The placing of Eleanor’s sons and daughters in the charge of wet nurses during their early infancy did not necessarily mean that they spent particularly long periods of time apart from their mother. A possible exception was the Montforts’ eldest son, Henry, who appears to have been left behind in England when the couple were forced, unexpectedly, to flee in 1239. The fact, though, that Earl Simon collected this son, so that he might convey him to his mother in time for the family to set out on crusade in 1240, suggests that that the Montforts were concerned to see their son restored to their household.134
Admittedly, the large amount of travelling in which the Montforts engaged, especially during their time overseas in France and Gascony, might have proved unsettling to the children as well as their parents. There is no evidence to suggest that the Montforts deviated from the relatively widespread practice among the English and French nobility of sending their sons away at around the age of seven and placing them in the households of high-ranking churchmen or barons.135 Two of the Montforts’ sons, Henry, their son and heir, and Amaury, their third surviving son, who was destined for a career in the church, spent part of their childhoods in the household of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln.136 The quality of the education that Henry received there – ‘in learning letters and … good manners’ – were, according to Marsh, important considerations behind the decision of the earl and countess that he should return there in 1249.137 Earl Simon clearly valued and respected Eleanor’s opinion on this matter.
If practical necessity as well as contemporary expectations sometimes dictated that at least some of the Montfort sons received their education in other households, then Eleanor still had an important role to play in supervising their care in early infancy. It was presumably into his wife’s capable hands that Simon placed the wards whose custody he received from the crown, like the infant heir of Gilbert de Umfraville, a wealthy northern baron,138 and who were subsequently raised alongside the couple’s younger children within the Montforts’ own establishments. Furthermore, the removal of Eleanor’s sons from their parents’ household did not prevent the earl and countess from soliciting regular reports on their progress. Marsh’s letters to Eleanor and Simon are littered with frequent reports on Henry and Amaury: ‘The lord bishop of Lincoln is well, blessed be the Son of God, and your noble children are also well and continue to make good progress’;139 ‘The lord of Lincoln is well and your noble children are well’;140 ‘The lord bishop of Lincoln is well, blessed be God, and your distinguished children, whose outstanding talents give us great hopes of them, daily progress in virtue’;141 ‘Your dear children are also well and are, I hope, advancing in both age and grace’;142 and ‘Your illustrious children are well, blessed be our Saviour’.143 From Marsh’s letters, both Montforts emerge as parents who bore a deep affection for their offspring.
FRIENDS AT COURT, 1251–3
Although Eleanor’s personal feelings about her recurring pregnancies are not recorded, the letters of Adam Marsh convey the sense of trepidation with which she approached her confinements. A letter he sent to the earl in October 1251, for example, began with a report of a false alarm: ‘On the feast of St Denis [9 October] the countess [who was then heavily pregnant] conjectured that she was going into labour, although the day of birth had not arrived as she supposed.’144 Eleanor, like many of her contemporaries, sought spiritual comfort at such a dangerous time for mother and child. Another letter in 1252, this time addressed to Eleanor, celebrated the safe arrival of her child, giving ‘Blessing and glory to the Lord, who has not despised your devotion and has heard your prayer, and granted you delivery from anxiety and danger and joyfulness for a beloved offspring.’145 News of this child was also greeted with joy by the queen, Eleanor of Provence, herself the mother of four surviving children by 1252.146 During the early 1250s, the Countess of Leicester remained on friendly terms with her sister-in-law, the queen, perhaps on friendlier terms than she and her husband were, at times, with the king. As Countess Eleanor awaited the birth of her child in the late summer and early autumn of 1252, Queen Eleanor sent her messenger, John, presumably to bring her news of how the final stages of her sister-in-law’s pregnancy were progressing.147 When Peter, Earl Simon’s barber, brought the queen ‘rumours of the birth’ of the countess’s long-anticipated child at Michaelmas, he received forty shillings, a sizeable gift that reflected the queen’s personal pleasure.148 The queen immediately dispatched one of her own nurses, Lady Alice, to Kenilworth to care for her sister-in-law.149 Queen Eleanor remained in close contact with the Countess of Leicester throughout the autumn, sending another messenger from Winchester to Kenilworth at the beginning of November.150 Further messengers were exchanged by the two women over the coming months and into the New Year, when Countess Eleanor was resident at Kenilworth and Odiham.151 One messenger, William de Gardin, was enlisted to convey a gift of jewellery to the countess on 1 December 1252.152 During the summer of 1253, the Countess of Leicester paid a visit to the queen, travelling from Kenilworth to Windsor and back again with an entourage mounted on 28 horses.153
