Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (16 page)

The reason for Earl Simon’s visit was a money-raising expedition and one whose ultimate purpose was unlikely to anger his brother-in-law, King Henry III. Before his marriage, Simon had vowed to go on crusade, and the departure of his older brother, Amaury, for the East in 1239 might well have helped to focus Simon’s mind on the need to fulfil his own vow.
³
Perhaps Simon and Eleanor attributed their own run of bad fortune in England to divine displeasure at the circumstances surrounding their marriage and sought to make amends. Now, Simon attempted to raise the funds for his crusade through the sale of lands to the canons and hospitallers of Leicester, and others.
⁴
The crusade, the political rehabilitation of the Montforts in years immediately following Earl Simon’s return and their relationship with the English crown during the 1240s and 1250s are explored within this chapter.

THE CRUSADE

In 1240, there were others among Eleanor’s close kin who entertained similar crusading ambitions to those of her husband. Richard of Cornwall also actively planned to go to the East. In the spring of 1240, Earl Richard and Earl Simon departed for the Holy Land in two separate contingents.
⁵
Earl Simon found the time first, though, to restore ‘his very small son’ to Eleanor in France; Henry de Montfort, who was not yet two years old, had been left behind in England in the wake of his parents’ flight in August 1239.
⁶
The pregnant Eleanor then travelled with Earl Simon and his contingent of crusaders over land through Lombardy and Apulia, as far as Brindisi, where the earl took ship for the East.
⁷

Eleanor remained behind in Apulia, where she awaited her husband’s return and her latest confinement in a castle with great lands, which Frederick II had placed at his sister-in-law’s disposal.
⁸
Earl Simon’s crusade came at a personal price – once the countess bade her husband farewell, she did not see him again for more than a year. In the East, Simon acquitted himself with dignity, apparently earning the regard of the inhabitants of the kingdom of Jerusalem to such a degree that they sought, unsuccessfully, his appointment as governor. When Simon decided to journey home in the autumn of 1241, he was finally reunited with his wife and with their growing brood of children. The Earl of Leicester travelled first to Burgundy, before he was recalled to English royal service for Henry III’s disastrous Poitevin campaign of 1242.
⁹

It was a measure of Simon and Eleanor’s dramatic fall from Henry III’s favour that, apart from the earl’s brief visit during the spring of 1240, they effectively chose to absent themselves from the Henrician court for nearly three years. This was, perhaps, a reflection of the personal hurt that the king’s accusations against the couple had caused them; Simon and Eleanor might still have felt deeply aggrieved by their treatment at Henry’s hands. Although, as the price of his military support in Poitou, Earl Simon secured compensation for the lands seized by the king to discharge his debt to Thomas of Savoy, he harboured bitter feelings towards Henry.
¹⁰
Only in the autumn of 1243 did the Montforts consider it safe to return to England.

The fracturing of Eleanor’s close personal relationship with Henry III naturally undermined her role as an intermediary between the king and her husband in the early 1240s. When the queen’s mother, Beatrice of Savoy, Countess of Provence, visited England in November 1243, it was Beatrice rather than Eleanor who approached the king on the couple’s behalf. Fortunately for the Montforts, the Countess of Provence, who had escorted the queen’s younger sister, Sanchia, to England so that she might marry Richard of Cornwall, proved to be an extremely effective negotiator. Matthew Paris recorded her friendly reception by Henry III and Beatrice’s kindness and consideration towards her royal son-in-law.
¹¹
It was in the midst of, or a little while after, the family celebrations for Richard and Sanchia’s marriage in late November 1243, that the Montforts secured the Countess of Provence’s help as an ally in a bid to alleviate their ever-increasing financial woes.
¹²
As a result of Beatrice’s intervention and a renewed warmth of feeling towards Eleanor and Simon, Henry III made a fresh series of financial concessions. First, on 7 January 1244, he pardoned debts to the value of £1,000 that the Earl and Countess of Leicester owed to the king ‘from the time of her [Eleanor’s] widowhood’.
¹³
At Beatrice’s insistence, Henry also, so the Montforts later recalled, agreed to bestow upon Eleanor a long-awaited dowry of 500 marks in lands or rents.
¹⁴
Countess Beatrice then turned her son-in-law’s attention to the ever-thorny issue of the arrears still due to Eleanor from her Irish dower.
¹⁵

