The Yorkist Ladies

We are now pretty much at the end of the first phase of the House of York (although, in my untidy way, I may well come back to this era from time to time) but it remains to say what happened to the surviving ladies of the family.

Constance of York, Lady Despenser, only briefly survived her brothers, dying on 28 or 29 November 1416, probably at Caversham. She was buried before the high altar of Reading Abbey, and later joined in her tomb by her great-granddaughter, Anne Beauchamp, daughter of Henry Duke of Warwick. Her son Richard had pre-deceased her, but she left two daughters, Isabelle Despenser and Alianore Holland.

Isabelle was already married (1411) to Richard Beauchamp of Abergavenny, created Earl of Worcester by Henry V. He died in 1421. They had one daughter, Elizabeth, who married Sir Edward Neville, Lord Bergavenny. Isabelle next married her first husband's cousin, Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. By him she had a son, Henry, later Duke of Warwick, and a daughter, Anne Beauchamp, later wife of Warwick the Kingmaker and mother of Anne and Isabelle Neville. (Ring any bells, Ricardians?)

Alianore Holland claimed to be the legitimate daughter (and heiress) of Edmund, Earl of Kent. She and her husband (James, Lord Audley) made every attempt to prove this via the spiritual courts, but a petition of her Holland relatives to Parliament in 1431 had the effect of preventing her from inheriting lands and title, irrespective of the findings of the spiritual court. After Alianore's birth Kent married the Lady Lucia of Milan, and the 'other side' alleged Constance had been present at the wedding banquet and made no protest. By 1431 of course Constance was long dead, and scarely in a position to give evidence, one way or the other. However it is interesting to note that in this case the much vaunted power of the spiritual court in these matters was simply ignored as irrelevant.

James and Alianore had many children and their descendants are legion.

Joan Holland, Duchess of York

Joan (or Joanne) Holland, second wife of Edmund of Langley, married three further times, though she had no children by any husband. Her second husband was William, Lord Willoughby. She had a running quarrel with her stepson after Willoughby's death over items of property he claimed she had taken without right.

The third was Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham, who was involved in the Southampton Plot and consequently executed. Scrope was a wealthy man, and he and Joan seem to have been equally grasping. At one point Joan arranged to have herself 'abducted' decamping with various valuables, worth £5000. Scrope bargained with her in his will that she could choose £2000 worth of his belongings providing she let go any right she might have to one third or one half of his goods. Of course, as he died a traitor, his goods were all forfeited anyway!

Joan consoled herself with a new, younger husband, Henry Bromflete, (much) later created Lord Vesci. He outlived her by many years, Joan dying 12 April 1434, but Bromflete not until 1469.

Philippa Mohun, Duchess of York

It is sometimes stated, even in otherwise respectable tomes, that Philippa married Henry Bromflete, but both duchesses simply cannot have done and it appears Joan was the one who did.

Like Joan, Philippa had no children by any of her husbands. The first of these, Lord Fitzwalter, died as far back as 1386. It seems that Philippa may have been born circa 1363, but if you check out her parents' date of marriage even this seems a bit of a stretch unless she and her younger sister were late additions.

Anyway, we can assume she was about 52 at the time of Edward's death and as she lived on until 17 July 1431 she would be at least 68 at the time of her death at Carisbrooke, a very respectable age for the era. Thrice dowered, and with a decent share of York's goods left to her in his will, I think we can assume she had a comfortable retirement, maybe mostly in the Isle of Wight over which she enjoyed lordship. She has a fine tomb in Westminster Abbey.

The York Family's Financial Arrangements

By the creative use of various footnotes in T.B. Pugh's Henry V and the Southampton Plot I have calculated that Edmund of Langley's income from land and annuities amounted to £2070 a year. Almost £1,100 of this was made of of annuities, and so it follows as night follows day that his income from land was less than £1,000. Edmund's widow Joan (or Joanne) Holland was entitled to a one third share for life.

Duke Edward's inheritance was therefore roughly £1,366, with maybe £600 from land. OK, he had what was left of the additional lands given him by Richard II, plus Philippa's relatively modest dower rights, but, given that for much of Henry IV's reign annuities were about as valuable as Bradford and Bingley shares in 2009, this was not much to run a dukedom on. It's not hard to see why debts of ten grand from his time in Gascony, and further debts run up while fighting Henry's battles in Wales would have given him serious problems.

