The two ladies de Vescy were also cousins of the queen, and within her matchmaking ambit. John de Vescy’s wife Isabella was part of the older Brienne line, descending from the marriage of Louis de Brienne to Agnes de Beaumont. Her marriage to John de Vescy in 1280 was very clearly brought about by Eleanor, with John promising to pay her £550 in silver if his new bride had no child (which she did not). The couple, as will be seen, remained very close to Eleanor and Edward, travelling to Gascony with them in 1286. Clemence de Avagour, later de Vescy, named as a domicille in 1290, married the nephew and heir presumptive of John de Vescy and was descended from the very same Brienne line, being Isabelle’s own niece. Clemence’s marriage, too, was a close concern of Eleanor’s, with the groom’s father (John de Vescy’s brother William) making promises directly to the queen about what dower property would be assigned to Clemence, and the queen providing her with a coronet on the occasion of the wedding on 16 July 1290 at Westminster. Both de Vescy marriages were highly advantageous ones, since the Vescy family were at this time the great lords of the North – effectively the predecessors of the Percy family, who came to prominence in the North after the Vescy family line failed.24
The third domicilla mentioned, Lady de Montfort, was no relation to Simon de Montfort, but yet another of Eleanor’s maternal relatives. Her grandfather-in-law was the Peter de Montfort who fell fighting in the Montfortian cause at Evesham. His son Piers reconciled with Edward in 1267 and it is the son of this Piers, John, who married Alice de la Plaunche, Eleanor’s relative. The exact family connection between the two is hard to trace, though it is clear from the acknowledgement of her as a ‘consanguine regine’ that such a connection did exist. The credible theory advanced by Parsons is that Alice was another connection of the de Fiennes family and hence a distant connection of Eleanor’s on the Dammartin side. The connection was not a close one, so it is significant that Eleanor acknowledged the relationship, with Lady de Montfort being named as kin in her Liber Garderobe. It appears likely that the relationship was acknowledged during the Gascon trip, since in 1286 Edward is noted as giving a silver gilt cup to the lord de la Plaunche, also identified as a relative of the queen. Alice then joined Eleanor’s household in Gascony and accompanied Eleanor to England on their return, with a suitable marriage being put in place for her before that return; the marriage appears to have taken place before March 1287, when Edward ordered Edmund of Cornwall to deal favourably with John de Montfort because he had married a relative of Edward’s ‘dearest consort’.
The Montfort marriage was not by any means as grand a marriage as those arranged for the other cousins, but it was more than respectable, and for a family which very probably descended from a bastard line it was something of a coup. Meanwhile, other members of this family were also looked after albeit to a lesser extent: James and John de la Plaunche had a tutor hired for them in Gascony in 1287. John de la Plaunche appears as a vallettus in Eleanor’s wardrobe list and his brother James was married in 1289 to a ward of Eleanor, Matilda de Haversham. Matilda de Haversham/de la Plaunche was herself at court as domicilla to Eleanora from 1287 to 1290.
Also in attendance on the queen was Marie de St Amand, formerly Marie de Pécquigny, who was a distant cousin of Eleanor’s, her great-grandmother having been a daughter of John I of Ponthieu (father of the William of Ponthieu who married Alys of France). Marie was married to Almeric de St Amand at Leeds Castle on 21 August 1289, a short time after she joined the royal household. The St Amands were not a particularly noble or rich family, but were close military associates of the English royal family: one of them was godfather to Edward himself, and then died on Crusade with Richard of Cornwall. Another served with distinction under Edward in the Welsh wars.25
These matches show Eleanor surrounding herself with maternal relatives, a natural extended family, and advancing them subtly at the same time. Such matches as we have seen within her own familia were far from being the limit of Eleanor’s matchmaking, however. She arranged marriages for a couple of the younger de Fiennes relatives who were not in her own household but were being brought up in the nursery establishment with Edward of Caernarfon. From one of these matches, between John de Fiennes and Joanna Forester, descends the lines of the lords Saye and Sele and the lords Dacre – and in modern times the array of famous Fiennes.
