Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (17 page)

The main problem with this situation from the point of view of the Montforts and, indeed, the crown, was essentially twofold. In the first place, the existence of other Marshal widows raised the question, once more, of whether Eleanor had, in fact, received a fair share of William junior’s estates in dower. Under the common law, Eleanor ought to have received lands or property valued at a third of her dead husband’s estates. As we have already observed in
chapter 3
, figures derived from the documents detailing the partition of 1247 indicate that Walter’s widow, Margaret de Lacy, was entitled to English and Welsh lands worth £444 per annum and Irish lands worth £572 per annum.
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It would, therefore, appear that Eleanor had been short-changed in accepting the £400 fee at the king’s urging in 1232. The speed with which Eleanor and Simon reached this realization, or at least decided to act upon it, and just how much it rankled with them, was reflected by their decision at Easter 1247 to launch a legal challenge against the Marshal co-heirs. Eleanor, so the Montforts claimed, had been dowered with a third of all William junior’s lands in Ireland and Wales, and they now demanded Eleanor’s full dower entitlement. When the agreement between Eleanor and Richard Marshal, whereby Eleanor had agreed to accept her £400 fee, was produced in court, the Montforts claimed, quite simply, not to recognize its force. According to Eleanor and Simon, it was invalid. It had been made, so they argued, when the countess was underage and in the king’s custody and power. In a bitter courtroom drama, this line of argument was, not altogether surprisingly, completely rejected by the Marshal co-heirs. According to them, the countess had possessed independent legal power at the time of the original settlement.
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The case dragged on into 1248, a day was appointed for judgment, but no verdict was apparently reached, much to the Montforts’ deep frustration.
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In the second place, the king was faced with the task of collecting the £400 fee for Eleanor’s Irish dower from each of the co-heirs in turn, many of whom were married to Henry III’s greatest earls and barons.
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This state of affairs was far from ideal and had all the makings of an administrative nightmare. For the first years, though, the Montforts were able to collect their money directly from the crown as they had done in the recent past. On 1 May and 20 October 1246, for example, Henry III authorized two separate payments to Earl Simon of the £200 he was due to receive on his wife’s behalf at Easter and Michaelmas.
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The same arrangement continued in 1247–54.
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Having issued instructions to his officials to pay the money owed to the Montforts, the king was then faced with the tricky task of recovering the sum from the Marshal co-heirs himself.
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Yet the king proved reluctant to force those co-heirs who defaulted to compensate the crown. In January 1249, for example, Henry III allowed three defaulters – the Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, William de Valence (Henry III’s Lusignan half-brother and the husband of Joan de Munchensy) and the Earl of Norfolk – to escape the threat of distraint on their lands for non-payment until Easter.
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As the crown lurched towards a severe financial crisis in the 1250s, however, the king’s orders for payment to the Montforts from his own funds might not always have been honoured in practice.
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By 1254, crown finances were in a parlous state. The payment of Eleanor’s fee was no longer forthcoming after Michaelmas 1254.
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By May 1256, the Montforts were still owed £400 to cover the payments due at Easter and Michaelmas in 1255, a situation the king attempted to remedy by authorizing an emergency payment of £600 to cover the period up to and including Easter 1256.
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Henry appears to have come to rely increasingly upon funds received directly from the Marshal co-heirs. Yet even these funds, when they were forthcoming, might, on occasion, have been directed elsewhere to meet other, more pressing obligations. In August 1256, the king solemnly promised Earl Simon that the money received by the crown for the yearly arrears of £400 owed by the Marshal co-heirs to the Montforts would be used for no other purpose than to pay off the outstanding sum.
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With a degree of irony, by 1256, the greatest defaulter of all the Marshal beneficiaries was another widow, Margaret de Lacy, Countess of Lincoln, who owed the crown seven years in arrears for her contribution towards Eleanor de Montfort’s £400 fee. When pressure was brought to bear on Margaret during the summer of 1256, the Countess of Lincoln came good and agreed to pay £1,066 directly to Eleanor and Simon.
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This sum was apparently enough to cover the money owing to the Montforts for Michaelmas 1254 to Michaelmas 1256, according to the royal clerk who compiled the memoranda roll.
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GASCONY

