Joan of Kent

Joan, Countess of Kent (29 September 1328 – 7 August 1385), known to history as The Fair Maid of Kent, was the first English Princess of Wales. The French chronicler Jean Froissart called her "the most beautiful woman in all the realm of England, and the most loving." The appellation "Fair Maid of Kent" does not appear to be contemporary.^[1]

Lineage

Joan was the daughter of Edmund of Woodstock, 1st Earl of Kent and Margaret Wake, 3rd Baroness Wake of Liddell and a granddaughter of King Edward I of England.^[2]

Her father, Edmund, was a younger half-brother of Edward II of England. Edmund's support of the King placed him in conflict with the Queen, Isabella of France, and her lover Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March. Edmund was executed after Edward II's deposition, and Joan's mother, along with her children, were placed under house-arrest in Arundel Castle when Joan was only two years old.

Early life

The Earl’s widow, Margaret Wake, was left with four children. Joan's first cousin, the new King Edward III, took on the responsibility for the family, and looked after them well. His wife, Queen Philippa (who was also Joan's second cousin), was well known for her tender-heartedness, and Joan grew up at court, where she became friendly with her cousins, including Edward, the Black Prince.

Marriages

In 1340, at the age of twelve, Joan entered into a clandestine marriage with Thomas Holland of Broughton without first gaining the royal consent necessary for couples of their rank.^[3] The following winter (1340 or 1341), while Holland was overseas, her family forced her to marry William Montacute, son and heir of the first Earl of Salisbury. Joan later averred that she did not disclose her existing marriage with Thomas Holland because she had been afraid that disclosing it would lead to Thomas's execution for treason upon his return. She may also have become convinced that the earlier marriage was invalid.^[4]

Joan is often identified as the countess of Salisbury who, legend says, inspired Edward III's founding the Order of the Garter.^[1] It is just as possible, though, that that countess was her mother-in-law, Catherine Montacute, Countess of Salisbury.

Several years later, Thomas Holland returned from the Crusades, having made his fortune, and the full story of his earlier relationship with Joan came out. Thomas appealed to the Pope for the return of his wife and confessed the secret marriage to the king. When the Earl of Salisbury discovered that Joan supported Holland’s case, he kept her a prisoner in her own home.^[5]

In 1349, Pope Clement VI annulled Joan’s marriage to the Earl and sent her back to Thomas Holland, with whom she lived for the next eleven years. They had four known children (though some sources list five), before Holland died in 1360.

Their children were:

1. Thomas Holland, 2nd Earl of Kent,
2. John Holland, 1st Duke of Exeter,
3. Joan Holland (1356-1384), who married John V, Duke of Brittany (1339-1399),
4. Maud Holland (1359-1391), who married Waleran III of Luxembourg, Count of Ligny (1355-1415),
5. Edmund (c. 1354), who died young (parentage uncertain)

When the last of Joan's siblings died in 1352, she became the Countess of Kent and Lady Wake of Liddell.

Marriage into the royal family

Evidence of the affection of Edward, the Black Prince (who was her first cousin once removed) for Joan may be found in the record of his presenting her with a silver cup, part of the booty from one of his early military campaigns. Edward's parents did not, however, favour a marriage between their son and their former ward. Queen Philippa had made a favourite of Joan at first, but both she and the king seem to have been concerned about Joan's reputation. English law was such that Joan's living ex-husband, Salisbury, might have claimed any children of her subsequent marriages as his own. In addition, Edward and Joan were within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity.

The secret marriage they are said to have contracted in 1360^[6] would have been invalid because of the consanguinity prohibition. At the King's request, the Pope granted a dispensation allowing the two to be legally married. The official ceremony occurred on 10 October 1361, at Windsor Castle with the King and Queen in attendance. The Archbishop of Canterbury presided.

In 1362, the Black Prince was invested as Prince of Aquitaine, a region of France which belonged to the English Crown since the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II. He and Joan moved to Bordeaux, the capital of the principality, where they spent the next nine years. Two sons were born in France to the royal couple. The elder son, named Edward (27 January 1365 - 1372) after his father and grandfather, died at the age of six.

Around the time of the birth of their younger son, Richard, the Prince was lured into a war on behalf of King Peter of Castile. The ensuing battle was one of the Black Prince’s greatest victories, but King Peter (Spanish: Pedro) was later killed, and there was no money to pay the troops. In the meantime, the Princess was forced to raise another army, because the Prince’s enemies were threatening Aquitaine in his absence.

