King Alexander II married Joan of England on 21st June 1221, although one source says June 25th, another the 19th.
Joan was the oldest of daughter of King John and his 2nd wife, Isabella of Angoulême. Born in July 1210 she was the 3rd of 5 children; she had 2 older brothers and 2 younger sisters would join the family by 1215.
Joan’s story is quite remarkable, and I am going to concentrate on part of her life before she became the wife of Alexander.
An agreement was made that she was to married to Alexander, perhaps before she was even born, definitely by aged two it was on the cards, but the King of England, John broke off the engagement when he found his daughter another husband, this time in France.
The new groom was Hugh of Lusignan, Count of La Marche in south-west France. Which is why, at the tender age of seven, Joan left England to join him with her r mother.
King John had died the previous year, 1216, leaving Isabelle a newly minted widow. The Queen saw no future for herself in England. She was never meant to go there in the first place. As a child, Isabelle was betrothed to the old Lord of Lusignan. Had King John not stepped in, that marriage would have gone ahead. But now John was dead; so was the old Count and his son (so nearly Isabelle’s stepson) was waiting to marry her daughter.
Going back to Angoulême, where she was Countess in her own right, and Isabelle could be mistress in her own house – with the added bonus of her daughter little Joan as her new neighbour.
The plan fell apart when Queen Isabelle arrived home, completely overshadowing her daughter. It didn’t take long for Hugh to realise he was wasting his time waiting for Joan to grow up when the mother was back on the marriage market – a queen, rich, fertile, and the right side of 30.
It’s seems like a headline for a tabloid newspaper, but yes the groom really did jilt his bride to marry her mother!
The full story goes that Isabelle married her daughter’s fiancé – ostensibly to save little Joan from the perils of early marriage and childbearing. “God knows”, Isabelle wrote to her son Henry III in England “that we did this for your benefit rather than our own”.
Outmanoeuvred, the English government resurrected the old plan to marry Joan off to Alexander, her first fiancé. The problem, of course, was that the bride was not to hand.
No matter how much the government demanded Joan’s return, Hugh and Queen Isabelle held all the cards. They used the little princess as leverage to strike a good financial deal, and even then only handed her back when the Pope got involved. But Joan’s mother and new stepfather could not be persuaded to return her dowry, which stayed with them in France.
Back in England, Joan had a few months to get reacquainted with the rest of her family. Then she travelled north to meet Alexander, ten years her senior and King of Scots. The couple were married in York in June 1221, with the English king paying for three days of celebrations. The marriage sealed the new friendship between the two kingdoms, with Joan at the heart of not one but two royal families. The Scottish chronicles described how their “lord king returned to his country a happy man with his wife”.
While no one expected an eleven-year-old girl to produce a child, expectations were higher ten years on. We are told Joan had grown by then into “an adult of comely beauty”. But still, there was no child. This meant that Joan had no real ties to Scotland beyond her husband, and Alexander’s need for an heir was starting to put the marriage under strain.
Joan was very close to her brother King Henry III, who was only three years her senior, and he gave her the means to live independently in England as and when she wanted.
Henry himself was married to Eleanor of Provence, although that marriage showed no sign of a child either. In late 1237, the two sisters in law went on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Both young queens prayed for an heir. The difference was that Joan, of course, had no chance of conceiving when she was so far away from her husband – and she had critics even in England who thought it wrong for a wife to live so far from her husband.
Even so, Queen Joan spent Christmas in England. Her family gave her new robes and wine for the festive season. She was preparing to return to her husband when she fell ill. Joan failed to recover and died on 4th March 1238 with her brothers at her side. She was only 27.
As Queen of Scotland, Joan’s body would normally be returned there for burial. But she asked for her body to go to Tarrant Abbey on the south coast of England (which is as far from Scotland as is geographically possible). The feeling was mutual and, not surprisingly, she was soon forgotten in her husband’s kingdom.