But Eleanor also advanced her family in more marked ways, while at the same time keeping them within her extended family. These matches are not easy to trace – a contrast to Eleanor of Provence’s profligate approach. However, when the records are closely examined, it becomes apparent that Eleanor almost certainly had a hand in at least two very high-status and ultimately significant marriages.
The first is the marriage, sometime in the early 1280s, of Joanna Wake’s sister Margaret de Fiennes to Edmund de Mortimer, Lord of Wigmore. Margaret was therefore also a ‘double’ cousin of Eleanor’s through the Dammartin family and the Castilian–Brienne link. Two things in particular indicate Eleanor’s hand in this match. The first is that the arrangements for the wedding were made at royal expense, i.e. Eleanor gave the wedding, as might be expected if she had brought the match about. The second is that the history of Wigmore monastery reports the bride as being from a Castilian family – which, of course, she was not. However, a Castilian link was obviously perceived by onlookers, which indicates an association with the queen.
The significance of the marriage is not far to seek: Margaret de Fiennes, Eleanor’s distant cousin, was the mother of the infamous Roger Mortimer (the lover of Edward II’s wife Isabella, and bête noire of Edward III’s minority), and she was also hence ancestress of the Yorkist kings. How the match came about is uncertain; there was no Welsh link, as was most usual for Mortimer marriages, though on the credit side the bride could boast descent from the famous warrior Jean de Brienne, as the Mortimers could from his English counterpart, William Marshal. Ultimately the most likely reason for the link is Eleanor herself; through the close ties that bound Edward to Edmund’s father Roger Mortimer, a relative of Edward’s adored and influential queen might well have been perceived by the Mortimers as a worthy or at least useful match, particularly in the difficult period after Roger’s death.
The second match, even more prestigious and even more mysterious, is one between Margaret’s aunt Maud/Mathilde de Fiennes, daughter of Enguerrand II de Fiennes, and Humphrey de Bohun, heir to the Earl of Hereford and Essex. This took place rather earlier, in 1275, and the blood link to Eleanor was later to be reinforced when their son, another Humphrey, married Eleanor’s daughter Elizabeth after Eleanor’s own death. As for the reasoning behind this first marriage, some link between the family and the Crown was probably felt to be politic after some years of uneasy relations – Humphrey de Bohun’s father had died on the wrong side at Evesham – and again it seems likely that a link to Eleanor’s family was seen as conveying its own prestige. This, of course, says much about the influence which she was felt to wield, even by major magnates. Another mild traditional justification might just be found in the Fiennes family’s property holdings in Essex, the earl’s own county.
There is also a suggestion in the documents that the marriage represented a rapprochement bought by Eleanor. De Bohun had bought from his guardian, Gloucester, the right to his own marriage in 1270, for a sum of £1,000. This sum had not been paid, and Gloucester had even commenced an action to recover it. This action was discontinued shortly after the wedding, the conclusion being that the sum was paid. On the other side of the transaction, we see that in 1270 Eleanor had acquired Martock, next to her farm of Somerton, from William de Fiennes on a six-year lease, and in 1275 she subleased it ‘so the queen may recover a portion of the £1,000 she agreed to pay as a dowry for William de Fiennes daughter [sic], who is to marry the earl of Essex’s heir’. The implication is clear – Eleanor bought de Bohun out of the litigation as the price of his taking her relative as a wife. Whatever the reasoning behind the marriage, the marriage was a momentous one – th
rough this line was ultimately to descend the Lancastrian kings of England.
