Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (19 page)

The small amounts of time that typically elapsed between the end of one of Eleanor’s early pregnancies and the conception of another child suggests that the Countess of Leicester, like other women of her wealth and status, handed over the wet nursing of her newborn children soon after birth. This was perfectly in keeping with contemporary expectations; it allowed Eleanor to resume her role in governing the Montforts’ household and estates, and assisted in the recovery of her fertility.
¹³²
Although we do not know the names of the nurses who cared for the Montforts’ children, noble mothers often played an active role in their recruitment, and were encouraged to keep a close eye on their health and character, to ensure the quality of their milk, their attentiveness to their charges and their moral fibre, since the latter would rub off on the children in their care.
¹³³

The placing of Eleanor’s sons and daughters in the charge of wet nurses during their early infancy did not necessarily mean that they spent particularly long periods of time apart from their mother. A possible exception was the Montforts’ eldest son, Henry, who appears to have been left behind in England when the couple were forced, unexpectedly, to flee in 1239. The fact, though, that Earl Simon collected this son, so that he might convey him to his mother in time for the family to set out on crusade in 1240, suggests that that the Montforts were concerned to see their son restored to their household.
¹³⁴

Admittedly, the large amount of travelling in which the Montforts engaged, especially during their time overseas in France and Gascony, might have proved unsettling to the children as well as their parents. There is no evidence to suggest that the Montforts deviated from the relatively widespread practice among the English and French nobility of sending their sons away at around the age of seven and placing them in the households of high-ranking churchmen or barons.
¹³⁵
Two of the Montforts’ sons, Henry, their son and heir, and Amaury, their third surviving son, who was destined for a career in the church, spent part of their childhoods in the household of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln.
¹³⁶
The quality of the education that Henry received there – ‘in learning letters and … good manners’ – were, according to Marsh, important considerations behind the decision of the earl
and
countess that he should return there in 1249.
¹³⁷
Earl Simon clearly valued and respected Eleanor’s opinion on this matter.

If practical necessity as well as contemporary expectations sometimes dictated that at least some of the Montfort sons received their education in other households, then Eleanor still had an important role to play in supervising their care in early infancy. It was presumably into his wife’s capable hands that Simon placed the wards whose custody he received from the crown, like the infant heir of Gilbert de Umfraville, a wealthy northern baron,
¹³⁸
and who were subsequently raised alongside the couple’s younger children within the Montforts’ own establishments. Furthermore, the removal of Eleanor’s sons from their parents’ household did not prevent the earl and countess from soliciting regular reports on their progress. Marsh’s letters to Eleanor and Simon are littered with frequent reports on Henry and Amaury: ‘The lord bishop of Lincoln is well, blessed be the Son of God, and your noble children are also well and continue to make good progress’;
¹³⁹
‘The lord of Lincoln is well and your noble children are well’;
¹⁴⁰
‘The lord bishop of Lincoln is well, blessed be God, and your distinguished children, whose outstanding talents give us great hopes of them, daily progress in virtue’;
¹⁴¹
‘Your dear children are also well and are, I hope, advancing in both age and grace’;
¹⁴²
and ‘Your illustrious children are well, blessed be our Saviour’.
¹⁴³
From Marsh’s letters, both Montforts emerge as parents who bore a deep affection for their offspring.

