Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England
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ELEANOR IN EXILE
In the late autumn and early winter of 1265, Eleanor was very much thrown back on her own resources and her family’s French lands and connections. Eleanor’s immediate concern on arriving in France in 1265 was to find a safe haven for herself, her daughter and her sons, and a means of securing their futures. Eleanor might, initially, have had fears about the warmth of her reception from Louis IX and Queen Margaret, in view of their close kinship with, and earlier support for, Eleanor of Provence, during the English queen’s recent exile. The French king and his wife appear, though, to have shared a surprising deal of sympathy with Countess Eleanor’s plight and quickly stepped in to mediate on the Countess of Leicester’s behalf in her dealings with the English crown. As early as 2 October 1265, Henry III wrote to Louis, informing him that he was dispatching envoys to the French court to engage in discussions there about the affairs of the Countess of Leicester and her sons.8 On 16 November 1265, Henry III granted Countess Eleanor, Sir Ralph d’Arcy and Thomas of Sandwich, her erstwhile companions at Dover Castle, protection for one year. Perhaps the king hoped to encourage his sister to attend the English royal court in order to stage a public ceremony of reconciliation, possibly in the hope that her presence might persuade the remaining rebels to come to heal.9 Eleanor’s importance, even after her flight to France, as a figurehead for those Montfortians who continued to resist surrender is suggested in an account of the siege of Kenilworth by a later St Albans chronicler, William Rishanger. The rebels who withstood a siege at Kenilworth Castle in 1266 initially refused to surrender because, so Rishanger observed, they claimed to hold the castle for the Countess of Leicester.10 It is far from clear whether Eleanor aided or abetted Simon junior’s attempts at rallying forces to launch an invasion of England from the French coast during the summer and early autumn of 1266. What is clear is that the level of threat that Simon junior posed in September 1266 was considered sufficiently serious by the crown for the Pope to order members of the senior clergy throughout France to excommunicate all who participated in such enterprises. The French king, Louis IX, was urged by Pope Clement IV to prevent his subjects from assisting Eleanor and her son in recovering their lands; Louis IX was encouraged, instead, to direct his efforts to assisting Henry III in recovering his position.11 In fact, Louis had already written to his brother-in-law in the summer of 1266, informing Henry that he had taken action to prevent his enemies from crossing to England. In the same letter, the French king strongly urged Henry to make peace with Eleanor and her sons.12
Once again, Louis IX was cast as a mediator between Henry III and the remaining Montforts. By means of a royal letter, issued on 25 September 1266, Henry III formally announced his decision to defer to the award of King Louis on the matter of all damages and injuries that he and his children had sustained at the hands of Simon junior, Earl Simon and ‘Eleanor, sometime countess of Leicester’.13 The circumstances that had prompted this letter were made explicit in another missive, issued on the same day, this time addressed to Louis, which recalled the earlier arrival in England of Louis’s representatives, who had expressly been sent to negotiate with the king ‘on the matter of the countess and Simon de Montfort, son of the sometime earl of Leicester’.14 All this activity ultimately explains why, under the terms of the Dictum of Kenilworth proclaimed on 31 October 1266, Henry III offered the remaining rebels the chance to keep their lives, limbs and property at the price of forfeiting between two and seven years’ income, but specifically excluded ‘Earl Simon de Montfort and his sons, for the lord King has left this matter in the hands of the king of France’.15
The process of arbitration was neither smooth nor fast. In February 1267, Henry III again repeated his intention to submit to Louis’s award, provided that a decision was reached by Easter.16 It was only with the arrival in England of John of Acre, the butler of France, and other French envoys in the spring of that year that it looked as though any significant headway might be made: on 24 May 1267, Henry III, with the backing of his council, informed Louis of his offer to restore the dead earl’s lands to Simon junior, and extend and value them in cooperation with Simon junior’s own representatives. Unfortunately for Simon junior, this offer came with an unpalatable sting in the tail: he was to promise to sell his lands to the king or the king’s children whenever he was required to do so, for a value approved by the king of France, but which took into account the damages sustained by Henry III through the ‘sedition’ of Earl Simon and Simon junior.17 As F. M. Powicke observed, ‘Henry still intended to keep Simon out of the country and to return to the plan of a money compensation, whose payment would depend on Simon’s good behaviour.’18 The deal failed to satisfy Simon junior, and the French king’s attempts at reconciliation dragged on, but made limited progress.19 By late 1268, Simon had joined his brother, Guy, in the service of Louis IX’s brother, Charles of Anjou, during the latter’s conquest of Italy.20
