Joan of Kent

Joan of Kent. Medieval representation

Joan of Kent, Princess of Wales and Princess of Aquitaine, suo jure 4th Countess of Kent and 5th Baroness Wake (also Joan Plantagenet , Joan of Woodstock , LG the Fair Maid of Kent ; * September 29, 1328 - † August 14 , according to other sources August 8, 1385 ) was an English noblewoman. She married the heir to the throne Edward, the Black Prince, and was the mother of King Richard II.

Origin and childhood

Joan came from a branch of the English ruling family of the Plantagenets . She was the youngest child of Edmund of Woodstock, 1st Earl of Kent and his wife Margaret Wake , so she was a granddaughter of King Edward I. Her father was in 1330 executed as a traitor, which the two-year-old Joan of Queen Philippa of Hainault adopted and grew up in the queen's household.

Appearance and character

As a twelve-year-old girl, Joan was already considered beautiful and personable. The chronicler Froissart described her as the most beautiful woman in England. In old age, however, she became so stout that she could barely stand up. She enjoyed great popularity among the population until her death. Her contemporaries referred to her, perhaps sarcastically, as the Virgin of Kent . After her death, the name The Fair Maid of Kent ( German  The beautiful girl from Kent ) finally prevailed.

Secret marriage to Thomas Holland

Presumably Joan accompanied the Queen and her cousin King Edward III. when they tried to attack France from Flanders at the beginning of the Hundred Years War . The beautiful girl won the attention of Sir Thomas Holland , a knight of the royal household, when the family returned to England in 1340. Holland persuaded her to secretly marry him in the spring of 1340, but without a church ceremony. Although the spouses even threatened excommunication , the marriage was considered closed. In the summer of 1340, Holland left England as a military man, while Joan stayed in England.

Controversial second marriage to William Montagu

Joan's mother Margaret either knew nothing about the marriage, considered it invalid or believed that Holland was dead, because she was now planning to marry Joan to William Montagu , the eldest son of William Montagu, 1st Earl of Salisbury . In fact, Joan was married to William Montagu in a church ceremony in the winter of 1340-41. She stayed with Montagu even when Holland returned to England in the summer of 1341. When Montagu, after his father's death in 1344, became his heir and rose to become Earl of Salisbury, Holland even became its administrator. In 1346, however, he took part in the campaign of Edward III. to France. In the battle of Crécy he was able to capture the Count of Eu , whom the king bought from him for 80,000 florins . This wealth enabled him to challenge the validity of Joan's marriage to Montagu before the Curia in Avignon from June 1347 . He himself stated that he legally married Joan and that he had consummated the marriage with her . Montagu, supported by Joan's mother, declared that he had no knowledge of his bride's previous marriage and rejected Holland's claim. The papal envoys were unable to bring Montagu to court in England for the marriage, after which Holland claimed that Joan was being held in a secluded estate against her will. In May 1348, Pope Clement VI approved. the dissolution of the marriage of Joan and Montagu, but his lawyers were able to delay the dissolution before a papal bull on November 13, 1349 declared their marriage invalid. Instead, the church ceremony of the wedding of Joan and Holland should be rescheduled immediately, whereupon Joan and Holland remarried.

Marriage to Thomas Holland

After the death of her younger brother John in 1352, Joan inherited his estates and the titles Countess of Kent and Baroness Wake . Her husband became governor of the English king in Brittany in 1353 , later governor of the Channel Islands and finally in 1359 captain general of the territories conquered by the English in France. It is possible that Joan lived at least temporarily in France during this time.

Marriage to the English heir to the throne

After Thomas Holland died unexpectedly in late December 1360, Edward of Woodstock , the Prince of Wales, asked for her hand in the spring or early summer of 1361 . The surprising engagement of the heir to the throne to a widowed woman, who also had a scandalous history, older than him and with whom he was also closely related, led to much speculation. It was originally planned to marry the Prince of Wales to the wealthy heiress Margaret of Flanders , but contrary to the information provided by French chroniclers, Edward III tried. not to prevent marriage. Instead, like his son, he asked the Pope for a dispensation for marriage, which was granted on September 7, 1361. In the presence of Archbishop Simon Islip of Canterbury, Joan pledged allegiance to the Prince of Wales on October 6, 1361, and the wedding took place at Windsor Castle on October 10, in the presence of the king and probably the entire royal family .

