Child of the Phoenix (161 page)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

T
he story of Eleyne of Mar is the result of a pilgrimage deep into the remote archives of my family, and is a part of a legend with which I grew up. This legend told of romance and excitement in Scotland in the time of Robert the Bruce and Isobel of Buchan, which I first wrote about in
Kingdom of Shadows
. It was while researching the historical sections of that novel that I realised how closely Eleyne (or Helen or Ellen), the great- grandmother of Isobel and the mother of Isabella, Robert’s first wife, was bound up with their story and I began to wonder what kind of a woman she was. It was the start of a quest which turned out to be convoluted and full of irreconcilable puzzles and which led in the end to the writing of this novel.

Like any good detective I began my research into Helen’s life with the part I already knew, or thought I knew, when she was the Countess of Mar. Thirteenth-century Scotland is fairly well documented. There are chronicles, there are records, there is the wonderful narrative poem ‘The Bruce’, written by John Barbour, the Archdeacon of Aberdeen, only seventy or so years after the siege of Kildrummy. I felt it would be easy to find out about ‘Helen’ and her world.

There she was, in the Peerage: ‘Donald, Earl of Mar m. Helen, widow of Malcolm, Earl of Fife (who d. 1266), and da. of Llywelyn, Prince of North Wales. She was living in Feb. 1294/5.’ The entry under Fife confirms her name. It was those words ‘daughter of Llywelyn’ which intrigued me. How had this daughter of a Welsh prince ended up the great-grandmother of a Scots king?

I was to discover, however, that there are very few mentions of her extant in original records. One of the few is to be found in the Pipe Roll of King Edward I where we have, in an account by Walter de Cambo of the Issues of Lands and Tenements belonging to Duncan, Earl of Fife: ‘
Et Elenae, comitissae de Mar, pro parte dotis suae
xl s. per idem tempus
’, an entry which is repeated a few months later, and lists the ‘pension’ which followed Ellen/Helen into her last marriage. This entry was brief, but appeared to establish her existence beyond any doubt. It was a start. But how had this daughter of Wales reached Scotland in the first place?

I turned to Welsh history. There were two Llywelyns who might be called ‘Prince of North Wales’, although the term was not strictly used for either of them. Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, or Llywelyn the Great, was Prince of Aberffraw and Lord of Snowdon. He was the ruler of Gwynedd and so could be said to have been Prince of North Wales. Then there was his grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, who in the latter part of his rule was to call himself Prince of Wales. The former appeared to be the most likely candidate for Helen’s father and there indeed in all the textbooks and family trees was the information that Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and his wife, Joan, had a daughter called Ellen or Helen. Her brother and two of her sisters were married to de Braoses, a fact which I registered with a shock of recognition as I had become so familiar with that family while researching
Lady of Hay
. Ellen/Helen herself was married to John the Scot, Earl of Huntingdon and Chester. This seemed at once to establish a Scots connection, albeit a somewhat tenuous one. I read on.

Ellen/Helen married John in 1222. But my Scots Ellen/Helen married the Earl of Mar sometime after 1266 and went on to bear him five children. If she was the same person the dates did not fit unless she married John of Huntingdon as a baby. There is a great deal of information available about this wedding between the daughter of Prince Llywelyn and the heir to the great and powerful earldom of Chester. We know where and when, we know some of the gifts, we know who the witnesses were. But nowhere does it say the bride was a baby or even a child or that the wedding was by proxy. By now doubting that this could after all be my Ellen/ Helen I read on about the Countess of Huntingdon, looking for clues. There were for instance no children by this marriage. That would fit if most of it was spent growing up. If she was a small child in 1222, at her husband’s death in 1237 she would have been in her teens. Of course there could be many reasons for her childlessness, such as his ill health – he was a comparatively young man when he died. (It was later that I was to find the intriguing information that at the time she was suspected of having procured his death by poison.)

