Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (2 page)

If Eleanor’s close kinship with the English king and her subsequent remarriage to a court favourite, and later reformer and rebel, Simon de Montfort, make her an exceptional woman in many respects, then her career still raises wider questions about the nature of, and potential for, women’s political agency in this period. As the sister of King Henry III, an aunt of the Lord Edward and the wife of Earl Simon, Eleanor straddled the bloody conflict between Henry III and the barons who wished to reform his government in the 1250s and 1260s. Yet she remained resolutely wedded to the cause of her second husband, sharing his political ambitions, energy and fiery nature. She stood firm in her opposition to the English crown during the mid 1260s and defended Dover Castle for the Montfortian cause during the summer of 1265 as her family’s enemies closed in around her.

I first encountered Eleanor as a doctoral student in the late 1990s, when I researched the life and political allegiances of another prominent thirteenth-century lady, Margaret de Lacy, Countess of Lincoln and Pembroke (d. 1266), who corresponded with Eleanor in 1265. It was not until 2006, when heavily pregnant with my first daughter, that I began to undertake more extensive research into Eleanor herself, and the idea for a biography gradually began to evolve from two papers that I wrote on Eleanor’s political involvement in the Barons’ War for the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds in 2006 and for a conference at The National Archives (UK) at Kew in 2007. In developing, researching and writing this study, I have, therefore, incurred a number of long-standing personal debts. Dr Adrian Jobson, Dr Liz Oakley-Brown, Dr Michael Ray and Dr Jennifer Ward have all kindly given me the benefit of their particular areas of expertise and have all read parts of this work. Any errors that remain are my own. I have also benefitted from the encouragement and friendship of Professor David Carpenter, Professor Michael Clanchy, Dr David Crook and Dr Paul Dryburgh at various stages of this project.
Chapters 7
and
8
of this book are based upon earlier papers that I gave at Leeds, Kew, Oxford and Canterbury between 2006 and 2008; the people who attended these events made numerous valuable suggestions that I have tried to incorporate. The record copying department at the Bibliothèque nationale de France has been extremely helpful in providing me with images of MS Clairambault 1188 (the remains of the Montfort family’s archive) and MS Clairambault 1021 (the Montfort confraternity letters from St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire), while the staff at the British Library furnished me with a copy of Eleanor de Montfort’s household roll (BL, MS Add. 8877). My thanks go to the staff of the reading rooms at the British Library, the Hampshire Record Office and The National Archives, who have provided valuable assistance during the course of my research. My colleagues and students at Canterbury Christ Church University have offered friendship and encouragement throughout the whole process. I am also particularly grateful to Michael Greenwood and all the staff at Continuum for their enduring patience and guidance. My greatest debt, though, is to my husband, Lee, for his love and support, and to our daughters, Emma and Katie, who were both born during the years when this book was first conceived.

A NOTE ON MONEY

In the thirteenth century, £1 was equivalent to 20 shillings, and 1 shilling was made up of 12 pence. A mark was a unit of account worth 13s. 4d.

Abbreviations

1

Childhood

‘descended from a race of kings’
¹

In 1917, a French scholar, Max Prinet, published a detailed description of a tomb housed within the church of the Abbey Royal of St-Antoine-des-Champs, a medieval nunnery on the outskirts of Paris. The tomb, which depicted a woman wearing a religious habit, was heavily decorated with armorial bearings typical of those employed in the thirteenth century. It bore no inscription that immediately identified its owner, but an analysis of its heraldic devices suggested that this was none other than the funerary monument constructed to house the heart of Eleanor (d. 1275), Countess of Leicester, the daughter of King John of England and the widow of William Marshal (d. 1231), Earl of Pembroke, and Simon de Montfort (d. 1265), Earl of Leicester. The arms depicted on the tomb included two emperors, those of the Holy Roman and Latin Empires, four kings, those of England, France, Sicily, and Castile-León, and those of the Montfort family, which an earlier French heraldist, Claude-François Ménestrier, had identified with Eleanor’s sons by her second marriage. This evidence, coupled with that from an ancient inventory of the abbey’s goods referring to a cloth placed ‘on the heart of the countess of Leicester’ on feast days and at Lent, confirmed that Eleanor’s heart was probably housed within this tomb or that, at the very least, there had later emerged a strong local tradition that this was so.
²

