Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (20 page)

At a parliament held at Westminster in April and May 1258, a group of seven magnates, including the Earl of Leicester, banded together and met the king, head-on, with demands to expel the aliens, especially the king’s detested half-brothers, and create a committee of twenty-four to overhaul royal government.
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Left with little choice other than to acquiesce, Henry III consented to the appointment of the committee, drawn from twelve royalists and twelve baronial supporters, which met at the Oxford parliament in June 1258.
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Earl Simon’s position on the committee ensured that its remit addressed two matters close to his heart and that of his wife: first, the issue of whether their annual fee of £400 that they had secured in 1253 ought to be replaced with land, and second, the settlement of outstanding debts now owed to the Montforts by the crown.
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This was rather surprising business, perhaps, for a committee concerned with a nationwide programme of governmental reform.

It remains frustratingly unclear just what feelings Countess Eleanor harboured about the reforming mantle that her husband assumed in the late 1250s. There are signs that she supported her husband’s actions. An awareness on her part that some of the Leicesters’ servants were vulnerable to the money-raising initiatives employed by the crown is, for example, suggested by her activities at this time. In 1256, the king decreed that all persons in possession of lands worth £15 per annum or over should be compelled to become knights, and thereby become liable to hold a range of unsalaried offices in local government.
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It is striking that it was Eleanor, and not her husband, who in June 1257 secured exemption (or respite) from knighthood for the Northamptonshire landholder William de Torvyle.
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Furthermore, as a woman who had had recourse to the financial services of the Jews, Eleanor might have felt sympathy for other Jewish debtors who now found themselves in more straightened financial circumstances. Eleanor’s involvement in politics in the era of reform raises intriguing questions about her role on both the national and international stage.

THE TREATY OF PARIS

As Maddicott observed, ‘the most important external issue confronting both the king and barons in 1258’ was that of concluding, successfully, a critical series of negotiations with the king of France for a permanent Anglo-French peace.
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This peace was intended to end the years of fighting punctuated by truces which had shaped Anglo-French relations since the loss of Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Touraine under King John.
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Under its terms, Henry III prepared to surrender all his claims in his dynasty’s former continental possessions to King Louis IX, who, through marriage to Margaret of Provence, was Henry III’s brother-in-law. In return, Louis allowed Henry to retain Gascony as a fief of the French crown. As a native French man with strong family ties to the English court and contacts at the French court, it was, perhaps, inevitable that Simon de Montfort served as Henry III’s agent at various stages in the negotiations. Henry’s decision to employ Simon in this capacity at a time when the earl was disenchanted with him was, at best, naive, and provided the earl and his wife with a perfect opportunity to secure leverage over the English crown.
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One of the remaining obstacles to the successful conclusion of the treaty in 1258 was Louis IX’s demand that Henry III’s surviving siblings, Richard, Earl of Cornwall and King of the Romans,
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and Eleanor, Countess of Leicester, should resign their claims to the same territories.
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In May that year, Henry III wrote to the French king to reassure him that he would do as much as was in his power to persuade his brother and sister to meet these terms. He even appointed Eleanor’s husband as one of his proctors in this matter.
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Yet Earl Simon might well have been, as Henry himself later claimed, directly responsible for persuading the French king to seek Eleanor’s resignation of their rights. Among the charges subsequently brought against Simon by the English king at a later trial in 1260 was the accusation that ‘the earl, both personally and through his agents, arranged and caused to be arranged, and put it into the mind of the king of France, that renunciation should be asked from the countess and her children’.
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Admittedly, the earl rebuffed this charge, but it is easy to understand why Henry III suspected his brother-in-law of duplicity. It was certainly curious, as the English king observed, that no mention was made during the negotiations of the comparable rights of Henry III’s daughters, those of Richard of Cornwall’s second son, and those of the children of Isabella the Empress, all of whom might have been considered alternative claimants to the former Angevin dominions.
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Although Earl Simon rigorously denied it, Louis’s decision to prioritize Richard’s and Eleanor’s claims might well have originated in the machinations of the Montforts.

Admittedly, it is not clear just how far Eleanor was implicated in all of this, but it seems likely that, at the very least, she endorsed Earl Simon’s activities. After all, the enduring strength of the couple’s marriage and the high esteem in which Simon held his wife at this time was demonstrated when, on 1 January 1259, Simon de Montfort’s eldest son, Henry, drafted his father’s will. In this document, Simon announced his decision to make Eleanor his chief executor in the event of his death. In a personal note, he urged Eleanor to act as his attorney in settling his affairs ‘in such a way as a good lady ought to do for her lord who trusts in her’.
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Eleanor’s appearance in this document is a strong indication of her husband’s belief in her capabilities; it also implies recognition, on Simon’s part, that Eleanor shared his personal, political and spiritual objectives to a sufficient degree for him to entrust her with overseeing his posthumous bequests.
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The question of Eleanor’s rights in the continental possessions claimed by Louis of France under the terms of the so-called Treaty of Paris placed the Countess of Leicester firmly at the centre of events. Earl Simon was in France in May and early June 1258, and again between November 1258 and February 1259.
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The peace settlement and the Montforts’ personal, financial grievances against the English crown became intertwined when the couple refused to renounce Eleanor’s claims to her natal family’s continental possessions in a blatant attempt to obstruct the Anglo-French talks.
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It was a measure of Eleanor’s strength of character and her obstinacy that she stood firm in the face of mounting pressure to acquiesce to her brother’s wishes. At his trial in July 1260, Earl Simon remembered how:

The land in question on this occasion related to the £400 fee settled on the couple in 1253.
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In February 1259, Richard of Cornwall and his eldest son, Henry, followed by the king’s younger son, Edmund, all formally renounced their rights in Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, Maine and Poitou. Henry III surrendered his own claims on 24 February.
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All that now remained was for the king’s eldest son, the Lord Edward, and for Eleanor and Simon to follow suit. Edward reluctantly conceded in May, but the Montforts held out.
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Chief among the stumbling blocks that Henry encountered in seeking to secure their co-operation was Eleanor’s Marshal dower. Hence a royal order issued on 10 March 1259, whereby Henry announced that he intended to send Earl Simon to France in the company of Peter of Savoy, Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, John Mansel and Robert Walerand. Henry assigned Simon’s companions the express task of making peace with the Montforts in their actions against the crown, including that touching Eleanor’s dower.
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In 1260, the king later recalled ‘that the earl [of Leicester] granted by his letter that he would make his wife and his children make the renunciation if the king paid to the countess what he owed her, and made good the wrongs done to her if he had done any’.
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The earl, for his part, recollected that ‘the king put himself on arbitration regarding the countess’s dower in Ireland’.
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Eleanor and Simon’s obstinacy and their sheer determination to press home their own interests proved an effective, if not insurmountable, obstacle to Anglo-French talks: the Montforts’ refusal to renounce their rights delayed the ratification of the Treaty of Paris for nine months.
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Yet their actions came at a high political price, as not only did their behaviour sour relations irrevocably between Eleanor and her brother, but their tactics drew criticism from members of the English baronage. Matthew Paris recounts a dramatic episode that took place in 1259, in which he placed the blame for the breakdown in friendly relations between Earl Simon and Richard de Clare, a fellow reformer and negotiator, squarely on Eleanor’s refusal to resign her rights in Normandy. Richard and the Earl of Leicester argued so violently that they had to be physically restrained.
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Faced with the Montforts’ intransigence, Henry III’s hand was forced into making a series of concessions to Earl Simon that were clearly intended to purchase his youngest sister’s co-operation. In May 1259, the king ordered that the earl was to be repaid the money that he had expended in the crown’s service in Gascony, and Simon and his wife were subsequently granted nine English manors ‘in tenancy’ to replace the £400 fee.
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More than a hint of Henry III’s mounting annoyance at the couple’s and, in particular, at Eleanor’s behaviour was betrayed by another royal directive issued on 20 May 1259: the king instructed Simon’s fellow negotiators, who now numbered John de Balliol among their ranks, that if Eleanor continued to refuse to resign her rights, they were to find another way to satisfy the king of France.
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On the same day, the English king wrote to Louis, describing how, in the presence of the great men of his realm in London, he had offered to submit himself to an award negotiated on his behalf at Saint-Germain-des-Prés in France and give security to his sister that he would honour this intention. This was all to no avail – Eleanor still declined to fall in with his plans.
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On 24 May 1259, as a result of intensive discussions to which Eleanor and Simon were both party, Henry III empowered Richard, Peter, John de Balliol, John Mansel and Robert to make an award provided that they examined the Montforts’ claim that the king had used force to persuade Eleanor to make peace with William Marshal junior’s heirs.
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The matter of whether Eleanor had been in the king’s power and authority when she accepted an annual cash sum in place of her Irish dower had, of course, already been raised in the late 1240s.
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The Montforts’ decision to resurrect this earlier accusation on an international stage betrays the level of resentment harboured by the couple towards the English crown. Once more, the king of France was kept closely abreast of matters in this intensely personal, and now increasingly bitter, family dispute between Henry III and the Montforts. When, on the same day, the English king informed Louis that he had personally authorized the payment of all debts owed to the earl and countess by the English crown,
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it seemed as though the Montforts’ gamble had finally paid off.

Yet the matter of Eleanor’s dower refused to go away. Eager to secure a new valuation of Eleanor’s dower and a new assignment, the couple pushed for further concessions. On 26 June, news arrived in England from Henry’s agents at the French court that Eleanor had agreed to a settlement.
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Spurred into action, Henry III’s officials worked hard to secure the Treaty’s ratification in July, only to have their ambitions thwarted yet again by those of Eleanor and her husband.
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Simon and Eleanor now demanded that the king should pay what the Montforts considered to be the true value of Eleanor’s dower in Ireland and Wales – 2,000 marks per annum. The couple also demanded that the crown should compensate them for twenty-six years’ worth in arrears, an impossibly large sum for a cash-strapped English king to pay, let alone collect from the Marshal co-heirs.
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The couple had overstepped the mark and overplayed their hand. In the face of their inflexibility, Henry III was left with no other alternative but to negotiate the Treaty of Paris around them. When, in October 1259, Earl Simon returned to England he had no other choice but to consent to an amended form of the Anglo-French treaty that the French king had finally approved and which omitted all mention of Eleanor’s rights.
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Outmanoeuvred, Earl Simon demanded Eleanor’s share of the former Angevin lands in parliament before the representatives of the French crown.
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When, on 24 November 1259, Henry III finally visited Paris to ratify the Treaty, Earl Simon again managed to delay proceedings for at least another eight days. It was finally agreed on 3 December 1259 at Saint-Germain-des-Prés that 15,000 marks which Louis was supposed to pay to Henry under the Treaty’s terms were to remain in the French king’s hands until the quarrels between the Montforts and the English crown were resolved. Henry III promised to settle these differences within the next two years.
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In the short term, this change of tact worked well for the English crown; Countess Eleanor fell in with Henry III’s wishes. On 4 December 1259, the Countess of Leicester renounced her claim to the Angevin lands before Earl Simon, King Henry and King Louis and their respective courts, and the Treaty of Paris was published.
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