Further and, at times, rather touching evidence of the close relationship enjoyed by these two women is provided by the royal jewel rolls for 1252–3, which record gifts made by the queen to members of the countess’s household. On 1 January 1253, Clemencia, Countess Eleanor’s damsel, received a brooch worth 2s. 10d., while another Montfort servant, Walter de Fauconberg, a knight of the Countess of Leicester, received another brooch valued at 2s. 9½d.154 Significantly, other recipients of brooches from the queen at this time were associated with the Montforts. They included, for example, Lady Agnes, the wife of Richard of Havering, a close associate of Countess Eleanor and Earl Simon, and the Haverings’ daughter.155 Such personal tokens of esteem reinforced and gave visual expression to the ties of friendship that existed between Henry III’s wife and his younger sister.
POLITICAL TENSIONS
The years 1252–3 were fraught with political upheavals and pressing financial concerns for the Montforts. Earl Simon’s return to Gascony in the immediate aftermath of his trial, coupled with his renewed military activities there, threatened a truce the king had secured with the Gascons in an attempt to restore peace. In October or November 1252, the king finally removed Simon from his command by means of an agreement negotiated with the king’s oldest son, the Lord Edward, which promised to compensate the Earl of Leicester for the losses he had sustained there in royal service.156 By the summer of 1253, however, the king was courting the earl’s assistance in Gascony in order to assist a royal campaign to subdue the province in the face of renewed rebellion. Although the earl was understandably reluctant to return, he finally arrived to assist the king in October that year, and he remained in royal service until the early months of 1254.157 It is interesting, though, to note that Paris credited Grosseteste, rather than Eleanor as Simon’s wife, with persuading the earl to set aside his resentment at his treatment by the king and join his brother-in-law in Gascony after all.158 In the event, it was wise advice. The earl’s change of heart paved the way for a reconciliation between Henry III and Earl Simon, which provided the Montforts with further opportunities to try to settle their financial affairs and resolve the ongoing matter of their family’s debts. The result was a generous series of royal grants made in November 1253 which attempted to redress the matter of the expenses previously incurred by the earl in the king’s service in Gascony. Henry did this by promising to pay the earl £500 and by bestowing an annual fee of 600 marks (£400) on Earl Simon, Eleanor and the couple’s heirs that the king would substitute for lands in the future.159
The concessions that the Montforts secured in 1253 also represented a financial coup at a time when competition for the king’s patronage was, arguably, at its peak, and at a time when the crown was increasingly strapped for resources. With the arrival of Henry and Eleanor’s Lusignan half-brothers and half-sisters (the children of Isabella of Angoulême’s second marriage) in England in 1247
came another group of relations, in addition to Henry III’s siblings, his wife and her Savoyard kin, and the royal children, for whom the king might be expected to provide, and who appealed to his personal generosity.160 William de Valence, the eldest of the king’s half-brothers, became one of the leading defaulters for Eleanor’s Irish dower after he secured the marriage of Joan de Munchensy.161 Bitter and public confrontations between William and Simon in 1257 and in April 1258 on Welsh affairs helped to alienate the Earl of Leicester from Henry III’s regime.162
