document: a petition submitted to parliament a quarter of a century later, trying to make sure that the (now grown-up) illegitimate baby had no claim on her father’s title and estates. In the others, we’re doing the historical equivalent of reaching a total of 4 not by adding 2 + 2, but with fractional scraps and algebraic inference.

In today’s story, we barely even have those. This noblewoman existed, but she’s a historical shadow drifting just beyond our peripheral vision. Still, I wanted to see whether – if at all – I could find her.

Let’s begin in April 1447, at the deathbed of Cardinal Beaufort.

Henry Beaufort is a reminder that the conventions governing the lives of aristocratic men were very different. He was the second of four children born to Katherine Swynford, the gentlewoman who was for years the mistress of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, son of the great king Edward III.

Gaunt had to weather some disapproval of his sinful private life by ostentatiously scandalised clerics, but his public position was unaffected, and his illegitimate children – three boys and a girl, all given the name of Beaufort – were acknowledged and accepted by Gaunt and everyone else as part of his powerful family.

In 1396, when Gaunt chose to marry Katherine and use his influence at Westminster and in Rome to have their children legitimised, he got his way – and so began the rise of the Beauforts to the epicentre of the English political establishment.

Henry Beaufort, the second son of this second Lancastrian family, was picked for a career in the Church. He was in his early twenties when he was named bishop of Lincoln in 1398. He wasn’t yet thirty when he was promoted to the bishopric of Winchester in 1404. He was in his early forties when, in 1417, he received a cardinal’s hat to go with his see.

Being a priest meant that – though his fortune was huge and his achievements many – he never married. But in the will he made during his last illness in 1447, there’s a bequest to a woman whose presence in the text is unexplained. To ‘Jane, wife of Sir Edward Stradling’, the Cardinal left a range of silverware, a set of white silk bed-hangings embroidered with roses, and the small fortune of £100 in gold.

These were obviously personal gifts. But who was Jane (or Joan – both names are Johanna in Latin)? And what was she to the Cardinal?

In 1780, when the editor and printer John Nichols published the will in a volume entitled (deep breath) A Collection of all the Wills now known to be extant of the Kings and Queens of England, Princes and Princesses of Wales, and every branch of the Blood Royal, from the reign of William the Conqueror, to that of Henry the Seventh exclusive, with explanatory notes, and a Glossary, his note on the Cardinal’s relationship with the mysterious Jane was clear and confident:

In his youthful days, before he took orders, he had by Alice daughter of Richard Earl of Arundel, sister of the Abp. of Canterbury, a daughter Jane, whom he married to Sir Edward Stradling, Knt. of Glamorganshire.

Interesting. In other words, Henry Beaufort, like plenty of other men of his class and his calling, fathered an illegitimate daughter. But the interesting bit is this: his daughter’s mother – at least according to Nichols – was a member of one of the greatest noble families in medieval England.

We seem to be on the trail of another blue-blooded woman refusing to accept that her freedom to form her own relationships should be circumscribed.

So who exactly was Alice? And what evidence does Nichols cite?

The unhelpful answer is: none.

Nichols’s earl of Arundel was one of Edward III’s right-hand men. His son Thomas became archbishop of Canterbury, and one of his daughters was named Alice.

But his story doesn’t add up. This Alice was a quarter of a century older than Henry Beaufort. She was married off a decade before he was born, to Thomas Holand, earl of Kent, and became the mother of nine children (one of them Joan Holand, the much married duchess of York). With the best will in the world, the chronology can’t easily be made to fit.

Perhaps Nichols was right about the names, but wrong about the generation? This impossible Alice’s oldest brother was the next Richard, earl of Arundel, and he too had a daughter named Alice. Was she Henry Beaufort’s lover?

We don’t know exactly when this second Alice was born, but she must have been the right kind of age to be a plausible match for the Cardinal. At some point before 1392, she married John, Lord Charleton of Powys, who died in 1401. The beginnings of a possible timeline are emerging.

Nichols says the Cardinal’s daughter was born ‘in his youthful days, before he took orders’, which would put Jane’s birth before he was ordained in 1397. But if Nichols was wrong about the generation to which Jane’s mother belonged, perhaps he was also wrong about the exact timing of her birth. Perhaps it was after 1401 that the young widow and the young bishop who’d been given no choice about his vocation found one another.

Perhaps. But the whole story is still built on Nichols’s unsupported assertion.

I turned to the work of K.B. McFarlane, one of the greatest historians of medieval English politics (and, incidentally, supervisor of Alan Bennett’s doctoral thesis on the retinue of Richard II which, had he not decided to abandon medieval history in order to become a national treasure, I would dearly love to have read).

In 1948, McFarlane published an essay entitled ‘At the Deathbed of Cardinal Beaufort’. It’s mostly concerned with a forensic accounting of the Cardinal’s financial dealings with the crown, but he mentions in passing the bequest to Beaufort’s ‘own natural daughter Joan and her husband, Sir Edward Stradling’. His footnote to that sentence begins:

Joan Stradling is said to have been Beaufort’s child by Alice, daughter of Richard, earl of Arundel.

McFarlane points out, with a variety of supporting evidence, that this can’t plausibly have been the older Alice, and that the younger Alice is the more likely candidate, whose ‘liaison with Beaufort . . . probably took place in her widowhood, i.e. when he was already a bishop’. He investigates the probable date of Joan/Jane’s marriage to Edward Stradling, which confirms that she was born around the right time to be the offspring of this affair, and cites some land transactions that strongly suggest – though don’t explicitly announce – that the Cardinal was taking a paternal hand in making provision for her future.

Fine. But still: ‘is said to have been’ is doing all the heavy lifting. ‘Is said to have been’ by whom?

Onward. My next port of call was the superb biography of Cardinal Beaufort by the late, great Gerald Harriss, a pupil of McFarlane’s (and, incidentally, one of the examiners of my PhD thesis, a moment when I couldn’t have been luckier to have such a humane and rigorous reader).

There, in his account of Beaufort’s early life, I found this, in a paragraph discussing the years around 1402:

. . . at about this time he fathered his only known bastard, Joan, by Alice, the recently widowed Lady Charleton of Powys and daughter of the late earl of Arundel.

That sounds encouragingly confident; but the only source Harriss cites is McFarlane’s ‘At the Deathbed of Cardinal Beaufort’.

Then I opened Chris Given-Wilson’s brilliant new biography of Thomas Arundel, the archbishop of Canterbury named by Nichols as part of the family of Jane/Joan’s mother.1 (Sidebar: the book’s only been out a few weeks, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Archbishop Arundel took a central role in the events Shakespeare dramatised in the Henriad, but is such a complex figure, a man to whom it’s so difficult to assign a clear place in the narrative arc, that he appears in none of the plays. Given-Wilson is an exceptional historian, and the book takes us deep into the late medieval world. Go read!)

In describing the tricky relationship between Henry Beaufort and Archbishop Arundel – another younger aristocratic son who became a bishop when he was only just out of his teens, but a man of an older generation and a very different temperament – Given-Wilson says this:

. . . [Arundel] found it hard as archbishop to condone [Beaufort]’s lack of interest in his episcopal responsibilities and his worldly lifestyle, which included fathering a daughter by Arundel’s niece, Alice, in 1402.

