Joan

Born in the Tower of London on the 5th July in 1321 was Joan, the youngest of the four children of Edward II of England and Isabella of France.

Joan was born into a country fraught with tension. What started out as a feud eventually escalated into civil war - this feud was the result of Joan's father's reliance on the Despensers a father and son history would call 'the Younger' -he was a royal favourite. This war came to an end following the Battle of Boroughbridge in March of the following year with the execution of Thomas of Lancaster and the exile of both Despencers. However, the Despencers were to return as favourites until the end of Edward's reign.

When Joan was just seven she was contracted to marry David of Scotland, the four-year-old son of Robert the Bruce. This marriage formed part of the Treaty of Northampton. Under the terms of the treaty, England recognised Scotland's independence and Robert the Bruce as king. For their part, the Scots would pay an agreed sum of money to end the war.

Poor Joan entered into this unhappy marriage on the 17th July 1328 and was crowned as a Scottish queen the next year. David as king was an English sympathiser and disliked in Scotland and history sees him as a disastrous leader. On a personal level, he was a womaniser but left on illegitimate offspring. It's is hard to say what Joan had to put up with during her thirty-four-year marriage to the Scottish king however the answer may lay in the fact that following his release from his eleven-year captivity in England Joan chose not to accompany him back to Scotland.

Where Joan lived during the last five years of her life is unknown, she may have lived at Castle Rising, one of her mother's properties however by 1358 she was living with her mother at Hertford Castle. I wonder what these two women talked of during their time together? Did they discuss the subject of living with men they cared little for or Joan's time as Queen of the Scots or Isabella's affair with Roger Mortimer? Oh to be a fly on the wall!

By the summer of 1358, Joan was caring for her dying mother who succumbed to death that year. Joan continued to live at Hertford Castle until her own death of the black plague in 1362.

She was buried in Christ Church Greyfriars, London. Her tomb no longer exists.