Philippa of Clarence, the only legitimate child of Lionel of Antwerp and his wife Elizabeth de Burgh, 4th Countess of Ulster, was born on 13 August 1355. She was the maternal ancestress that gave the Yorks their claim to the English throne, and the unsuspecting progenitor of the Wars of the Roses.
Lionel of Antwerp was the second surviving son of King Edward III, and as the granddaughter of a king — as well as the heiress of the Earldom of Ulster though her mother — young Philippa was a quite the marital catch. When she was 13, she wed Edmund Mortimer, 3rd Earl of March, a nobleman with large estates in the Welsh Marches who was helping her grandfather keep Wales from breaking free of English occupation. Philippa and Mortimer had four children who survived to adulthood, and happily Philippa died before their status as great-grandchildren of Edward III got most of them killed.
After her death on 5 January 1382, her eldest living son, Roger de Mortimer, 4th Earl of March, became the heir presumptive of Philippa’s nephew, King Richard II. The king wisely kept Roger out of England as much as possible once the earl had become an adult. There was no point dangling the crown in front of him, or setting him up to be used as an alternative king. Nonetheless, discontent with King Richard’s rule meant that support for an alternative monarch — the handsome, brave, and popular 4th Earl of March — was growing. Roger Mortimer was known to be “of approved honesty, active in knightly exercises, glorious in pleasantry, affable and merry in conversation, excelling his contemporaries in beauty of appearance, sumptuous in his feasting, and liberal in his gifts”, and looked like an excellent would-be monarch to the English peerage. The fact that Mortimer was married and already had a ‘heir and spare’ to follow him made him even more dangerous to the king.
On 26th of July 1398 Richard named Thomas Holland, 3rd Earl of Kent, and recently created 1st Duke of Surrey, a nephew who could never take the throne from him, the new Lieutenant of Ireland. The king ordered Surrey to go to Ireland to take command of the island and, incidentally, arrest Roger de Mortimer. Unbeknown to the king and Surrey, the earl was no longer a potential candidate for the throne by then. The 24 year old earl had been killed in clash with the native Irish resisters on 20 July 1398. Since Roger’s eldest son, the 6 year old Edmund, 5th Earl of March and 7th Earl of Ulster, was too young to be a challenge to the king’s throne, he was left unmolested as the heir apparent in his father’s place.
Edmund de Mortimer was safe until Henry Bolingbroke rebelled and usurped their mutual cousin Richard’s crown. Once Henry of Bolingbroke became King Henry IV, Edmund was again in a very dangerous position, because he had much more right to sit on the throne than the monarch with his butt currently on it.
Seeing Edmund and his little brother Roger as the threats that they were, King Henry IV put the little boys into the custody of Sir Hugh Waterton. It would have been very easy for them to ‘disappear’ as later heirs would, but Henry IV just wasn’t that much of a monster. Instead he “treated them honorably, and for part of the time brought up with the King Henry IV’s own children, John and Philippa.”
Henry IV’s paranoia and fear of losing the throne served him ill in other instances. For example, when Philippa of Clarence’s younger son, Sir Edmund Mortimer, was captured by Welsh resistance fighter Owain Glyndŵr on 22 June 1402, the king refused to ransom him. Perhaps he was hoping Owain Glyndŵr would kill Sir Edmund, and eliminate the threat he posed? Then the king tried to escape critique for abandoning Sir Edmund, who had been loyal to his cousin Henry IV, by claiming that Edmund hadn’t really gotten captured; Edmund had actually betrayed Henry and defected to Owain Glyndŵr’s team. To add insult to injury, Henry used this as an excuse to confiscate Sir Edmund’s land.
Now the shit hit the fan.
Sir Edmund was justifiably irked and promptly became an ally with the Welsh resistance in truth. Edmund wed the Tywysog Cymru’s daughter, Catrin (Catherine) Glyndŵr, and on 13 December 1402 declared that the 5th Earl of March was the rightful king. Moreover, Sir Edmund’s sister, Lady Elizabeth de Mortimer, was the wife of Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy, son of the Earl of Northumberland, so Edmund was able to talk the powerful Percy family into joining the rebellion. Glyndŵr, Sir Edmund (in his nephew’s name), and Hotspur all agreed to split the kingdom up when Henry IV was deposed, with the North going to the Percys, the South going to the 5th Earl of March, who would be the new king, and Wales staying with Glyndŵr.
Luck, however, was on King Henry IV’s side. Hotspur was defeated and slain at Shrewsbury and when the conspirators managed to free Edmund and Roger de Mortimer on 13 February 1405, the king’s allies were able to quickly recaptured the boys. King Henry IV also had the luck of his son, the future Henry V, a military genius whose tactics eventually crushed the civil war and Welsh rebellion.
Prince Henry defeated Edmund de Mortimer after an eight-month siege of Harlech Castle in Wales. Catrin Mortimer and her surviving children, three granddaughters of Philippa of Clarence, were imprisoned in the Tower of London for the rest of their lives, which ended prematurely in 1413, supposedly from illness.
The prince was kinder to Philippa of Clarence’s grandsons, however. When he was crowned Henry V he reconciled with Elizabeth Mortimer and Hotspur’s son, Henry Percy, and granted the teenager his rights to the title of 2nd Earl of Northumberland in 1416. Henry V was also freed the blameless Edmund and Roger de Mortimer, making them Knights of the Bath and allowing them to wed women from powerful families.
Edmund de Mortimer was loyal to Henry V until the day the earl died. Since Edmund and Roger were childless, his estates and titles were then passed to his sister’s Anne’s son, Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York, who was now the eldest male heir from the line of Philippa of Clarence. York and Henry Percy were both good subjects of King Henry V, but they would later rebel against the weaker King Henry VI. Although York would die in the attempt to take the throne, eldest son would become King Edward IV after overthrowing Henry VI and killing the heir, Edward of Westminster.
Eventually, and after a lot of slaughter and civil war, Philippa of Clarence’s great-granddaughter, Elizabeth of York married the Lancastrian heir, King Henry VII, and created the Tudor dynasty. As irony would have it, Henry VII was a cousin of Owain Glyndŵr’s through his grandfather, Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur, whom the English referred to as Owen Tudor. Tudor’s grandmother Glyndŵr‘s grandmother were sisters, and both men were descendants of Llywelyn the Great.
Notwithstanding the fact the Tudor line wove the competing factions of the Wars of the Roses back together, the cousins-killing-cousins mess of disputed claims to the throne would continue for decades. Happily, the matter seems to have finally resolved itself, because the current sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II, is the direct descendant of both Philippa of Clarence and the Lancasters through Margaret Tudor, and I am sure she doesn’t want to deal with fighting a civil war to keep her crown.
