Growing Up Constance of Castile

Baths of Maria Padilla under the Palace of Alcazar at Seville;
Wiki commons license; photo © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro 

1352 saw conflict in the royal house of Castile.  It was in this year that King Pedro reportedly met and became besotted with the young noblewoman Maria de Padilla on his way to do battle in the Asturias with his unhappy half-brother, Henry of Trastamere, whose mother had been executed by Pedro and his mother, Maria of Portugal.  

By 1354, Pedro's mother Maria, finally fed up with life in Castile, participated in a rebellion against her own son, Pedro, and left Castile for good. Pedro dug in his heals against his mother, his noblemen, his half-brothers, and was well settled on his path to leaving Blanche of Bourbon to die possibly from an assassin's hands, well guarded against release in increasingly more remote, inaccessible locations, and utterly abandoned while Pedro whined about the French not paying the rest of Blanche's dowery (who can blame them, honestly?).  There was also a story bandied about that Blanche had had a clandestine red hot improbable affair with Pedro's illegitimate half-brother en route to marrying Pedro in person.  Blanche would die thus, at the age of ~25 years, alone, in the same year as her rival Maria de Padilla would die from the Plague.  And Pedro would never again feel secure upon his throne.

Who was this beckoning siren who convinced Pedro to ignore his own country falling apart in front of him?  Maria de Padilla was described by a contemporary:

…muy fermosa, e de buen entendimiento e pequeña de cuerpo [very beautiful, intelligent, and small of body...]

She seems to have been quite the diminutive beauty and intelligent to cap it off.  If she were truly small of body frame, it would seem that her daughter, Constance, inherited but little of it: she likely gained her tall height from her father, Pedro, who was also tall of build with fair skin and eyes.  This is important to consider given Anya Seton's fictional treatment of Constance, who she portrays as a short, dark, unhygienic, nearly unhinged woman.  It bears pointing out that she and her family were Northern Freaking European Nobility.  They were not "moorish looking."

During Constance's formative years, she and her siblings were exposed to the exquisite artistic tastes of their mother, who seemingly left her mark in a good many foundations with her arms and connections.  She also apparently had a deep appreciation for the bright tiled fountains and wall decore, some of which was called the "mujeden" style, drawing upon Islamic and Jewish styles of ornamentation.

There appears to be no effigy or other life representation of Maria de Padilla who, after Blanche of Bourbon's death, seems to have lived triumphantly with Pedro in the Palace at Seville for but a short space.  Still, she is the focus of a wonderful narrative of  'the lovely Padilla,' almost a farcical figure in her own life, a figure concerned with pools and baths and pretty lights.  A figure who died, tragically, young, like all great hist-fict heroines.  Unlike what is claimed by the new women's historians of her daughter Constance, Maria de Padilla seems to have indeed avidly courted her own destiny and history with palaces and convents, her arms with their funny-looking frying pans, for all their lack of respectable decorum, existing to this day in choir stalls in California (USA) having been purchased from a Castilian convent by a wealthy U.S. Catholic family who had them installed at the San Diego (CA) Mission of San Diego de Alcala, where she is claimed to be the queen of Pedro that she never was.  She is ever thus -- the romantic heroine who perseveres despite the truly obnoxious fate of her rival and who bore Pedro his  living, but of of questionable legitimacy, heirs and who died, tragically, young.

Except that she didn't.  Pedro had married another woman in her place in addition to Blanche of Bourbon.  The woman's name was Juana de Castro and it was she and no other who took her claim of being Queen of Castile quite literally to her grave which depicts her thus.  And not for nothing:  Despite Pedro's abandoning Juana as well as Blanche of Bourbon after mere days of marriage, it was she who bore his supposedly sole surviving legitimate male heir, Juan, who didn't die until 1405 leaving offspring.

Constance of Castile: Of Dowries & Doubts

What had happened to the marriage of Pedro of Castile and Blanche of Bourbon, indeed?

The siren of Maria de Padilla may be one factor and Pedro's dissatisfaction with his mother’s guidance may well be another.  Then there is the matter of Blanche’s dowry:  obtaining it proved difficult given Pedro’s treatment of Blanche as well as the Pedro's contention that Blanche’s family never intended to pay Blanche's considerable dowry.   The idea of a political alliance between Castile and Leon, on the one hand, and the House of Bourbon, on the other, may also have been attractive to Pedro, who would spend the rest of his life battling unsuccessfully for his crown at the hands of his illegitimate half-brother and his own disaffected nobility: Pedro was perennially short of funds and Blanche’s dowry, along with the cemented political alliance with Bourbon, must have looked like an easy ticket out.  It also played into the various wars of Northern Europe at the time, with Pedro playing France and its traditional ally, Scotland, against the English, to whom he would turn next.

