The Perfect King (85 page)

The
Descendants
of
Edward
III

Edward is generally credited with twelve legitimate and three illegitimate children. For obvious reasons, there is far greater certainty about the names and vital dates of his legitimate offspring, but even with these there is confusion. If the plethora of Internet sites which deal with royal genealogy can be taken as a good gauge of popular understanding, then there is certainly widespread doubt about whether there was a thirteenth legitimate child, Thomas, or even a fourteenth, Joan. There is also confusion about the dates of birth of the fifteen known children. Finally, and of relevance in considering Edward
LTI's
legacy, there is the question about how many descendants he had, and whether he is in fact the last royal common ancestor of the English people.

There is no doubt about the vital dates of Edward of Woodstock, later known as the Black Prince, who was born on
15
June
1330
and died at Westminster on
8
June
1376.
He married Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent in
1361
and had by her two legitimate children, Edward
(1365—1371)
and Richard II
(1367-1400).
He also had at least two illegitimate sons, Edward (fl
.1349;
presumed to have died young) and Sir Roger Clarendon (d
.1402).
Thus it is only from his illegitimate offspring that any line of his descended.

Isabella of Woodstock was probably born on
16
June
1332
(not in March as sometimes claimed). She was promised as a bride to a large number of heirs, including Louis, son of the count of Flanders
(1335),
a son of the duke of Brabant
(1344),
the Emperor Charles
(1349),
and Bernard, eldest son of Lord Albret
(1351).
She finally married Enguerrand or Ingelram de Coucy, a hostage at Edward's court, in
1365.
She had two daughters by him, Mary and Philippa, and died before
4
May
1379.

The next two children are sli
ghtly
more problematic. Various dates and places are popularly given for the birth of Joan. The nearest we can come to an exact date is to use the record of her mother's 'churching', which took place at Woodstock on
8-10
March
1334.
5
As
9
March
1334
was not a Sunday but a Wednesday, it probably marked an exact forty or eighty days after the birth, which would imply that Joan was born on either
28
January
1334
or
19
December
1333.
6
Edward made allowance for her and his other two children on
6
March of that year.
7
She
died of plague in the summer of
1348,
on
1
July, on her way to marry the heir of King Alfonso of Castile.
Edward's second son, William, was born at Hatfield in January
1337.
Philippa's churching feast was held on Sunday
16
February, and so William was probably born in the week ending Sunday
11
January
1337.
He died before
3
March
1337
and was buried in York Minster.

The next three children are, after the Black Prince, the most famous. Lionel was born at Antwerp on
29
November
1338.
He firsdy married Elizabeth de Burgh in
1342
and had one daughter, Philippa, through whom her descendants, the earls of March, claimed the throne. He died at Alba (Italy) on
17
October
1368,
shortly after his second marriage to Violante Visconti. John was born at Ghent in early February
1340
and died at Leicester
Castle
on
3
or
4
February
1399."
H
e was married three times, firstl
y in
1359
to Blanche, the daughter of Henry, duke of Lancaster, by whom he had three surviving children, including the future King Henry IV, and four who died young; secondly to Constanza of Castile, by whom he had a daughter, Catalina, and a son who died young; and thirdly to his mistress, Catherine de Roet, widow of Sir Hugh Swynford, by whom he had three sons and a daughter. Edmund was born at Langley on
5
June
1341
and died at the same place on
1
August
1402.
He married firstl
y Isabella of Castile, by whom he had three children, and secondly Joan of Holland, by whom he had none.

Edward's next four children all died without offspring. Blanche of the Tower was born and died in March
1342
and was buried at Westminster Abbey. Mary was born at Waltham on
10
October
1344
and married to the duke of Brittany in
1361;
Margaret was born on
20
July
1346
and married to the earl of Pembroke in
1359.
Both Mary and Margaret died after
1
October
1361
and were buried in Abingdon Abbey. William was born at Windsor in late May
1348.
Philippa's churching took place on Tuesday
24
June
1348,
and so William was probably born on or after 15
May.
He was buried on
5
September at Westminster Abbey.

As mentioned above, one does come across references to another son, Thomas, supposedly born at Windsor in the summer of
1347.
This is a mistake. Philippa was not at Windsor in the summer of
1347
but at Calais with Edward. Furthermore, if she had been at Windsor, the child could not have been sired by Edward, who had been in France since July
1346.
As Philippa did not join him until shortly before Christmas
1346,
no legitimate offspring could have been born before August
1347,
which is the probable date of conception of William of Windsor. The reference to Thomas is therefore almost certainly spurious, possibly based on Froissart's reference to Philippa being pregnant at the surrender of Calais. The child is supposed to have been buried at King'
s Langley. Given the absence of
reference to any churching in the records, and no apparent image of another boy on the paintings of the family at St Stephen's Chapel at Westminster, nor a weeper on Edward's tomb (as there were for all the others, including the deceased infants) we can rule out the existence of a son called Thomas before
1355.