The records chart Ellen/Helen’s removal to Chester Castle, where she was to be kept in honourable and fitting state until Henry decided what to do with her, and her swift remarriage to Robert de Quincy. We read from the Dunstable annalist the remark about Llywelyn’s indignation at the haste of the wedding and at his new son-in-law’s low rank. We learn of her two daughters and can determine their ages. We know about Joanna’s marriage, we lose track of Hawisa while still a minor shortly after her father’s death. We know that Robert de Quincy took the Cross (but not if he actually went to the Holy Land) and we know when he died.

I assumed that at this point, if Ellen/Helen was my Ellen/Helen, she would now have remarried for the third time, on this occasion to Malcolm, Earl of Fife. There would have been plenty of time then for her to have had two sons by him before he died in 1266.

But no.

Following the records further, I found that in 1253 the story of the Countess of Huntingdon and Chester abruptly ended when her dower lands were redistributed amongst her heirs. The obvious inference was that she was dead and I must admit I was very disappointed. I had become fascinated with my Welsh Ellen/Helen and now I was left, so it seemed, with two Ellen/Helens and an unbridgeable gap between them.

Where to go from there?

Families in medieval times commonly and confusingly had siblings with the same Christian name. Did Llywelyn ap Iorwerth have two daughters called Ellen? Back came an unequivocal answer from North Wales, no, although at this point some information emerged about an interesting variation on Welsh Ellen’s birth. Two sources, one collected in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, state that she was not Joan’s daughter, as all the modern history books said, but the eldest daughter of Tangwystl, Llywelyn’s mistress or first wife. (Margaret and Gwladus were also, according to this source, daughters of Tangwystl.) This record does agree however that she married John the Scot. Intriguing, but the authorities who claim the three girls as Joan’s daughters seem to outnumber those who uphold that they were Tangwystl’s.

At this point I took a step back to take a more oblique look at Welsh history. There were at least a dozen Llywelyns, lesser princelings and lords, extant at the relevant period. Could my Scots Ellen/Helen be the daughter of one of them, and had he become transmogrified over the centuries into ‘the’ Llywelyn by her descendants?

I put this idea on hold whilst considering the other major contender for the title of Llywelyn, Prince of North Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd. I had at first discounted him because, as far as the majority of history books and records are concerned, he had only one child, the unfortunate Gwenllian who died without issue. But…

In a collection of traditional Welsh pedigrees in the College of Arms in London, consulted for me by Peter Gwynn-Jones, the Lancaster Herald, there are at least two which contain a record of Llywelyn’s marriage to Eleanor, daughter of Simon de Montfort, and go on to speak of their only child, Catherine Lackland, who married first Philip ap Ifor and second MALCOLM, EARL OF FIFE!

Catherine?

This was a shock. And it couldn’t be right! Llywelyn married Eleanor in 1278, twelve years after Malcolm died! Perhaps Catherine was a bastard daughter of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, conceived in his youth? (That might explain her name of Lackland.) Works based on pedigrees in the National Library of Wales do not mention her at all, speaking only of Gwenllian.

I was by now feeling very confused. Obviously there had been a marriage between some member of the house of Gwynedd and Malcolm, Earl of Fife. At the Scots end, the lady’s name was believed to have been Ellen/Helen; at the Welsh end, the only actual mention of Malcolm of Fife is linked with a putative daughter of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, called Catherine.

It seemed to be a good time to return to the Scots records and once again to consult the experts, confronting them with Catherine. There is quite a lot of information in existence about the Mar family at that date. We know Donald was knighted rather late in life (but not why). We know who his children were and whom they married. Obviously their close relationship with the Bruces is well documented. We know Alexander was kept in the Tower (the cost of the Scots nobles and their retinues ‘staying’ in the Tower after the Battle of Dunbar was noted in Edward I’s account book as being £407 6s. ½d) and we know he is not heard of again. But sadly it proved impossible to learn any more than I already knew about Donald’s wife, namely that she was Malcolm’s widow, that her name was Ellen or Helen and that she was a daughter of a Llywelyn.