Given-Wilson’s cited source is Harriss, citing McFarlane. The baton is passed, solidifying in each hand, but it’s no clearer where it originally came from.

All three are historians of exceptional insight; and facts often have to be established on the balance of probability, across chasms in the chain of evidence. All the same, in their narratives this ‘fact’ is peripheral, a momentary aside, not the focus of their forensic attention.

Was it enough? It didn’t seem like enough.

So I started going backwards instead of forwards. I needed a source earlier than John Nichols in 1780. If I couldn’t track one down via Cardinal Beaufort, perhaps I could find a lead via the family into which Joan/Jane married?

A little digging turned up a history of the Stradlings published in 1963 by the distinguished Welsh historian Ralph Griffiths. (You can read it here.) His starting point is a treatise called ‘The winning of the lordship of Glamorgan’, written in the 1560s by a descendant of Joan/Jane, another Edward Stradling.

So I went to look at that.

And there it was, in this later Stradling’s account of the descent of his own family, as published in 1584:

The said Sir Edward maried with Iane daughter to Henry Beauford, afterwards Cardinall, begotten (before he was Priest) upon Alice one of the daughters of Richard Earle of Arundell:

Still no footnotes – but we’re back to within two centuries of Jane’s birth, in an account compiled by her great-great-great-grandson. Could we be dealing with family lore, the details mutating as they passed down the generations? The story must, after all, have come from somewhere.

If that was that – if that were all I’d found – I’d feel I had licence to start joining dots. I’d be encouraged by the willingness of McFarlane, Harriss and Given-Wilson to give house-room to the story, and by the fact that I’ve already pieced together scraps of evidence from the lives of other noblewomen who did have relationships and children outside their marriages.

I’d be pointing out that our younger Alice’s family endured terrifying trauma in 1397 when her father, the earl, was suddenly arrested on Richard II’s orders, found guilty of treason, and beheaded on Tower Hill. And I’d be suggesting that, after the death of her husband in 1401, it’s plausible to suppose that the young and so far childless Alice might have found comfort with charismatic, ambitious Henry Beaufort, unavailable for marriage though he was.

But I’d reckoned without the benefits of the internet, and without the expertise of researchers for whom Alice Fitzalan, daughter of the fourth earl of Arundel, is no more peripheral, no less significant, than any other member of the vast range of families they investigate.

The Foundation for Medieval Genealogy was established in 2001 to promote the study of genealogy and prosopography – that is, the description of individual lives – in the centuries before 1500. The first seven volumes of its journal, Foundations, are freely available to read online. I wish I’d discovered it years ago.

And there, published in 2004 by Brad Verity, is an article entitled ‘A Non-Affair to Remember – The Alleged Liaison of Cardinal Beaufort and Alice of Arundel’.

For someone as skilled in genealogical detective work as Verity, it turns out there is more to say about Alice.

Edward Stradling’s version of the family history from the 1560s is here in Verity’s account. So are McFarlane and Harriss, and the whole lineage of the story from the 16th century to the 20th, including a 17th-century suggestion that Alice and Beaufort might even have married before he became a priest.

And then comes Verity’s bombshell:

In the four centuries since Sir Edward Stradling first circulated his pedigree in the 1560s, to the many lines of descent in print today, Alice has gone from being young wife to mother as a maiden to mistress as a widow. She should have been removed altogether, for a close examination of the late 14th and early 15th century evidence regarding Beaufort and Alice reveals she could not have been the mother of Beaufort’s daughter Jane in any of the possible scenarios.

Verity shows that Alice’s last appearance anywhere in the surviving medieval records is the bequest her father chose to leave her when he drew up his will in 1393. When her husband died in 1401, she’s entirely absent from the legal documents relating to his estates. As his wife, she would (almost certainly) have received a ‘jointure’ – lands settled jointly on the couple for the term of their lives, to protect her income if she were left a widow. As his widow, she would also have been entitled to a dower settlement of a third of the remaining estate.

But there’s no sign of John, Lord Charleton’s widow in any of these post-mortem documents. His heir was his younger brother, whose right to ‘all the lands which his said brother held of the king’ was confirmed a month after Charleton’s death.

The only possible conclusion is that Alice was already dead by 1401 – and therefore couldn’t have given birth to Beaufort’s daughter after that date.

If she couldn’t have become Jane’s mother as a widow, what about as a wife?

That doesn’t work either. For one thing, Jane died in 1479. It wasn’t unknown for people in the late middle ages to live into their eighties, but it wasn’t common – so the window for her birth before 1401 is narrow.

Narrow, but chronologically possible – except that any baby to which Alice gave birth during her marriage to John, Lord Charleton, would be deemed by law to be his. Repudiating a child born as a result of an affair wasn’t out of the question, but it couldn’t be done in silence. No mention of Alice when John died in 1401 means that Alice was already dead; no mention of Jane means that Alice can’t have been her mother.

So where did the story come from?

There’s no demonstrable link between Jane and the family of the earls of Arundel in her lifetime. But that’s not true when it comes to her great-great-great-grandson Edward Stradling, writing his family pedigree in the 1560s.

In 1545, a Stradling cousin had married the 12th earl of Arundel, who thereby became Edward’s patron. By the 1560s it was a tricky political inheritance: both the earl and Edward’s father refused to abandon their Catholic faith in Elizabeth’s Protestant England. Perhaps, Verity suggests,

Edward may have had a desire to create a blood kinship to Arundel. Or perhaps he was in collusion with the earl himself, who was a constant conspirator and leader of the old nobility and Catholics, to preserve the reputation of Beaufort, the most renowned prelate of medieval England.

Perhaps.

We’re left with more questions we can’t answer; and Alice Fitzalan – the woman I set out to find – disappears completely from view.

Except: there’s one last ripple as the waters close.

I’m in awe of Verity’s command of the lives of the late medieval Fitzalans, in all their intricate detail; but I find myself disagreeing with one final conclusion. ‘Who then,’ he asks, ‘if not Alice of Arundel as the pedigree states, had been the mistress of Henry Beaufort and mother of his daughter Jane?’

Her identity will probably never be determined, but some sections of society can be eliminated. She was not a noblewoman such as the earl of Arundel’s daughters and sisters. Women of the medieval English aristocracy, especially if they were heiresses, were off-limits as mistresses even to the king. A clandestine liaison would greatly affect the marriage prospects of highborn ladies, and wives and daughters of English nobles were closely guarded as a rule.

But the historical lesson of my failure to find Alice Fitzalan has been this: never accept without question the claims of authority.

An unsupported assertion becomes no more true for being repeated, whether by me or by any other historian (however much I might revere their judgement).

And – to return to my beginning – women of the medieval English aristocracy were not supposed to have clandestine liaisons, but that doesn’t mean they never did.

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In 1517, at the age of 32, she is the mother of one daughter. She’s still young enough to have more children, to give her husband the son he needs to inherit his crown. But she’s had enough of Henry and the kingdom he rules. There are grounds – there are always grounds, if you look hard enough – to argue that the Church should rescind its permission for them to be married at all. She demands her freedom; and she leaves.

In this parallel universe, everything – everyone – is different. Katherine isn’t driven by an unflinching commitment to her duty and her faith. Henry’s ego is not so terrifyingly fragile that he can’t tolerate the world refusing to arrange itself according to his will. Above all, Katherine manages to find some kind of leverage to secure her escape, and some new home to live in. In a world where kings rule, how can a queen seize control of her fate?