Between 1248 and 1252, Simon de Montfort’s political career was dominated by his governance of Gascony and Eleanor, as his wife, also experienced the highs and lows of his time there. Earl Simon’s initial triumphs in 1248, whereby he negotiated and reached agreements with the kings of France and Navarre, were quickly overshadowed by Gascon complaints about the earl’s administration and by the huge expenses he incurred in attempting to bring order to the duchy.
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Furthermore, the earl’s commitments in Gascony placed extra strain on the Montforts’ finances as the crown struggled to divert adequate funds to support Simon’s regime.
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The Countess of Leicester’s activities during her husband’s Gascon years are difficult to trace. Even Paris, who describes, in some detail, Simon’s role in Gascony after his appointment, is often silent on the subject of Eleanor’s movements during this period of her life. It seems, however, likely that the countess had accompanied the earl on his first visit to the duchy after his appointment in 1248 and was, as the English king’s sister, an informal party to her husband’s dealings with the kings of France and Navarre. According to Paris, Simon de Montfort returned to England in December 1248, whereupon the king received his brother-in-law with joy.
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This date for his return, perhaps in his wife’s company, is confirmed by a series of royal grants that served Simon and Eleanor’s mutual interests.
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The earl and countess were certainly in England together during the spring of 1249, when Simon, ‘after discussing the matter with the lady countess’, made arrangements for the education of the couple’s eldest son, Henry, in anticipation of his return to Gascony.
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In the event, the earl’s departure was delayed until early June 1249.
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Eleanor and Simon were in Gascony in the autumn of 1249 when the friar Adam Marsh regretfully informed the couple’s friend Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, that he was ‘unable to dispatch letters’ for ‘the earl and countess of Leicester in time for them to reach [the bishop’s palace at] Buckden’ in Cambridgeshire. Marsh asked if Grosseteste’s messenger, who was destined for Gascony, might visit him en route to collect his letters for the Montforts.
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The countess’s presence in the duchy, holding court alongside her husband, is also confirmed by another letter, written by a clerk of Count Alphonse of Poitiers, whose master had been asked to visit the couple at La Réole.
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Earl Simon was in England again, according to Paris, during Rogation (May) in 1250.
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Although the earl departed for Gascony by the middle of May, his wife was almost certainly in England in July 1250, when the king gave her ten bucks from the New Forest.
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In 1251, Paris noted that Simon had returned from Gascony to his brother-in-law’s court by Epiphany (6 January);
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the earl departed again for the duchy in March.
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Eleanor’s presence overseas in 1251 is supported by Paris’s story of a crossing to England which the earl and countess attempted to make that year in the company of Eleanor’s half-brother, Guy de Lusignan. This chronicler described how the couple set out from the port of Wissant, only for their ship to be driven back by the wind, before they were able to cross safely to Dover.
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One hopes that Eleanor had, by this time of her life, overcome the seasickness that plagued her teenage years.

