APPENDIX 8

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 III’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).¹ 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).² 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 1379.³

The next two children are slightly more problematic. Various dates and places are popularly given for the birth of Joan.⁴ 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.⁸ Edward’s second son, William, was born at Hatfield in January 1337.⁹ Philippa’s churching feast was held on Sunday 16 February, and so William was probably born in the week ending Sunday 11 January 1337.¹⁰ 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 firstly 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 1399.¹¹ He was married three times, firstly 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 Roët, 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. ¹² He married firstly 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.¹³ 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.¹⁴ John Southeray appears regularly in the records, and there is no doubt that he was an illegitimate son of the king’s.¹⁵ In January 1377 he was knighted and married to Maud, a sister of Lord Percy, the future earl of Northumberland.¹⁶ 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 himself and Joan, is still extant.¹⁷

*

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 III’s sons continued in England in perpetuity.¹⁸

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.¹⁹ 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, Edward III’s descendants were settled 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.²⁰However, 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.

The intermarriage of Edward’s descendants as a result of social expectation was at its height in the fifteenth century. As noted above, of the twenty-one great-grandchildren whose descendants perpetuated Edward’s lineage, ten (48%) married another descendant, implying five of the sixteen marriages in this generation (31%) were intermarriages. But this proportion seems to decline over the centuries. Of all the marriages noted as taking place in the generation alive in and shortly after 1500, less than 13% were to other descendants of Edward III, so far as can be determined. This is surprising at first, until we reflect that it was only a few great families whose children were all expected to marry peers of the realm. The younger sons and daughters of younger sons and daughters of the gentry increasingly married merchants and local yeomen. Even by 1500 merchants and minor gentry were marrying descendants of Edward III. Thus the proportion of intermarriage which took place as a result of social obligation or bias (as opposed to pure chance) decreased, and this decrease was probably continual. Nevertheless, if the 13% of intermarriage around 1500 is taken as a guide, this would have reduced the number of descendants in the generation centred on 1530 by a factor of 100/113. ²¹ Rather than doubling to roughly 872 descendants as implied in the previous calculation, the total would have been around 771. Applying the same corrective factor would have led to a further decline in the increment of the next generation, so that the figure for the generation centred on 1560 would be 1,472 of the population of 2,963,505. If we then apply this corrective factor once more to the increment, we arrive at about 3,424 of the population in 1590 (estimated at 3,895,749) and 7,208 of the population in 1620 (estimated at 4,634,570) as being descended from Edward III. A rough check on the acceptability of these figures is possible. If the twenty-two descendants of Edward’s alive on 1 January 1380 had increased to at least 436 in 1500 (an increase of 20x over 120 years of slowly increasing population levels), a 16.5x increase over the 120 years from 1500 (a period of rapidly increasing population levels) is reasonable, and almost certainly an underestimate, as intended.²²

This implies that maybe up to 99.84% of the population of England was not descended from Edward in 1620. Nevertheless, continuing to use the correction factor of 13% of all marriages between Edward’s descendants being non-accidental status-related intermarriages, we may estimate that the maximum proportions of the population who were not descended from Edward were as follows:

Up to this point we have been adjusting for non-accidental intermarriages in every generation at a level of 13%. However, by 1860 the real level was much less than this. Therefore the percentages in the above table are very considerable overestimates of the population not descended from Edward. Also, from this point onwards, the emerging capitalist society and the railway network mean that, with the exception of remote areas of the country, the corrective factor applies less and less. If we dispense with this factor from now on, the remaining generations work out as follows:

And, following this patterm, we should expect less than 1% of English children born to English-descended parents after 1995 not to be descended from Edward III.

The above working has been exceedingly cautious on several levels. The social bias affecting whom one married did not extend to 13% of all marriages of Edward’s descendants in 1860. The population in that year was about 18,682,352, and the above deliberate underestimate suggests that at least 2,546,348 of these were legitimately descended from Edward. Social considerations of ancestry were of importance to the minority: probably fewer than 100,000 members of the aristocracy, gentry and upper-middle classes (less than 4% of Edward’s descendants). In addition, the model above allows for a far higher level of intermarriage due to social bias in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than was probably the case. The reality is that the upper tiers of society would have become relatively quickly saturated with Edward III’s genes, and thus almost every marriage out of class would have resulted in a dispersal of genes down the social hierarchy. Although the contrast in about 1600 is great – most of the nobility and gentry were descended and yet 99% of all English people were not – the likelihood of anyone alive today having absolutely no gentry or nobility among his or her eleven, twelve or thirteen great-grandparents (eight thousand or so antecedents) is small. Furthermore, we have been working on minima throughout, and totally ignoring illegitimate conception as a factor to be taken into account. Historians tend to put the proportion of illegitimacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at around 5% of all births, so the result of neglecting this 5% increase in the number of Edward’s descendants in each generation, as we have done above, amounts to an underestimate over a two-hundred-year period of roughly a quarter. To correct this we should increase the numbers of descendants at the end of the sixteenth century by 33%. Obviously if by 1600 there were 33% more descendants than estimated in the above model (including many more among the lower classes, reducing the need for a status-connected corrective factor), the proportion of people of English descent alive today who are not descended from Edward would be negligible.

As a result of this we may regard Edward III as being a common ancestor of well over 80% – probably over 95% – of the living English-descended population of England.²³ It is conceivable that there are exceptional areas in some comparatively geographically isolated corners of the country which welcomed few newcomers before recent times and which have remained largely independent of the mobile middle classes, and have had few or no resident landowners, and never served as a port of any sort, and are isolated from the major highways, but there cannot be many of these. Rural and isolated poor farming communities which themselves practised inbreeding on a regular basis would be the most likely instances, and even then they must be considered exceptional if they have entirely avoided the steady march of Edward III’s genes.

Finally, it is worth noting that the above conclusion implies that all the post-Conquest kings of England prior to Edward are also common ancestors of the vast majority of the English, with the exceptions of William II, Stephen and Richard I.²⁴ It also implies that among the common ancestors of the English people are the kings of France before 1314, the kings of Castile before 1252, the counts of Hainault before 1337, the counts of Provence before 1245, the counts of Savoy before 1233, and the dukes of Aquitaine before 1204, not to mention a multitude of earlier French, Italian, Spanish and German noble familes. The same thing may also be said for some of the English magnates who appear in this book. Probably the most notable example is Roger Mortimer, the first earl of March, Edward’s erstwhile enemy, whose twelve children yielded more than thirty-five grandchildren, twenty-two of whom had had progeny by 1380. Time has not permitted an accurate estimate of how many descendants of Roger Mortimer were alive in 1500 but it is very likely to have been many more than the total for Edward III, and they would certainly have been equally widely dispersed across all the English counties. The story told at the beginning of this book – of how Edward III survived and surmounted the terror of the first earl of March – is thus a story in which probably everyone of English descent has a stake. The political history of England up to and including the reign of Edward III is the collective family history of the English people.