It seems impossible. But three and a half centuries earlier, another queen in our own timeline had shown that it could be done.

In 1152, at the age of 28, Eleanor of Aquitaine was the mother of two daughters. For fifteen years she had been married to Louis VII, king of France. She was still young enough to have more children, and to give her husband the son he needed to inherit his crown.

But there were grounds – there were always grounds, if you looked hard enough – to argue that the Church should rescind its permission for them to be married at all. In March of that year, an assembly of French bishops declared that Eleanor and Louis were too closely related to be husband and wife. As a result, their marriage was null and void.

Technically, the judgement had merit. Eleanor and Louis were related within the degrees of consanguinity prohibited by the Church, because they shared an ancestor within their families’ last seven generations.

On the other hand, so did most royal couples, given how interrelated the ruling families of Europe were and how small the pool of potential spouses. And only three years earlier Pope Eugenius III had forbidden any mention of consanguinity as a threat to the legitimacy of their marriage, which he proceeded to confirm ‘by word and writing’, and threatened anathema against anyone who sought to dissolve it.

So what had changed?

Historians have always agreed that the answer lies with Louis. Jane Martindale, in her excellent survey of Eleanor’s life for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, sums up the consensus:

There can be little doubt that both personal desire and dynastic need for a son were the motives underlying Louis VII’s decision to obtain a divorce in 1152 . . .

In some sense, of course it was the king’s decision. The bishops wouldn’t have gathered without his say-so, let alone declared the end of his marriage.

But here’s where I need to stand up and say: I disagree. Louis gave the order, but I doubt – a lot more than a little – that he was the moving force behind the annulment.

He did need a son. But Eleanor had given him two healthy daughters. The younger was only eighteen months old, and Eleanor herself wasn’t yet 30. There was no reason to believe she was physically incapable of giving birth in the coming years to a whole brood of boys.

And, between the two of them, it wasn’t Louis who had ever shown a desire to escape the relationship. When the pope declared their marriage valid in 1149, noted the well-informed observer John of Salisbury, ‘the ruling plainly delighted the king, since he loved the queen passionately, in an almost boyish way’.

It was Eleanor – not Louis – who had clearly had enough.

Never, since their wedding when she was just 13, had she seemed enthusiastic about her unimpressive husband. The suspicion was that her failure, so far, to give him more children than their two little girls might relate to the personal mismatch between his gauche religiosity and her worldly self-possession.

The breach between them came into public view when Eleanor accompanied Louis on crusade in 1147. Scandalous rumours flew around Europe about the intimacy that developed between the queen and her uncle Raymond of Poitiers, ruler of the principality of Antioch. When Louis gave the order to move on to Jerusalem, it was Eleanor – daringly and shockingly – who raised the issue of consanguinity to justify her refusal to go with him.

At that point, hundreds of miles from home, she didn’t win her freedom. Instead she was forced to submit to the ‘reconciliation’ brokered by the pope on their journey back through Italy, which resulted in the birth of their second daughter in 1150.

But there’s no sign that her feelings had changed; and, back in Paris, she still had an ace to play.

For a queen who wanted to leave – rather than a queen who assumed she must stay – the birth of another daughter had been the luckiest of breaks. Having a boy would raise the stakes dramatically: then, any further questions about the legitimacy of her marriage would also cast doubt on the legitimacy of the heir to France’s throne.

Not only that, but she would lose control of the inheritance she’d brought to her royal marriage, the great territories of the duchy of Aquitaine in the south-west of the kingdom, which would pass by right to any son she had with Louis.

To have a chance of making her escape, it was imperative that she should not conceive again. And not conceiving again was the best chance she had of making her escape. Louis needed a son and heir. If Eleanor remained his wife but refused to have sex with him, he would never have one.

Eleanor was more than capable of taking that stand – and isn’t it the most plausible explanation for the extraordinary facts we have?

We know, so far as we can for people who lived nine centuries ago, that Louis loved her. We know that, despite the scandal in Antioch, he wanted to continue the marriage. We also know that Aquitaine was a political and territorial prize of immense value to the French crown.

Yet, just eighteen months after their second daughter’s birth, he was prepared to let Eleanor go, and – should she have a son by any future marriage – Aquitaine with her.

These were huge sacrifices, worth making only if Louis saw no viable alternative.

Meanwhile Eleanor made no protest about the bishops’ decision. Their judgement affirmed the legitimacy of her two daughters, on the grounds that their parents had married in good faith. Otherwise, she left the girls behind without a backward glance.

Then, eight weeks and two days after the bishops had proclaimed her divorce, she married again. Her new husband was Henry, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, a nineteen-year-old who had visited the French court seven months earlier. Less than two years after that, Henry was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey with Eleanor, his queen, beside him. By then she had already given birth to the first of their five sons, and was pregnant again with their second. Aquitaine was now part of Henry’s empire; and Eleanor, once queen of France, was queen of England.

I can’t prove that the move to end Eleanor and Louis’s marriage originated with Eleanor herself. But it does make sense of what we know.

Unlike Katherine of Aragon, Eleanor had her own lands in Aquitaine which gave her another home to go to, and a rich inheritance to bring to a new marriage. Unlike Katherine of Aragon, she saw no virtue in a ‘reputation’ that trapped her in a situation she despised.

She had the freedom to act, rather than only react. And still, at this pivotal moment, accounts of her life leave agency in the hands of her husband. Here’s Ralph V. Turner’s biography of Eleanor:

Like Henry VIII of England almost 400 years later, Louis came to see his lack of male offspring as proof that God was frowning on his marriage and denying it divine blessing in spite of a papal dispensation. The birth of their second daughter confirmed this thinking and made invalidation of the marriage inevitable.

Perhaps that’s true – but there’s no direct evidence whatsoever of Louis’s thinking in 1152, and he showed no hesitation about marrying two more wives to whom he was equally or even more closely related.1

Why have we found it easier to join the dots this way than to imagine the possibility that Eleanor might have found a way to dictate terms in her own life?

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What I didn’t anticipate was quite how many of them would be women behaving badly.

By ‘badly’, of course I mean defying expectations. Expectations that they would be chaste outside marriage and faithful inside it. Expectations that they would marry a man chosen for them by their family. Expectations that they wouldn’t act too independently, or intervene in politics beyond offering appropriately submissive wifely advice.

So far, I’ve written about four rebellious women who meet that expectation-defying description:

• Joan of Kent, who engineered an annulment of her first, arranged marriage in order to take a second husband she had chosen herself, and then – as a widow with four children – married the heir to the throne, her cousin the Black Prince.

• Isabel of Castile, duchess of York, who (in all probability) had an extramarital affair with Joan’s son John Holand and gave birth to his son.

• Elizabeth of Lancaster, who also became pregnant during an extramarital affair with John Holand, as a result of which her first, arranged marriage was annulled so that the lovers could become husband and wife.

• Joan Holand, duchess of York – niece of John Holand, and second wife of Isabel’s husband – who married four times and seems to have left at least two of her husbands, taking with her substantial quantities of their possessions.

I think it’s significant that these four stories are so closely intertwined. After all, no woman is an island: the two Joans, Isabel and Elizabeth had expectations of their own lives that must have been shaped by the family environment, and the wider culture, within which they grew up.

