The Plantagenets: History of a Dynasty

by J. S. Hamilton

  By the time of Montfort’s wedding to Eleanor, the king himself had also wed. The marriage of Henry III to Eleanor of Provence in January 1236 was to have far-reaching implications for his reign. His choice of a bride has been questioned since his own day. Despite their difference in age, the 12-year-old daughter of Count Raymond-Berenguer V might have been seen as a suitable match for the 28-year-old Henry had she been an heiress. However, as the second of four daughters, Eleanor was unlikely to inherit more than a modest portion of her father’s holdings, especially since her older sister Margaret had married Louis IX of France some 2 years previously. Yet her family connections were still of considerable value from Henry’s point of view, if not that of his critics, both contemporary and modern. Her so-called Savoyard uncles became powerful figures in English politics, but it would be wrong to describe them as favourites, as they were never really subservient to Henry’s will or dependent upon his favour.

  It would also be wrong to dismiss them as parasites at the king’s court, although they certainly received lavish patronage from the king. They were talented, had useful connections, and they quickly integrated themselves into English political society with little initial opposition. The picture of Henry’s court awash in ‘aliens’, so prominent in the writing of the St Albans chronicler Matthew Paris, is an extreme exaggeration in the decade following the royal marriage.

  The wedding took place on 14 January 1236 at Canterbury, and 6 days later Eleanor was crowned Queen of England at Westminster. London was decorated with silk banners and garlands of flowers, and various royal officials were charged with keeping the enormous crowd under control. A procession of mounted worthies from the City of London rode to Westminster, preceded by the king’s trumpeters, where they presented hundreds of gold and silver cups to be used at the coronation banquet. At the coronation itself, the king in his full coronation regalia processed from Westminster Palace to the Abbey across a blue-rayed carpet under a canopy of purple silk supported on silver lances by the barons of the Cinque Ports. He was preceded by three earls bearing the ceremonial swords of state and by the treasurer and chancellor carrying the paten and chalice to be used in the coronation mass. Eleanor followed Henry under a similar canopy, escorted by two bishops, one on each side. Following a prayer at the church door celebrating the Virgin and child-bearing, Eleanor proceeded to the steps before the high altar where the archbishop of Canterbury anointed her with holy oil before placing a crown on her head. On the day of her coronation, Eleanor acted for the first time in the expected queenly role of intercessor, seeking pardon for one William de Panchehall. The importance of another queenly duty, to provide the king with heirs – and the importance of dynastic continuity – was soon vividly impressed upon her as well, when Henry commissioned a stained-glass Jesse window for the queen’s bedchamber in Winchester.

  Eleanor had been exposed to a variety of influences in her native Provence, ranging from troubadour poetry to the preaching of the first generation of the Franciscans. Henry apparently took Eleanor to Glastonbury in the summer of 1236 to see the site of King Arthur’s burial, perhaps in recognition of her familiarity with Arthurian romance. From the outset of the marriage, Henry appears to have been genuinely pleased with his bride, to whom he remained faithful throughout his long life. Although royal records are generally impersonal, mediated as they are by the clerk transcribing them, we should perhaps give some credence to the formal language of the Curia Regis rolls where the queen is described as karissima concors and dilecta concors (dearest and beloved consort).

  An interesting personal note is found in the Close Rolls for 1240 when the king seems to have forgotten to order his wife’s Christmas gift until the last minute, ordering an expensive golden, footed cup on 19 December. 9 There is a charming quality to the immediacy of Henry’s order, speaking perhaps to two of his fundamental characteristics – a lack of foresight and a basic goodness of heart.

  Henry took care to provide his queen with a welcoming environment. Eleanor was given a number of English companions such as her physician/tutor Nicholas Farnham and her steward Robert de Mucegros, as well as ladies of the chamber including the redoubtable Margaret Bisset who would personally foil an attempt on Henry’s life in 1238. Soon, Eleanor would also have the company of her Savoyard uncles and a goodly number of Savoyard immigrants, including even a Provençal gardener. With the queen’s comfort in mind, Henry undertook work at no less than nine royal residences. Along with the Jesse window at Winchester, he had the Queen’s Tower at the Tower of London, on the site of the present Lanthorn Tower, whitewashed and decorated with painted roses. At Havering, her chamber was decorated with 20 glass windows containing heraldic shields.