The letter of 24 May 1267 also disclosed important information about the state of negotiations over Countess Eleanor’s dower. In it, Henry III, repeated his support for an arrangement between the Countess of Leicester and the tenants of the lands in which she claimed her dower that had already been reached at ‘another time’ in the presence of Eleanor of Provence. Under the terms of this agreement, it was set down that the countess, via her proctor, would receive £500 a year in lieu of dower. If, however, this agreement now proved unsatisfactory to the countess, the king laid down that her proctors might sue for the recovery of her rights before the royal justices.21 It is striking that Countess Eleanor had turned to her sister-in-law, with whom she had previously enjoyed strong ties of friendship, rather than her brother, in order to pursue her dower. This offers another example of female networking within the royal family and is, perhaps, suggestive of shared sympathies between the two women, in spite of the antagonism between the king and the surviving Montforts. Perhaps Countess Eleanor found it easier to deal with the queen on personal grounds. After all, Eleanor of Provence was absent from England, herself an exile in France, for the duration of the troubles of 1264–5,22 and as such was not tainted by close association with the bloody end of Earl Simon at Evesham or with the indignities to which his corpse was subjected after the battle.
Eleanor’s actions in the late 1260s might well have been fuelled by her deep sense of personal grief. Widowed for a second time, Eleanor sought solace, as she had previously done at other troubled moments of her life, in her piety and spirituality. Yet, in doing so, Eleanor was still also able to make an overt political gesture that demonstrated the scale of the bitterness that she felt towards her eldest brother, Henry III, and her disillusionment with her family’s treatment at his hands. Soon after leaving England late in 1265, Countess Eleanor entered a female religious community where she spent the remainder of her days. The community that Eleanor chose was not that of the great abbey of Fontevrault, the final resting place of her royal Angevin forebears, and of her mother, Isabella of Angoulême. Eleanor chose, instead, in an expression of loyalty and devotion to her recently deceased husband, to enter the Dominican nunnery of Montargis, a community of women religious founded by Earl Simon’s sister, Amicia (d. 1252), the widow of Gaucher of Joigny.23 Eleanor and Earl Simon’s support for the Mendicant Orders has already been discussed in this study and it might simply have been the case that Eleanor preferred the spirituality of the Dominican nuns to that of the more antiquated double communities of the Order of Fontevrault.24 Yet it is striking that a woman who had in the past traded upon her kinship with the English king, a woman who styled herself on her counterseal as ‘sister of the king of England’, chose in her second period of widowhood to align herself firmly with the Montforts, her kin by marriage. This move revealed the extent of her alienation from the English crown.
The constitutions of the community of Montargis, drawn up in or around 1250, and those for all Dominican nuns, drawn up in 1259, offer glimpses of the rhythms of life that Countess Eleanor might have encou
ntered within the convent.25 As a sister of Montargis, Eleanor would have been expected to embrace strict enclosure and a regime of religious observances, centred primarily upon singing the psalms, prayer and contemplation as a means of bringing her soul closer to God.26 It is, therefore, likely that much of Eleanor’s time at Montargis was spent in silence, a state of existence that was highly valued by Dominicans as a way of aiding their spiritual endeavours. The constitutions of 1259 forbade nuns from speaking in the oratory, cloister, refectory or dormitory, and laid down stiff penalties for those who broke this rule.27 Value was, however, attached to the reading of devotional texts, something that a literate woman like Eleanor might well have welcomed as a source of spiritual succour and enlightenment.28 In fact, in March 1270, Prioress Guie of Montargis borrowed a copy of one of Earl Simon’s former books, A Summary of Vices and Virtues by the Dominican Guillaume Peyraut, from Eleanor’s son Amaury, a loan that was perhaps informed by the countess’s knowledge of her dead husband’s library.29 Silence at Montargis was broken at regulated points throughout the day when the community came together to celebrate the canonical hours – matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers and compline – that demarcated the religious day.30 In fact, the constitutions laid down that Dominican novices ought ‘diligently’ to ‘study psalmody and Divine Office’ upon entering her house.31
The religious life that Eleanor encountered at Montargis did not necessarily require her to turn her back upon her family and kin. Eleanor was still able to receive guests at this family foundation. The French king, queen, local bishop and patrons of the house, both male and female, were, for example, all allowed access to the conventual cloister.32 From Montargis, Eleanor was able to look to the interests of her children in the decade after Evesham.
