Serving Isabella of France 169
Chapter 7 Serving Isabella of France: From Queen Consort to Dowager Queen
Caroline Dunn
In 1358, the dowager queen of England was dying. She was in her mid-sixties and had lived a more eventful life than many queens. Brought up at the French court and married to Edward II of England at the age of twelve, life took a dramatic turn for Isabella when she and her lover, Roger Mortimer, staged a coup against the king and placed her young son on the throne while she served as effective queen-regent of England between 1327 and 1330.1 Her remaining decades were quieter, but Isabella was by no means as permanently secluded (or imprisoned) as earlier chroniclers alleged.2 On her deathbed at Hertford castle on 22 August 1358, Isabella was attended by Joan of Bar, countess of Surrey, who had been her longstanding attendant and confidante for most of the years since Isabella’s arrival in England. The former queen was prob- ably also surrounded by all or most of the eight ladies and damsels known to have been in her service the previous January: Agnes Paumart, Isabella de St. Pol, Joan de Corby, Marie Whithors, Katherine Bronart, Matilda Bret, Margaret Bedyk, and Agnes Anget. Although the number of attendants was not signifi- cantly lower than the thirteen ladies and damsels who earned livery for waiting upon the young queen in 1311, their degrees of status, as we will see, were not comparable. Although Isabella’s life is well documented and her role as queen has been assessed by both scholarly works and popular biographies, the identities, duties, and experiences of her household attendants have been little explored.
1 Lisa Benz St. John, Three Medieval Queens: Queenship and the Crown in Fourteenth-Century England (New York and Basingstoke, 2012), passim, but esp. pp. 135-63; Natalie Fryde, The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II, 1321-1326 (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 180-227; and Seymour Phillips, Edward II (New Haven and London, 2010), passim. 2 Jean Froissart, “Chronicles, Translation of Book 1,” in The Online Froissart, trans. Keira Borrill, eds Peter Ainsworth and Godfried Croenen, ver. 1.5 (Sheffield, 2013)
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004360761_009 170 Dunn
This is also true of other medieval ladies-in-waiting. While queenship has enjoyed a revival of scholarship in the past two decades,3 the courtiers and household servants – particularly female ones – who waited upon medieval English queens remain in the shadows. The king’s male courtiers have been examined in several important studies that illuminate royal service and its rewards.4 Other scholars have analyzed the lives of noblewomen more broadly, not just during their times in service,5 but, apart from famous examples such as Alice Perrers, mistress of Edward III, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s wife Philippa,6 analysis of female service at the royal court largely begins with the Tudor era.7 Hilda Johnstone, writing in the first
3 St. John, Medieval Queens; Margaret Howell, Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth- Century England (Oxford, 2001); Joanna Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship, 1445-1503 (Oxford, 2004); Helen Maurer, Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2003); John Carmi Parsons, Eleanor of Castile: Queen and Society in Thirteenth-Century England (New York, 1995); Theresa Earenfight, Queenship in Medieval Europe (Basingstoke, 2013); idem, “Where Do We Go From Here? Some Thoughts on Power and Gender in the Middle Ages,” Medieval Feminist Forum 51:2 (2015): 116-31. 4 Chris Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity: Service, Politics and Finance in England, 1360-1413 (New Haven, 1986); Rosemary Horrox, “Caterpillars of the Commonwealth: Courtiers in Late Medieval England,” in eds Rowena E. Archer and Simon Walker, Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England (London and Rio Grande, 1995), pp. 1-16; A.R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parliament in Fifteenth-Century England (Lon- don, 1985); Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-west Europe, 1270-1380 (Oxford, 2003). 5 See Linda Mitchell, Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Social Relation- ships in Thirteenth-Century England (Basingstoke, 2003) and her article in this volume; and Ralph A. Griffiths, “The Trial of Eleanor Cobham: An Episode in the Fall of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 51 (1968-9): 381-99. 6 For Perrers, see James Bothwell, “The Management of Position: Alice Perrers, Edward III, and the Creation of a Landed Estates, 1362-1377,” Journal of Medieval History 24 (1998): 31-51; W.M. Ormrod, “Alice Perrers and John Salisbury,” English Historical Review 123 (2008): 379-93; idem, “Who Was Alice Perrers?” The Chaucer Review 40 (2006): 219-29; Laura Tompkins, “The Uncrowned Queen: Alice Perrers, Edward III and Political Crisis in Four- teenth-Century England, 1360-1377,” PhD dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2013, pp. 41-44. I thank Laura Tompkins for sharing her thesis with me. For the Chaucers, see Margaret Galway, “Philippa Pan, Philippa Chaucer,” Modern Language Review 55 (1960): 481-7; James R. Hulbert, “Chaucer’s Official Life,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1912, pp. 58-9; and Russell Krauss, “Chaucerian Problems: Especially the Petherton Forest- ship and the Question of Thomas Chaucer,” in Three Chaucer Studies (New York, 1932). 7 Jeri L. McIntosh, From Heads of Household to Heads of State: The Preaccession Households of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor (New York, 2008); Charlotte L. Merton, “The Women Who Served Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth: Ladies, Gentlewomen, and Maids of the Privy