The marriage of Marie, half-royal and heiress to two strategically important counties, was arranged while she was still young, in 1208. It forms the fourth marriage in our chain because it would provide the political impetus for the marriage between Eleanor’s parents. The groom was the thirty-year-old Simon of Dammartin. His claim to fame and to such a distinguished marriage rested entirely on the fact that he was the younger brother of a remarkable man called Renaud of Dammartin, who likely figured as a tragic hero of romance in tales told to Eleanor as a child.
Up until 1190, the family of Dammartin had a proud heritage but held only a fairly small county near Paris. Their daughters married other members of the minor northern French nobility – de Tries, de Saint-Omers, de Gourneys and (significantly for our story) de Fiennes. But in that year the family began a rapid ascent to influence and power by virtue of Renaud of Dammartin’s exercise of one of the less distinguished traditions of the era – the abduction and forced marriage of an heiress. The heiress in question was one Ida of Boulogne, the sole surviving granddaughter of King Stephen and Matilda of Boulogne and hence the heiress to both the Norman county of Mortain and the county of Boulogne. Ida was a massive matrimonial prize – and also chronically unlucky in the matter of husbands. By 1186, when she was twenty-six, she had already lost three husbands. It appears that she thereafter had plans to marry her own choice: Arnold II of Guines. However, at this point Renaud of Dammartin intervened. He sought Ida openly, but when her uncle refused to consent to the match, the intrepid Renaud simply abducted Ida and carried her off to Lorraine. Ida seems to have been reconciled to the match, to the extent of reportedly colluding in Renaud’s later imprisonment of Arnold of Guines. They had one child, who in due course became Queen of Portugal.
Ida’s apparent readiness to acquiesce in her abduction may be explained by the fact that Renaud was far from being a simple adventurer. He is described variously by contemporaries in superlatives and four-letter words. He was ‘cultivated, ambitious and versatile’ and, among other things, a noted patron of the arts. More to the point, so far as material advancement goes, he appears to have been one of the most able military men of his generation. He campaigned successfully with Richard the Lionheart against Philip of France in the late 1190s but defected to Philip shortly after Richard’s death. He was then apparently instrumental in the vital French propaganda victory in 1203 – the taking of Richard’s beloved and supposedly impregnable Chateau Gaillard.
The link between Renaud of Dammartin and this attack is strongly suggested by the fact that, very shortly thereafter, Philip created him Count of Mortain, Varenne and Aumale. Nor was this the end of Philip’s gratitude, for he then appears to have sided with Renaud when he contrived to fall out with his neighbour in the Pas-de-Calais – Alys’s husband, William Talvas. Through Philip’s influence and Renaud’s high standing with him a reconciliation was brokered, the key point of which was the marriage of Simon, Renaud’s nearly landless younger brother, and William Talvas’ heiress, Marie. The land issues which had brought the row into being were compromised and Renaud agreed to give Simon some of his Norman lands and possibly also his own county of Aumale. The deal was sealed by the marriage, which took place in 1209.21
But within ten years Renaud, at the best of times difficult to live with, had overreached himself and brought ruin not only on himself but also for a time on the county of Ponthieu. By 1212 it was clear that he would gain no further promotion from Philip; he therefore sought refuge with his cousin, the Count of Bar, and threw in his lot with King John, who promised him further counties in the Pas-de-Calais–Somme area, some of which he earmarked for Simon. The acquisition of these counties, together with the future occupation of Ponthieu, would have given Renaud control over virtually the whole of the strategically vital Pas-de-Calais area and made him one of the most important men in France and England.22
Accordingly it was on John’s side that Renaud, Simon and their de Fiennes in-laws fought at the epochal Battle of Bouvines in 1214, while Simon’s father-in-law, William Talvas, remained loyal to the throne of France. Renaud fought brilliantly, repelling charge after charge, but eventually his formation was wiped out by sheer force of numbers. Simon escaped the field of battle, but Renaud was taken prisoner in the melee. He and Comte Ferrand of Flanders, who had defected with him to support John, were held in the castle of Goulet for thirteen years; according to some picturesque reports, Renaud was chained to the wall by a chain half a metre long for all this time. It is then said that, on the release of Ferrand in 1227, Renaud was told that he would never be released, upon hearing which he committed suicide, choosing the anniversary of Ida’s death for the occasion.23
Meanwhile, Simon escaped to England, where he lived for some time without his wife, who remained with her father in Ponthieu. Inevitably, in the light of the betrayal by Renaud, his and Simon’s assets and titles in France were confiscated by King Philip. Thus at the death in 1221 of William Talvas, although Marie was his heiress, the title of Count of Ponthieu was confiscated to France. Philip had guardians appointed for Marie, who lived at Abbeville on a small pension from the king. However, the separation from her husband in this period was perhaps not as absolute as the records might suggest. Her eldest daughter, Jeanne, Eleanor’s mother, was apparently born in around 1220, six years after Bouvines, and three other daughters followed – at least one of them being of marriageable age in 1236 and therefore inferentially born in the early 1220s. It would seem therefore that one or the other of the couple managed to sneak across the Channel for occasional conjugal visits.
