Edward III and his Many Children
-Chrissie

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            King Edward III caused two of the major wars in Medieval English history: the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses. We’ll dive into both of these in future episodes; right now we’re going to look at how Edward (inadvertently) laid the groundwork for civil war between his descendants.

            Edward was crowned at age 14, on 25 January 1327. His first three years were spent acting as a figurehead for his mother, Isabella of France, and her lover, Roger Mortimer, who had overthrown his father and predecessor, Edward II. A few days before his eighteenth birthday in November 1330, Edward pushed off Mortimer and his mother and asserted control of the kingdom on his own. In that same year his wife, Philippa of Heinault, gave birth to their first child, a son named Edward. Over the next 25 years, they produced twelve more children, of whom nine survived to adulthood.

            For his daughters, he arranged marriages to English and foreign nobility. His second-eldest daughter, Joan of England, was betrothed to Pedro of Castille, but died en route to her wedding. Of the daughters, only the eldest, Isabelle of England, produced any children; two daughters were only tangential to the later political upheavals.

            For his sons, King Edward created aristocratic positions and found very rich heiresses for their wives. The dukedoms of Clarence, Lancaster, York, and Gloucester were all created to assure the later boys a position and income, and to place them in fealty to their brother the heir, Edward the Black Prince. This was not, on its own, a problematic arrangement, but circumstances created a situation by which these sons’ descendants could all make legitimate claims to the throne. As historian Allison Wier says in her book on the subject, “he brought into being a race of powerful magnates related by blood to the royal line, whose descendants would ultimately challenge each other for the throne itself.”[1]

            The eldest son, and heir, Edward, Prince of Wales, the Black Prince, was raised to succeed his father as King of England and (it was hoped) France. He was married to Joan of Kent and they produced two sons, one who died in infancy and the other, Richard, who succeeded his grandfather on the English throne.

            The second son, Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence, was married to Elizabeth de Burgh, heiress to the Irish territory of Ulster. They had only one child, a daughter named Philippa of Clarence. She is the basis of the legitimacy claim for the House of York through later intermarriage with descendants of Lionel’s brother, Edmond, Duke of York. The Yorkists point to Philippa because, as the daughter of the second son, her descendants had a stronger claim than those of Edmond, who was the fourth son.

            The third son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, produce two English royal houses: Lancaster and Tudor. His first marriage, to Blanche of Lancaster, produced two daughters, Philippa and Elizabeth, and one son, Henry of Bolingbroke, John’s heir and later King Henry IV. His second marriage to Constance of Castille produced one daughter, Katherine, who became Queen of Castille. His third and last marriage was to his mistress of over 25 years, Katherine Swynford, with whom he already had four children, who were given the surname Beaufort after one of John’s properties. These children were legitimized by Richard II, creating a royal claim via Edward III’s third son. The eldest, John Beaufort, is the origin of the claim by the Tudor family via his granddaughter Margaret Beaufort, who married Owen Tudor and produced Henry VII.

            The fourth son, Edmond of Langly, Duke of York, married Isabella of Castille (sister of John of Gaunt’s second wife) and produced three children: Edward, Richard, and Constance. It is Edmond’s son Richard who marries the granddaughter of Lionel, thereby giving the Yorkists a better claim via the bloodline of the second, rather than the fourth, son.

            The youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, was instrumental in the overthrow of his nephew Richard II. His descendants supported various family members on both sides of the Wars of the Roses but did not make claims on the throne.

            Medieval English inheritance operated by a principle of primogeniture, meaning the eldest son inherits and the later sons do not. Edward the Black Prince was heir to the throne and should have succeeded his father, but he died a year before Edward III. The position of heir fell to the Black Prince’s son and Edward III’s grandson, Richard, rather than Edward’s second son, Lionel. At the time, this was the expected succession and, even though the newly-crowned Richard II was only ten years old, there was little to no dispute. It wouldn’t remain that way.

[1] Allison Weir, The Wars of the Roses, electronic edition, p. 36.