The third significant marriage in which Eleanor’s hand can be traced is one between Margaret, daughter of Count Arnoul of Guines and Mathilde de Fiennes, and Richard de Burgh, 2nd Earl of Ulster. Again, too, there is a link to the royal nursery: Richard de Burgh was another of the children brought into the royal nursery after the death of his mother in 1274. He married Margaret in February 1281 and Margaret seems to have been a member of Eleanor’s household from then until the Gascon visit. This was a high-status marriage for Margaret, but plainly had considerable advantages for Richard de Burgh too – courtesy of it, he was thereafter known as the king’s kinsman and the extension granted of his tenure of his Irish lands was obviously related to this, being for the lifetime of his wife. In the longer term, this too was a significant marriage. Margaret’s son John married Joan of Acre’s daughter Elizabeth de Clare. Their granddaughter Elizabeth married Edward III’s son Lionel of Antwerp, from whose line descends the Yorkist claim.26
As can be seen from this, Eleanor did not just surround herself with her wider family; some of the matches made by her put members of her family in the heart of some of the most prominent families in the country – and in future in the line for the throne. Yet Eleanor completely avoided the odium which was heaped on Eleanor of Provence. Indeed, one of the early chroniclers specifically praises her as being a queen in whose time the land was not troubled by foreigners, despite her own foreign birth. How was this coup achieved? The short answer is that Eleanor’s matchmaking was a masterpiece of subtlety. Unlike Eleanor of Provence, she did not seek to marry relatives who were too obviously close to her. Unlike Eleanor of Provence, she did not choose as beneficiaries of her matchmaking impoverished male relatives, or girls with no connection to England at all; nor did she broker treaties encapsulating lots of matches, which were bound to be noticed.
Furthermore, she seems to have worked quite hard to make the marriages palatable in traditional English matchmaking terms as well. A very good example is that of the de Vescy marriages. The brides in those cases were from the Fiennes/Beaumont families, both of which were some little distance in terms of familial proximity from Eleanor, and both of which held English lands: the Fiennes family held lands in Somerset, Hertfordshire and Essex, given to Pharamus de Tingry by King Stephen; and the Beaumonts held lands granted to Raoul de Beaumont by Henry I on the occasion of his son Roscelin’s marriage to one of Henry’s numerous illegitimate daughters. Thus the Beaumonts and de Fiennes could by this stage pass muster as English – or at least ‘non-alien’. In addition, however, the Vescy marriages had a subtle touch of kinship to recommend them even in traditional English matchmaking terms. The Vescys were related to the Scottish king, descending from a natural daughter of William the Lion of Scotland; meanwhile, the Beaumonts too were related to Alexander of Scotland, via Alexander II’s mother Ermengarde de Beaumont, and held lands from him by reason of that connection. Therefore, while a marriage between the families was not an obvious dynastic choice, it was perfectly explicable in local terms and a world away from Eleanor of Provence’s matches.27
Thus we can see that, very quietly, and without any of the outcry which Eleanor of Provence attracted for ultimately less influential marriages, Eleanor succeeded in inserting her relatives within touching distance of the royal house itself. At the time this was probably about securing loyal supporters for the royal house itself, in much the same way that she had done at a less elevated level within her own household. In the end, however, it maximised the chances of her family’s bloodline occupying the top spot.
Parsons notes that one reason Eleanor avoided outcry was that she made no attempt to advance her male relatives; no heiresses were ‘disparaged’ and no Castilian or French relatives received baronial summonses to Parliament. Actually, Parsons slightly overstates the case – at least as regards her de Brienne relatives, who were related to her on her father’s side. The Beaumont side of the family armoured by their descent from Henry I and Scottish connections not only received the marriage of Isabella to John de Vescy; the son Louis became Bishop of Durham in 1318 and another son, Henry, was Lord of Man, and through his marriage to Alice Comyn, the countess of Buchan, a conduit to the Lancaster line. However this marriage and his main honours (for example being made Constable of England) did not come until Edward II’s reign. Probably Eleanor’s main contribution to their advancement consisted in establishing them in Edward of Caernarfon’s household, which facilitated their eventual promotion by him. Otherwise, advancement of male relatives, such as John de Fiennes and James de la Plaunche, was very limited and not at a level to create scandal.28
Eleanor’s family can therefore be seen to be a very complex construct. Apart from Edward, the unalterable centre of her world, she assembled many layers of support and friendship, in which her children played a relatively small part. Her closest ties of blood created yet more responsibilities for her. But elsewhere she had a vibrant network of friends, most of whom were also Edward’s intimates, providing a close support network as the royal couple went about their business. There was also a close extended family around the queen largely made up of families tied to her by blood and marriage and who also owed some portion of their advancement to her, although there was a small leavening of close blood family. The atmosphere will have been warm and familiar, many miles from the formalities of later court protocols. But also Eleanor will have been assured of the kind of loyalty which had been missing around England’s royal family for some years – her household had multiple ties of interest with her and her family. The success of her strategy can be seen in the way that these families went on to support Eleanor’s descendants for generations to come.
