Countess Margaret of Ulster (d. 1304)

In 1982 I published "Eleanor of Castile and the Countess Margaret of Ulster"
(*Genealogists' Magazine* vol. 20 no. 10 [June 1982], pp. 335-40 [cols.
669-80]). This article presents evidence from royal wardrobe documents and
other original records of the reign of Edward I indicating very strongly
that Countess Margaret was a kinswoman of Eleanor of Castile. The exact
blood links are not as clear as one might wish but a strong case can be made
out that Margaret can be identified as that daughter of Queen Eleanor's
second cousin, Count Arnoul III of Guines, which daughter is stated in a
somewhat later French narrative source to have married "un seigneur du pais
d'Irland," whom that source unfortunately leaves unnamed.

In other words Countess Margaret would have been (in modern terms) a second
cousin, once removed, to Queen Eleanor, and therefore a third cousin to
Eleanor's children including Edward II.
This would readily explain the use of terms of kinship by Edward I and
Edward II in addressing the de Burgh earls of Ulster in the late 13th and
early 14th centuries.

Margaret and Earl Richard of Ulster were most probably married around the
date of Edward I's birthday on 17/18 June 1282, when the king knighted
Richard at Rhuddlan. Later in June 1282, the earl and countess were granted
Irish lands formerly held in dower by the widow of the last de Lacy earl of
Ulster; the grant significantly was made only for the lifetime of the new
Countess Margaret. Earl Richard appears for the first time with the
designation kinsman of Queen Eleanor on 2 July 1283, when the queen granted
Richard and Margaret one of her manors in Ireland.

As a daughter of the count of Guines, Margaret would also have been a first
cousin of Alexander III of Scotland; their mothers (respectively Alice and
Marie de Coucy) were sisters. Margaret was thus a very well-placed
individual to marry a prominent Irish earl in the 1280s.

John P.