Constance of Castile: Uncertain Princess

Constance of Castile*1354-1394 

Constance, or Constança, of Castile was the second wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, himself the son of England’s King Edward III.  Known to students of history primarily as the wronged wife of a man whose passions lay elsewhere, to readers of Anya Seton's novel Katherine as a small, dark, near fanatical woman with questionable personal hygiene and, finally, to today's new women's historians as a powerful woman who charted her own destiny, we are left to wonder who, exactly, Constance really was.

Constance was the daughter of Pedro I (the Cruel or Just, but for various reasons I'll be sticking with Cruel), King of Castile after the death of his father Alfonso XI of Castile (by his wife Maria of Portugal).  Such a noble heritage really should have made Constance an unchallenged and valuable Iberian princess, heiress to Pedro's throne as the first-born and eldest surviving of Pedro's many children, but for one minor detail: her father was married to someone other than her mother at the time.  In fact, it is dubious he was ever legally married to her mother at all.

Pedro the Cruel; Convento de Santo Domingo el Real,
Madrid.

Later portrait, clearly based upon carving, shows
Pedro with a tall, erect stance, blue eyes, and a head
of blond hair.

The devil is in the details.  Pedro himself may have carried forward emotional baggage from a less than ideal childhood.  Iberian courts could be deadly compared to others in Northern Europe at the time, and the court of Alfonso was no exception.  Married to a respectable Iberian princess, Maria of Portugal, Pedro's father had a fondness for women other than his wife; in particular, Leonor Guzman, a beautiful Castilian noblewoman, with whom he had nearly a dozen half-siblings to Pedro.  

However, unlike John of Gaunt's carefully constructed familial mutual respect between his 'real' family and his johnny-come-lately legitimized Beauforts, there would be no harmony betwixt Alfonso's two families. This would ultimately cost Pedro his crown, his life, and thus reduce the value of daughters Constance and Isabel on the European marriage market (Beatriz, the eldest daughter, ultimately resigned herself into entering a convent after one too many marriage proposal deals gone south).

The affair between Alfonso and Leonor, which predated Alfonso's marriage in 1328 to the Infanta Maria, lasted to the end of Alfonso's life. One might reasonably wonder just how happy that particular union was on the face of it. The question seems well answered by actions taken by Maria herself.  By 1335, she appears to have had quite enough and, with her family's backing, left Alfonso, his philandering and his increasing isolation of her.

It was a strategic move on Maria's part:  Castile and Portugal found themselves facing a mutual foe -- Aragon -- and, with the Pope weighing in and declaring that Alfonso was to return to Maria, which he did albeit briefly, Maria was 'reinstalled' to her position.  After the defeat of Aragonese forces, however, Alfonso shrugged his shoulders, put Maria away again and returned to Leonor.

There is some indication that this familial backdrop had an impact on the development of Pedro's psyche.  Pedro grew up with philandering and uncertainty.  His half-siblings had a powerful mother to advance their cause, perhaps even over that of Pedro.  Both Maria and Leonor survived Alfonso; however, pointedly, only the son of one of them could be king.

Where Pedro might have chosen to take the high road of being king and ignored or sent away Leonor and kept his half-siblings close enough to monitor but not too close to gain support, Pedro chose the low road and had Leonor either executed or murdered.  Thus 'avenged,' Pedro allowed his mother Maria to briefly take control of Castile to advance her son's interests, including a favorable dynastic marriage to a foreign friendly powers princess.  Previously, Alfonso had chosen a foreign alliance with England: Joan, daughter of Edward III and his queen, Philippa of Hainaut, was betrothed to Pedro at age 12 in 1345 and dead of the plague, en route to Castile, in 1348.  Upon Alfonso's own death, Maria sought a second foreign marriage alliance, this time to a French princess.  Blanche of Bourbon was married by proxy at age 13 to Pedro in 1353, in person the following year in 1354, and dead by age 25, largely alone, guarded, forgotten, and quite possibly murdered.  There would be no children for reasons which follow.

Not long after Pedro's marriage to Blanche -- whom he pointedly abandoned after a whopping three days of marriage -- Pedro sired a daughter named Constance.  Her mother was Pedro's mistress, Maria de Padilla, a Castilian noblewoman.

Maria had many things going for her as an ideal handmaid to Pedro of Castile:  she was reportedly beautiful, nobly-born, loyal, and Pedro was besotted with her.  Among her many admirable qualities, however, being Pedro's legal wife was not one of them.  It was a status she was never afforded in life and her "marriage" to Pedro sworn to only reluctantly by Castilian bishops who seem to have been unduly influenced to swear to a story that Pedro and Maria were secretly married prior to his legal marriage to Blanche of Bourbon, making Pedro an admitted bigamist whose ex post facto explanation sounds suspicious at best.  Thus, Constance herself grew up with some degree of uncertainty -- she had to have been aware that her father was not legally married to her mother and had seen her own father severely abandon and imprison his young wife because he desired the attentions of another.  Do we perhaps see this in her seeming acceptance of John of Gaunt's affair with Katherine Swynford?  Constance's mother as she knew her was the faithful and feted mistress, but to a man willing to commit bigamy (and worse) and to shut his legal wife away under inaccessible and incommunicable guard.

Disgusted or disheartened by her long life in Castile, Maria participated in a 1354 rebellion against Pedro and left Castile once again, never to return in life.  She was buried with two small children.  Constance probably never knew her paternal grandmother but was likely later told the Castilian version of events; this we may safely assume given Armitage-Smith's argument that Constance was later a valued Iberian font of knowledge for John of Gaunt.

Unlike Maria of Portugal, Blanche of Bourbon had but little support from Pope or family, enabling Pedro to desert after a mere three days of their 1353 wedding to return to the arms of his mistress Maria de Padilla.  While Pedro was legally married to Blanche of Bourbon, Maria bore Pedro four almost certainly illegitimate children who grew up to watch their father irritate a number of his country's noblemen including his own half-siblings, and watch this turn murderous, their mother never accorded international recognition of the legality of her 'union' and the murder of their father at the hands of his illegitimate half-brother and his supporters.

What happened there???