In the event, Henry III made good his promises, perhaps wishing to save face with his mother-in-law. With regard to Eleanor’s Irish dower, the situation surrounding the payment of the £400 fee owing to her from the earls of Pembroke had been complicated by Gilbert Marshal’s sudden and unexpected death in June 1241 from wounds sustained in a tournament.
¹⁶
Walter Marshal, Gilbert’s younger brother, stood next in line to succeed to the earldom of Pembroke, but Walter’s succession was delayed until October 1241 by Henry III’s refusal to recognize his claim. In fact, the king was angered by Walter’s presence at the fatal tournament, a tournament Henry had expressly prohibited from taking place.
¹⁷
Once Walter became earl, he inherited the obligation to pay Eleanor the £400 fee in lieu of her Irish dower. Eleanor and Simon’s prolonged absence from England had made it easy for Walter to ignore this payment.

Eleanor and Simon’s return to England in 1243, with a family of young sons to support, made them particularly eager to pursue Eleanor’s dower rights once more. One immediate problem that the couple faced was that the king’s agreement to stand as a surety for Gilbert Marshal’s payments had expired on Gilbert’s death, alleviating the pressure on Walter to honour payments to his sister-in-law. On 9 January 1244, just two days after he pardoned Eleanor’s debts to the crown, Henry III announced his agreement to stand as surety on Walter’s behalf to Eleanor and Simon. Henceforth, the king undertook to make good any dower payments that Walter missed.
¹⁸
The arrangement was augmented by a bond which confirmed that on the first default of payment by Walter, the king would step in to assign the Countess of Leicester’s dower directly from her late husband’s lands in Ireland and south Wales.
¹⁹
This, as Maddicott has argued, represented a potentially momentous undertaking by the king; it suggests not only that the couple ‘had complained about the inadequacy of the dower’, but ‘that they had broached the possibility of a full settlement in land, that Henry had recognized their case, and that he was even prepared to contemplate giving them what they wanted by assigning Irish land to Eleanor at Walter Marshal’s expense’.
²⁰
On 2 May, the king compensated Eleanor and Simon with 200 marks to cover the losses the Montforts had sustained because Eleanor was ‘not fully dowered of the lands of W. Marshal formerly her husband’.
²¹

Admittedly, it took a little longer for the king to provide Eleanor with her promised dowry. It was not until 28 May 1244 that Simon and Eleanor received an annual grant of 500 marks from the Exchequer for the remainder of both their lives. Henry promised to substitute the cash for lands to the same value as soon as he was able. He also agreed to give the Montforts’ heirs 300 marks from the Exchequer after their parents’ deaths.
²²
On the face of it, this might have appeared like a generous grant, had not the king decided to reduce the sum payable to Eleanor and Simon’s heirs. Had Henry provided Eleanor and Simon with a grant of land as a marriage portion, then that land might, according to custom, have descended to their heirs in its entirety.
²³
Once again, Henry sold the interests of his youngest sister short.

Further favours were, however, on the horizon. Throughout 1244, the Montforts pushed for further concessions from Henry III that promised to place them on a firmer financial footing. In February, for example, the Montforts had been provided with another suitably royal residence for the king’s sister, her husband and their sons, when Henry III granted Earl Simon the custody of Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, the royal residence where Eleanor had stayed in 1238 during Simon’s trip to Rome.
²⁴
In June, Henry III pardoned Eleanor for a debt of £100 that she was bound to pay to the Jewish moneylender, David of Oxford, indicating the Eleanor had once again resorted to the services of Jewish financiers when faced with a lack of ready cash to meet her expenses.
²⁵
A month later, another debt of £110 that the Montforts owed to David of Oxford was effectively written off and the king instructed that they were to be protected from prosecution by David’s widow, Licoricia.
²⁶