In addition, Eleanor carefully selected female relatives to advance her bloodline into Britain’s foremost noble families. often choosing from among those who had played some part in that extended family at court. The aim was probably to seed loyalty into those houses as she did among her staff. The result would put her family on England’s throne.
13
The Golden Years
I have called the period from the coronation in 1274 up to 1281 ‘the Golden Years’ because this is how they appear from the outside, at first glance. The snapshot is the glorious Crusader king and queen, turning their hands to the work of peaceful government and business – and of course raising a family – with everything apparently going smoothly. However, looked at more closely, it becomes apparent that these years, which were to take Eleanor from her mid-thirties to her fortieth birthday, were a time of ceaseless work on many fronts for the king and queen, and also for those in their inner circle. While some sense of the individual jobs which fell within Eleanor’s remit have been conveyed by the previous chapters, it is in following the chronological account that one can begin to grasp the intensity of the life which she lived over these years.
Following the completion of the first parliament of the reign, at the end of October the king and queen set off north via Luton for the trip into the Northampton–Leicester area of Eleanor’s existing and dower lands discussed in Chapter 10. It was at Northampton that the king (in company with that notable denizen of Savoy, Otho de Grandison) renewed the pension of Count Philippe of Savoy for his homage in relation to the ‘English’ Savoyard lands. Officially, this tour was also originally intended to press on further to Shrewsbury, to meet with Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. But that part was called off, a little mysteriously, on the pretext that Edward was taken ill, possibly from a recurrence of his wounds – a suggestion not entirely borne out by the amount of travelling done.1
The party then moved back inland via Silverstone, convenient for a wardship just acquired by Eleanor at Haversham, along the modern A43 towards Woodstock. There, of course, lay one of the principal royal residences since the time of Henry II, which offered a congenial spot to spend the first Christmas in England as king and queen.
Once Christmas was over, Anthony Bek and
Otho de Grandison were sent off to Paris to try to raise finance to pay off some of the more insistent creditors. The royal party was also on the move on the first day of the new year, after a bare week’s rest – touring this time towards the west, taking in Marlborough, Amesbury and the palace of Clarendon – and the proposed Wiltshire holdings for Eleanor’s revised dower. Some meeting with Eleanor of Provence, who held Marlborough as part of her dower, would have been inevitable during this visit, particularly since the elder Eleanor was about to undertake a visit to France and seems to have been in less than perfect health. Once this visit was completed, the party headed towards Eleanor’s existing lands in Ringwood and Beaulieu and then back via Romsey and Wherwell to Windsor for Margaret’s birth.2
This pregnancy would have been a doleful one for Eleanor – not only was there the loss of Henry, for whom there would have been considerable grief despite the absence of contact, but just weeks later Edmund of Lancaster’s sixteen-year-old wife, Aveline de Forz, died in childbirth – a reminder of the risks which Eleanor was once again undertaking. Then, in late February 1275, Edward’s sister Margaret of Scotland died. It seems beyond doubt that baby Margaret, whose birth occurred more or less exactly at this time, was named for this sister of Edward’s, who had been one of Eleanor’s early companions in her married days in England and who had so recently helped to make the celebration of the coronation such a joyous event. And then, while Eleanor was just emerging from her lying-in, came the news of the death of Edward’s other sister, Beatrice, Eleanor’s close companion from the Crusade. Beatrice died in London in late March, inferentially giving birth to a child named for Eleanor, Eleanor of Brittany (later Abbess of Fontevrault). When Beatrice’s grieving husband left for his lands, their sons John and Henry remained to be raised by Eleanor and Edward with their children.3
Eleanor of Castile: The Shadow Queen Page 38