For Women’s History Month, Dr Simon Payling from our Commons 1461-1504 project discusses the life of Elizabeth Lancaster, the sister of Henry IV, who demonstrated a degree of independence unusual for an aristocratic woman.
It is surprising to find the sister of a King buried in a remote Shropshire church. Henry IV’s sister, Elizabeth, in marked contrast to her elder sister, Philippa (d.1415), wife of King John I of Portugal, grandly entombed in Batalha Monastery, found her final resting in the modest country church of Burford. The two sisters were also markedly contrasted in life.
Philippa’s sole marriage was made in 1387 to advance, unsuccessfully as it transpired, the claims of her step-mother, Constance of Castile, to the throne of Castile. Elizabeth had a rather more colourful marital history. In 1380, when she was about 17, her father, John of Gaunt, contracted a conventional marriage for her: John Hastings, earl of Pembroke, was his ward, and by birth and wealth a suitable spouse. There was, however, a problem, that Gaunt chose to ignore. The groom was some ten years younger than his bride, and it would be some years before they could live together as a married couple. In the interim, the young earl grew up in Gaunt’s household, while Elizabeth was sent to the royal court to, in the words of the Westminster chronicler, ‘study the behaviour and customs of courtly society’. That study took a predictable and active form. She formed a romantic attachment with Richard II’s half-brother, Sir John Holland, some ten years her senior, who had, rather ironically, been present at her marriage to Pembroke.
Whatever her precise marital status, this attachment was less than ideal. Holland, despite his grand birth, was a younger son with no great financial prospects, and he had shown himself to have tendencies violent beyond even the generous limits of his times. None the less, in its most notorious manifestation, that violence had been exercised in defence of Elizabeth’s father. In 1384, when a Carmelite friar denounced Gaunt to the King’s face as a traitor, Holland took a leading part in the torture and murder of the either deranged or unwisely forthright friar (‘Am I not your uncle?’: John of Gaunt, the murder of Friar Latimer and the Salisbury Parliament of 1384, 8 March 2022). It was perhaps Holland’s apparent devotion to him that led Gaunt to abandon the objections raised by prudence to his daughter’s liaison; or else, perhaps more probably, he found himself faced with a fait accompli when she fell pregnant. What is not clear is whether the Pembroke marriage had already been set aside before this happy event. Since the marriage had been contracted when the groom was under the canonical age of consent, its dissolution was a matter of no great difficulty, and it is probable that it had already been dissolved as unsuitable before her affair with Holland. However, it makes a better story to assume a causal link, and contemporary chroniclers were not slow in proposing one. In any event, the new marriage was made before the child was born. The young couple were married at Plymouth on 24 June 1386 as her father made ready for a campaign in Spain. Holland had a leading position of command in that campaign, and his new wife accompanied him, perhaps not the ideal start to married life.
A less than ideal start was followed by a calamitous end. In the late 1390s the marriage was compromised by mounting political crises. As Richard II’s autocracy created unbridgeable divides among the leading aristocracy, Elizabeth faced a terrible dilemma. Her husband had never enjoyed the same close relationship with her brother, the future Henry IV, as he did with her father, and, given his own kinship with Richard II, it is not surprising that he should have sided with the King. His reward was promotion to the dukedom of Exeter. By contrast, her brother found himself banished and excluded from inheriting the great Lancastrian inheritance on his father’s death in February 1399. Even, however, against this background, all would have been well if Holland had been able to reconcile himself to the new political disposition after Henry returned triumphantly from exile to depose Richard II. Given his marriage to Elizabeth, such a reconciliation would, no doubt, have been expected (although it must be said that Henry did not exert himself to bring it about), and it must have been to her dismay that her husband chose to rise in a futile conspiracy to depose her brother. Taking flight, his reward was execution in January 1400 at the hands of a group of Essex peasants.
Elizabeth, not seemingly one to dwell on life’s setbacks, lost little time in making a new marriage. 1400 was a momentous year for her, beginning with her husband’s death and ending with the death of her eldest son, Richard Holland. In the interval, however, there was a much happier moment. At a tournament held at York in July, her attention was caught by the skill of one of its participants, Sir John Cornwall, a few years her junior. As the son of a younger son of a Shropshire knightly family, and notwithstanding the fact that his mother was, reputedly at least, a niece of John de Montfort (d.1399), duke of Brittany, he hardly had the social qualifications as a husband for a King’s sister, yet the couple were married by the end of the year. If Henry IV originally viewed this with disapproval, he quickly came to a brighter view, making lavish grants in favour of the couple and, in February 1405, standing godfather to their son. The couple went on to prosper. The profits of Cornwall’s military career compensated him for his lack of hereditary expectations. Through their only son, John, the couple could look forward to establishing a dynasty.
Again, however, tragedy intervened. Just as war had made Cornwall rich, it also ended his male line. Late in 1421, at the siege of Meaux, the young John was killed by a cannonball in the presence of his father (H.W.Kleineke, ‘1421: a troubled royal Christmas’, 11 Jan. 2022). Elizabeth did not long survive this loss, dying in November 1425. Cornwall, for reasons one can only speculate, did not remarry.
It is not known why Elizabeth should have been buried in the church of Burford. Her husband was not the lord of the manor, only the representative of a junior branch of the knightly family long established there. Further, he had, before her death, purchased the extensive lordship of Ampthill in Bedfordshire and began the building of a great castle there. That castle, not yet complete on Elizabeth’s death, had no doubt been intended as the grand residence of a new dynasty, and the church of Ampthill might have become its mausoleum. The only plausible explanation for her burial at Burford is her personal affection for the place, perhaps because she had spent time there during Cornwall’s absences fighting in France.
Elizabeth’s career was a remarkable one. She demonstrated a degree of independence unusual for an aristocratic woman. She repudiated the marriage made for her by her powerful father when she was in her late teens; she then chose her own husband in what appears to have been scandalous circumstances; and, as a widow in her thirties, she followed her own inclinations in marrying below her rank to one of the foremost soldiers of the day. No doubt part of the reason for this seeming freedom was the indulgence of a father and brother to a favoured daughter and sister. Yet that indulgence was only necessary because of Elizabeth’s spirited independence.
SP
The History of Parliament 