Iberian Lands & Languages of the 14th C.

Above we see a map of the Iberian lands and language groups of the 14th Century (not my graphic).    France is of course towards the upper-right, with Castile sandwiched between Portugal and Aragon, and itself made up of two previous smaller countries, Leon and Castile.  The New Castile was thus an amalgam of competing noblemen and language barriers that made it vulnerable not only to infighting, but to outside invasion as well.

The three day speed with which Pedro abandoned Blanche, first cousin to the King of France, however, was shocking even in its day; it also seems inconsistent with later explanations that Pedro left Blanche because he was unhappy with her French relatives dragging their feet on paying her dowry.  The time for such negotiations should have occurred prior to the marriage and not after, and most assuredly not after abandoning Blanche after a mere three days time.  

While Blanche's family did little to rescue the pathetic princess (Pedro's letters to the Pope complained that the French had seemingly no intention to honor the payment of Blanche's sizable dowry of 300,000 gold florins, for which they had, tellingly, insisted on installment payments), Pedro's nobles reportedly began muttering about on history repeating itself vis-a-vis Pedro's infidelity and the possibly of a second recent set of Castilian royal bastards being favored and advanced in society.  

Maria of Portugal's brief ascendancy saw her rival 'convicted' and executed; Eleanor de Guzman left behind unhappy progeny, eager to avenge their mother and assert their right to the crown.  This is the world Pedro's daughters would inherit, always looking over their shoulders for the Trastamere treachery.  Pedro needed a good ally after losing France to stabilize his country and that of the region.

Pedro needed Blanche's dowry ironically because his infidelity threatened the Castilian social order.  His illegitimate half-brother would pursue this path relentlessly until Pedro had walked himself into a corner and lost his crown and then his life.  It proved to be his undoing.  

After about a year of 'wedlock' with Blanche of Bourbon, Pedro was successful in 'convincing' a few of his country's bishops to nullify his marriage to Blanche... only to 'marry' him to Juana de Castro, another noblewoman... while Blanche was still alive.  She, too, was abandoned, after bearing Pedro a son, when the Pope belatedly commanded Pedro to return to Blanche.  Thus, by the mid-1350s/early 1360s, Pedro had not one, not two, but three living wives by his own reckoning.

Froissart says of Pedro, We must add likewise that this Don Pedro, king of Castile, who at present is driven out of his realm, is a man of great pride, very cruel, and full of bad dispositions.  The kingdom of Castile has suffered many grievances at his hands: many valiant men have been beheaded and murdered, without justice or reason, so that these wicked actions, which he ordered or consented to, he owes the loss of his kingdom.  

Tomb of "Queen" Juana de Castro (d. 1374)

By 1361/2, Blanche died of either poison or neglect and Maria de Padilla, too, died, possibly of the Plague.  Juana de Castro is said to have been deserted by Pedro after their brief 'marriage,' bearing him a son; she would herself die in 1374, and her son would live until 1405.  Thus at Pedro's death he left four documented children:  one by Juana de Castro (abandoned with the strange story of it being because the Pope excommunicated Pedro for abandoning Blanche):  Juana's son Juan (d. 1405) and the three surviving children of Maria de Padilla: Constance, Isabell and Beatrice (nun).

Next up:  the childhood and early adulthood of the children of Pedro and Maria de Padilla. 

History for Ready Reference from the Best Historians, Volume 4
Pedro the Cruel of Castile (Clara Estow)
Kathryn Warner's Edward II Blog
Anna Belfrage's Blog

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???

The Will and Burial of John of Gaunt, 1399

I, John, son of the King of England, Duke of Lancaster, February 3d, 1397. My body to be buried in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, of London, near the principal altar, beside my most dear late wife Blanch, who is there interred. If I die out of London I desire that the night my body arrives there, that it be carried direct to the Friars Carmelites in Fleet Street, and the next day taken strait to St. Paul's, and that it be not buried for forty days, during which I charge my executors that there be no cering or embalming my corpse...

Seal of John of Gaunt, seated, crowned and with royal scepter
and orb.