Reconciliation with the French Crown followed in stages. First, in 1225, Marie concluded a treaty at Chinon by which she acknowledged the Crown’s right to take her lands and in return she was restored to her father’s lands. Simon, however, remained persona non grata until five years later when a second treaty, concluded at St Germain en Laye, finally allowed him to return from England and reconciled him to the French Crown. But the treaty had teeth. Not only did he have to endorse the seizure of his lands, but critically he also agreed not to marry either Jeanne or her next sister to any enemy of the king or kingdom. Thereafter Simon and Marie held Ponthieu jointly until his death in 1239, and Marie held it alone until her own death in 1251.24
By 1233, Jeanne was of marriageable age. She was a reputed beauty – she was later described by Roderigo Ximines de Rada, the Archbishop of Toledo, as ‘a princess who excelled as much in modesty as beauty … enriched with all sorts of good qualities’. She was also the heiress to a county, which was vital if the English Crown was going to maintain any form of challenge to the French in Normandy. Finally, her family, which had suffered considerably in the service of King John, might well be seen as having a claim on the English monarchy for some considerable benefit. For one or more of these reasons, in 1233 Henry III began to negotiate a marriage with Jeanne. These negotiations progressed to the stage that, on 8 April 1235, Henry and Jeanne actually pledged themselves to each other by proxy by the verba de praesenti, an exchange of vows couched in the present tense, which was widely taken as being a binding marriage. The marriage between Henry and Jeanne was therefore seen as a done deal, subject only to obtaining a dispensation from the Pope allowing people related within the prohibited degrees to marry. The intention appears to have been for the formal marriage to take place quickly – possibly as soon as 27 May 1235 – and a letter was promptly sent to the Pope seeking a speedy dispensation.25
Of course we know that this marriage did not ultimately take place; by 22 June Henry was instead suggesting to the Count of Savoy a marriage with Eleanor, daughter of the Count of Provence; and by October this suggestion had materialised into a definite marriage contract. In the end Henry married Eleanor of Provence and became father of Edward I, while Jeanne married Ferdinand III and became Eleanor’s mother. What prevented the original plan from coming to fruition was some constructive collusion on the parts of the formidable sisters Blanche of Castile, Dowager Queen of France, and Beren
garia of Castile, Dowager Queen of León.