Whether or not this monument contained the heart of the youngest daughter of King John of England, Eleanor was certainly a remarkable woman who could claim close kinship with the most powerful ruling dynasties of Western Europe and the Latin East in the thirteenth century. This point was not lost on her contemporaries. Eleanor’s impeccable connections, and those of her sisters – Joan Queen of Scots and Isabella, the Holy Roman Empress – were detailed in an elaborate genealogy compiled to celebrate the latter’s marriage in 1235 to Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. On their father’s side, these women claimed descent from the kings of England, dukes of Aquitaine and Normandy, and counts of Anjou, Maine and Touraine. Through the marriages of their aunts in the paternal line, they were associated with the kings of Castile and Sicily, the dukes of Saxony and the counts of Toulouse.
³
As members of the European political elite, Eleanor’s and her sisters’ lives were, therefore, played out on an international stage. This was, after all, an era in which the language, life and culture of the English royal family and high aristocracy were closely integrated with Europe and especially with France.

These continental connections were especially important for Eleanor, the only English royal sister not to acquire a crown through marriage. Like her grandmother and namesake, the formidably talented Eleanor (d. 1204), Duchess of Aquitaine, who had been the wife of King Louis VII of France and King Henry II of England in turn, the key events in the younger Eleanor’s life took place on both sides of the English Channel. The political capital invested by the younger Eleanor, her two husbands and, ultimately, her children in
her
lineage and
her
natal family ties offers a window onto female agency and the opportunities that existed for medieval noblewomen, primarily through the mediums of marriage, motherhood and lordship, to foster their own interests and those of their closest kin. It was, after all, precisely these ties that located the younger Eleanor at the very heart of the conflict for control of English government that emerged between her brother, King Henry III, and his barons. The years 1258 to 1267 – a period of baronial reform and rebellion – were of tremendous significance in English history. They saw the king reduced to a cipher and a baronial council, led by Eleanor’s second husband, Simon de Montfort, pushing through legal and administrative reforms far more radical and wide ranging than those envisaged in Magna Carta in 1215. This book, therefore, considers the life and career of Eleanor, the youngest daughter of King John, against the turbulent background of thirteenth-century English politics and Anglo-French relations, and considers her transformation from the king’s beloved youngest sister into his bitter political enemy.

BEGINNINGS

The earliest years of Eleanor’s life, in common with those of other medieval English princesses, remain clouded in obscurity, with few hints of what was to come.
⁴
No English chronicler saw fit to record the birth of Eleanor to King John and his wife, Isabella of Angoulême, in or around 1215.
⁵
The arrival of the couple’s fifth surviving child and third surviving daughter went unremarked by contemporary chroniclers in an age of high rates of infant mortality and at a time when the Angevin dynasty faced a grave political crisis – civil war in England between Eleanor’s father and his barons.
⁶
King John, the youngest son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, had seized the English throne in 1199 on the death of his elder brother, Richard. The loss of Normandy to the French king, Philip Augustus, in 1204 seriously dented the prestige of the English crown, so much so that John devoted the remainder of his reign to raising money to help secure its recovery. John’s plans, though, came to nought, thanks, in large part, to the disastrous defeat of his allies at the battle of Bouvines on 27 July 1214. Defeat at Bouvines left the English crown financially embarrassed and critically exposed to its enemies at home, to the barons, knights and free men who bore financial and other grievances against John, and who resented the intrusive and rapacious system of government over which John and his predecessors had presided.
⁷
The outpouring of these grievances culminated in civil war, in the issue of Magna Carta in June 1215, in its failure as a peace treaty and in the renewal of hostilities between the warring parties in August 1215. Thoroughly disenchanted with John, the rebel barons invited Philip Augustus’s eldest son, Louis (the future King Louis VIII of France), to take the English throne; Louis’s arrival in England in May 1216 posed a serious threat not only to John but also to his wife, his sons and his daughters.
⁸