John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Aquitaine and Guyenne; fourth son of England's Edward III and his lowlands queen, Philippa of Hainaut.  Husband to cousin Blanche of Lancaster, the sometime Infanta of Castile, Constanza, and finally to his longtime mistress, Katherine Roet Swynford.  His progeny would rule considerable areas of northern Europe during the succeeding generations, to wit:

•Henry of Lancaster (of Derby or Monmouth), son of Gaunt by his first wife, who took the throne by right of conquest from his first cousin Richard II;

•Philippa of Lancaster, his daughter by Blanche of Lancaster, who became Queen of Portugal upon her marriage to Joao I of Portugal, cementing the world's longest standing naval treaty, still in force today;

•Catherine of Lancaster, his daughter by the Infanta Constanza, who became Queen of Spain upon her marriage to Enrique III (Trastamara);

•John Beaufort, son by his mistress Katherine, who was raised to the rank of Marquis and was a staunch supporter of the House of Lancaster; his direct line ended in a female -- Margaret Beaufort -- who was, of course, the mother of Henry VII.

•Thomas Beaufort, a capable admiral and loyal supporter of his half-brother, Henry IV, who was noted for his high moral standards.

•Joan Beaufort, his daughter with Katherine Swynford, who made an extremely advantageous second marriage upon legitimation to the Earl of Westmoreland, Ralph Neville.  Their children's lines would be largely decimated in the subsequent Wars of the Roses as their lines split between Lancastrian (as seen on Joan's empty tomb effigy at Staindrop Church and in MS illuminations) and those of Yorkist affiliations (especially descending from Joan's daughter Cecily Neville, the white rose of Raby).

•Henry Beaufort, Bishop, Cardinal and Chancellor of England, son of John and Katherine who has been described as the ablest of the Beauforts. Beaufort's financial astuteness resulted in a well feathered nest for him and those he cared for, including his half-brother the King and his nephew, Henry V.  Beaufort financed to a large degree English military exploits during his adulthood, and was largely responsible, along with his sister Joan, for establishing the Lincoln Cathedral tombs and chantry for Joan and their mother, Katherine.  He was also a seasoned diplomat, meeting with the Hess, and even making a joke about Sweden's St. Birgitta during diplomatic negotiations.

John's personal seal showing the arms of England & France, ancient.

Gaunt's Will. 

Wills are wonderful tools to examine to see what was considered valuable or meaningful or important.  Some are short and perfunctory, some are very legalistic, and others shine light upon the deceased and the people in his or her life.  The will of John of Gaunt is detailed and complex but also gives ample evidence of those who were important in his life as well as some practical matters, as we shall see below.

Probably the most curious aspect of Gaunt's will -- and it was up front in the second sentence of the will -- was the business of the deceased being kept above ground for a considerable period, without benefit of embalming or preservation of the body; in Gaunt's case, the term was for 40 days.  The request seems strange and morbid until one realizes that, in the absence of knowledge gained from modern medicine, someone suffering from some hopefully temporary condition that makes one appear as dead (comatose? catatonic? a stroke?) just might have a vested interest in not being summarily buried alive.  The fear of being buried alive is said to be one of the more common human phobias.  The philosopher John Duns Scotus was reportedly buried alive (although the 14th century tale is likely apocryphal).  Other stories were known, as well:  it seems to have been used for executions in medieval Italy and Japan.  Why would Gaunt have had this fear?

Not all wills carried this provision and one wonders what was on Gaunt's mind.  Biographer Anthony Goodman discusses at some length the various political entanglements afoot towards the end of Gaunt's days:  longstanding conflicts within the royal family were coming to a head, pitting  brother against brother; the proposed marriage and peace treaty with France was one such source of contention.   Gaunt's brother Woodstock was reported to have betrayed their plan to kidnap the king, Gaunt, and brother Langley to remove them from power.  John Beaufort and Henry of Derby were both involved and things got ugly, culminating in Richard's having Woodstock assassinated.  Gaunt evidently had begun to fear Richard with respect to the royal family and his own close kin; as he left Richard's presence a few years earlier to manage crown affairs, he wrote to the king,

I believe and truly hope, my lord, that you have always had such proof [of my loyalty] by experience of all my dealings with you.

Richard was playing a tricky game of appeasement with his uncle.  On the one hand, he was invariably courteous and outwardly supportive: he acceded to Gaunt's wish to have his cherished Beaufort children legitimated.  Richard, who was contemplating his second marriage to Isabella of Valois, was likely not feeling particularly competitive where his Beaufort relations were concerned.  On the other, Gaunt may have lived every day wondering when the assassin -- possibly armed with disabling poison or other substance -- would come for him.  He'd been fighting for the crown of Castile for his wife, and the Castilian court was byzantine at best.  He'd lost his loved palace of the Savoy.  So many vicissitudes may have weighed on his mind as he drew up his will preparatory to breathing his last.  What would happen now to his wife and their four children?

Links:

Buried Alive!
Medieval Persian teenager declared 'dead'

3 February 1399: Death of John of Gaunt

John of Gaunt; a 16th C. Portrait by Corneliz.  Gaunt's heraldic tunic, seen in
the full original,  shows his adoption of the arms of Spain in right of his wife.