The high cost of the war in Gascony also left Henry III short of funds. This, coupled with the king’s decision in March 1254 to accept an offer made by the Pope to bestow the crown of Sicily on Henry’s second son, Edmund, placed unprecedented strains on the crown’s finances and stretched them to breaking point. The papal offer came with strings attached: an English army to reconquer Sicily from the Hohenstaufens and a promise to pay off debts incurred by the papacy there to the tune of more than £90,000.163 For the Montforts, who relied for so much of their cash income on the crown, and who still awaited the conversion of some of the fees owing to them into land, the outlook might well have appeared understandably bleak. We have already noted how, by 1256, Henry III was struggling to safeguard and satisfy the payments for Eleanor’s Irish dower. He was, as Maddicott has shown, also becoming increasingly tardy when it came to repaying the sums owed to Earl Simon under the terms of the settlement agreed for his past services in Gascony, so that some debts remained unpaid for more than two years.164
Although the Montforts’ debts provided Eleanor and Simon with a shared sense of grievance against the English crown, it did not, as the 1250s progressed, prevent the earl from serving Henry III on diplomatic missions overseas. The outcome of affairs in Gascony did not dent Simon’s reputation as a skilled diplomat and politician. In 1253, shortly before he joined Henry III’s campaign to Gascony, the French nobles asked the Earl of Leicester to assume the office of seneschal of France; the death of Blanche of Castile had left the Capetian kingdom without a regent in Louis IX’s absence on crusade.165 One cannot help but wonder whether Eleanor influenced the earl’s decision to decline this offer. Paris observed that the Earl of Leicester had no wish to serve two royal masters.166 It is easy to understand why his wife’s blood tie to the English king, together with the degree to which the couple were beholden financially to Henry III, might also have helped to determine Simon’s choice. As it was, Simon’s cross-Channel connections proved invaluable to the English king, who dispatched him to negotiate with the French in 1255 and 1257. Simon’s advice was also sought on an abortive English mission to Rome, as well as in the crown’s dealings with the kingdom of Castile.167 It was Simon who was selected, in September 1254, to visit the Scottish royal court, with the sensitive mission of ascertaining the wellbeing of his royal niece, Margaret, Queen of Scots.168 In the end, though, the loyalties engendered by such ties proved far too fragile to last; they could not withstand Simon and Eleanor’s shared financial grievances against the crown and the resentment provoked by the Lusignans. Enough was enough.
7
Reform, Revolution and War
the lord king and the Lord Edward his son… submitted themselves,
for the correction and reform both of their own affairs
and of the state of the realm.1
By the spring of 1258 it was not just the Montforts who were disillusioned with Henry III’s personal rule. The king’s ill-considered handling of patronage and the favouritism shown to his arrogant Lusignan half-brothers provoked widespread discontent. On top of this came the king’s involvement in costly schemes abroad, most notably the ‘Sicilian Business’ in 1254, whereby he attempted to secure a throne for his second son, Edmund, which contributed further to the parlous state of royal finances. The weight of royal government came to feel particularly burdensome and oppressive to the knights and free tenants in the localities, where the Exchequer attempted to raise ever-greater sums of money through the machinery of royal justice. In addition to this, the sheriffs, the crown’s chief local agents, were now expected to pay much higher cash increments over and above the county farms, so that many resorted to extortion to raise funds. The crown exploited the Jews to a much higher degree than before, with the result that the Jews, in their turn, placed greater pressure on their debtors in order to meet their more onerous obligations.2 It was against this backdrop of popular disenchantment with Henry III’s regime that Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, became involved in the baronial movement to reform the government of the realm. As his wife, Eleanor inevitably became involved in the events that unfolded in 1258–9.
At a parliament held at Westminster in April and May 1258, a group of seven magnates, including the Earl of Leicester, banded together and met the king, head-on, with demands to expel the aliens, especially the king’s detested half-brothers, and create a committee of twenty-four to overhaul royal government.3 Left with little choice other than to acquiesce, Henry III consented to the appointment of the committee, drawn from twelve royalists and twelve baronial supporters, which met at the Oxford parliament in June 1258.4 Earl Simon’s position on the committee ensured that its remit addressed two matters close to his heart and that of his wife: first, the issue of whether their annual fee of £400 that they had secured in 1253 ought to be replaced with land, and second, the settlement of outstanding debts now owed to the Montforts by the crown.5 This was rather surprising business, perhaps, for a committee concerned with a nationwide programme of governmental reform.