  Charmingly, her chamber at Westminster was painted with a figure of winter ‘to be portrayed with such sad looks and miserable appearance that he may be truly likened to winter’. 10 Having been raised in the warm Mediterranean sun, Eleanor would have suffered in the long English winters, and Henry must have recognized this in this painting. An English spring, however, can be as gentle as the winter is harsh and, at Everswell, Henry had 100 pear trees planted to further enhance an already idyllic setting.

  The marriage to Eleanor of Provence introduced a new diplomatic element into English politics. If Eleanor brought little to her marriage in terms of dowry, she brought powerful connections of another kind. She was accompanied to England by her uncle William, bishop-elect of Savoy. Henry was greatly taken with William, who was soon described by a contemporary chronicler as the king’s ‘chief counsellor’, and whom Henry rewarded with the lands, if not the title, of the earldom of Richmond. Soon the king was also promoting him – both aggressively and unsuccessfully – as a candidate to fill the vacant see of Winchester. William, however, left England in May 1238, never to return: he died prematurely in Viterbo in the following year. William’s greatest impact during his brief sojourn in England was probably the intense dislike he inspired in Matthew Paris and, through that chronicler, the perceived linkage of the queen to aliens in general and Savoyards in particular.

  Another of Eleanor’s uncles, Peter of Savoy, arrived in England in December 1240. He was knighted by the king in January 1241, and in May of that year he received the honour of Richmond, which his brother William had previously held. He would be one of Henry’s staunchest supporters and most trusted advisors throughout the reign, and would be particularly closely associated with his niece, the queen. A month later, yet another uncle, Boniface of Savoy, was elected archbishop of Canterbury, although he did not actually take up residence in England until 3 years later. Finally, Thomas of Savoy, count of Flanders in right of his wife Joan, became a pivotal figure in English affairs not only because the circumstance of a debt owed to him by Simon de Montfort proved to be a flashpoint in the deterioration of relations between Montfort and the king, but also because Flanders, as always, was crucial to English military and diplomatic schemes on the continent.

  Eleanor’s Savoyard uncles were, of course, high-profile visitors to England, but they were not the only newcomers to follow the queen from the continent.

  Of the approximately 170 recipients of royal patronage who can be identified as Savoyards, roughly half of whom settled in England, two-thirds were clerics and one-third knights. Along with the queen’s relations, other prominent Savoyards also found a place in the king’s inner circle, most notably Pierre d’Aigueblanche, who became bishop of Hereford, and Imbert Pugeis, who served as steward of the king’s household. They, in turn, became magnets for other of their countrymen, who found places in their own households. A considerable number also found their way into the queen’s service and were recipients of her patronage. Eleanor played an influential role in arranging marriages to wealthy Englishwomen for these newly arrived Savoyards, such as Peter and Ebulo of Geneva, Geoffrey de Joinville and Ebulo de Montibus. Similarly, Savoyard wives were provided for English heirs. In 1247, Alice of Saluzzo, granddaughter of Count Amadeus of Savoy, married Edmund de Lacy, hei
r to the earldom of Lincoln. In 1253, William de Vescy agreed to the marriage of his heir to whatever Savoyard bride ‘the queen and [Peter of Savoy] shall provide’,11 while in 1257 Thomas of Savoy’s own daughter Margaret was married to Baldwin, heir to the earldom of Devon. The queen’s role in all this matchmaking was neither unnoticed nor widely approved of. In the Petition of the Barons in 1258, it was specifically requested that no woman whose marriage was in the king’s gift be given to a foreigner. But during Eleanor’s first decade or more in England, opposition to the Savoyards was generally muted and they were smoothly assimilated into English society.

  Following the marriage of Henry and Eleanor and the emergence of William of Savoy at the centre of the royal court, Richard of Cornwall withdrew from court in indignation at his diminished stature there, and soon took the cross as a means to distance himself further, while yet retaining his honour. But otherwise there was little initial discontent with Henry’s new circle of advisors. Indeed, this was a period of considerable harmony and cooperation. Along with the royal marriage, 1236 saw the publication of the Statute of Merton, which addressed a number of pressing legal concerns, and in 1237 the king reissued the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest. In return, the Westminster parliament of January 1237 awarded a tax of a thirtieth on movables, worth in excess of £20,000. As it turned out, this was to be last parliamentary subsidy granted to the king for three decades, but for the present it provided Henry with some much-needed cash.