Saint Margaret of Scotland, queen to King Malcolm III, is probably one of the most famous women in Scottish history, and the country’s only royal saint. As a granddaughter of Edmund Ironside and the sister of Edgar Aetheling, she was an eleventh-century princess of England’s pre-Norman royal family, the House of Wessex, who though she allegedly wished at first to be a nun, ended up marrying the Scottish king c.1070. As queen of Scotland, she is credited with helping revitalise the life of the Church in the country (founding many churches, such as that which later became Dunfermline Abbey, and helping revive interest in things like the shrine of Saint Andrew) as well as bringing the it more in line with the Roman tradition, and also with helping to transform the kingdom in a more secular sense. She was also the mother of three (possibly four) kings of Scotland and one queen of England, as well as being the grandmother, through her two daughters, of the Empress Maud and her rival King Stephen’s wife Queen Matilda of Boulogne. Little wonder, then that she has remained famous and revered as a holy woman since even her own lifetime over nine hundred years ago.
As a girl, Margaret may have spent some time at a nunnery- probably Wilton Abbey, Salisbury- and grew to be a very learned woman. To this end she possessed several books of which only two survive- a psalter in Edinburgh and this Gospel-Book, possibly her favourite of them all, which now resides in the Bodleian at Oxford. After Margaret’s death, the book passed through many different people’s hands, gradually becoming disassociated with its saintly owner, so that, by the late nineteenth century, when it arrived at the Bodleian, having been bought comparatively cheaply and (inaccurately) dated to the fourteenth century. However in 1887 a young woman named Lucy Hill, through the studying of a poem inscribed at the front of the book, realised that what she was holding was nothing other than Saint Margaret’s own Gospel-Book and, happily, brought her findings to light.
But the book is not simply remarkable for having been thought lost for so long. It is also rare in that it is the subject of a particular allegedly miraculous event- in memory of which, the poem was inscribed at the front of the book and, perhaps more importantly, the poem matches up with a story told in the biography of Margaret written by Turgot at the request of her daughter Queen Matilda (or Edith). The story goes that St Margaret’s Gospel-Book (at that time with a cover of jewels and gold, though since replaced with a leather one), whilst being carried on a journey, slipped unnoticed from its holdings and fell into a fast-flowing river. When it was eventually recovered, the onlookers were sure that, with its silk covers washed away, its pages would be completely ruined but in an apparent miracle it was undamaged save for some slight moistening of the edges (and indeed, some water-staining on the manuscript would seem to support the tale). Thereafter, it is said that Margaret cherished it more than before with the result that the book now held by the Bodleian could very well be St Margaret of Scotland’s favourite book.
But even without its miraculous story, the book would still have been extremely precious to its owner. Books were expensive and difficult to make in those days- since there was no paper available in England at the time, the parchment had to be made from animal skin, which had to go through an extremely arduous process before it could be written on. The scribe then would have had a tremendous amount of work to do when he or she came to write it, and the elaborate decoration of the words and pages are also testament to someone’s hard work. And to historians it is doubly precious in that it is a short, selective, Gospel-Book intended to be small and easily carried making it an extremely personal item in contrast to the full versions of the Gospel which Margaret may also have owned. The selections of texts in it tell us a lot about the Queen’s piety- for example, the large number of tales regarding women such as Martha and Mary Magdalene.
Therefore, even if you’re not the type to believe in miracles, the identification and survival of St Margaret’s Gospel-Book is something of a miracle for history in itself- it’s existence gives us, in a way very few other things could, a glimpse into the mind of, and a physical link to, one of Scotland’s most remarkable queens.
* And there were a LOT of remarkable Scottish queens. The picture above is not mine, sorry. It is worth noting that a copy of the Gospel-Book may be found in St Margaret’s Chapel at Edinburgh castle as well. For references, see Richard Oram’s ‘Domination and Lordship’, Rebecca Rushforth’s book on the Gospel-Book, and others.
