by Lisa Hilton
PART THREE
PLANTAGENET QUEENS
THE PLANTAGENETS
CHAPTER 8
ELEANOR OF PROVENCE
‘How high does the arrogance of woman rise if it is not restrained?’
Eleanor of Provence was the second daughter of Count RaymondBerengar, who had ruled Provence as a vassal of the Emperor Frederick II since 1219, and Beatrice of Savoy Eleanor’s sisters Marguerite (born 1221), Sanchia (1228) and Beatrice (1231) were all to become queens, and each of their marriages was to be influential in shaping the direction of English policy abroad. In 1234, Marguerite joined the French monarchy as the bride of Louis IX, and it was this alliance that encouraged Henry III of England to consider Eleanor as a wife. Their union provides an exceptionally strong example of the significance of women in the dynastic strategies of Europe’s royal houses as well as of the importance a queen’s natal family could achieve in the politics of her adopted country.
On attaining his majority in 1227, Henry was anxious to begin the recovery of the Angevin lands lost under his father, John, and since the French crown would naturally oppose any such attempt, a marriage with Eleanor had the potential to counter the influence of her sister’s. Both the French and English kings were interested in securing the support of the house of Savoy, which was powerful in the east and south of France. RaymondBerengar was neither particularly rich nor likely to be able to leave his daughters any great territorial claims, and both Marguerite and Eleanor were selected as royal wives as much for their maternal family’s connections as for their status as the Count’s daughters.
Henry was keen enough to marry Eleanor to dissolve a previous arrangement with Joan, the heiress to the small but strategically placed county of Ponthieu on the Norman border. This agreement had progressed so far that in April 1235 Henry had written to her father asking for Joan to come to England, and had planned her coronation for the next month. The French King — or more specifically his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s granddaughter Blanche of Castile — strongly objected to the match, and by invoking a promise made by Joan s father that he would forfeit his lands if he married his eldest daughter without the King’s permission, they were able to stop the marriage at the last minute. Henry’s acceptance of their interference suggests that he was glad to have an excuse to renege on his pledge.
Apparently, Joan did not much mind being jilted by the King of England, and released Henry from his engagement. By October, Henry’s envoys Richard le Gras and John of Gatesden were in Provence to inspect the new lady (who, like nearly all girls of her class, was complacently pronounced to be beautiful), while John FitzPhilip and Robert de Mucegros were charged with the negotiation of her dowry, which was settled at 10,000 marks. Eleanor’s dower arrangements were more complicated — Isabelle of Angoulême was still living, and if Henry were to die before the new Queen and the Dowager Queen it would be difficult to provide for both of them — but the portion was provisionally fixed at fourteen English towns including Gloucester, Cambridge and Bath. With the business arrangements settled, in November the twelve-year-old Eleanor was married by proxy, with Robert de Mucegros standing in for the King at the castle of Tarascon, and, after travelling via Vienne, Dover and Canterbury, where her marriage was consummated, she was crowned at Westminster on 20 January 1236.
In just a few months, Eleanor’s world had changed completely. It is not possible to extrapolate her ‘real’ feelings from the sources, but the fact that, nearly fifty years later she joined forces with her daughter-in-law Eleanor of Castile, who was married at fourteen, to persuade Edward I that his thirteen-year-old daughter was not yet ready for matrimony, suggests she herself may have found the transition difficult. Eleanor’s subsequent and often ill-advised dependence on her Savoyard relatives may also have stemmed from a sense of personal isolation at the time of her marriage. Unlike many royal brides raised with the expectation of their future role, often in the country of which they would become queen, Eleanor had had to adjust to both marriage and queenship in a very short space of time. She was to display great ambition and a highly protective love for her children, but also a strong tendency to control, which was interpreted as ‘arrogance’ by her critics but which may well have had its source in self-preservation, in a need for the reassurance that came from feeling she was mistress of her own environment. She also demonstrated a certain impatience with what she saw as the provincial insularity of English politics, which compared so unfavourably with her own sophisticated, cosmopolitan background.