  The marriage of Simon de Montfort to Henry III’s widowed sister, Eleanor Marshal, caused a brief but sharp crisis in 1238. Henry himself arranged the marriage of the couple, which took place on 7 January 1238 in his chamber chapel at Westminster. As Eleanor had previously taken a vow of celibacy before the archbishop of Canterbury following the death of her first husband, the younger William Marshal, the marriage was controversial. That the ceremony was conducted in secret and without the consultation of the magnates was contrary to the Magna Carta. Thus, the marriage provoked a rebellion led by Richard of Cornwall, Richard Marshal, earl of Pembroke (brother of Eleanor’s late husband) and the earl of Winchester. The rebels confronted the king in arms at Stratford-le-Bow in late February, with Henry retreating to the security of the Tower at the beginning of March. William of Savoy was able to negotiate a settlement, in which the king’s brother settled for a cash contribution of 16,000 marks toward the cost of his proposed crusade. The settlement may have been hastened by the impending death of Joan, Queen of Scotland, as both Henry and Richard were present at their sister’s death at Havering on 4 March. From this point forward, Richard of Cornwall was unwavering in his loyalty to his brother, the king, and often served as a mediator in defusing later crises. As to Henry and Simon, their friendship was still strong at this point. The king was present at the baptism of Montfort’s first son, significantly named Henry, in November 1238.

  On 17/18 June 1239, Eleanor of Provence gave birth to her own first child, a son named Edward, after the king’s patron saint, the Confessor. This event was important not only because Eleanor hereby fulfilled the most fundamental role of medieval queenship, but also because, in the aftermath of the birth, Henry III and Simon de Montfort had a serious falling out. The purification ceremony for Eleanor on 9 August 1239 was meant to be a joyous occasion. Some 500 tapers burned before the shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey, and the Laudes Reginaewas sung in the queen’s honour. In the midst of all this, however, the king confronted his erstwhile friend over a debt of 2,000 marks owed to Thomas of Savoy, for which Simon had apparently used the king as a guarantor without either Henry’s knowledge or consent. In the heated exchange that ensued, in the presence of the archbishop of Canterbury, Henry went beyond the present question of the nature of the debt to Thomas, and accused Montfort of having seduced his sister Eleanor, despite her vows of chastity. He went on to suggest that Simon had secured a papal dispensation allowing the marriage only by means of bribery. Whether or not any of these charges was true remains uncertain, yet there are numerous reports in the chronicles of Montfort’s continuing struggle with a troubled conscience over the violation of Eleanor’s vows, so that Henry’s accusations would have certainly struck home. In any case, humiliated and disgraced, Simon and his wife soon left England for France, where he was to remain until the following spring before returning to England to join Richard of Cornwall on his crusade. Henry and Simon would subsequently reconcile and fall out several more times, but this initial wound to Montfort’s pride probably never healed.

  Although the marriage of his sister Isabella to the Emperor Frederick II in 1235 had provided no more tangible benefit to Henry than his own marriage to Eleanor – indeed, it cost him a dowry of £20,000 – it did point to his interest in continental affairs. Henry developed increasingly close diplomatic ties with the Emperor, of whom he had certainly gained earlier knowledge through the personal experiences of Peter des Roches. The Plantagenets and Hohenstaufen shared a common adversary in the Capetians, and particularly following Henry’s marriage to Eleanor, a common interest in Italian affairs. Henry also hoped for imperial support in his ultimate goal, the recovery of the lost English lands in France, although it is unlikely that Frederick, who attempted to broker a peace between England and France in 1236, shared Henry’s vision. Regardless of his interests in the international stage, however, given his lack of resources, Henry III was in no position to go to war in the latter half of the 1230s, and during these years truces were arranged or extended with Llywelyn in Wales, Louis IX in France and Thibault I in Navarre.