It was frustrating, the more so when I learned that many of the charters of the noble families of Scotland had been taken by Oliver Cromwell and had been lost in a storm in the Forth on their way to England. Amongst these, gone forever, were perhaps the very documents which might have mentioned Ellen of Fife, her origins and her marriage to Donald of Mar.

I should have been dismayed, but by this time the strange alchemy had begun by which a fictional character is born. Based on legend or fact, one person or two, Eleyne, my Eleyne (or Ellen or Helen), was beginning to stir. And yes, she was the daughter of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and Joan. And yes, she had four husbands, in a life which spanned nearly a century, and yes, she had nine children, at least. And, yes, in 1253 her dower lands had been redistributed. But seizing on the fact that nowhere did it actually say that she had died at that point, an alternative reason for this drastic action began to present itself and a novel was born.

I kept reminding myself that I am neither genealogist, nor historian, nor biographer. I am a novelist. My Eleyne, though based loosely on fact, was fiction. Probably I would never know the truth about her, so all I could do was listen to the story which she was beginning to whisper in my ear.

Her love affair with Alexander was her idea – it formed no part of my original synopsis. But time and again I found the facts, where they could be checked, fitted exactly the story she was dictating so insistently in my head. Alexander II did indeed have many lady friends – why not Eleyne? He had several bastard children, why could she too not carry his babies? Her heroic role, her triumphs and her failures, all came from her. And as for ghosts and predictions, Michael the Scot and Thomas of Ercildoune are part of Scots history, as are their predictions of Alexander III’s doom. Even the ghost at his wedding is recorded in the chronicles – a story retold with lip-licking gusto by Hector Boece: But flesche and blude, haiffand nocht ellis than,

At that mariage tak tent I sall tell

So greit ane wounder on ane nycht befell …

Into the figure that tyme of ane man,

But flesche or blude, haiffand nocht ellis than,

Bot like ane bogill all of ratland banis …

And as tha stude to farlie on that thing,

So laithlie wes thair in the candill licht

Richt suddanlie it vaneist out of sicht.

Also from Eleyne came the prompt that her marriage to Robert was unhappy – nothing in the records says as much. All we have to go on is the difference in their rank, her father’s disapproval of the marriage and umpteen references to the endless litigation in which they were engaged – they were forever fighting their neighbours over boundaries and rents which conveys an impression that at least one of them was quarrelsome (and by now I was too partisan to believe it could have been Ellen/Helen).

There is always, in handling a historical theme, a conflict between the promptings of fiction and the actualities of fact. Reconciling them without compromising historical accuracy too much is part of the joy and the nightmare of writing a novel like this. I hope I have succeeded in making an enjoyable and credible story, but please, no examination theses based on Eleyne’s life!

As portrayed here I now think Eleyne probably did not exist. She is a composite; a family legend of the type which converts dingy oil paintings into Rembrandts and Victorian paste beads into aquamarines. But, if the two Ellen/Helens were indeed the same person she must have been a woman cast in the mould of Eleanor of Aquitaine – tough, fertile, healthy and long-lived! She would have been a formidable lady. Whoever she was she is an ancestor of whom I’m extremely proud.

The spelling of Elyne is taken from the form of the name adopted by my great-aunt when she copied the pedigrees from her grandfather’s version. It survived in the Erskine family, the descendants of Eleyne’s grand-daughter, as Elyne, which is, I suspect, a Victorian etymological amalgam or mis-spelling and as such admirably suits my enigmatic and evasive heroine.

Preview

A lost child in the Welsh borders;
a violent attack in London;
an epic battle between the Celts and the Romans.

What can possibly link them?

Read on for an extract from
BARBARA ERSKINE’S

thrilling new novel,

The Warrior’s Princess