Role as wife of the English heir to the throne

As a woman from Holland, Joan had to live relatively modestly due to her small possessions until she inherited her brother's property in 1352 and thus also the property of her uncle Thomas Wake, 2nd Baron Wake . As the wife of the heir to the throne, she could now run a splendid household, which also included her four surviving children from her marriage to Thomas Holland. At Christmas 1361, the king and queen visited the couple at Berkhamsted Castle , one of the heir's favorite residences. The heir to the throne, who was already considered generous to his friends, gave his wife rich gifts in early 1362 with valuable clothing and jewelry. 1362 the king put her husband as Prince and Joan as princess (Princess) of Aquitaine one that was in the possession of the English kings. Joan and her children accompanied Edward of Woodstock on June 9, 1362, when he left Plymouth for Aquitaine. She and her husband lived in Aquitaine for the next nine years, probably mainly in Bordeaux or Angoulême . Little is known about their life in southwest France. In April 1365, the Prince of Wales held a particularly splendid tournament in Angoulême on the occasion of Joan's blessing after the birth of her first son. The heir to the throne remained in love with his wife, as shown by a letter he sent her after the battle of Nájera in 1367. When he returned from his campaign in Spain, she was waiting for him in front of the Cathedral of Bordeaux , where he dismounted and walked hand in hand the rest of the way to the Bishop's Palace, where they had taken up quarters. After the Prince of Wales returned to England sick in 1371, Joan apparently acted at least temporarily as his authorized representative. She thanked the representatives of the City of London for a gift to her husband, and in August 1371 she attended the annual office of Queen Philippa without him .

Role as queen mother

Influence on the king

After the death of her husband in 1376, Joan became the guardian of her son, the young heir to the throne Richard , whose income she received. She was allowed to continue the title Princess of Wales and she was assured that she would continue to receive a third of the income from the Principality of Wales , even if her son were raised to Prince of Wales. In 1377 the young Richard was after the death of Edward III. new English king, and Joan apparently retained considerable influence over her son until her death. Numerous royal pardons and gifts were made at the request of the Queen Mother , and in 1378 she was granted financial compensation for her lower income after the death of her husband. She had the estates of Bushey and North Weald expanded as her residences and in May 1381 she commissioned a new ship for her voyages.

Relationship with John of Gaunt

In January 1379, the citizens of the City of London donated John of Gaunt , their late husband's influential brother, a feast at his palace in Kennington when Joan and the King visited him. Only a few weeks later, however, Gaunt had to flee to Joan from angry Londoners, and three of her knights managed to calm the angry crowd. Despite the tensions between the young king and Gaunt, Joan was apparently able to maintain a good relationship with Gaunt. Gaunt gave gifts to her first marriage sons, and their second son, John, married a daughter of Gaunt's. In 1385, despite her poor health, she was still traveling between the royal court and Gaunt to avoid an armed conflict between the king and his uncle. However, she only achieved a formal reconciliation between the two, which did not end the conflict.

Miscellaneous and death

Apparently supported Joan even more than Gaunt the Lollards . Several leading lollards such as Sir Richard Stury and Sir Lewis Clifford were among her entourage, and she arranged for the trials of John Wyclif to be dropped in 1378. During the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, she was unmolested.

Joan presumably died at Wallingford Castle , two months after the king set out on a campaign for Scotland. According to her request, she was not buried next to her third husband Edward of Woodstock, but near her first husband Thomas Holland in the Franciscan Church of Stamford , but only after the return of the king on January 27, 1386.

progeny

With her first husband Thomas Holland, Joan had five children:

• Thomas Holland, 2nd Earl of Kent (* 1350; † 1397)
• John Holland, 1st Duke of Exeter (around 1352 - 1400)
• Edmund Holland
• Mathilda (also Maud) Holland

1. ∞ Hugh de Courtenay, 1st Baron Courtenay
2. ∞ Walram III, Count of Ligny and St. Pol

• Joan Holland

Her second marriage to William Montagu had been childless.

She had two children with her third husband, Edward of Woodstock:

• Eduard of Angoulême (* 1365; † 1371)
• Richard II (* 1367; † 1400)

literature

• Penny Lawne: Joan of Kent, first Princess of Wales . Amberley, Stroud 2016, ISBN 978-1-4456-5527-7
• KP Wentersdorf: The clandestine marriages of the Fair Maid of Kent . In: Journal of Medieval History , 5 (1979), pp. 203-232

Web links

Commons : Joan of Kent  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Richard Barber: Joan, suo jure countess of Kent, and princess of Wales and of Aquitaine [called the Fair Maid of Kent] (c. 1328-1385). In: Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , from the earliest times to the year 2000 (ODNB). Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-861411-X , ( oxforddnb.com license required ), as of 2004

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cracroft's Peerage: The Early House of Plantagenet (1154-1327). Retrieved April 21, 2018 . 
2. ^ Richard Barber: Joan, suo jure countess of Kent, and princess of Wales and of Aquitaine [called the Fair Maid of Kent] (c. 1328-1385). In: Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , from the earliest times to the year 2000 (ODNB). Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-861411-X , ( oxforddnb.com license required ), as of 2004
3. ↑ Cracroft's Peerage: The Early House of Plantagenet (1154-1327). Retrieved April 21, 2018 . 
4. ↑ Penny Lawne: Joan of Kent, first Princess of Wales . Amberley, Stroud 2016, ISBN 978-1-4456-5527-7 , p. 6
5. ^ Anthony Goodman: John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe. Routledge, Abingdon 2016. ISBN 978-1-138-14029-5 , p. 62

predecessor	Office	successor
John	Countess of Kent 1352-1385	Title expired
John	Baroness Wake 1352-1385	Thomas Holland