General Notes

The early death of the brave son and successor of Saint Louis IX, King of France, King Philip the Hardy of France, left his youngest daughter, the Princess Marguerite, fatherless at a very tender age. If she possessed any comliness of person, her claims to beauty were wholly overlooked by her contemporaries, who admired the exquisite persons of her elder brother and sister, Philip le Bel and Blanche le Belle. A marriage treaty was made between Edward and Blanche, but through the scheming of their brother Philip, Marguerite, then a child of eleven, was substituted and a war immediately ensued, lasting from 1294 to 1298, and by this time Marguerite had grown up; as Edward was a widower of 60, he agreed to the terms and they were married Sept. 8, 1299, nine years after the death of his first wife. She is the ancestress of all the English nobility bearing the name of Howard through her son Thomas and all who bore the name of Holland through her son Edmund of Woodstock, through his daughter Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, who married Sir Thomas Holland.