And the conclusion is inescapable: they believed they could direct their own lives more than we ever usually imagine.

I don’t mean that what they did was taken lightly; but it certainly wasn’t unprecedented, or even vanishingly rare. And ways were found to cover up their transgressions, or at least to manage them without resorting to public ostracism or unleashing uncontrollable scandal.

Today’s story – the tale of Constance of York – isn’t a happy one, but it too fits this (to me) unexpected pattern.

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22 July 1395, Eltham Palace, south-east of London. A fraught meeting of the royal council.

The main item on the agenda is crisis in faraway Aquitaine. Richard II – as usual when faced with an issue in which he has no pressing personal interest – is bored and irritable.

The oldest of his three uncles, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, is absent, troubleshooting on the ground in Bordeaux. The youngest, Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester – as usual when faced with his royal nephew – is terse, haughty and impatient.

The middle uncle, Edmund of Langley, duke of York – well, he’s there. But, as an observer points out, no one really pays him any attention. He’s always been a dithering, harmless nonentity, and what’s always been true is currently truer than ever. York (our eyewitness says) has just married ‘a beautiful and very graceful young woman’, and her charms are all he can think about.1

In July 1395, York is a month past his fifty-fourth birthday. His first, not very happy marriage – a diplomatic union with Isabel, daughter of a long-deposed king of Castile – has ended with Isabel’s death three years earlier. The relationship was rocky for years before that. It’s possible, probable even, that Isabel’s youngest child isn’t his, but the result of her affair with King Richard’s half-brother John Holand, earl of Huntingdon.

Still, all that unpleasantness is in the past. It may even be that York’s second wife has been offered as some sort of reparation for the behaviour of his first. She is Joan Holand, niece of John and daughter of John’s brother Thomas Holand, the earl of Kent. The Holand family are famously good-looking, so our eyewitness account is entirely credible: Joan is probably beautiful, and she’s certainly young. In 1395, she’s no more than fifteen.

And that’s all we know about the duke of York’s marriage to his second duchess. He was entranced. Joan’s feelings are unrecorded.

This is where I first met Joan. For The Eagle and the Hart, I was piecing together the story of the council meeting. The explanation for York’s distraction offered by the chronicler Jean Froissart, who happened to be visiting Eltham at the time, seemed valuable, casting light on political dynamics and on the duke’s character.

I stopped for a moment to think about how young Joan was. And then I moved on.

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Three of them – one sister, one half-sister and one daughter – became queens: his sister Philippa in Portugal; his half-sister Catalina in Castile; and his daughter Philippa in the linked kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

(Note to self or anyone reading who might be up for the job: work out who was the last of the deluge of Philippas among the immediate descendants of Edward III and Philippa of Hainaut. When did the Philippas stop?)

But I’d like to tell you about one more among Henry’s family of women: his sister Elizabeth, who never wore a crown, but spent her life acting as though she did.

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Her parents, the noblewoman Maria de Padilla and King Pedro of Castile, were not married in the mid-1350s when Isabel and her two older sisters, Beatriz and Constanza, were born – or, at least, not married in any publicly recognised way.

Pedro later insisted, after the death of his estranged queen Blanche of Bourbon, that he and Maria had, in fact, been husband and wife, to such good effect that in 1362 the girls were formally recognised by the Cortes of Castile as his heirs. It was Isabel’s first experience of how negotiable legitimacy of birth might be.

Her second came in 1366, when Pedro lost his throne to his bastard half-brother Enrique. Isabel and her sisters fled with their father first to Portugal and then to English-ruled Aquitaine. Beatriz died there in 1367. With the help of the Black Prince and an English army, Pedro briefly reclaimed his crown, but in 1369 he was captured and stabbed to death by his brother.

Constanza and Isabel were all that was left of their father’s line. It didn’t take long before their claim to Castile was appropriated by England, in the person of the Black Prince’s brother John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster. In 1371 Gaunt, a thirty-one-year-old widower, married seventeen-year-old Constanza. That winter he brought his new bride and her sixteen-year-old sister Isabel home to London. The following summer, Isabel was married to Gaunt’s younger brother Edmund of Langley, later created duke of York. Her future, it seemed, was settled. She would be a dutiful English wife, serving as a backstop for Gaunt’s hope of securing the Castilian crown through her older sister.

To begin with, Isabel’s commitment to duty is evident in the surviving sources relating to her marriage. Within the next four years she gave birth to a boy, Edward, and a girl, Constance. In 1381 she and their son accompanied her husband on campaign to Portugal; the plan was for English and Portuguese forces to invade Castile to seize the throne for Gaunt and Constanza.

Thanks to bad luck and bad management, the plan didn’t work. But it didn’t help that Isabel’s husband was in command of the English contingent. Edmund of Langley’s career has been beautifully summed up by Jonathan Sumption: Langley, Sumption says, was ‘not a man to press his own view even if he had one’.1

As so often with medieval women, it’s much harder to get a sense of Isabel’s character, because she didn’t act on the public stage in a way that would let us draw clear conclusions from what she chose to do. But there are hints – or spaces in the record that admit of the possibility – that all was not well in her marriage.

Isabel, it seems from the bequests she left in her will, was a cultured and intelligent woman, widely read, musical, and stylish. No one, meanwhile, was ever moved to describe Langley as interesting. Finding anything distinctive to say about him has proved an ongoing challenge. The historian C.L. Kingsford, summing him up for the Dictionary of National Biography in 1892, called him easy-going and kindly (drawing on the strikingly bland words of a similarly struggling fifteenth-century chronicler), and ‘the least remarkable of his father’s sons’.

For a decade after 1375, Isabel conceived no more children. When she did give birth to another son, Richard, at Conisbrough Castle in Yorkshire in 1385, it was in circumstances that are still (at least in my corner of the middle ages) causing controversy more than six centuries later.

When Thomas Walsingham recorded Isabel’s death, shortly after it took place in the 1390s, he had this to say:

… domina carnalis et delicata, mundialis et venerea, set tamen in fine, Christe gracia, penitens et conuersa.

A lady of a sensual and self-indulgent disposition, she had been worldly and lustful; yet in the end, by the grace of Christ, she repented and was converted.

Thirty or so years later, a scribe named John Shirley appended a gossipy afterword to his copied text of Chaucer’s ‘Complaint of Mars’, a poem about a brief and passionate affair between Mars and Venus that seems to relate to an astronomical conjunction of the planets that took place in the spring of 1385. ‘Some men sayne’, Shirley wrote, that the subject of the poem was connected to ‘my lady of York daughter to the kyng of Spaygne and my lord of Huntyngdon’ – the latter being John Holand, Richard II’s half-brother, who was created earl of Huntingdon in 1388.

Isabel and Holand certainly had a relationship of some kind. In her will – sealed on 16 December 1392, a week before she died at the age of thirty-seven – she left her eldest son a brooch of gold set with three sapphires and three great pearls that had been a gift from Holand. She also left to Holand himself her best collar – its ornament and form unspecified, but likely of gold or silver-gilt – and two bibles.

These pieces of evidence have formed the basis for an argument that during the 1380s Isabel and Holand had an affair. More than that: it’s proposed that Isabel’s third child, born a decade after her second, was the son not of Langley but of Holand.

There’s circumstantial evidence to support the story.

