Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England
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The king’s anger against the earl ultimately remained unabated. Eleanor as Simon’s wife shared in her husband’s troubles and anxieties. Alongside him, she felt the weight of the king’s displeasure once more. Dismissed from court, Earl Simon sent letters reaffirming his loyalty to Henry III before crossing the Channel to France on 13 June 1252, ‘safe and cheerful, with Henry, his eldest son’.79 The precariousness of the Montforts’ position, Eleanor’s deep sense of unease with the situation and her concern for the immediate future all were conveyed by a message which Marsh added, expressly at her bidding, to the end of his letter to Grosseteste:
The illustrious lady countess sends her greetings to your lordship [Grosseteste] by this letter, with respectful thanks, and embracing the feet of your fatherly goodness in humble supplication, in this time of fear and danger, she commends to you in the blessed Son of God through the Mother of God, her lord, herself, with her children and her house and all those connected with it.80
It was a moving missive, but one with a clear political purpose. Eleanor urged Grosseteste, through Marsh, to assist and protect her husband’s interests, her own interests and those of their offspring, their household and their followers. In expressing herself thus and in mentioning ‘her lord’ (i.e. Earl Simon) first, Eleanor or perhaps Marsh employed a form of address that observed patriarchal conventions in a way which might be pleasing to the addressee, but which, at the same time, subverted patriarchal norms by exercising political agency. If the Montforts’ relationship with Henry III remained unstable, then the Montforts’ wider network of courtly contacts, a network Eleanor helped to foster, offered them alternative routes for influence.
HOUSEHOLD, RELIGION, ESTATES AND FAMILY
Eleanor’s activities during the time of Simon’s Gascon lieutenancy are, as we have seen, difficult to determine with any degree of certainty. What is, however, striking is the decision apparently taken by the earl and countess that Eleanor should often accompany her husband overseas, rather than remaining behind in England to oversee the couple’s estates there. Initially, at least, it might well have been hoped, both by the earl and by his brother-in-law, the English king, that Eleanor’s presence in the duchy would strengthen the legitimacy of the earl’s administration there and perhaps foster loyalty to Henry III through her close kinship with the king/duke. The latter connection was, after all, one that the countess was happy to advertise; on the seal that Eleanor used during her second marriage, she was styled ‘countess of Leicester’, and on her counterseal, she was styled ‘sister of the king of England’.81 Even Eleanor’s close friend, Marsh, acknowledging the difference in rank between them, addressed her deferentially as ‘the noble lady Eleanor, countess of Leicester’, ‘the illustrious lady Eleanor, countess of Leicester’, ‘the illustrious Countess of Leicester’ and ‘the most excellent lady Eleanor, countess of Leicester’, and referred in his letters to ‘your excellency’s royal heart’.82
In Gascony, it presumably fell to Eleanor to assist in running the Montfort’s great household in the duchy. When Earl Simon was called away to counter the various military threats that arose there, Eleanor was ideally placed to act as her husband’s representative. Marsh certainly believed Eleanor capable of influencing the earl in political affairs. In one letter, which dates from the time of Simon’s lieutenancy, the friar advised the countess that if the earl met with failure in Gascony, she might assist her husband ‘with quiet advice’.83
When the couple were in England during the 1240s and 1250s, Eleanor took a keen interest in the day-to-day administration of the Montforts’ household and estates, and in the domestic needs of her growing family. It was Eleanor, for instance, rather than Simon, whom Grosseteste thanked for lending him the services of her cook, John of Leicester.84 Eleanor responded by reassuring Grosseteste that ‘if she had the best of servants, however indispensable they might be to her, she would joyfully and promptly grant them to … [him] to minister to … [his] lordship’, a generous gesture of friendship, intended to find favour with the bishop.85