The Provençal court was culturally, if not financially rich, and Eleanor’s father was a patron of troubadour literature. Eleanor herself spoke Occitan, French and the Norman French of Henry’s court, as well as having some grasp of Latin, and though the north-south divide in European culture, which had been exaggerated even in Eleanor of Aquitaine’s time, was now still less pronounced, it may still have seemed very marked to a young girl spending her first freezing winter far from home. Much like Eleanor of Aquitaine, Eleanor of Provence was a daughter of the south, ‘a milieu of music, dancing, tournaments, knights-errant and fair damsels in distress, while Henry’s dominions to the north symbolised sobriety and joylessness, the world of … stubborn and irreducible facts, the boring domain of penny-pinching accountants, nit-picking lawyers and pedantic administrators’.1 Eleanor’s later career proved she could pick a nit as well as the next man, but Henry’s initial treatment of his young wife suggests that he was eager to make the contrasts between old and new homes less jarring.
Henry was clearly aware that his new wife might find her English accommodation rather shabby, for he built or improved apartments for her in nine of the royal residences, including a chamber and chapel at Westminster and a room decorated with roses painted on a white ground in the Tower of London. At Clarendon, modern conveniences were installed: a ‘fair privy chamber, well-vaulted’ on both floors of her rooms, and glazed windows that could be opened in the chapel. Architecture was one of Henry’s passions, and Eleanor benefited from his decision to show his welcome to her in buildings. All her life, she seems to have loved gardens. A walled garden was made at Clarendon and herb gardens at Kempton and Winchester, while at Woodstock, a favourite residence of the couple, a flower garden was laid for her outside her chapel, with another herb garden around the ‘stew’, or fish pond. Later, at Gloucester, a bridge was constructed to enable Eleanor to walk in the gardens of neighbouring Llanthony Priory Most touchingly of all, one of the gardens laid out for her at Windsor was ‘Provençal’ in style. Henry was also thoughtful when it came to the initial appointments to Eleanor’s household, choosing John of Gatesden and Robert de Mucegros, the two courtiers with whom she had had most contact before her wedding, as her wardrobe keeper and steward respectively. For the post of her doctor and tutor, he selected Nicholas Farnham, a scholar who eventually became bishop of Durham. Without reading too much into these gestures, it might be said Henry was mindful that his young wife was feeling insecure and lonely, and that he tried to make her surroundings comforting.
Despite Eleanor being twelve to her husband’s twenty-eight, they had begun sleeping together straight away and, in a dramatic incident at Woodstock in 1237, it was Henry’s intimacy with his wife that saved his life. In the middle of the night, a madman somehow broke into the royal bedroom, waving a knife and demanding the crown. He stabbed at Henry’s bed, but luckily Henry wasn’t in it, as he was with Eleanor in her apartments. When the intruder began searching for the King, the alarm was raised by one of Eleanor’s ladies, Margaret Biset, who had stayed up late to read her psalter. Eleanor remembered Margaret’s courage, and thirty years later Henry confirmed a property grant to the Biset family’s leper foundation at Maiden Bradley on account of his Queen’s ‘great love’ for the house.
In general, however, Eleanor’s queenship was to be marked not by particular loyalty to her English servants but by her close and continuing associations with her Savoyard family. She has been described as the �
�supreme example’2 of the manner in which well-born women could maintain political power after marriage by manipulating the connections of their birth families. Her mother, Beatrice of Savoy, had five brothers, all of whom were impressively skilled diplomats. Together, the ‘eagles of Savoy’ were able to build up a network of alliances that extended their influence all over England and France and across the Alps into Italy. The brilliance of Eleanor’s uncles lay in their capacity to engage in apparently conflicting policies while simultaneously working for their collective good. By 1240, two of these uncles, Thomas and Peter, were at Henry’s court, and in 1244, a third, Boniface, was provided to the see of Canterbury. In Peter of Savoy, to whom she was especially close, Eleanor found a guide and a teacher as she began to negotiate her first steps in English politics.
