Jacqueline of Hainaut

Jacqueline of Hainaut inherited Holland, Zeeland and Hainaut at seventeen and spent the rest of her life losing them to her own uncle. She was the only child of William VI, married at five to a French prince who died, and succeeded in 1417 to three counties that no woman had held and that her uncle John of Bavaria immediately claimed. Her second marriage, to John IV of Brabant, was intended to secure support and produced the opposite: he pawned her territories to her uncle. She fled to England in 1421, obtained an annulment of doubtful validity from the antipope Benedict XIII, and married Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who invaded Hainaut on her behalf in 1424 with an English army. The campaign failed, Humphrey went home, and Philip the Good of Burgundy - her cousin, and the man who actually wanted the territories - took her prisoner. She escaped from Ghent disguised as a man, raised the Hook faction in Holland and fought a war for three years, and lost. The Treaty of Delft in 1428 left her the titles and gave Philip the government and the succession. Humphrey had meanwhile had the marriage declared void by Martin V and married her lady-in-waiting Eleanor Cobham. She married a Zeeland nobleman in 1434 without Philip's consent, was forced to abdicate entirely, and died of tuberculosis two years later at thirty-six. Her lands passed to Burgundy and from there to the Habsburgs. She was a keen hunter and is said to have made small pottery jugs during her final retirement, thousands of which have been dug up in Holland and are called Jacobakannetjes. Philip the Good founded the Order of the Golden Fleece the year after her defeat. The Hook and Cod wars she fought in ran on for another sixty years.

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