  In 1242, a golden opportunity to recover the Plantagenet holdings on the continent appeared to present itself. The transformation of Poitou into an appanage for Louis IX’s younger brother, Alphonse of Poitiers, alienated Hugh de Lusignan and Henry’s mother Isabella, who now, belatedly, looked to the English king for support. Henry only too readily responded to the call. Although parliament declined to offer the king any taxes beyond a scutage, Henry enthusiastically set about raising an army. In the end, the core of this force was no more than 200 knights, half of them drawn from the king’s own household. Nevertheless, Henry landed in France in May and advanced as far as Saintes. But when Louis IX led his army across the Charente at Taillebourg, Henry rushed to its defence and headlong into a trap. He was lucky to escape, and was forced to retreat south to Bordeaux without offering battle. Indeed, the only reason why Henry was able to extricate himself from Taillebourg at all was the presence there of his brother, Richard. He, rather than the king, was accorded a truce of just one day on account of his status as a crusader, and this truce allowed the English withdrawal. Following this debacle, Simon de Montfort famously berated Henry for his lack of generalship, telling the king ‘You should be taken and locked up like Charles the Simple’, a reference to the unfortunate Carolingian king who had ceded Normandy to the Vikings in the tenth century. Bowing to the inevitable, in August, Hugh de Lusignan and Isabella returned their allegiance to Louis IX, ending the Poitevin revolt. Whether or not Henry III recognized it, the failure of his campaign in 1242 put paid to the Plantagenets’ loss of all territories north of the Garonne for a century to come. Only Gascony remained of the once-great Angevin Empire.

  In the immediate aftermath of the failed campaign, Henry had promised Gascony to his brother, Richard of Cornwall, out of gratitude for the escape from Taillebourg. Queen Eleanor, however, insisted that this must remain part of the inheritance of her son, Edward, and Henry acquiesced. In order to compensate his brother for this loss, as well as to enhance further the diplomatic position of the Plantagenet family, a marriage was arranged. Henry’s relationship with the house of Savoy was further solidified as Richard married Queen Eleanor’s younger sister Sanchia amid magnificent festivities at Westminster on 23 November 1243. Although it was unlikely that Henry would ever change his mind and ‘confer Gascony upon him again of his mere liberality’, Richard did receive the county of Cornwall, and the honours of Wallingford and Eye, along
with additional lands valued at £500 per year. It is interesting to note that the fourth and youngest daughter of Raymond-Berenguer of Provence and Beatrice of Savoy, another Beatrice, would subsequently marry the brother of Louis IX of France, Charles of Anjou, in 1246, completing the remarkable advance of the house of Savoy.

  Henry had returned from the Poitou campaign some £15,000 in debt, but through a combination of peace and particularly heavy taxation on the Jews of the kingdom, his financial situation soon recovered. During the 1240s, he sought to avoid conflict with the magnates and in this he was largely successful, often as a result of forgiving their debts and extending their liberties. He was also lavish in his hospitality and his patronage. His architectural patronage during this period reflected his vision of kingship, even if he could never fully realize this vision in practice. As we have seen, vast sums were committed to the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey at this time, but despite his taste for splendid royal display, Henry could hardly be described as autocratic or absolutist. Constraints upon his kingship had been a part of his life since boyhood, and if he sometimes bridled against infringement upon his prerogatives, nevertheless he repeatedly affirmed his commitment to the charters and genuinely meant it. Indeed, one of his failings as a king was his desire to please everyone and his tendency to listen to the advice of the last person to whom he had spoken, leading to frustrating inconsistency in virtually every aspect of his rule.

  In December 1244, Louis IX of France took the Cross and announced his intention to go on crusade. Over the next 3 years, the French king accumulated a massive war-chest of one million livres, constructed a purpose-built Mediterranean port at Aigues Mortes to serve as the point of embarkation for his expedition, and stockpiled food and weapons on Cyprus in anticipation of his arrival there en route to the Holy Land. On the one hand, the prospect of Louis’s absence abroad appeared to present Henry III with another opportunity to recover the lost Plantagenet lands. On the other, Henry himself was genuinely tempted to go on crusade with his brother-in-law. He had first taken the cross as long ago as 1216 at the time of his first coronation, and he would renew his vow in 1250. Meanwhile, if he could not go in person, he at least wanted to be represented in this great enterprise, suggesting that his Lusignan half-brother, Guy, lead one of the contingents in the crusading army, an offer rebuffed by the French king. And yet, regardless of whatever Henry’s inclination might have been, matters closer to home proved more pressing than the relief of the Holy Land.