FRIENDS AT COURT, 1251–3

Although Eleanor’s personal feelings about her recurring pregnancies are not recorded, the letters of Adam Marsh convey the sense of trepidation with which she approached her confinements. A letter he sent to the earl in October 1251, for example, began with a report of a false alarm: ‘On the feast of St Denis [9 October] the countess [who was then heavily pregnant] conjectured that she was going into labour, although the day of birth had not arrived as she supposed.’
¹⁴⁴
Eleanor, like many of her contemporaries, sought spiritual comfort at such a dangerous time for mother and child. Another letter in 1252, this time addressed to Eleanor, celebrated the safe arrival of her child, giving ‘Blessing and glory to the Lord, who has not despised your devotion and has heard your prayer, and granted you delivery from anxiety and danger and joyfulness for a beloved offspring.’
¹⁴⁵
News of this child was also greeted with joy by the queen, Eleanor of Provence, herself the mother of four surviving children by 1252.
¹⁴⁶
During the early 1250s, the Countess of Leicester remained on friendly terms with her sister-in-law, the queen, perhaps on friendlier terms than she and her husband were, at times, with the king. As Countess Eleanor awaited the birth of her child in the late summer and early autumn of 1252, Queen Eleanor sent her messenger, John, presumably to bring her news of how the final stages of her sister-in-law’s pregnancy were progressing.
¹⁴⁷
When Peter, Earl Simon’s barber, brought the queen ‘rumours of the birth’ of the countess’s long-anticipated child at Michaelmas, he received forty shillings, a sizeable gift that reflected the queen’s personal pleasure.
¹⁴⁸
The queen immediately dispatched one of her own nurses, Lady Alice, to Kenilworth to care for her sister-in-law.
¹⁴⁹
Queen Eleanor remained in close contact with the Countess of Leicester throughout the autumn, sending another messenger from Winchester to Kenilworth at the beginning of November.
¹⁵⁰
Further messengers were exchanged by the two women over the coming months and into the New Year, when Countess Eleanor was resident at Kenilworth and Odiham.
¹⁵¹
One messenger, William de Gardin, was enlisted to convey a gift of jewellery to the countess on 1 December 1252.
¹⁵²
During the summer of 1253, the Countess of Leicester paid a visit to the queen, travelling from Kenilworth to Windsor and back again with an entourage mounted on 28 horses.
¹⁵³

Further and, at times, rather touching evidence of the close relationship enjoyed by these two women is provided by the royal jewel rolls for 1252–3, which record gifts made by the queen to members of the countess’s household. On 1 January 1253, Clemencia, Countess Eleanor’s damsel, received a brooch worth 2s. 10d., while another Montfort servant, Walter de Fauconberg, a knight of the Countess of Leicester, received another brooch valued at 2s. 9½d.
¹⁵⁴
Significantly, other recipients of brooches from the queen at this time were associated with the Montforts. They included, for example, Lady Agnes, the wife of Richard of Havering, a close associate of Countess Eleanor and Earl Simon, and the Haverings’ daughter.
¹⁵⁵
Such personal tokens of esteem reinforced and gave visual expression to the ties of friendship that existed between Henry III’s wife and his younger sister.

POLITICAL TENSIONS

The years 1252–3 were fraught with political upheavals and pressing financial concerns for the Montforts. Earl Simon’s return to Gascony in the immediate aftermath of his trial, coupled with his renewed military activities there, threatened a truce the king had secured with the Gascons in an attempt to restore peace. In October or November 1252, the king finally removed Simon from his command by means of an agreement negotiated with the king’s oldest son, the Lord Edward, which promised to compensate the Earl of Leicester for the losses he had sustained there in royal service.
¹⁵⁶
By the summer of 1253, however, the king was courting the earl’s assistance in Gascony in order to assist a royal campaign to subdue the province in the face of renewed rebellion. Although the earl was understandably reluctant to return, he finally arrived to assist the king in October that year, and he remained in royal service until the early months of 1254.
¹⁵⁷
It is interesting, though, to note that Paris credited Grosseteste, rather than Eleanor as Simon’s wife, with persuading the earl to set aside his resentment at his treatment by the king and join his brother-in-law in Gascony after all.
¹⁵⁸
In the event, it was wise advice. The earl’s change of heart paved the way for a reconciliation between Henry III and Earl Simon, which provided the Montforts with further opportunities to try to settle their financial affairs and resolve the ongoing matter of their family’s debts. The result was a generous series of royal grants made in November 1253 which attempted to redress the matter of the expenses previously incurred by the earl in the king’s service in Gascony. Henry did this by promising to pay the earl £500 and by bestowing an annual fee of 600 marks (£400) on Earl Simon, Eleanor and the couple’s heirs that the king would substitute for lands in the future.
¹⁵⁹

