Alice Chaucer: Three Husbands Claimed by the Same War

She was ten years old when she became a widow for the first time. Her next two husbands would also be claimed by the same war.

Alice Chaucer was born around 1404, probably at Ewelme in Oxfordshire, the only child of Thomas Chaucer and Maud Burghersh. Her grandfather was the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who had died a few years before she was born. Her mother was an heiress, and Ewelme came to the family through her. Her father was the king's chief butler, one of the wealthiest commoners in England, and he was about to be elected Speaker of the Commons for the fourth time.

That made Alice a fortune with no brothers. Everything her father had built would pass to her and to whoever she married, and a girl in that position was not raised to choose. She was raised to be placed.

In the autumn of 1414 her father placed her. Sir John Phelip was more than twenty years her senior, a close friend of the new king, Henry V, who had knighted him on the eve of the coronation. He had recently buried his second wife, a widow. Chaucer's trustees settled the castle and manor of Donnington on the couple, and Phelip assigned Alice the rich estate of Grovebury for her widowhood. It was a land settlement between a wealthy man and a rising one. The bride was ten or eleven years old.

The marriage lasted a year. In the summer of 1415 Phelip went to France with Henry V's army, and on 2 October he died of dysentery at the siege of Harfleur, three weeks before Agincourt. His will left her, among other things, a covered cup of gold and a gold ewer, and Donnington, the castle her father's trustees had settled on the couple, stayed with her. She was a widow, and she was still a child.

By 1424, and perhaps as early as 1421, she was the wife of Thomas Montagu, Earl of Salisbury, a widower sixteen years her senior and one of the most experienced English commanders in France. In the autumn of 1428 he besieged Orléans. On 27 October he stood at a window in the captured fort of Les Tourelles, looking at the city, and was struck by debris from a cannonball that tore away much of his lower face. He lived for another week and died at Meung on 3 November. In his will he called her his beloved wife, left her half his goods, a thousand marks in gold and three thousand more in jewels and plate, and asked that his tomb at Bisham have room for her beside his first wife, if she wished it. She was twenty-four, and a widow for the second time.

William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, took over Salisbury's command. Two years later, on 11 November 1430, a royal licence allowed him to marry the widow. His own father had died at Harfleur, in the same siege that killed Phelip.

Of her three marriages, this was the one that lasted. In 1432 she was made a Lady of the Garter, an honour rarely given to women. In 1434 her father died and she inherited his estates. In 1437 she and Suffolk founded God's House at Ewelme, an almshouse for thirteen paupers, with a school added later. It still stands. Her books included Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies.

In the autumn of 1444 she went to France with her husband to fetch Henry VI's bride, Margaret of Anjou. Suffolk had been made a marquess that September for arranging the match. In March 1445 the young bride fell ill at Rouen, and Alice put on her robes and took her place in the entry into the city.

Suffolk became a duke in 1448. By 1450 the war in France was going badly, and he had become one of the most hated men in England. The Commons accused him of treason, and among the charges was a plot to put his own son on the throne by marrying the boy to Margaret Beaufort. Henry VI, hoping to save his chief minister, sent him into exile instead of to trial.

Before he sailed, Suffolk wrote to the son in question, who was seven. He told John to love and honour his mother, to obey her commands and to trust her counsel. In his will, written that January, he named Alice his sole executrix, "for above all the earth my singular trust is most in her."

He sailed from Ipswich and was intercepted off Dover by a larger ship, the Nicholas of the Tower. The crew took him aboard to cries of "Welcome, traitor!" and held a mock trial, and he was given the evening to prepare with his chaplain. The next morning he was put into a small boat and beheaded with six strokes of a rusty sword. His body was left on the sand at Dover.

Alice was in England with John. That summer Jack Cade's rebels reached London and forced a court to indict a list of supposed traitors. Her name was on it. In October she lent the Crown 3,500 marks for the war in France, and in November the Commons petitioned the king to bar certain men from his presence. The Duke of Somerset headed the list. Alice was second. The king refused. By March 1451 she had been tried for treason before the assembled lords, and she was acquitted.

She was widowed for the third time at forty-six, and she did not marry again.

Her son had been married at seven, to Margaret Beaufort. In 1453 the marriage was dissolved, and Margaret's wardship went to Edmund and Jasper Tudor. In 1458 Alice agreed with Richard, Duke of York, that John should marry his daughter Elizabeth. Three years later York's son was Edward IV.

She played a long game. She took the Pastons' manors of Hellesdon and Drayton, among others, and the Pastons called her "subtle." She gave books and money to Oxford University. She and John were joint constables of Wallingford Castle, and in 1455 she was given a state prisoner to keep, the Duke of Exeter, taken after the battle of St Albans. In 1472 Margaret of Anjou, whose robes she had worn at Rouen, was placed in her custody after Tewkesbury.

Alice died on 20 May 1475, aged about seventy. Her tomb at Ewelme carries an alabaster effigy of a duchess in her coronet, the Garter on her left arm. Below it, enclosed, lies a second figure, the same woman as a naked corpse in an opened shroud. It is the only life-sized female cadaver sculpture in England to survive intact.

Phelip lies at Kidderminster and Salisbury at Bisham. Suffolk was moved to Hull. Salisbury had left room for her beside him, if she wished. Alice lies at Ewelme, beside none of them.