Eleanor also looked to the spiritual welfare of her family. The countess and the earl actively attempted to recruit spiritual advisers into their service, including Brother Gregory de Bosellis, a friar well known to the Franciscan Marsh, whom Marsh praised for being ‘well versed in mystical language’.86 On one particular occasion, Marsh counselled Bosellis on the appointment of a suitable priest to serve Eleanor’s Kentish manor at Kemsing.87 On another, he rebuked Earl Simon after he learned from Eleanor that he had taken the vicar of the chancellor of Salisbury who served the church of Odiham with him overseas, thereby depriving that church of its priest.88 In 1250, while Simon was in Gascony, Marsh extended to the earl his commiserations for the death of Master Ralph of Canterbury, another cleric who served the earl overseas. Eager to find someone to fill Ralph’s place, Marsh asked Simon whether ‘your discreet lordship together with the lady countess, if you please’ could advise him on how to proceed with this business.89
The couple’s special devotion to the Mendicant Orders was one that the Montforts shared with Henry III and his queen, Eleanor of Provence. The English king was a generous patron of the friars, who regularly provided financial support and gifts in kind, such as fuel and clothing, to the houses at Canterbury, London, Reading and Oxford.90 Throughout the 1230s, 1240s and 1250s Dominican and Franciscan friars were constantly in attendance upon Henry and his wife, fulfilling a pastoral role as confessors and preachers.91 The friars exerted an important influence on Earl Simon’s religious life beyond his friendship with Marsh. In his daily devotions, Simon’s prayers and vigils mirrored those of the early Franciscans, and he favoured the same russet cloth for his clothes as that from which the Franciscans made their habits, in contrast to the jewellery and luxurious fabrics adopted by his wife.92 It is likely that the earl founded the house for Black Friars (Dominicans) in Leicester, perhaps with his wife’s support.93 After all, the couple selected the chapel of St Peter the Apostle in the Dominican priory at Bordeaux as the final resting place for an infant daughter in or around 1248–51.94 Eleanor used her relationship with the king to secure gifts for communities of friars who resided on or near the Montforts’ English estates and who might otherwise have missed out on her brother’s bounty. In November 1255, for example, at Eleanor’s special request, Henry III granted the Friars Minor of Leicester eighteen oaks from the ‘hay’ (forest enclosure) of Alrewas in Staffordshire for making their stall and wainscoting their chapel.95
Contact with the friars shaped Eleanor’s piety in a highly personal way. A strong sense of her religious outlook, or at least of the way in which it was sculpted by Marsh, emerges from the Franciscan’s correspondence with the countess. A postscript added by Marsh to an undated letter to Eleanor of Provence urged the queen to receive the countess, her sister-in-law, with sympathy and encourage her towards a spiritual conversion: ‘Lady, if at this Easter you wish to have a serious discussion with the Countess of Leicester about the salvation of souls … I hope in the blessed Son of God that by the power of his glorious resurrection, he will give you counsel for the occasion to the glory of his name.’96 In another letter addressed to Earl Simon, written in October 1251, Marsh recalled the countess ‘speaking to me about matters relating to both your eternal salvation and hers and your temporal situation’.97
Eleanor’s spiritual interest did not begin and end with the friars; it also extended to the patronage of the Cistercian Order, an affection for which she shared with her father and her brother, Richard of Cornwall.98 On Palm Sunday (1 April) in 1245, so the annalist of the house recalled, the Montforts – Eleanor, who as a woman had secured the Pope’s special permission to enter a Cistercian monastery, Simon, and two of their sons, Henry and Simon junior – all paid a special visit to Waverley Abbey.99 Once at the abbey, the couple heard a sermon in the chapter house, watched the procession and observed the celebration of mass. Eleanor, a ‘most sincere lover’ of the abbey, presented its monks with a p
recious cloth for its high altar, perhaps one that she had sewn herself.100 The ceremony obviously made a deep impression on the countess, as she later gave the abbey sixty-eight marks, eighteen of which were donated to the fabric of the church. The monks used the money to buy 150 acres of land in Neatham in Hampshire.101 The Waverley Abbey annalist placed Eleanor’s piety firmly within a family context – her husband and sons shared in the uplifting religious experience of visiting the abbey, apparently at their mother’s behest.