Holand and his siblings – the four children of Richard II’s scandalously beautiful mother Joan of Kent by Sir Thomas Holand, the husband to whom she was married before the Black Prince – were forceful characters and strikingly good-looking. John Holand was particularly hot-headed, and by the end of 1385 had embroiled himself in another affair with Gaunt’s daughter Elizabeth, a young woman whose noble blood was the equal of Isabel’s (a relationship I’ll be discussing in a post to come). If we – or Isabel – were looking for a contrast to passive, dull Langley, it would be hard to find a better candidate than Holand.

And then there’s the fact that, from 1385 until Langley’s death in 1402, no record exists of Isabel’s husband making any financial or practical provision for the boy who was supposedly his youngest child. Instead, Isabel’s will offered most of her own personal possessions to Richard II, who had stood godfather to the boy, if the king would provide her son with an income of 500 marks a year for life.

We seem to be building a case. But there’s a counter-argument.

In a characteristically lucid, precise and thoughtful essay, Jenny Stratford suggests that – like so many women before and after her – Isabel has been a victim of salacious and unfounded innuendo.2

Stratford rightly notes Thomas Walsingham’s ‘traditional outlook’, and his preferential approval for ‘ladies of extreme piety’. She characterises his description of Isabel as ‘misanthropic’, though ‘misogynist’ might be equally appropriate. She points out that he is wrong even about the date of Isabel’s death, which he places in 1394 rather than 1392.

She sees Shirley’s words appended to Chaucer’s poem as ‘few but disproportionately influential’. Writing decades after the event, his allusion to an adulterous relationship between ‘my lady of York’ and the earl of Huntingdon is not only gossipy but ‘very unreliable’. In fact, Isabel’s daughter would later have an extramarital affair with Holand’s nephew – another relationship I’ll discuss in a future post – and Stratford argues that this story may have reached Shirley’s ears in distorted form to produce his insinuation about Isabel.

Nor can Isabel’s will, or Langley’s, be used to support the case for her affair or her son’s illegitimacy, Stratford argues. She describes Isabel’s bequest to the king and her request that he provide her boy with an income as ‘eminently practical’, given how short of money her husband was. The will, she points out, was made with Langley’s consent. In his own much shorter will, drawn up a decade later, Langley asked to be buried next to ‘my beloved Isabel, late my companion’; and he left no individual bequests to any of his children.

All in all, Stratford suggests that the full text of Isabel’s will

… argues against any ready acceptance of either Walsingham’s characterisation of Isabel, or of Shirley’s insinuations. The duchess herself emerges in a favourable light.

I’d certainly agree with the latter sentence. But I don’t think that conclusion depends on the former.

Let’s look again at the scraps of evidence we have.

Walsingham certainly approved of pious ladies. He described Isabel’s sister Constanza as ‘a woman wonderfully dedicated to God’ (‘femina mirabiliter Deo devota’). But if we ascribe his contrasting comment on Isabel to generalised misogyny, we’re left with no reason why he might have chosen her specifically, among all the great ladies of England, for such a barbed swipe.3

Not only that, but his swipe is specific in its narrative: she had been worldly and lustful, he says, but in the end she repented. And that gives us a possible story that can make sense of what we know.

It was not unheard of for women of noble blood to have sexual relationships outside marriage.

One such was John Holand’s liaison with Elizabeth of Lancaster, begun in 1385; another, years later, was that of Isabel’s daughter and Holand’s nephew. We know that both took place, because both resulted in children, but neither woman was loudly denounced by contemporary chroniclers. So we can’t be confident that any such affair would always leave unarguable traces in the written record; nor can we assume that a specific remark apparently alluding to one, such as Walsingham’s about Isabel, should simply be discounted.

We also know that noble ‘misconduct’ of various kinds – including much less retrievable acts – could be forgiven.

In the summer of 1385 John Holand murdered the earl of Stafford’s only son, a young man who was a favourite of the young king and queen. Despite Stafford’s outraged grief, and Richard II’s immediate declaration that he would visit justice upon his half-brother, Holand was pardoned and reintegrated into political society at the highest level, in large part through the good offices of John of Gaunt. It was Gaunt’s daughter Elizabeth who became pregnant by Holand at the end of 1385; and Gaunt responded by arranging their marriage, and offering his support and protection to his new son-in-law.

Jenny Stratford argues that the chronological proximity between Isabel giving birth in the summer of 1385 and the beginning of Holand’s relationship with Gaunt’s daughter before the end of that year makes a liaison between Isabel and Holand around that time ‘improbable’. I’m much less convinced. Why would a man who dared to get the twenty-one-year-old daughter of the most powerful nobleman in England pregnant have hesitated to do the same with a thirty-year-old duchess the year before?

Gaunt’s role in all of this is striking. He presided over the regularisation of Holand’s relationship with Elizabeth, and Holand’s political rehabilitation. He was, throughout their lives, very clearly the boss of his brother Edmund of Langley. He was married to Isabel’s sister. And in 1392, along with his nephew King Richard, he was named by Isabel as one of the supervisors of her will.

So the story I’m proposing is this. Isabel was a strong character. By the time of their return from the disastrous campaign in Portugal in the autumn of 1382, she was restless in her marriage to her unimpressive husband. At some point after that, she began a relationship with John Holand, during which she became pregnant. She gave birth to their son in July 1385.

None of the protagonists in this complex situation had an incentive to make its complexities public. Exposing Isabel’s adultery risked calling into question the legitimacy of her two older children. The young king’s relationship with his uncles was neither close nor simple, and those waters were muddied further by the shockwaves of John Holand’s behaviour in 1385. Gaunt’s role as a peacemaker within the family in 1386 was redoubled after his return from campaign in Castile in 1389, by which time devastating political conflict within England had comprehensively overshadowed domestic dramas within the royal family.

Let’s imagine the possibility that – in circumstances where there was no overriding political motive for denouncing a noblewoman who had compromised her sexual reputation – the forgiveness extended to John Holand might have encompassed Isabel too. As she appears through the text of her will, the duchess was impressive, and she was loved. If, as Walsingham suggests, she transgressed but ‘repented, and was converted’, it doesn’t seem implausible to suggest that she and her second son might have been gathered into a closing of the family ranks that shielded many sins, not just hers, from prying eyes.

(We might also note that, within a year of her death, her bereaved fifty-two-year-old husband married John Holand’s beautiful fourteen-year-old niece, a relationship which one chronicler said left Langley incapable of thinking about anything else.)4

I can’t prove my version of Isabel’s story beyond reasonable doubt; but I also can’t come up with an alternative that makes better sense of the evidence we have.

There was one person whose life was not set right by the conclusion of this family drama. Richard of Conisbrough lost his mother when he was only seven. In 1399, when he was fourteen, his godfather the king was toppled from the throne. Langley, whose dukedom of York had never been lavishly endowed, left him nothing in his will when he died in 1402. John Holand had already lost his life in 1400, rebelling against the new regime.

Richard’s older brother Edward, the new duke of York, was struggling to make his way in the new Lancastrian world, and had no time – and perhaps no inclination – to help his younger brother. In the end, Richard’s dissatisfaction at his penury and political impotence led him into hopelessly inept conspiracy against Henry V. He was executed as a traitor in August 1415, just weeks after his thirtieth birthday.