Her political career really began after the birth of her first child, Edward, in 1239, when she and her uncles worked together to neutralise any threat posed to the baby prince’s interests by King Henry’s younger brother, Richard of Cornwall. Peter of Savoy had arrived in England while Richard was away on crusade and Henry was preparing for a military expedition in Poitou. If he were to be killed, Edward’s position would be highly vulnerable, and Eleanor sought to associate the future of the Savoyards with his security. Henry ordered that, in the event of his death, the castles of the Welsh marches should be delivered to Edward, and in early 1242 he issued similar instructions for several fortresses, including Dover. Moreover, Eleanor’s own importance was augmented at Richard’s expense, since not only was he left out of any guardianship arrangements made for Edward, but it was also decided that any castle the Queen could not hold personally as regent would be delivered up to any of her uncles who were not in a position of fealty to France (which at this point meant Peter of Savoy). While these decisions went some way to ensuring that Edward would have powerful and loyal supporters in the event of his inheriting the crown, they obviously risked alienating Richard of Cornwall. The solution to this was a proposed marriage between Richard and Eleanor’s sister Sanchia of Provence, which would dissipate any conflict between Prince Edward and his uncle by allying their interests. So in May 1242 Peter of Savoy was dispatched as an envoy to participate in a proxy marriage ceremony with Sanchia at Tarascon.
That summer, Eleanor accompanied Henry to Poitou on campaign. She had given birth to a daughter, Margaret, in September 1240, and was now in the last stages of pregnancy with her third child. They landed at Royan in Gascony and while Henry set off to confront his brother-in-law Louis on the battlefield, Eleanor was delivered of another girl, Beatrice, at Bordeaux. The expedition was a failure, largely as a result of the defection of Hugh de Lusignan after the English and French forces met at Taillebourg, a disastrous battle for the English, and one in which, as we have seen, Henry himself was saved from capture only by the quick thinking of Richard of Cornwall, who rode into the enemy camp and negotiated a retreat to Saintes. Impulsively, Henry promised Gascony to his brother in return for his rescue, which did not suit Eleanor’s plans at all. It is possible that her reaction to Henry’s gesture resulted in Richard being deprived of Chester, as on 17 August 1243, a month before the royal party returned from Gascony, some of Eleanor’s dower lands were exchanged for the county in a document witnessed by yet another Savoyard uncle, Philip. Richard was then persuaded to renounce Gascony in return for lands worth 500 pounds a year.
Despite the failure of Taillebourg, Henry put on a magnificent show when Beatrice of Savoy and Sanchia arrived for the wedding proper, which took place at Westminster on 23 November. Beatrice’s visit was diplomatic as well as celebratory: she aimed to convince Henry to lend her embattled husband 4,000 marks on the security of five castles in Provence, which were to be held for the use of the King and Queen of England. The inclusion of Eleanor in this contract emphasises the importance of her right of inheritance in Provence, which was a means for Henry to acquire strategic strongholds in the province. The smoothness of these arrangements was not, however, appreciated by the English people, who already perceived the marriage between Richard and Sanchia as evidence of Eleanor’s excessive power over the King. ‘The whole community in England,’ wrote Matthew Paris, ‘taking it ill, began to fear that the whole business of the kingdom would be disposed of at the will of the Queen and her sister.’
The devious devices of the Savoyards were further exposed when Eleanor’s father RaymondBerengar died in 1245. As the sole unmarried sister, Beatrice was to inherit, but Blanche of Castile, the Dowager Queen of France (and motherin-law to Eleanor’s sister Marguerite) had no intention of letting such a prize escape French clutches. She conspired with the Pope, Innocent IV, to marry Beatrice to Charles of Anjou, King Louis’s younger brother. Shockingly, this plan was faciliated not only by Eleanor’s mother, whose allegiances were quite evenly divided, but also by Philip of Savoy and Archbishop Boniface. However, if the Savoyards took, they also gave. Even as Henry was being relieved of his stake in the Provençal inheritance, Peter was negotiating a deal with Eleanor’s fifth uncle, Amadeus, the ruler of Savoy, whereby Amadeus became Henry’s vassal and awarded him four castles in exchange for a pension of 200 marks and a downpayment of 1,000. A further clause was the marriage of Amadeus’s granddaughter to a royal ward. Having accepted these conditions, Henry was then unwise enough to permit a number of marriages between Savoyard girls and eligible English aristocrats, among them Edmund de Lacy, heir to the Earl of Lincoln, Richard de Burgh, heir to the Irish lordship of Connacht, William de Vescy, heir to Alnwick, Alexander Balliol and Baldwin, heir to the Earl of Devon, who married Queen Eleanor’s first cousin Marguerite, the daughter of Thomas of Savoy. Naturally, English magnates with daughters of their own to provide for greatly resented this plague of Savoyard brides, and though the policy was Henry’s much of the blame was laid on Eleanor.