It remains frustratingly unclear just what feelings Countess Eleanor harboured about the reforming mantle that her husband assumed in the late 1250s. There are signs that she supported her husband’s actions. An awareness on her part that some of the Leicesters’ servants were vulnerable to the money-raising initiatives employed by the crown is, for example, suggested by her activities at this time. In 1256, the king decreed that all persons in possession of lands worth £15 per annum or over should be compelled to become knights, and thereby become liable to hold a range of unsalaried offices in local government.6 It is striking that it was Eleanor, and not her husband, who in June 1257 secured exemption (or respite) from knighthood for the Northamptonshire landholder William de Torvyle.7 Furthermore, as a woman who had had recourse to the financial services of the Jews, Eleanor might have felt sympathy for other Jewish debtors who now found themselves in more straightened financial circumstances. Eleanor’s involvement in politics in the era of reform raises intriguing questions about her role on both the national and international stage.
THE TREATY OF PARIS
As Maddicott observed, ‘the most important external issue confronting both the king and barons in 1258’ was that of concluding, successfully, a critical series of negotiations with the king of France for a permanent Anglo-French peace.8 This peace was intended to end the years of fighting punctuated by truces which had shaped Anglo-French relations since the loss of Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Touraine under King John.9 Under its terms, Henry III prepared to surrender all his claims in his dynasty’s former continental possessions to King Louis IX, who, through marriage to Margaret of Provence, was Henry III’s brother-in-law. In return, Louis allowed Henry to retain Gascony as a fief of the French crown. As a native French man with strong family ties to the English court and contacts at the French court, it was, perhaps, inevitable that Simon de Montfort served as Henry III’s agent at various stages in the negotiations. Henry’s decision to employ Simon in this capacity at a time when the earl was disenchanted with him was, at best, naive, and provided the earl and his wife with a perfect opportunity to secure leverage over the English crown.10
One of the remaining obstacles to the successful conclusion of the treaty in 1258 was Louis IX’s demand that Henry III’s surviving siblings, Richard, Earl of Cornwall and King of the Romans,11 and Eleanor, Countess of Leicester, should resign their claims to the same territories.12 In May that year, Henry III wrote to the French
king to reassure him that he would do as much as was in his power to persuade his brother and sister to meet these terms. He even appointed Eleanor’s husband as one of his proctors in this matter.13 Yet Earl Simon might well have been, as Henry himself later claimed, directly responsible for persuading the French king to seek Eleanor’s resignation of their rights. Among the charges subsequently brought against Simon by the English king at a later trial in 1260 was the accusation that ‘the earl, both personally and through his agents, arranged and caused to be arranged, and put it into the mind of the king of France, that renunciation should be asked from the countess and her children’.14 Admittedly, the earl rebuffed this charge, but it is easy to understand why Henry III suspected his brother-in-law of duplicity. It was certainly curious, as the English king observed, that no mention was made during the negotiations of the comparable rights of Henry III’s daughters, those of Richard of Cornwall’s second son, and those of the children of Isabella the Empress, all of whom might have been considered alternative claimants to the former Angevin dominions.15 Although Earl Simon rigorously denied it, Louis’s decision to prioritize Richard’s and Eleanor’s claims might well have originated in the machinations of the Montforts.
Admittedly, it is not clear just how far Eleanor was implicated in all of this, but it seems likely that, at the very least, she endorsed Earl Simon’s activities. After all, the enduring strength of the couple’s marriage and the high esteem in which Simon held his wife at this time was demonstrated when, on 1 January 1259, Simon de Montfort’s eldest son, Henry, drafted his father’s will. In this document, Simon announced his decision to make Eleanor his chief executor in the event of his death. In a personal note, he urged Eleanor to act as his attorney in settling his affairs ‘in such a way as a good lady ought to do for her lord who trusts in her’.16 Eleanor’s appearance in this document is a strong indication of her husband’s belief in her capabilities; it also implies recognition, on Simon’s part, that Eleanor shared his personal, political and spiritual objectives to a sufficient degree for him to entrust her with overseeing his posthumous bequests.17
Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England Page 14