But he had lived long enough to marry Anne Mortimer, sister of the earl of March, a young woman descended from John of Gaunt’s older brother Lionel, duke of Clarence. And she had lived long enough to give him a son, another Richard, who would eventually inherit the dukedom of York.

In 1460, that Richard renounced his allegiance to the Lancastrian king Henry VI to claim the crown for the house of York; and in 1461 his son took the throne as King Edward IV. It was a change of dynasty won on the battlefield and justified, by its supporters, through the Mortimer bloodline.

But if this version of Isabel’s story is right, and her youngest son wasn’t Edmund of Langley’s, then the house of York – in its struggle against the house of Lancaster in the brutal Wars of the Roses – wasn’t really ‘Yorkist’ at all.

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To get me through the week, I’ve been thinking about my own time in Cambridge and the history of the colleges I know best: I spent seven years studying at Gonville and Caius, and another eight teaching at Sidney Sussex, just down the street.

(In between I spent a year as a research fellow at Jesus College: cue endless jokes about ‘going home to Jesus’ etc.)

Gonville and Caius got its double-barrelled name from the two men responsible for its foundation. Edmund Gonville, a priest from a Norfolk gentry family, first set up what was then called Gonville Hall in 1348. Two centuries later, another Norfolk scholar who became a wealthy physician, John Keys – or, in its Latin spelling (though identically pronounced), Caius – added a new endowment to refound the college in 1557.

Sidney Sussex is double-barrelled for a different reason. It wasn’t founded by two men, but by one woman: Frances Sidney, countess of Sussex.

The story of Frances’s life – and the relationship between the names of Sidney and Sussex – have left a mystery relating to the college’s foundation that I find fascinating.

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The time was 1380 (or thereabouts), the place Milan (or somewhere near).

Her formidable mother, Beatrice Regina della Scala, was already in her late forties when Lucia was born, and died before the little girl’s fifth birthday.

A year later her terrifying father, Bernabò Visconti, lord of Milan, was deposed and murdered by his nephew and co-ruler Gian Galeazzo. Perhaps Bernabò should have seen it coming: he himself had done the same to his brother Matteo thirty years before.

But the result for Lucia and her siblings was sudden vulnerability.

Many of her five brothers, nine sisters and at least twenty illegitimate half-siblings were already grown to adulthood and established in the world, or in some cases – given that Bernabò had been fathering children for more than forty years – already dead.

Lucia’s oldest sister Taddea had married the duke of Bavaria in 1364, and died in 1381. (Isabeau of Bavaria, queen consort of Charles VI of France, was Taddea’s daughter.)

Her half-sister Donnina was the wife of Sir John Hawkwood (his unpronounceable name rendered in Italian as Giovanni Acuto), an English mercenary who made his fortune in the service of the states of Milan and Florence.

Her sister Caterina had been proposed, two years before Lucia’s birth, as a bride for the young king Richard II of England. One of the envoys sent from London to Milan to discuss the match was an esquire of the royal household named Geoffrey Chaucer, who may well have read the works of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio in the great Visconti libraries in Milan and Pavia. Despite Chaucer’s best efforts, no agreement with the English had been reached by 1380, when Caterina instead became the wife of her cousin Gian Galeazzo.

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In 1385, therefore, when their father Bernabò was overthrown, Caterina’s presence at Gian Galeazzo’s side – and Lucia’s own potential value on the international marriage market – were the little girl’s best hope of safety.

But safety wouldn’t come without challenges. Most likely, marriage would take her far from home, into an unfamiliar political world and an intimate relationship with a man she’d never met. Among her sisters, one had been dispatched to Austria, two to Germany, and one south to Cyprus. Another, Agnese, was closer at hand in Mantua, just 80 miles from Milan, but closeness had its own dangers: in 1391, caught in the violent currents of Italian politics, she was executed on charges of adultery by her husband Francesco Gonzaga.

Two years after that, perhaps it was no wonder that thirteen-year-old Lucia – with such uncertain prospects ahead of her – was swept off her feet by the visiting English lord Henry of Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, heir to England’s great duchy of Lancaster.

No one ever said (at least, not in any of the documents I’ve read) that Henry was handsome – but then he didn’t need to be. He was athletic, rich, elegant, well educated, charismatic, the cousin of a king, and on top of all that he was nice – by which I mean that people liked him. The men who served him stayed with him. The friends he made were life-long and close-knit. When he spent a few months in Paris in 1398–9 in appallingly difficult circumstances – banished from England by his increasingly tyrannical cousin – he was so ‘gracious, good-natured, courteous and easy to deal with’, the chronicler Jean Froissart reported, that the French nobles were certain either that Richard II must know something they didn’t, or that the king was very badly advised to have got rid of him. Because in France, Froissart said, he was ‘loved by all’.

In Italy too. In the spring of 1393, twenty-six-year-old Henry had passed through Milan on his way back from a glamorous grand tour across Europe and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Lucia was bowled over.

But if Gian Galeazzo’s plans for her had worked as he intended, I suspect we wouldn’t know how she felt.

When Henry made this dazzling appearance at the Visconti court, he was a contentedly married man, his young wife Mary de Bohun waiting at home in Peterborough with their four small sons and a baby daughter. A little more than a year later Mary was dead, having not long survived the birth of their sixth child.

By the beginning of 1398, Gian Galeazzo – who’d also been impressed with Henry, and was seeking English support in his war against Florence – proposed that Lucia should become Henry’s second wife. If that marriage had taken place, theirs would have been one among many more-or-less-inscrutable dynastic alliances, their deeper feelings, or lack of them, hidden from prying historical eyes.

But in September 1398 Richard banished Henry from England for ten years. Meanwhile, ambassadors arrived in Milan from Germany with another offer for Lucia’s hand. Where would her future lie now?

A remarkable document survives in the Milanese archives: a record of a conversation between Lucia and her sister Caterina, wife of Gian Galeazzo, that took place in the Visconti castle at Pavia on the evening of 11 May 1399 in the presence of the bishop of Novara, the marquis of Monferrato and other counsellors.

Lucia knew, Caterina said, that negotiations had taken place for her marriage to Henry, and for a reciprocal match between one of Henry’s little daughters and one of Gian Galeazzo’s sons.

But Henry was now exiled from England and from the favour of his king – and Lucia must make a life-defining decision. Carefully, Caterina set out the questions she faced.

Would Lucia choose to wait for Henry until he was restored to his home and position?

Would she choose to wait for him even if it meant losing the German princeling who had come forward as a new suitor?

If she chose to wait for Henry for two or three years, and if, after that time, the German princeling was gone and Henry not yet in a position to marry her, would she agree to marry Gian Galeazzo’s illegitimate son Gabriele, now a boy of twelve, or another suitable husband instead?

Or would she choose to wait for Henry, no matter how long it took?

Gian Galeazzo had asked her to think about these matters. Now he, and the German ambassadors, required an answer.

For nineteen-year-old Lucia, nothing was simple. With every year that passed, her value as a bride and a potential mother of sons would decrease. Her cousin wouldn’t let her marry Henry before Henry was restored to favour in England; but Henry’s father had just died, Richard had seized the Lancastrian inheritance, and rumour had it that Henry might never be allowed to return home. And he had already been offered another bride in France. She might wait and wait until her life was over. The German ambassadors were here. The fifteen-year-old margrave of Meissen, heir to the landgrave of Thuringia, wished to be her husband. It was the one version of her future she could actively grasp.