LANDS AND LITIGATION
Eleanor’s spiritual alignment with her Montfort in-laws did not deter Eleanor from pressing her blood relations in the maternal line – the Lusignans – for the recovery of her share of her mother’s inheritance in Angoulême in the French courts. The loss of income from Eleanor’s English lands and her residence in France made the matter of securing a firm financial base and future for her exiled children all the more compelling. Here, Eleanor met with a degree of success. In 1267, Eleanor secured a judgment in her favour in the parlement of Paris that upheld her rights in her mother’s lands against those of Count Hugh (XII) of La Marche and Geoffrey de Lusignan. When the Count of La Marche failed to act upon this settlement with suitable speed, Eleanor secured another verdict in her favour in 1269. Under the terms of this second award, it was agreed that the count would assign the Countess of Leicester £400 a year in land and would undertake to pay her an additional £800 to cover the arrears that had built up during the last two years.33
Eleanor also continued to pursue her English lands and rights, as she had done for most of her life. In Louis IX, Eleanor found a useful and powerful political ally who interceded with the Pope on the countess’s behalf when she took her grievances against Henry III to the Roman curia.34 Early in 1268, for example, Louis secured the assurances of the Pope that he would be just to the Countess of Leicester and her sons.35 It is hard to imagine that Eleanor was not party to the mission by her clerical son, Amaury, to the Roman curia, where, in the spring of 1267, he successfully petitioned Pope Clement to preserve his English ecclesiastical offices, notably the treasurership and prebend of York, which his dead father had been instrumental in securing for him.36 It was also at Amaury’s request that the papal legate to England, Ottobuono, was ordered to investigate Amaury’s claims that, although Earl Simon as a good Christian had sought and obtained absolution for his sins before Evesham and had shown repentance, his body had not received a church burial, a situation that imperiled the fate of Simon’s immortal soul.37 Here, Amaury was dealing with a highly sensitive issue that was extremely close to his mother’s heart. As the chief executor of Simon’s will, as well as his grieving widow, it was Eleanor’s duty to ensure, in spite of the extraordinary circumstances of his death, that Simon’s body was given an appropriate Christian burial. It also testifies to Amaury’s personal talents as a negotiator that he was able to persuade a pope, who in the recent past had vehemently opposed the Montfortian cause, to listen to and act upon his petition. Eleanor’s close relationship with Amaury was witnessed by her decision to appoint him as the chief executor of her will on her death in 1275.38
Eleanor’s contacts with her other sons – Richard, Guy and Simon – are more difficult to trace. A brief glimpse of a family reunion that took place in December 1266 is provided by a letter jointly addressed by Eleanor, Simon, Guy and Eleanor the younger to Louis IX, King of France, to which the countess’s seal and those of her children were attached. The letter, which touched upon an annual rent of £500 par. (Parisian money) paid by Louis to Earl Simon, also referred to Amaury and Richard.39 Shortly after leaving England, Richard appears to have found service with Theobald II of Navarre, and fought in the latter’s Gascon campaign against Henry III in 1266 before disappearing from the records.40 Guy, for his part, took part in Charles of Anjou’s successful Italian and Sicilian conquests of 1268. Guy enjoyed the company of his French cousin, Philip de Montfort, a descendant of his great uncle, another Guy, and was rewarded by Charles with estates and offices in the south of Europe. After helping to secure victory at Alba in August 1268, Guy the younger received fiefs in the kingdom of Naples, namely Arienzo, Nola, Castel Cicala, Monteforte, Forino and Atripalda, and, following service to Philip de Montfort in central Italy, he was appointed vicar-general of Tuscany and vicar of Florence in 1270.41 On 10 August 1270, Guy cemented his position by marrying Margherita Aldobrandesca, the heiress of the Count Palatine Ildebrandino of Pitigliano.42 Simon junior, a later arrival in Italy, similarly profited from the generosity of Charles of Anjou and was granted the county of Avellino.43 Amaury, who also travelled to Italy in 1268 and subsequently studied for three years at the University of Padua, might well have acted as a point of contact between his brothers and their mother in France.44
