Granddaughter of Edward I whose secret first marriage and contested second marriage made her the most talked-about woman at Edward III's court; wife of the Black Prince, mother of Richard II, and a peacemaker in the crises of his minority.
Joan of Kent was a granddaughter of Edward I and the daughter of Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, and one of the most remarkable women of Edward III's court. Before she was twenty she had secretly married one knight and been publicly married to another, and a papal court had to decide which marriage stood. In 1361 she married the king's heir, Edward the Black Prince, and became Princess of Wales.
Her son by the prince became Richard II of England in 1377, and in the first years of his reign Joan acted as a mediator between the boy king's powerful uncles, the Londoners and the Church. Froissart called her the most beautiful woman in the realm of England, and later writers named her the Fair Maid of Kent.
Joan was born around 1326–1328 to Edmund of Woodstock, a son of Edward I, and Margaret Wake. In 1330 her father was executed on the orders of Isabella of France and Roger Mortimer for plotting to restore Edward II, whom he had been led to believe was alive, and Joan grew up in the household of Queen Philippa of Hainault. Around 1340, aged about twelve, she secretly married Sir Thomas Holland, a knight of the royal household; while he was away on crusade in Prussia, her family married her to William Montagu, heir to the earldom of Salisbury.
The chroniclers presented Joan chiefly through her beauty and her marriages. Froissart praised her as the most beautiful woman in the realm and the most loving, and gossip about her marriages followed her through the court. Her choices show a woman prepared to defy family and king: she held to her first marriage against her family's wishes, and in 1361 married the heir to the throne, by all accounts for love, in spite of Edward III's reluctance.
Her public role in the 1370s and 1380s was that of a peacemaker. In 1377 she reconciled her brother-in-law John of Gaunt with the Londoners who had risen against him, and in 1378 she sent word to the bishops gathered at Lambeth to halt their proceedings against John Wycliffe, whom she and Gaunt protected. The sympathy for Wycliffe's early ideas at Richard II's court owed something to her household.
In 1347 Thomas Holland petitioned the pope, claiming Joan as his wife, and after a long hearing Pope Clement VI declared her marriage to Montagu void in 1349. She lived with Holland, who was styled earl of Kent in her right, until his death in 1360, and bore him several children, among them Thomas and John Holland, who later rose high at Richard II's court.
In October 1361 she married Edward the Black Prince, her cousin, with a papal dispensation for their kinship. The prince was given the principality of Aquitaine, and from 1363 the couple kept a splendid court at Bordeaux and Angoulême, where her sons Edward and Richard were born. The prince's Spanish campaign of 1367, and the illness he brought back from it, ended that court, and in 1371 they returned to England, where he died in 1376.
When Richard II became king in 1377 at the age of ten, no regent was appointed, and Joan's household was the centre of his personal life. In June 1381 she was returning from Canterbury when she met the rebels of the Peasants' Revolt at Blackheath; they let her through unharmed, reportedly after no more than a few kisses, and she spent the crisis with Richard in the Tower of London.
In 1385 Joan's son John Holland killed Ralph Stafford, a friend of the king, in a quarrel, and Richard swore to punish his half-brother. Joan pleaded for John and died at Wallingford Castle on 7 August 1385, reportedly worn down by the quarrel; Richard pardoned John soon afterwards. At her own wish she was buried not beside the Black Prince at Canterbury but beside her first husband, Thomas Holland, in the Franciscan church at Stamford.