The document records her response. If she were certain of having Henry as her husband, she said, she would wait for him as long as she could. She would wait to the very end of her life, even if she knew that she would die three days after the wedding.

But she wasn’t certain. She couldn’t be. If she waited, Gabriele might say she was too old for him. The German ambassadors were here now. She would take their princeling.

It was done. The witnesses put their seal to the document – a document that contains an expression of feeling of a kind I’ve seen nowhere else in an official record. The text isn’t transparent: we can’t know what discussions happened behind the scenes, or quite how much external pressure Lucia faced. All we can say is that, willingly or unwillingly, faced with a conflict between her feelings and unyielding facts, she made a rational decision.

But no one, however rational, can be sure what’s about to happen.

Later that same year, Henry returned to England, deposed his cousin Richard, and took the throne as King Henry IV. He was restored not just to royal favour but to royal power – while, hundreds of miles away in Milan, Lucia was committed to the margrave of Meissen.

Three years later, in September 1402, Gian Galeazzo Visconti died suddenly. Lucia hadn’t yet left for Germany to live with her young husband, and she seized her chance, claiming an annulment of the marriage on the grounds that she’d made her vows under duress.

By then, however, Henry was no longer free. He’d just married Joan of Navarre, the widowed duchess of Brittany, an intelligent, cultured woman almost his own age.

Lucia’s dream, once agonisingly close, was over. But Henry hadn’t forgotten her.

In the spring of 1405, he sent one of his household servants to Milan to offer her an English husband. He did so, his letters said, ‘purely on account of the deepest affection’ he had always held for the noble lady.

And I think we can believe him. ‘What was the wider diplomatic context?’, my editor asked, with proper historical scepticism. ‘What treaty was being negotiated between England and Milan?’ It’s a very good question, but the answer is: there wasn’t one. This was Henry’s personal mission to rescue Lucia. And he’d found her an ideal bridegroom.

Edmund Holand, earl of Kent, was young and dashing, a brave soldier and a champion in the joust. He had recently fathered an illegitimate daughter with the duke of York’s sister; but in February 1405 she had involved herself in a plot against Henry, and if they’d ever hoped to marry, those plans were finished. Edmund had a noble title and very little money, because three dowager countesses – his great-aunt, his mother and his sister-in-law – temporarily held most of his estates. That, it turned out, was where Lucia came in.

Gian Galeazzo’s young son Gian Maria, trying and failing to contain the chaos that engulfed Milan after his father’s death, was glad to have Lucia taken off his hands. He directed the commune of Milan to provide a dowry of 70,000 gold florins, to be paid in yearly instalments, and waved Lucia and her trousseau off to England.

At last, at nearly twenty-seven, Lucia could see her future. She would have waited till the end of her life to marry Henry, but he had married someone else. Now he met her at the church door of St Mary Overy in Southwark to give her away to a different English knight.

A decade and a half on from their last meeting, thirty-nine-year-old Henry wasn’t the dazzling figure she remembered. He was heavier and less mobile, worn by the stress of taking and keeping his crown, and struggling with chronic illness.

But, if he couldn’t be her husband, he had become her protector, and now her king. To mark the new dawn of her marriage, he gave her two golden dishes engraved with sun rays, inside and out. It was the wedding of the year, reported breathlessly in almost every English chronicle. All that remained was for the young couple to start their new life together, and to wait for their Milanese gold to arrive.

No one knows what’s about to happen.

It was a different dowry that derailed their chance at a happy ever after. The Isle of Bréhat, off the north coast of Brittany, had failed to contribute its share to the money Queen Joan should have brought to her royal marriage. Edmund Holand commanded the small fleet that sailed to collect the cash by force. Riding without a helmet among the English soldiers besieging the island’s castle, he took a crossbow bolt to the head. In September 1408, not yet two years after their wedding, Lucia had to bury her new husband.

Henry did what he could to support her. He pardoned Edmund’s debts to the crown, and made sure as much of the earldom’s income as legally possible came to Lucia. He paid £200 to reclaim the silverware marked with the arms of Kent and Milan that Edmund had pawned to fund his fatal voyage, and gave it back to her as a gift.

But after Henry died in 1413, just before his forty-sixth birthday, Lucia was no one’s priority. She spent the rest of her life in London, trying and failing to secure payment of her dowry from Milan, and to clear the rest of her husband’s debts in England.

For much of the time, she lived with her Italian servants in an elegant town house built inside the precincts of the Franciscan Minoresses’ convent, just beyond the city walls to the east, within sight of the Tower. By chance, it was the place where Mary de Bohun had lived as a girl, before she became Henry’s first wife, and its abbess was Mary’s niece, her sister’s daughter Isabel.

When she died in 1424 at the age of forty-four, Lucia left a series of magnificent phantom bequests from the dowry she’d never received. The absent money, she said, should pay for prayers for her soul, and Edmund’s, and Henry’s. Her gift to the Minoresses was more substantial: her red velvet altar hangings, her silver altar vessels, and her own velvet kirtle, to be made into vestments.

But the epitaph on her tomb in the Austin Friars, the favourite church of the Italians within the city, placed her back in the heart of her Italian family. In its Latin verse she was the daughter of the lord of Milan, the proud sister, aunt and great-aunt of women who had been countesses, duchesses and queens across Europe.

In death, as in life, Lucia in London belonged only to herself.

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When Joan of Kent married the Black Prince in 1361, she was by some margin the least conventional wife of an heir to the throne of England in the three centuries since the Conquest of 1066.

• She was the first Englishwoman, and the first widow, to marry the heir to the English throne

• She was the first (as a first cousin of the prince’s father Edward III) to come from within England’s immediate royal family

• She was the first to be chosen (so far as we can tell) for love, not political or diplomatic gain

And even where she was not quite the first, she was in extremely exclusive company.

• Only one previous wife of a post-Conquest heir to the English throne was older than her husband

• Only one had had a previous marriage annulled

• Only one already had children

In all three cases, that bride was Eleanor of Aquitaine, who married the future Henry II when he was still fighting for his right to the English crown. Eleanor was an heiress who brought Henry the vast territories of the duchy of Aquitaine – so far, so conventionally advantageous – but she was also a woman for whom rebellion (against convention, and literally against her husband) turned out to be a recurring theme of her long and spectacular life.

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Joan of Kent was no political rebel, but her reputation raised eyebrows all the same. It was par for the course to describe noblewomen as beautiful, but Joan – everyone agreed – was astonishingly lovely. The chronicler Jean Froissart, who visited the English court in the 1360s, declared that ‘this young maiden of Kent’ was ‘in her time the most beautiful lady in the whole kingdom of England’ (‘celle jone damoiselle de Kent … fu en son temps la plus belle dame de tout le roiaulme d’Engleterre’). The obvious adjective to add, in any conventional paean of praise, would have been ‘virtuous’. Instead, Froissart said that Joan was not only the most beautiful woman in England but ‘the most amorous’ (‘la plus amoureuse’).

Everyone knew what he was talking about. When thirty-three-year-old Joan married the thirty-one-year-old prince of Wales at Windsor Castle in 1361, in a gown (the inventories of St George’s Chapel tell us) of red cloth of gold embroidered with birds, it was her third wedding. The previous two had been controversial, and one of her former husbands was still alive. When another chronicler called the new princess of Wales ‘the Virgin of Kent’, the sarcasm was biting.