That collusion was necessitated by Blanche of Castile’s political agenda. For Blanche, who had ruled a somewhat restive France throughout her son’s minority, this proposed marriage between Henry and Jeanne created a real problem. The principal attraction of the marriage for Henry was the strategic importance of Ponthieu, which would give England a key foothold in north-east France – as the Battle of Crécy en Ponthieu was later to prove. This would be a loss of prestige for the Crown which would encourage disloyalty as the new king, Louis IX, found his feet. Moreover the history of the Dammartin family would have indicated to Blanche that trouble might well be expected from them. Blanche was therefore determined that this marriage should not take place and invoked the term in the reconciliation between the French Crown and the Dammartin family. Although the marriage to Henry arguably did not fall foul of this provision, the threat of invoking this penalty was enough to ensure that the marriage did not proceed.26
But having deprived Jeanne of a splendid marriage, with a king as a husband, Blanche was in honour bound to find a very good alternative. It was here that what might be termed Berengaria’s personal problem offered a solution to Blanche’s political one. Berengaria’s problem was relatively simple: Ferdinand III was now widowed. There might have seemed no pressing need for him to remarry since he had an extensive and relatively healthy family – including seven living sons – by his first wife, and there can be no doubt that his mother was more than capable of arranging for the upbringing of these children. However, she was concerned lest he contract liaisons which were unbecoming to his dignity. Whether this was a real concern can never be known, but certainly the number of children produced by his two marriages (he was to add a further five by his second marriage to his tally of ten children from his first marriage) suggests a partiality for feminine company. In addition, Berengaria will have been aware that if Ferdinand resembled his father at all, there might well be a tendency to collect mistresses: Alfonso had acquired at least thirteen illegitimate children during the course of his two marriages.27
A marriage between Jeanne and Ferdinand was therefore ideal for both sisters’ purposes – it was of sufficiently high status to placate the Ponthevins but moved Ponthieu away from English alliance. It also kept the heir to Ponthieu under Blanche’s control, albeit at one remove, and it strengthened the links of blood between the Castilian and French crowns. Meanwhile, from Berengaria’s point of view there was that Castilian blood link. She was banking a favour with France, and if Ferdinand had a keen eye for feminine charms, a young wife of great beauty was just what was required.
Seventeen-year-old Jeanne was therefore betrothed to King Ferdinand in the summer of 1237 and married in October of the same year. The marriage seems to have been a success – Ferdinand was very fond of his new wife, taking her with him on campaign, and giving her extensive gifts of property. In dynastic terms, too, the marriage was productive; the couple had four sons and one daughter. The eldest child was Infante Ferdinand, later Count of Aumale, who was born in 1239 and died in around 1265. Their second child was Eleanor.28
2
Eleanor’s Early Years
Nearly thirteen years of Eleanor’s life passed before her wedding. According to St Ignatius’ view of education, her nature was formed long before she stepped onto the English stage. And yet before the date of her marriage with Edward we know nothing for certain about Eleanor. There is no record of her date of birth. There are no stories of her childhood. There are no letters by her or about her. She is named by no contemporaneous chronicler. About the only thing of which we can be sure is that she was at her father’s deathbed in 1252. The process of unearthing her childhood is therefore by no means straightforward.
Mercifully, however, Eleanor grew up in a country which was full of activity and which placed a premium on written record. From these records we can piece together three different perspectives on Eleanor’s childhood, each of which will show powerful influences which acted upon her and inevitably affected who she was. The first view we can get is the political record; it is possible to trace in outline the major events which punctuated her childhood and which provided the major talking points of those years. As Eleanor’s family was at the heart of these events, this shows us the circumstances in which she grew up, the major themes which occupied those around her – and the figure which dominated her childhood.
The other two perspectives are essentially cultural. One is broadly so, considering the administrative work which her father, King Ferdinand, was doing, in which his model of kingship and the multicultural aspects of the Iberian peninsula which made Castile such a different place to England, had considerable influence. The third is more intimate: to try to conjure up some kind of picture of the day-to-day life of a princess of thirteenth-century Castile. This can be done predominantly by considering the facts which we do know about her family and the culture of the Castilian court.
The first perspective must start with Eleanor’s own birth. There is no record of the date, simply because it was not a great event in Castile. Ferdinand already had plenty of children, and to the commentators one more was neither here nor there.
Eleanor’s birthdate has traditionally been given as 1244 or even 1246, thus suggesting that she was under ten years of age when married. There are still modern accounts which follow this orthodoxy, but it can now be convincingly rebutted by three pieces of solid evidence which show that Eleanor was in fact born in late 1241 and that she was thus just under thirteen years old at the time of her marriage.