The year 1244, therefore, represented a relative high point thus far in the Montforts’ standing at Henry III’s court. The couple remained, for the time being, on relatively warm terms with the king. Simon did not, for example, number among those barons who protested at the harshness of the king’s government and denied Henry III’s request for taxation at the November parliament.
²⁷
The earl also served the king during the Welsh campaign of 1245.
²⁸
Henry III, for his part, allowed Eleanor occasional favours that hint at the renewal of their earlier relationship. Significantly, the resumption of more cordial relations between Henry III and his youngest sister can be traced through the renewal of royal gifts to her. These presents often accompanied other grants intended to alleviate some of the couple’s financial woes. On 8 November 1244, the same day that Henry III granted Eleanor the right to tallage (impose a tax on) the men of the manors of East Stoke and Garbeton in Nottinghamshire, for example, Henry instructed the keeper of the royal wines at Clarendon Palace to send the countess a tun of wine.
²⁹
The king also began, once more, to send her venison. In December 1244, Henry arranged for a cart and horses to convey fifteen does to the Countess of Leicester’s manor of Sutton in Kent.
³⁰
On 17 August 1246, the king gave his sister seven bucks from Rockingham Forest in Northamptonshire.
³¹
The summer of 1247 found Eleanor a willing recipient of her brother’s bounty: two stags from Feckenham Forest in June were followed by ten bucks from Rockingham Forest in July.
³²
Some of these gifts were clearly intended to stock the Montforts’ properties. It was, for instance, with a view to replenishing the herds in the Montforts’ park at Hungerford that the Countess of Leicester secured a total of thirty does and ten bucks from the royal forests of Melksham and Chippenham in January 1248.
³³
These gifts from Melksham and Chippenham were accompanied by another concession from the king that addressed, more directly, the couple’s financial situation, whereby Henry promised to relieve his sister of the burden of paying an annual rent of £50 for her manor of Odiham.
³⁴

The royal patronage directed towards the Montforts hints at the extent to which Eleanor traded upon her kinship with the king to provide for her expanding family. The most striking indications of Eleanor’s influence, though, were the privileges which she began, once more, to secure for third parties through her personal intervention with the king. In December 1248, the Countess of Leicester approached the king to secure an exemption from service on assizes, juries and recognitions for her servant, Adam de la Brech.
³⁵
Eleanor also effectively petitioned her brother to pardon felons convicted of a variety of offences.
³⁶

The year 1248 marked a pinnacle in Earl Simon’s public career: on 1 May, Simon was appointed governor of Gascony for seven years, whereupon he took up residence there with a view to restoring the authority of the English crown within the duchy.
³⁷
Paris attributed the Earl of Leicester’s Gascon appointment to Simon’s reputation as a warrior.
³⁸
His natal family’s position in France and Earl Simon’s experiences as a diplomat on the international stage also recommended him for the post.
³⁹
In view of Henry III’s increased generosity towards Eleanor, it is also possible that the king wished to please his sister and her husband by providing Earl Simon with a weighty role in government, an almost vice-regal role that signified the scale of the couple’s political rehabilitation. From his point of view, Henry might have felt that his brother-in-law was ideally placed, through his marital ties to the crown, to act as Henry’s trusted lieutenant in Gascon affairs.
⁴⁰
It was unfortunate, to say the least, for the Montforts, that Earl Simon’s sojourn in Gascony was, ultimately, fraught with controversy.
⁴¹
At the same time, the matter of Eleanor’s Irish Marshal dower returned, ominously, to the fore.

ELEANOR’S IRISH DOWER

The death of Walter Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, at Goodrich Castle on 24 November 1245 was followed just eleven days later by that of his younger brother and heir, Anselm Marshal.
⁴²
This left the great Marshal estates in England, Ireland and Wales to be divided between the five sisters of William Marshal junior or their descendants as co-heirs. By the time that the final partition was made in May 1247, there were thirteen co-heirs with claims to the Marshal lands. Of the five sisters, only Matilda, the widow of Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, and of William de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, was still alive. Of the remaining sisters, Joan, the wife of Warin de Munchensy, was succeeded first by her son John (who died in 1247) and then by her daughter, Joan, while Isabella was succeeded by her son from her first marriage, Richard, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, Sibyl by her seven daughters from her marriage to William de Ferrers, Earl of Derby, and Eva by her three daughters from her marriage to William de Briouze.
⁴³
Furthermore, there were now two other Marshal widows with claims to dower in the Marshal lands in addition to those of Eleanor: Walter’s widow, Margaret de Lacy,
suo jure
Countess of Lincoln, and Anselm’s widow, Matilda de Bohun.
⁴⁴