Transition to Dowager Princess of Wales

By 1371, the Black Prince was no longer able to perform his duties as Prince of Aquitaine, and returned to England, where plague was wreaking havoc. In 1372, he forced himself to attempt one final, abortive campaign in the hope of saving his father’s French possessions. His health was now completely shattered. On 7 June 1376, a week before his forty-sixth birthday, he died in his bed at Westminster.

Joan’s son was next in line to succeed King Edward III. Edward III died on 21 June 1377 and Richard became King. He was crowned Richard II at the age of 10 in the following month. Early in his reign, the young King faced the challenge of the Peasants' Revolt. The Lollards, religious reformers led by John Wyclif, had enjoyed the protection of Joan of Kent, but the violent climax of the popular movement for reform reduced the feisty Joan to a state of terror, while leaving the King with an improved reputation.

As a power behind the throne, she was well-loved for her influence over the young king - for example, on her return to London (via her Wickhambreaux estate) from a pilgrimage to Becket's shrine at Canterbury Cathedral in 1381, she found her way barred by Wat Tyler and his mob of rebels on Blackheath but was not only let through unharmed, but saluted with kisses and provided with an escort for the rest of her journey.

In 1385, Sir John Holland, an adult son of her first marriage, was campaigning with the King in the Kingdom of Scotland, when a quarrel broke out between him and Ralph Stafford, son of the 2nd Earl of Stafford, a favourite of the new Queen Anne of Bohemia. Stafford was killed, and John Holland sought sanctuary at the shrine of St John of Beverley. On the King’s return, Holland was condemned to death. Joan pleaded with her son for four days to spare his half-brother. On the fifth day (the exact date in August is not known), she died, at Wallingford Castle. Richard relented, and pardoned Holland (though he was then sent on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land).

Joan was buried, as requested in her will, at the Greyfriars, the site of the present hospital, in Stamford in Lincolnshire, beside her first husband. Her third husband, the Black Prince, had built a chantry for her in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral (where he was to have been buried), with ceiling bosses of her face. (Another boss in the north nave aisle is also said to be of her.)[1]

Fictional depictions

Joan of Kent features in several pieces of fiction. In The Lady Royal, a fictionalized biography by Molly Costain Haycraft, Joan is portrayed as a rival to her cousin, Isabella, for the affections of Enguerrand de Coucy. She is the protagonist of Sweet Passion's Pain, a novel by Karen Harper, which was republished as The First Princess of Wales. She appears briefly in Katherine by Anya Seton, as well as in The King's Mistress, by Emma Campion, where she is a friend of the main character, Alice Perrers.

Joan is also a principal character in The Wheel of Fortune by Susan Howatch, a novel that takes the characters of the Plantagenet family and recreates them in a modern dimension of the Godwin family of Oxmoon (the throne), where she appears as Ginevra (Ginette). Her story, retold in the first person, closely mirrors Joan's story and background.

The last published book of Gordon R. Dickson's semi-historical Dragon Knight series is titled The Dragon and the Fair Maid of Kent, and concerns Joan's attempts to reconcile the Black Prince with his father Edward III during the first years of the Black Plague in England.

Madeline Hunter's first novel, By Arrangement, features Joan of Kent as a secondary character. The novel also mentions her relationships with Thomas Holland and William Montacute. Joan is portrayed as flirtatious and inconstant in her affections to the two men. Virginia Henley's Desired features Joan of Kent as a secondary character.

Joan of Kent also appears in the novel The Nameless Day (The Crucible, #1) by Sara Douglass. In that novel, she dies when her husband's death is announced.

Ancestry

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Tait
2. ^ Alison Weir, Britain's Royal Families
3. ^ Wentersdorf p. 205.
4. ^ Wentersdorf, p. 206
5. ^ Wentersdorf, p. 212
6. ^ Wentersdorf, p. 217
7. ^ the peerage: Baldwin Wake
8. ^ ^{a b} Foundation for Medieval Genealogy: ENGLISH NOBILITY T - Z
9. ^ the peerage: Robert de Quincy

• Tait, James (1892). "Joan". Dictionary of National Biography 29: 392–393. 
• The Times Kings & Queens of The British Isles, by Thomas Cussans (page 92) ISBN 0-0071-4195-5
• Wentersdorf, Karl P (1979). "The clandestine marriages of the Fair Maid of Kent". Journal of Medieval History 5 (3): 203–231. doi:10.1016/0304-4181(79)90037-X.