APPENDIX 1

Philippa of Hainault’s Date of Birth

THE REGISTER OF Walter Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter, contains a delightful description of a daughter of the count of Hainault, dated 1319, which has long been thought to refer to Philippa.¹ Stapeldon writes that the girl was, according to her mother, aged ‘nine on the next Nativity of St John the Baptist’ (24 June). He mentions that her hair was ‘between blue [i.e. blue-black] and brown’, her eyes were ‘brown and deep’, her forehead large, and her nose was ‘large at the tip’ but not snubbed, and ‘her neck shoulders and all her body and limbs of good form’.² The adjectives used are those of romance literature, with the notable exception that Stapeldon stated she had some off-white teeth.³ Many historians (including the author of Philippa’s article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) have accepted that this relates to Philippa, and have assumed as a result that she was slightly older than Edward, being born in 1310. However, this is incorrect.

For a start, the eldest daughter of the count of Hainault was Margaret, who was born in 1311.⁴ If Philippa had been born before 1311, she would have been in a much stronger position to inherit the county which passed to her sister on the death of their brother William in 1345. But laying this inconclusive argument aside, there are aspects of the actual entry in Stapeldon’s register which should concern us. Although this is in the same hand as the surrounding text, and thus contemporary, the statement that it was Philippa is of later date, in a later hand (probably that of Bishop Grandison), and an insertion in the margin. Therefore the attribution to Philippa is not part of the description. As noted in Chapter One, Stapeldon made two trips to the courts of Flanders and Hainault in 1319: one from January to March, and another in the summer. The reason for the error that Philippa was born in 1310 is a double assumption: that the description relates to Philippa as the insertion suggests, and that the description was made on Stapeldon’s return to England after his first trip in March 1319. If correct, this would mean that the girl he described was born on 24 June 1310. However, this overlooks Stapeldon’s second trip in the summer of 1319. Edward sent Stapeldon back again to see Count William of Hainault, urging the count to pay special heed to ‘certain matters’ which Stapeldon would discuss with him. This second visit was organised before 10 April 1319, the date of Edward II’s letter to Count William.⁵ However, Stapeldon did not receive his letters of safe-conduct – the equivalent of a passport – until 27 May, and at that point he was in the north, at York.⁶ These letters stated he should return from his mission by Michaelmas (29 September). If we then check Stapeldon’s register it appears that his reference to the Hainaulter girl appears on folio 142, after entries for May, June and July 1319.⁷ The description therefore dates from his second trip to Hainault. This took place between 6 July (when he was at Canterbury) and 7 August (when he was in London). He did not return to see the king at York, but returned to the West Country, and sent his report by letter: hence the appearance of a copy in his register.⁸ Therefore his reference to the girl as nine on the ‘next’ 24 June must refer to the next such date after 6 July, i.e. 1320. So we can be sure that the girl he was describing was born in 1311. This was Count William’s eldest daughter, Margaret, who was born in that year, as mentioned above. It would follow that Stapeldon was looking over Margaret of Hainault for the possible marriage to Edward, not Philippa. Other documents confirm that Count William wrote to the pope on 10 December 1318 seeking dispensation for Margaret of Hainault to be married to Edward.⁹ Although permission for the marriage was granted by the pope in 1321, as stated in Chapter One, nothing came of the attempt. By the time of Edward’s visit to Hainault in 1326, Margaret had been married for eighteen months to Ludvig of Bavaria, the future Holy Roman Emperor; hence she never became Edward’s bride.

As a result we may be sure of several things: that Margaret was Edward’s first intended bride, and that the description is of her, and that the clerk who inserted the note that Stapeldon’s description related to Philippa was doing so on an assumption that only one daughter of the count’s was proposed as Edward’s marriage partner. We may also be confident that Margaret’s birthdate was 24 June 1311. It follows that it is very unlikely that Philippa was born before April 1312. In this context it is worth returning to older narratives, which suggest that she was younger than Edward. Froissart, who knew her in her later years, asserted that she was in her fourteenth year at the time of her marriage in 1328.¹⁰ This implies that she was born between 25 January 1314 and 24 January 1315, and thus about three years younger than her sister Margaret, and about two years younger than Edward.