The first piece of evidence as to the date of her birth is the fact that, in 1254, after their marriage, not only did Eleanor accompany Edward to Gascony, but they also set up their own household for about a year, rather than joining his parents in returning to England. It was, of course, absolutely normal practice for underage brides to be handed over to their future families, but the expectation was that they would then be educated and trained in the home of their new parents, rather than commencing married life. Children had to be raised and educated to fill their station in life, and even as they reached canonically marriageable age it appears to have been well appreciated that the risks of early childbirth were to be avoided if possible. Therefore the usual age at which a princess or high-status bride would be expected to enter onto married life was not earlier than fourteen. So to find Eleanor and Edward despatched onto married life with her aged only ten would be almost unheard of.
It would be completely unthinkable given that the queen to whom Eleanor was entrusted was Eleanor of Provence. Edward’s mother has received (in part justifiably) a fairly hard press over the years. However, one positive thing which is quite clear about her is that she was a very caring and dutiful mother, very much beyond the norms of the day. She had herself the unhappy experience of being married at a very young age, having been twelve years old when she was married to Henry III and having suffered from the pressures put on her to produce an heir. There is evidence that she had formed the view that even twelve was a young age for marriage. Therefore, had Eleanor been as young as ten, there is simply no way that she would have been left alone in Gascony for the first year of her marriage.1
The second piece of evidence is an impeccable, near-contemporary record of the birth of a daughter Eleanor to Ferdinand and Jeanne at an earlier date than 1244. Rodrigo of Toledo, who was chancellor of Castile and Ferdinand’s principal adviser for many years, writes in March 1243 in his great work De Rebus Hispaniae that Ferdinand and Jeanne had three children: Ferdinand, Eleanor and Louis. The fact that Eleanor is named second in this list raises a strong inference that she was indeed the second child of the marriage – particularly as it was frequently the case that sons be listed before daughters. The inference that she was the middle child chronologically also appears to be supported by external evidence: there is a three-and-a-half-year gap between the two sons first appearing as witnesses to Castilian royal charters. This rite of passage effectiv
ely marked the princes’ emergence into political society and was likely to have been undertaken at more or less the same age. So the fact that Ferdinand first appears in May 1252 and Louis in October 1255 indicates that there was a gap of more than three years in age between them.
The third and perhaps most conclusive piece of evidence for the approximate date of Eleanor’s birth is that at her memorial service in 1291 there was a procession of forty-nine bearers with candles. This being a slightly unusual number, it gives rise to a strong inference that it related to her age at death.2
It is possible to narrow the dates slightly more by considering these last two pieces of evidence together. The evidence of the candles strongly suggests an age at her death of forty-nine and hence of birth in 1241. However, if her age at death on 28 November 1290 was in fact forty-nine this would indicate that Eleanor must have been born before 28 November 1241. Counting back from this date would suggest that Eleanor would have been conceived by about the first week in March 1241. The Castilian evidence shows that it is unlikely that Ferdinand and Jeanne were cohabiting for a period of thirteen months prior to nearly the end of February 1241; he is recorded by the reliable Primera Cronica General (which he part authored) as being resident in Cordoba, assisting the Christian population of that city against the Moors of Seville, and being ‘reunited’ with Jeanne on his return to the north. A baby conceived at this period would be (premature births aside) born in mid- or late November 1241. One can therefore tentatively give Eleanor’s birthdate as somewhere from mid- to late November 1241.
This date also fits in well with what we know about the birth of Louis, whose appearance in the charters in late 1255 suggests a birthdate not later than late 1242, while he is referred to by Roderigo of Toledo as being very young (parvulus) in early 1243.3
As for pinning down an actual day, there is no way of doing this for certain. In the late thirteenth century more mind was paid to the anniversaries of people’s deaths, when memorial services were held, than the anniversaries of their birth. There is therefore no record of birthday celebrations to point the way. The only birthday which appears to rate a mention is ‘Domine Natalis’ – the Lord’s birthday. However, in my view there is some reason to suggest 23 November. This is because, as we shall see, both Edward and Ferdinand were to deliberately schedule important events for this date.
Eleanor of Castile: The Shadow Queen Page 4