Edward received some wages in addition. For example he had twelve pence a day as Master of Hart Hounds and a salary of £200 a year as a member of Henry's Council. However, this would have been a lot less in total than he received from the juicy offices he held under Richard II, and I expect the wages were often paid in arrears, given the state of Henry's finances.

To give some comparisons, the Mortimer inheritance in England and Wales was conservatively estimated at being worth £3,400 in 1398, while circa 1415 the Despenser inheritance, despite all it had suffered from forfeitures and the ravages of Owain Glyn Dwr's friends, was still reckoned to be worth £1,500. In 1391 the duchy of Lancaster was worth about £10,000, while Pugh estimates that Gaunt's total income at the end of his life was more like £20,000.

Despite grabbing what he could from the Despenser wardship Edward was still reduced to mortgaging some of his lands to pay the debts he ran up in the Welsh wars, and in 1404 was wandering around borrowing from anyone he could, including the Abbot of Glastonbury. This was probably one of his motives for seeking to overthrow Henry in 1405, and, frankly, he had more cause to complain on the effect of government policy on his finances than Thomas of Woodstock had in the 1390s.

Although Henry's finances improved in the later part of his reign and Edward (presumably) saw more in the way of hard cash, he still ended up selling (in 1412) the Lordship of Tyndale, together with the reversion of Joanne's one third share to Sir Thomas Grey for £500. This may have had something to do with the proposed marriage of Richard of Conisbrough's daughter, Isabel, to Grey's son, but generally speaking the sale of inherited land was something that was done only as a last resort.

Philippa's Will

That reference to Carisbrooke reminded me that in her widowhood Philippa Duchess of York described herself as 'Lady of the Isle of Wight'. That in turn prompted me to do a bit of googling, and find her will. It's quite interesting for a short will - I'm pretty sure the man she describes as her 'son' was actually her stepson, and probably the guy who challenged Edward to single combat.

By the way, if you ever fancy visiting Philippa, her tomb is in Westminster Abbey. (Arguably, the best tomb of the whole family in that generation. Constance's is destroyed, Edward's is a crummy Elizabethan replacement at Fotheringhay, and poor old Richard of Conisbrough having been executed as a traitor never had a proper tomb as far as I know.)

The influential Lady Mohun and her daughter.

In his book The Court of Richard II Father Gervase Mathew stated that Joan, Lady Mohun was one of the more influential ladies of Richard's court. This seems likely to be true, if only because the Appellants banished her from court in 1388 - they'd scarcely have bothered if she'd just been sitting there quietly producing embroidery, would they?

One of Anne of Bohemia's last acts was to grant Lady Mohun Leeds Castle, in Kent. Not a bad Christmas present you may think! Yet there are some dunderheads around who believe that medieval noblewomen were all powerless nonentities. True, they didn't have the vote, or the right to sit in councils and parliaments, but they had influence, direct and indirect, and some of them knew how to use it.

Lady Mohun had been granted a jointure in all her late husband's lands. To finance her comfortable life at court she sold the reversion to the Lutterell family (of psalter fame) and thus disinherited her three daughters.

The youngest of these was Philippa, who most improbably became the wife of Edward of York around 1397. She was at least 10 years older than her husband - Pugh is unkind enough to suggest that she was old enough to be his mother.

Philippa had been married twice before, but had no children. It seems odd that Edward, the heir of York, should have chosen a wife who was most unlikely to give him a son. Moreover, a woman who was not an heiress, merely in possession of a life interest in her modest Fitzwalter and Golafre dower properties. The explanation seems to be that Edward was not a conventional thinker, and he simply loved her. This is one of his more endearing qualities. Some of you may find (lack of children apart) some congruence with the tale of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville a couple of generations on.

Although Edward and Philippa were certainly married by 1398, in which year, at the height of his power as Duke of Aumale, Lord High Constable, etc., etc., he procured from the Pope a Plenary Indulgence to cover them both - a buy yourself out of purgatory card. Apart from this Philippa is rarely mentioned in the early years of their marriage and did not, for example, get Garter robes as his consort until 1408. I've often scratched my head over why this might have been, but am forced back to the conclusion that medieval clerks made as many mistakes as modern computer operators.