The earl and countess were not constant companions that year. In October 1251, Marsh wrote to Earl Simon with news of the countess, whom he had visited in England.
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In December 1251, Earl Simon attended the king’s Christmas court at York, where the marriage of Henry’s daughter, Margaret, to Alexander III, King of Scots was celebrated, and where he quarrelled with the king over a Gascon revolt, a revolt provoked, so the Gascons claimed, by the harshness of the earl’s government.
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Earl Simon returned, briefly, in the spring of 1252 to the duchy to deal with the situation before coming back to England, this time to answer the charges relating to Gascon affairs as political pressures mounted.
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The royal inquiry into Earl Simon’s governance of Gascony inevitably brought to a head long-standing tensions between the Montforts and the king over Simon’s lieutenancy. Marsh, in a letter dated 15 June, summarized affairs for Grosseteste’s benefit. Writing from Eleanor’s Kentish manor of Sutton, Marsh described how Earl Simon ‘frequently suffered reproaches and vociferous abuse from the lord king in front of many great persons’.
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‘It must be a long time’, the clearly partisan Marsh reflected, ‘since any nobleman or private individual has been so harshly and insensitively treated.’
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Such was the Earl of Leicester’s isolation at the English court, once the full fury of the king’s rage became apparent, that only a few men were initially prepared to speak up on his behalf or offer him ‘loyal protection’, apart from Walter de Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, Peter of Savoy, the queen’s uncle, and Peter de Montfort.
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Fortunately for Simon, the prelates, Richard of Cornwall, the Lusignans and ‘the barons of the kingdom’ stepped in as well to defend Earl Simon’s reputation.
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The king’s anger against the earl ultimately remained unabated. Eleanor as Simon’s wife shared in her husband’s troubles and anxieties. Alongside him, she felt the weight of the king’s displeasure once more. Dismissed from court, Earl Simon sent letters reaffirming his loyalty to Henry III before crossing the Channel to France on 13 June 1252, ‘safe and cheerful, with Henry, his eldest son’.
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The precariousness of the Montforts’ position, Eleanor’s deep sense of unease with the situation and her concern for the immediate future all were conveyed by a message which Marsh added, expressly at her bidding, to the end of his letter to Grosseteste:

It was a moving missive, but one with a clear political purpose. Eleanor urged Grosseteste, through Marsh, to assist and protect her husband’s interests, her own interests and those of their offspring, their household and their followers. In expressing herself thus and in mentioning ‘her lord’ (i.e. Earl Simon) first, Eleanor or perhaps Marsh employed a form of address that observed patriarchal conventions in a way which might be pleasing to the addressee, but which, at the same time, subverted patriarchal norms by exercising political agency. If the Montforts’ relationship with Henry III remained unstable, then the Montforts’ wider network of courtly contacts, a network Eleanor helped to foster, offered them alternative routes for influence.

HOUSEHOLD, RELIGION, ESTATES AND FAMILY

Eleanor’s activities during the time of Simon’s Gascon lieutenancy are, as we have seen, difficult to determine with any degree of certainty. What is, however, striking is the decision apparently taken by the earl and countess that Eleanor should often accompany her husband overseas, rather than remaining behind in England to oversee the couple’s estates there. Initially, at least, it might well have been hoped, both by the earl and by his brother-in-law, the English king, that Eleanor’s presence in the duchy would strengthen the legitimacy of the earl’s administration there and perhaps foster loyalty to Henry III through her close kinship with the king/duke. The latter connection was, after all, one that the countess was happy to advertise; on the seal that Eleanor used during her second marriage, she was styled ‘countess of Leicester’, and on her counterseal, she was styled ‘sister of the king of England’.
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Even Eleanor’s close friend, Marsh, acknowledging the difference in rank between them, addressed her deferentially as ‘the noble lady Eleanor, countess of Leicester’, ‘the illustrious lady Eleanor, countess of Leicester’, ‘the illustrious Countess of Leicester’ and ‘the most excellent lady Eleanor, countess of Leicester’, and referred in his letters to ‘your excellency’s royal heart’.
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In Gascony, it presumably fell to Eleanor to assist in running the Montfort’s great household in the duchy. When Earl Simon was called away to counter the various military threats that arose there, Eleanor was ideally placed to act as her husband’s representative. Marsh certainly believed Eleanor capable of influencing the earl in political affairs. In one letter, which dates from the time of Simon’s lieutenancy, the friar advised the countess that if the earl met with failure in Gascony, she might assist her husband ‘with quiet advice’.
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