Edward's last son by Philippa, Thomas, was born at Woodstock on
7
January
1355.
He married Eleanor Bohun, by whom he had five children, and died at Calais in September
1397.

Finally, Edward had three illegitimate children by Alice Perrers - Sir John Southeray, and two daughters, Joan and Jane. It is impossible that the abbot of Westminster, Nicholas Lytlington, was Edward's
bastard offspring.
John Southeray appears regularly in the records, and there is no doubt that he was an
illegitimate son of the king's.
In January
1377
he was knighted and married to Maud, a sister of Lord Percy, the
future earl of Northumberland.
In the arrangements for this wedding a payment is made for his 'sisters'. Much less is known of them. They were still young at the time of Edward's death. Jane married Richard Northland, about whom almost nothing is known. Joan married a lawyer called Robert Skerne from Kingston-upon-Thames. He died in
1437,
and the fine brass memorial he ordered to be made, which shows him
self and Joan, is still extant.

By
1500
many English earls and barons were descendants of Edward III, and so were many Iberian noble families. By
1600
almost the entire English gentry were his descendants. By
1900
hundreds of thousands of people could demonstrate their descent from him. Therefore it is a fair question whether Edward is the last king to be a common ancestor of the English people.

It is of course, impossible to answer this through tracing every single family offshoot. Records do not exist for the vast majority of people born before the mid-sixteenth century, and even some very high-born individuals' families are shrouded in medieval mist. However, it is possible to estimate reasonably accurately whether this statement might be true. By tracing his descendants to a point in time where they constitute a group, with a distinguishable range of social and geographical features as well as predictable nuptial and paternal behaviour, we may then start to make observations about the descendants of Edward III as a subset of the English people as a whole.

Of Edward's twelve legitimate children, only six themselves had children. Together they had at least twenty-four legitimate (or legitimised) children: Prince Edward had two, Isabella two, Lionel one, John eleven, Edmund three, and Thomas five. Prince Edward's legitimate line died out with this generation, but the others carried on. Lionel had four legitimate grandchildren, Isabella one, John at least forty-four, Edmund eight, and Thomas eight. Not all of these survived, of course, and some were born abroad, especially in Portugal (following the marriage of John's daughter Philippa to King John I of Portugal). But twenty-one of them ensured that the bloodlines of four of Edward Ill's sons conti
nued in England in perpetuity.

If we trace the descendants of these twenty-one great-grandchildren we may establish that Edward
III
had at least
436
descendants alive in England in the year
1500.
This is a minimum, excluding all three of Edward's illegitimate children (whose lines are difficult to trace) and all but four lines of descent from an illegitimate descendant (only including those cases where an illegitimate descendant was recognised and ennobled), and excluding all lines descended from those who married overseas or married into Scottish and Welsh families. It also excludes a number of very young children who might have been born by
1500
but probably were not (dates of birth being difficult to determine in several cases). Many more descendants were alive in Portugal, France, Spain and
Scotland
and a handful in Ireland and Wales, but these have been excluded in the following calculations. It is important at every step to underestimate the number of descendants flourishing in England to reduce the risk of error or exaggeration, so although the actual number of descendants was certainly much greater than
436,
possibly in excess of a thousand, the minimum number has been used.

The population of England in
1500
was about
2.75
million.
Therefore, as a proportion of the English population, Edward's descendants amounted to at least this fraction:
436/2,750,000.
This does not sound very impressive, but over time the proportion increased steadily. Moreover, we must consider the social privilege and geographical circumstances of the
436.
Whereas the descendants of a fourteenth-century Cornish tin miner would be unlikely to have spread very far from Cornwall by
1500,
let alone to have reached into the upper classes in other counties, Ed
ward Ill's descendants were settl
ed in almost every county in England and in all the higher ranks of society. The propensity of the gentry to intermarry their heirs among other gentry families in neighbouring counties meant that the heads of most gentry families would have been descended from Edward by
1600.

If all things were equal - if every woman in England was as likely to marry any man as any other, and vice versa - one could say that the maximum proportion of the English who were
not
descended from Edward one generation after
1500
(roughly
1530)
would be

[1-(
436 / 2.75 million)]
2
= 99.9683%

and one generation after that, approximately
1560,
the proportion would be
(99.9683%
x
99.9683%) = 99.9366%.
On this basis way we might say that at least
1,879
of the English population in
1560
(estimated at
2,963,505)
were descended from Edward
III
.
However, there is a problem in that there were considerable social obstacles which prevented any man from marrying any woman. Although Edward's genes had seeped into the gentry of most counties by
1500
- from Devon to Norfolk and Northumberland - there were significant social barriers which prevented the children of rich fathers from marrying members of the working classes and vice versa. This issue affects the rate of increase of Edward's legitimate descendants in the following way. If the daughter of an earl or a duke was restricted to marrying someone of similar status, then her husband, of course, would have been more likely than not also to be descended from Edward III. Where this happened, two of Edward's decendants would have given rise to one family, not two.