THE MURDER OF HENRY OF ALMAIN
The horrors of Evesham came back, however, to haunt the Countess of Leicester and her family in 1271. On Friday 13 March 1271, Henry of Almain, who had been dispatched to Italy by the Lord Edward, then en route to the Near East on crusade, to act as a peace-broker between the Montfort sons and the English crown, was murdered. While Henry was hearing mass in the church of San Silvestro in Viterbo, he was brutally attacked by Guy.45 This act, which deeply shocked the courts of Europe, resulted in the flight of the murderer and his accomplice, Simon junior. Both men suffered the immediate confiscation of their estates and offices.46 It should be seen primarily as an opportunistic act of revenge for the deaths of Guy and Simon junior’s father and brother at Evesham, and perhaps also for Henry’s earlier desertion by turning his back on the Montfortian cause in 1263. Another significant factor that riled Earl Simon’s sons further was Henry’s recent marriage to a Gascon heiress, Constance, the daughter of Gaston de Béarn, a marriage that threatened the Montforts’ interests in their father’s former county of Bigorre.47
The murder at Viterbo cast a dark shadow over all Countess Eleanor’s surviving sons. The Lord Edward strongly suspected Amaury of involvement, although a spell of illness in Padua, which was subsequently confirmed by the bishop, chapter and university there, apparently proved that Amaury was not witness to, or obviously complicit in, the deed.48 What is clear, however, is that the Lord Edward did not extend his suspicion to his aunt, Eleanor, at Montargis. Furthermore, when Simon and Guy fled in the aftermath of the murder, they remained in Italy, rather than seeking direct and open aid from their mother or their Montfort kinsmen in France. Simon died a short time later, in a castle near Siena,49 while Guy evaded capture with the assistance of his father-in-law. After his excommunication by the Pope in April 1273, Guy surrendered and was imprisoned, albeit in the custody of his former lord, Charles of Anjou.50
THE ACCESSION OF
EDWARD I
With the death of Henry III on 16 November 1272, the Lord Edward, who was then still absent on crusade, succeeded to the English throne as Edward I. Edward’s accession smoothed the way, with a bit of help from the new French king, Philip III, for a period of reconciliation between Eleanor and the English court. When, on his way back from the East, Edward visited Melun on the outskirts of Paris in the summer of 1273, it is likely that he met with his aunt for the first time in almost eight years. At the time of his accession and, no doubt, with a view to conducting a successful exercise in public relations that was designed to heal past divisions, he offered Eleanor an olive branch. On 10 August 1273, Edward wrote to the royal chancellor, Walter of Merton, in England, announcing that, ‘at the instance of the most serene prince and our dearest kinsman, Philip, by the grace of God, illustrious king of France’, he had withdrawn all his indignation and all the rancour within his soul towards Eleanor, Countess of Leicester. Eleanor, the letter recorded, was now admitted ‘to our grace and firm peace’, provided that she continued to behave ‘well and faithfully to us’.51 During the visit, Edward felt sufficiently well disposed towards his aunt to loan her £200, a debt that she subsequently repaid in full to the keeper of the royal wardrobe in the autumn of 1274.52