Shortly after the New Year, John, called 'of Gaunt' for his birthplace in Ghent, Belgium, son of England's King Edward III and Queen Philippa 'of Hainaut,' acknowledged the ending of his mortal existence and died at Leicester Castle.  He was 58 years old.

He had been ill for months, since at least the prior September when, after his son's unexpected banishment, he had perhaps become weary of his life.  Henry of Derby had thought to go on pilgrimage but held back after reports that his father wasn't likely to live long.

The man described as the last knight never wore a crown of his own but his son and daughters were kings or queens of England, Spain and Portugal.

One happy life achievement happened when he married his longtime mistress, Katherine Swynford, and obtained papal and parliamentary legitimation of their four adult children, the Beauforts, in 1396.  The Duchess Constanza, living largely apart from Gaunt, died in 1394 while Gaunt was abroad and was buried with fitting pomp in the medieval Collegiate Church of Leicester, also the burial place for Gaunt's daughter-in-law, Mary de Bohun, who died within the same year.  The church, no longer extant, had just been established as a Lancastrian favorite by Blanche of Lancaster's father.

Digitally reconstructed interior of the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was the royal chantry chapel of the Dukes of Lancaster in the the Chantry College of the Annunciation of St Mary in the Newarke, Leicester, founded in 1353. (text and information here.

Richard II also lost his wife, Anne of Bohemia, in that year and his grief was well known and may have been a turning point in the development of his personality as well as his relationships with others.

Lilleshall Abbey Lodge

At the close of the year, John of Gaunt, his wife Katherine and squire William Chetwynd, lodged for two evenings at Lilleshall Abbey (January 1398) when Gaunt fell ill with fever following the close of the Shrewsbury Parliament.

Little exists now of the abbey but Gaunt's lodging there, following that of his nephew Richard II, his queen Isabella of Valois, five dukes and three earls there at the beginning of the 24th Parliament doubtless helped revive the abbey from poor financial management.  Gaunt's retinue alone was likely to have been considerable (his visit was recorded as cum familia copius nimis), and his gift to the abbey of  twenty pounds of gold as well as the abbey's admission of John and Duchess Katherine to the abbey's confraternity led to newfound influence of the abbey and in Lancastrian knights' financial support.

Lilleshall Abbey West Front Carving.  Splendid ruins remain of the sandstone building.

The buildings on the east and south sides of the cloister, which lay south of the church, were completed in stone in the late 12th century.... The range contained an outer parlour next to the church, the abbot's or guest hall on the first floor, and the abbot's lodging in a projecting wing near the south end. The first-floor hall may have been a rebuilding of an earlier one, mentioned c. 1272... in the same position. In the early 19th century it was recorded that the hall measured 66 feet by 28 feet; it had a number of small rooms below and a staircase leading to an upper story. Many floor-tiles, some with armorial bearings, were being carried away at that time. Foundations of buildings have been uncovered in the outer court to the south of the cloister but, pending scientific excavation, their function remains unknown. The position of the infirmary has not yet been established and the guest accommodation of the abbey was clearly on a scale that could house, albeit with some difficulty, the huge retinue of John of Gaunt. Traces of the precinct wall have been discovered, but the exact location of the great gate is not known (Source).

G. Vertue; 18th C. Engraving.

From the Shrewsbury Parliament to Lilleshall Abbey, John, Katherine and his retinue continued south to Leceister Castle, where he settled in, signed his will, and passed away after receiving a visit from the King.  Richard's demeanor towards his uncle appears to have changed considerably by the end of Gaunt's life: always outwardly courteous but with a glint of sharp, hardened metal behind his gaze.  It has been widely speculated that Richard's reception of him when he returned from abroad in 1395 while correct, was not cordial, and one naturally ponders Richard's advancing the Beauforts while settling his gaze on their half-brother as *the* threat to his reign.

After extending the banishment of Gaunt's son Henry of Derby from 6 years to life and the confiscation of his inheritance, Richard apparently had one last score to settle with his uncle:  he is said to have met with Gaunt, leaving him with a set of documents.  We will likely never know the contents of those documents, but it is said that Gaunt expired shortly after they were read to him.  All that was left was the execution of his will and his burial next to his first wife in old St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

Wenceslas Hollar engraving of the alabaster double tomb of John of Lancaster
and his wife, Blanche, in St. Paul's.  It was completed in the 1380s.

Links:

Armitage-Smith Biography of Gaunt Online

Lilleshall Abbey History

Images of Lilleshall

Historic England: Lilleshall

Collegiate Church of Newark, Leicester