Royal: Joan, Lady of Wales, C 1191-1237

The idea that being an illegitimate child was a shameful thing comes from the Victorian era.  For centuries, out-of-wedlock children, if acknowledged by their parents and properly provided for, could attain a respectable station in life.  For royal or noble children, that could lead to a decent marriage and some income if one were lucky, which many of such children were.  Blood was blood, and the Plantagenets did look after their own.

While the future King John was still John Lackland, the problematic younger brother of King Richard the Lionhearted, he indulged in a few extra-marital relationships.  That's what royal and noble men did, but it also may have had to do with the fact that, although John was married to an heiress in her own right, Isabel, Countess of Gloucester, he was forbidden by the Church to treat her as his wife due to the fact that they'd married without papal consent.  One of John's relationships with was a woman named Clemence and around about 1191 it produced a daughter named Joan.  Two years later, John was King of England, Isabel was a divorced woman, John was in negotiations to marry Isabella of Angouleme and his daughter Joan would have a part to play in her father's continuing quest to spread Plantagenet rule to the rest of the Isle of Britain. 

Wales was a pain in the side of the early Plantagenet kings until Edward I finally ended the native Welsh governance forever.  The Welsh, like many Celtic cultures, were not a centralized kingdom, but a collection of local chiefdoms constantly warring with one another.  Those wars sometimes spilled over into English territory, the Welsh Marches, which were a lawless and often violent place.  John was having enough trouble reconciling his barons to his rule and holding onto the family's French domains as well as keeping Scotland at bay.  He didn't have time to deal with Wales, too.  It was much more expedient to unite the Plantagenets with the most predominant of the Welsh chiefdoms. 

Enter Joan, who up to this point had spent her life in Normandy, where she was probably born.  What her mother's origins were, if any, aren't known, but she had to be prepared for her future role in life.  In 1203, John had her brought to England in preparation for her marriage to Prince Llewellyn ab Iowerth, known to history as Llewellyn the Great.  He had managed to concur much of North Wales and was the first to use the style Prince of Wales.  He and Joan, all of about 13 years old, which was old enough in those day to be married and start to perform the duties and obligations of a wife.  The couple had two children, Ellen ferch Llewellyn and Dafydd ap Lewellyn.  Some of Llewellyn's other known children may also have been Joan's but the records are murky.  All of the girls who survived, whether Joan's or not, married English noblemen and Joan, through Jaquetta of Luxembourg, a distant granddaughter, is another ancestress of the present royal family. 

The details of Joan's life are sketchy.  In 1226, she obtained a papal decree of legitimization.  This acknowledged her parentage as being John and Clemence, but without giving her a claim to the English throne.  Then, in 1230, she was discovered with an English knight, one Walter de Braose, in her bedchamber in circumstances suggesting that the two of them had been otherwise engaged.  Llewellyn was furious and had de Braose hanged.  Joan was placed under house arrest, but later her husband forgave her and restored her to favor.  In 1237 she died, and Llewellyn had a Franciscan priory built in her honor at Llanfaes. 

This priory survived until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, when it was demolished and the monks disbanded.  Joan's ruined tomb and empty tomb survived a horse trough.  A headstone purporting to be Joan's was later taken to St. Nicholas and St. Mary's parish church in Beaumaris, Anglesey, with a plaque identifying it as Joan's headstone, but on another tomb.  Probably, it's the tomb of a later Plantagenet descendant, Eleanor de Montfort.