Just how scandalous were these circumstances – and how much doubt did they cast on the legality of Joan’s royal marriage?

We’re faced with a choice about how to read the evidence.

The first and most obvious option is to follow the paperwork. What do the documents say?

Well, the story they tell goes something like this.

In 1340, when she was twelve, Joan met a dashing soldier twice her age, a knight of the royal household named Thomas Holand. Joan and her knight fell in love and wanted to marry – which, according to the rules of the Church, required neither a priest nor a public ceremony. At twelve, Joan had just reached the age at which she could formally consent to take a husband. She and Thomas made their vows in secret, in the presence of trusted (but unnamed) witnesses. Afterwards, they consummated the relationship. In the eyes of God, they were man and wife.

But they said nothing to anyone, and Thomas returned to war. Meanwhile Joan’s mother, oblivious to what her daughter had done, was making other plans. She arranged a dynastic alliance with William Montagu, earl of Salisbury, one of Edward III’s best friends. Joan would marry Montagu’s young son and heir, another William. The wedding took place at the beginning of 1341. Three years later, Joan and her William became the new earl and countess of Salisbury. Still Joan said nothing.

By 1347 Thomas Holand was a war hero. He had lost an eye, but he had made a fortune. Now he had the money, and the status, to reclaim his bride. He sent a petition to the pope to make his case: Joan had been his wife since 1340, and any vows she had subsequently made to Salisbury were therefore invalid. Salisbury and Joan’s mother were horrified, and did everything they could to block the case. Holand told the pope that they were holding Joan under close guard to stop her speaking out. But they couldn’t hold her forever, and in the summer of 1349 she confirmed Holand’s account. That November, the pope made his decision: Joan and Thomas Holand were man and wife, and her marriage to Salisbury was null and void.

That’s the story the documents tell – and, trained to pursue the documentary trail as we are, most historians have accepted it wholesale. It’s a story in which Joan is a young innocent who follows her heart in pledging herself to her handsome but penniless knight, only to find that she can’t withstand her family’s plans for her future. But she never loses hope, and when he finally stakes his claim she’s there, waiting faithfully for the man who is her true husband. It’s also a story that preserves the better part of Joan’s virtue: she only makes her bigamous vows to Salisbury under duress. And it leaves her unequivocally free to marry the Black Prince in 1361, because Thomas Holand, her one true husband, died in 1360.

Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending? That’s what the documents say.

But, even if the story were significantly different, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

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There is another possible version.

Joan and Thomas didn’t meet when she was twelve and he was twenty-five – or, if they did, the encounter didn’t lead directly to romance, wedding vows and sex in secret, somehow, within a crowded noble household.

Instead, twelve-year-old Joan was married off by her mother to the twelve-year-old heir to the earldom of Salisbury. It was a fine match except for one thing: Joan was unimpressed by the gangly boy who was now her husband.

Time did nothing to improve the situation. No one expected twelve-year-olds to consummate a marriage immediately, but by 1347 Joan and William were nineteen, they’d been man and wife for six years, and still there was no sign of a pregnancy.

Divorce was not an option. The Church offered no way out of a valid marriage. But if a marriage had never been valid in the first place? That was a different matter.

Nineteen-year-old Joan was beautiful and wilful. Thirty-two-year-old Thomas was brave, charismatic and ambitious, and his remaining eye was firmly fixed on the prizes that might lie within his reach. If they now chose to swear they’d made solemn vows to one another before Salisbury had appeared on the scene, who could contradict them?

That’s not the story the documents tell; but it is a story that would produce the same documents.

Choosing to believe this version means accepting that Joan and Thomas lied to their families, to their king and to the pope. Is it implausible to imagine that people in an intensely religious age might risk their souls by lying before God? Or is it more implausible to believe that no one ever would, even to escape intolerable circumstances, or in the service of what they might see as a greater and more valuable good?

It seems to me that people in the fourteenth century were as complex and as unpredictable as we are, and that the effects of faith – either then or now – can’t be taken for granted.

And the idea that a twelve-year-old girl of royal blood and a twenty-five-year-old soldier conducted a secret sexual relationship and kept it quiet for seven years strikes me as much less credible – on several fronts and by some orders of magnitude – than the possibility that new lovers of nineteen and thirty-two might move heaven and earth to be together.

I can’t prove it beyond reasonable doubt. It’s not the story the documents tell.

But there’s one sidelong moment in the surviving evidence that helps persuade me of its plausibility.

At Christmas 1348, Edward III gathered his magnificent court around him. It had been a year of devastating loss: the plague known as the Black Death had reached England, and as it swept northward across Europe it had killed the king’s daughter Joan at Bordeaux, on her way to marry the king of Castile. From that moment on, Edward would prove strikingly reluctant to force any of his beloved children into marriage against their will – and not only his beloved children. With them that Christmas was the king’s twenty-year-old cousin Joan of Kent, still embroiled in Thomas Holand’s controversial case to challenge her marriage to Salisbury, but newly freed from her disapproving mother’s custody.

The case was not yet decided, but Joan’s presence showed beyond doubt that she now had the king’s support. And we have one glimpse of the intimacy of her relationship with the royal family. A financial account survives of ‘the jewels, horses and other things’ given by the eighteen-year-old Black Prince ‘to various people by his commandment for all the time before the last day of January 1349’. His dead sister Joan is there, in the early part of the list, her name given in Latin: Johanna. But his cousin Joan is also there: a gift of a silver drinking cup (called a ‘beaker’, notes the accountant) to ‘my lord’s cousin, the lady Jeannette’.

To me, the French diminutive suggests not only a sense of easy familiarity, but a reflection of her glamour and her sophisticated self-possession. This, it suddenly seems, is a young woman who might know how to get what she wants.

It’s only a glimpse; a subjective impression. But sure enough: within a year, the pope confirmed her marriage to Holand. Within two, her first son by Holand was born.

By the end of the century, a decade and a half after her death, the chronicler Adam Usk was prepared to allege that Jeannette had ‘given herself over to a lascivious life’ (‘lubrice vite dedita’). His political angle was clear. Richard II, her son by the Black Prince, had just been overthrown by his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke, and Usk – a clerk who was involved in the scramble to find legal justification for the deposition – was insinuating that the identity of Richard’s father, and with it his right to the throne, might be called into question.

It was a low blow, and an obvious move: cast aspersions on a royal woman’s virtue as a way to undermine a royal man.

But if I’m right, then – technically, at least – Usk was onto something. If Jeannette and Thomas Holand lied, then in the sight of God, by contemporary principles, her marriage to Salisbury was binding. And if her marriage to Salisbury was binding, then in 1361 – when Salisbury, who outlived Jeannette, was still very much alive – she was not free to marry the Black Prince.

And if his parents were not legally married, then Richard was a bastard. No wonder he kept a precious box in the safekeeping of the abbot of Westminster, full of the papal documents that proclaimed the legality of his mother’s marriages to Thomas Holand and his own father the prince.

It’s a reminder that legitimacy – of royal birth or royal power – was a matter of realpolitik rather than objective right. In medieval England, it seems, political reality was a negotiation between demonstrable fact and whatever ‘truths’ the world could be forced to accept.

And that sounds all too familiar.

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