Eleanor’s participation in other acts of religious benefaction during her marriage is suggested by her occasional appearance in her husband’s charters. When, for example, the earl was in London on 21 October 1255, he granted the abbey of St Mary de Pre in Leicester plots of woodland. Simon’s charter, documenting this gift, stated that he did so expressly for the salvation of his own soul ‘and the soul of Eleanor our countess’.102 Eleanor also supported, alongside her husband, the wealthy Benedictine abbey of St Albans, which was also the home of Matthew Paris. The remnants of the Montfort family archives, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, preserve confraternity letters addressed to Earl Simon and his wife that outline a complex series of arrangements for their posthumous commemoration by the monks there, accompanied by a schedule of almsgiving to the poor.103 Significantly, these letters were issued in November 1257 at Eleanor’s manor of Luton in Bedfordshire,104 and were, perhaps, intended to reciprocate a charter, issued jointly in the names of both Simon and Eleanor, a year earlier, which had granted the abbey the tithes from their demesne in Luton parish.105
The management of the Montforts’ English estates, so that they might support the great household, also absorbed Eleanor’s energies. According to Maddicott’s calculation, the couple’s income from their estates – Earl Simon’s own and those acquired through marriage to Eleanor and by royal grant – stood at around £1,950, placing them in the second rank, but still within the wealthiest half dozen, of English earls and countesses.106 Gifts of venison, although less frequent than they had been during Eleanor’s years as a widow, were still authorized by the king in order to provide fresh meat or increase the stock of the earl and countess’s parks.107 Gifts of wood that Eleanor secured from Henry for building work convey the countess’s continued interest in maintaining and improving the family properties. This was a concern that Earl Simon evidently shared with his wife. Even before Simon’s departure for the East in 1239, he had overseen the construction of a new hall and kitchen at Odiham Castle.108 When the royal court visited Canterbury in Kent in May 1246, Eleanor, for her part, secured a personal grant of ten oaks in Savernake Forest, that were presumably destined for one of her southern dower manors.109 Three months later, Eleanor received another forty oaks from the king in the forests of Savernake and Chute to assist in rebuilding her chapel of Everleigh in Wiltshire.110
In an age when visual displays of wealth might enhance a family’s prestige and function as outward indicators of their status and influence, such expenditure might, as discussed in Chapter 4, have served a valuable political purpose.111 When the king granted Earl Simon custody of Kenilworth Castle in 1244, he effectively provided the couple with a royal residence fit for the king’s sister and the king’s nephews.112 By the time the Montforts took possession of Kenilworth, it had undergone extensive restoration work to turn it into a luxurious and more comfortable residence worthy of a royal palace and fortress. Eleanor’s father, King John, had, for example, spent £1,115 on improvements to Kenilworth’s living quarters and its defences.113 The castle included a great oblong hall-keep, built in the twelfth century, inner and outer baileys and a series of water defences in the form of artificial meres or lakes.114 Under Henry III, the work continued. In 1233, for example, the king ordered the sheriff of Warwickshire to supervise repairs in lead, wood and stone to the tower there.115 In February 1241, the king had issued detailed instructions for the refurbishment of the castle’s main chapel. The interior was to be wainscoted, whitened and painted, a wall was erected to separate the chancel from the main part of the chapel, and special wooden seats installed for the king and the queen. The queen’s own private chapel, situated in the castle tower, was to be furnished with another seat, where she might say her private devotions. The porch of the tower was also rebuilt, the great chamber roofed, the gaol and gutters repaired, and a castle wall, which was falling into the fish pond, was knocked down and rebuilt.116 In September 1241, when Henry III inspected the castle in person, he ordered substantial improvements to the queen’s accommodation there, accommodation his sister Eleanor very probably occupied subsequently. The queen’s chamber was wainscoted, whitened and lined. Its windows were made larger. The fireplaces in both the queen’s and the king’s chamber were enlarged. The queen’s privy chamber was repaired, as was another chamber near the castle wall. A new porch was added to the queen’s chamber, a new window was added to the north side of the castle chapel, a swing-bridge was installed, although it is not clear precisely where, and the castle’s defences were improved by the construction of a new wall between the inner and outer walls of the fortress.117 It was, indeed, generous of the king to hand over such a splendid residence to his sister and brother-in-law so soon after these works were undertaken.