In total, 170 Savoyards are known to have enjoyed royal patronage, though the majority of them were clerks and fewer than eighty-five remained permanently in England. Thirty-nine did receive grants of land, and at the top of the scale Eleanor’s uncles, notably Peter, received massive gifts of land and money. Matthew Paris was quick to point out the resentment this provoked, a resentment not confined, in his account, to the immediate circle of the court. So why was Eleanor so insensitive to the effect of this favouritism on her own reputation and her husband’s popularity? One answer may be found in the legacy of another English queen, Isabelle of Angoulême. Isabelle had five children by her second husband, Hugh de Lusignan: William de Valence, Geoffrey, Guy and Aymer de Lusignan and Alice. Despite the treachery of their father, in 1247 Henry invited all his half-siblings to join him in England. Immediately, the Lusignans set themselves up as a counter-faction to the Savoyards. In particular, they were jealous of the affinity of interest Eleanor had created between Edward (who was their nephew, too) and her Savoyard family. Almost immediately, conflict between the rival groups began to focus on Eleanor, so it might be concluded that she was prepared to ignore the negative consequences of Savoyard patronage in the interests of the valuable bulwark it provided against the Lusignans who, from the start, she seems to have perceived as her enemies.
In 1244 Eleanor gave birth to a second son, Edmund. Henry, determined that this child should be a boy, had had 1,000 candles set before the altar of Becket’s shrine at Canterbury and 1,000 more at the church of St Augustine. He told the abbot of St Edmund’s that if he had a son he would name the child for the saint and had the monks chant the Antiphon of St Edmund while Eleanor was in labour, so the result of his efforts was highly satisfactory. The birthdates of Eleanor’s first four children (1239, 1240, 1242 and 1244) indicate that she and Henry had been sleeping together regularly (the fact that no baby is known to have been born earlier suggests that she might not have fully reached puberty at the time of her marriage), but she was not to have another child until 1253. While she may have suffered miscarriages or unrecorded stillbirths, this absence of documented pregnancy may point to an estrangement between a
couple whose married life had begun so successfully. That Eleanor and Henry were at odds in these eight years is clear from their actions, and their difficulties may have stemmed from Eleanor’s increasing appetite for power and her antipathy towards the Lusignans.
In addition to her lands and queens-gold, Eleanor raised funds through the incomes of royal wardships, whereby the estates of a minor were managed to the profit of the holder until the heir came of age. Gifts of such wardships were a convenient means for a king to increase his wife’s income without impinging directly on the crown estates, and they were to become a significant part of the financial endowments of English queens. (For the period between 1257 and 1269, for example, Eleanor raised an average of over 750 pounds a year from wardships.) Among numerous similar arrangements, Eleanor had received wardship of the De Toesny lands in 1242. Her De Toesny grant explicitly excluded advowsons, or the right to present a chosen candidate to a Church living, so when, some years later, she placed a churchman, William of London, in a De Toesny benefice to which she had no right, she found herself in conflict with her husband. Henry dismissed her choice and attempted to appoint his own man, Artaud de St Romain, to the post. Eleanor saw this as a public humiliation and, with the support of Robert de Grosseteste, the sheriff of Buckinghamshire, the dispute was brought to court. At this point, Eleanor was clearly angry enough with Henry to risk openly embarrassing him, and since her candidate won (at least, he was still in office in 1274), the case would have made the King seem shamefully henpecked. It may have been this incident that prompted Henry to take a strong line against Eleanor’s meddling when, in 1252, the LusignanSavoyard rivalry spilled over into ecclesiastical matters.