The concessions that the Montforts secured in 1253 also represented a financial coup at a time when competition for the king’s patronage was, arguably, at its peak, and at a time when the crown was increasingly strapped for resources. With the arrival of Henry and Eleanor’s Lusignan half-brothers and half-sisters (the children of Isabella of Angoulême’s second marriage) in England in 1247 came another group of relations, in addition to Henry III’s siblings, his wife and her Savoyard kin, and the royal children, for whom the king might be expected to provide, and who appealed to his personal generosity.
¹⁶⁰
William de Valence, the eldest of the king’s half-brothers, became one of the leading defaulters for Eleanor’s Irish dower after he secured the marriage of Joan de Munchensy.
¹⁶¹
Bitter and public confrontations between William and Simon in 1257 and in April 1258 on Welsh affairs helped to alienate the Earl of Leicester from Henry III’s regime.
¹⁶²

The high cost of the war in Gascony also left Henry III short of funds. This, coupled with the king’s decision in March 1254 to accept an offer made by the Pope to bestow the crown of Sicily on Henry’s second son, Edmund, placed unprecedented strains on the crown’s finances and stretched them to breaking point. The papal offer came with strings attached: an English army to reconquer Sicily from the Hohenstaufens and a promise to pay off debts incurred by the papacy there to the tune of more than £90,000.
¹⁶³
For the Montforts, who relied for so much of their cash income on the crown, and who still awaited the conversion of some of the fees owing to them into land, the outlook might well have appeared understandably bleak. We have already noted how, by 1256, Henry III was struggling to safeguard and satisfy the payments for Eleanor’s Irish dower. He was, as Maddicott has shown, also becoming increasingly tardy when it came to repaying the sums owed to Earl Simon under the terms of the settlement agreed for his past services in Gascony, so that some debts remained unpaid for more than two years.
¹⁶⁴

Although the Montforts’ debts provided Eleanor and Simon with a shared sense of grievance against the English crown, it did not, as the 1250s progressed, prevent the earl from serving Henry III on diplomatic missions overseas. The outcome of affairs in Gascony did not dent Simon’s reputation as a skilled diplomat and politician. In 1253, shortly before he joined Henry III’s campaign to Gascony, the French nobles asked the Earl of Leicester to assume the office of seneschal of France; the death of Blanche of Castile had left the Capetian kingdom without a regent in Louis IX’s absence on crusade.
¹⁶⁵
One cannot help but wonder whether Eleanor influenced the earl’s decision to decline this offer. Paris observed that the Earl of Leicester had no wish to serve two royal masters.
¹⁶⁶
It is easy to understand why his wife’s blood tie to the English king, together with the degree to which the couple were beholden financially to Henry III, might also have helped to determine Simon’s choice. As it was, Simon’s cross-Channel connections proved invaluable to the English king, who dispatched him to negotiate with the French in 1255 and 1257. Simon’s advice was also sought on an abortive English mission to Rome, as well as in the crown’s dealings with the kingdom of Castile.
¹⁶⁷
It was Simon who was selected, in September 1254, to visit the Scottish royal court, with the sensitive mission of ascertaining the wellbeing of his royal niece, Margaret, Queen of Scots.
¹⁶⁸
In the end, though, the loyalties engendered by such ties proved far too fragile to last; they could not withstand Simon and Eleanor’s shared financial grievances against the crown and the resentment provoked by the Lusignans. Enough was enough.

7

Reform, Revolution and War

the lord king and the Lord Edward his son… submitted themselves,
for the correction and reform both of their own affairs
and of the state of the realm.
¹

By the spring of 1258 it was not just the Montforts who were disillusioned with Henry III’s personal rule. The king’s ill-considered handling of patronage and the favouritism shown to his arrogant Lusignan half-brothers provoked widespread discontent. On top of this came the king’s involvement in costly schemes abroad, most notably the ‘Sicilian Business’ in 1254, whereby he attempted to secure a throne for his second son, Edmund, which contributed further to the parlous state of royal finances. The weight of royal government came to feel particularly burdensome and oppressive to the knights and free tenants in the localities, where the Exchequer attempted to raise ever-greater sums of money through the machinery of royal justice. In addition to this, the sheriffs, the crown’s chief local agents, were now expected to pay much higher cash increments over and above the county farms, so that many resorted to extortion to raise funds. The crown exploited the Jews to a much higher degree than before, with the result that the Jews, in their turn, placed greater pressure on their debtors in order to meet their more onerous obligations.
²
It was against this backdrop of popular disenchantment with Henry III’s regime that Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, became involved in the baronial movement to reform the government of the realm. As his wife, Eleanor inevitably became involved in the events that unfolded in 1258–9.