Kenilworth was a far more appropriate and spacious residence for Eleanor and her growing brood of children than that which they already enjoyed at Odiham. Henry III appreciated this, if we can judge from his subsequent decisions to place the couple’s possession of the castle on a firmer footing. In 1248, the year of Earl Simon’s appointment to Gascony, the king granted Eleanor personal custody of Kenilworth Castle for life.118 In 1253, in the aftermath of the debacle over Gascony, the couple’s enjoyment of both Kenilworth and Odiham was extended further so that henceforth both Eleanor and Simon held these properties for the remainder of their lives.119
It was no mean task for a noblewoman like Eleanor to assist her husband in the day-to-day maintenance of such properties. Eleanor even appears to have issued charters in her own name during her second marriage. An undated charter is deposited in the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archives that records a grant made by Eleanor, styled Countess of Leicester and Pembroke, of property in Desford to a man named Walter, which was endorsed by her husband, Earl Simon.120 At times, Eleanor almost seemed to cut a semi-autonomous figure within her marriage. Earl Simon was not always happy with this situation. The letter that Marsh wrote to Eleanor in or about 1250, wherein he urged her to moderate her behaviour towards her husband and learn to act in a more meek and submissive, and a less angry and argumentative manner, certainly supports this impression. One wonders what particular action by Eleanor compelled Marsh to remind her, in no uncertain terms, of her wifely duty of obedience to her husband.121 There were other potential sources of tension, apart from Eleanor’s behaviour to her husband, within their relationship – financial pressures and the couple’s continuing anxiety about the legitimacy of their marriage. According to Paris, it was this latter reason that prompted the earl, with the full support of his wife, to take the cross in 1247.122 In the event, neither husband nor wife set out for the East, but this did not deter Earl Simon from taking the cross yet again in 1250.123
MOTHERHOOD
Perhaps the most important role that Eleanor de Montfort fulfilled within her marriage to Earl Simon was that of a mother. As Barbara Harris observed in her exemplary study of English aristocratic women in Yorkist and early Tudor England, ‘Motherhood was a crucial dimension of aristocratic women’s careers as wives. Their success in bearing children, particularly sons, ensured the survival of their husbands’ lineages and constituted a crucial service to their spouses and in-laws.’124 A similarly high premium was placed on motherhood in thirteenth-century England for similar reasons.125 Eleanor de Montfort’s marriage to Earl Simon proved to be extremely fertile – the countess bore her husband five sons and one daughter who are known to have survived infancy. After the birth of the couple’s eldest child, a son named Henry,
in November 1238,126 Eleanor quickly became pregnant again. In fact, she was already pregnant when she fled the kingdom with her husband in August 1239.127 Eleanor was either still pregnant or possibly pregnant for a third time when the couple set off on crusade in 1240.128 The birth of the couple’s second son, who was named Simon, after his father and grandfather, was presumably the result of Eleanor’s second or third pregnancy. Next to Simon in age was his younger brother, Amaury, who was most probably conceived after the earl’s return from the East and who was born, by his own account, between spring 1242 and 1243.129 The births of Guy, whom Maddicott has suggested was born in 1244, Richard, who was perhaps the child born to the couple in 1252, and Eleanor, who might have been born as late as 1258, followed.130 Eleanor’s time in Gascony, between 1248 and 1251, also witnessed the burial of another daughter, who either died soon after birth or in early infancy.131
The small amounts of time that typically elapsed between the end of one of Eleanor’s early pregnancies and the conception of another child suggests that the Countess of Leicester, like other women of her wealth and status, handed over the wet nursing of her newborn children soon after birth. This was perfectly in keeping with contemporary expectations; it allowed Eleanor to resume her role in governing the Montforts’ household and estates, and assisted in the recovery of her fertility.132 Although we do not know the names of the nurses who cared for the Montforts’ children, noble mothers often played an active role in their recruitment, and were encouraged to keep a close eye on their health and character, to ensure the quality of their milk, their attentiveness to their charges and their moral fibre, since the latter would rub off on the children in their care.133