The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [16]
Lionel’s marriage to Elizabeth de Burgh brought him an Irish earldom and the ancestral lands of the de Burgh family in Ulster, although Ireland was in such chaos that he was never able to exercise more than nominal control over his inheritance. Nevertheless, this was the beginning of the long association between his family and the land and people of Ireland.
Lionel’s daughter Philippa became the wife of Edmund Mortimer, 3rd Earl of March (1352–81). In 1363, on the death of her mother, Philippa became Countess of Ulster in her own right. The House of York would one day base its claim to the throne on its descent from Edward III through Philippa of Clarence, and certainly by the law of primogeniture, after the Black Prince’s line failed, the crown should have passed to the heirs of his next brother, Lionel. But it did not, and this was one of the crucial issues raised during the Wars of the Roses.
The Mortimers were a family of great barons whose chief sphere of influence was along the Welsh border – the Marches. Their principal seats were Wigmore Castle – now a ruin – and Ludlow Castle. Through marriage, they had absorbed the estates of other Marcher barons, the Lacys and the Genvilles. At the peak of their power, in the late fourteenth century, they were the richest of all the magnates and the most powerful family on the Welsh Marches. They owned extensive estates, not only there, but also in Ireland, Wales, Dorset, Somerset and East Anglia. They extended and improved Ludlow Castle, building a magnificent range of domestic apartments which are considered to be the best surviving examples of the domestic quarters of a late mediaeval aristocrat.
Edmund Mortimer had become 3rd Earl of March at the age of eight on his father’s death; he was also Earl of Ulster in right of his wife. In 1379 he was appointed Lieutenant of Ireland, a post held by several of his descendants. His tour of duty there lasted less than three years, but he achieved a great deal in that time. He drowned whilst crossing a ford in Cork in December 1381, leaving his son Roger (1373–98) as his heir.
Edward Ill’s third surviving son was John of Gaunt (1340–99), who became Duke of Lancaster by right of his marriage to his distant cousin Blanche, the heiress of the House of Lancaster, which had been founded by Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster, second son of Henry III, in the thirteenth century. The Duchy of Lancaster was a palatinate, which meant that it was virtually an independent state in which the king’s writ counted for very little.
Gaunt, a tall, lean man of military bearing, was a fabulously wealthy prince. Proud and ambitious, he maintained an impressive establishment organised along the lines of the royal household and staffed by a retinue of 500 persons. He owned vast estates, scattered throughout England and France, thirty castles and numerous manors, and could summon a formidable army of tenants at will. Gaunt’s favourite residences were his London palace of the Savoy, which rivalled Westminster in magnificence but was burned down in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, a place much beloved by his Lancastrian descendants. It is now a ruin, but Gaunt’s magnificent banqueting hall with its huge windows remains.
He loved ceremony and, like most of his class, held to the laws of chivalry as if they were a second religion. He was a cultivated man who loved books, patronised Chaucer, and enjoyed jousting. Dignified, reserved in manner and guarded in conversation, he was also peaceable, rarely exacting revenge for wrongs done to him and looking after his tenants. He was merciful to the humble and compassionate to villeins, or bondsmen, who wanted their freedom and even to lepers, the outcasts