Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (21 page)

The deal that Henry III brokered with Louis in December 1259 marked the beginning of renewed attempts to settle the issue of Eleanor’s dower. In reality, and much to the Montforts’ frustration, this new arrangement achieved little. A year passed before the English king gave serious consideration to the Montforts’ grievances. On 7 January 1261 and again on 11 January 1261, Henry III issued letters in which he promised to submit to the arbitration of the king of France, or to that of Queen Margaret or of Peter the Chamberlain.
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On 14 March 1261, the king again expressed his willingness to submit his quarrels with Earl Simon and Countess Eleanor to the French king’s judgement, and secured the earl’s agreement, presumably with the support of his wife, to do the same.
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With the matter still progressing slowly, two new teams of negotiators were appointed on 5 July 1261 – Philip Basset, the royal justiciar, and John Mansel, treasurer of York, for the king and Walter de Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, and Peter de Montfort for the Earl and Countess of Leicester. On this occasion the Duke of Burgundy and Peter the Chamberlain were appointed as intermediaries.
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When, however, the duke and Peter the Chamberlain refused to act, Henry III wrote to Louis IX, requesting that Queen Margaret might become involved.
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The fast-moving political events in England, however, meant that matters had still yet to reach a satisfactory conclusion in 1263.
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If controversy over Eleanor’s refusal to renounce her rights had placed her and her husband at the centre of Anglo-French negotiations, it remains difficult to trace her movements with any precision during the months preceding the final ratification of the Treaty of Paris in December 1259. Although it is likely that she accompanied her husband in England and France, the couple also experienced time apart. In August 1259, for example, it was Simon alone who paid a brief visit to Archbishop Odo Rigaud of Rouen, one of the chief French intermediaries, in a break from the talks.
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When in England, Eleanor’s formal attendance was not presumably required, as a woman, at the great councils or parliaments of this time. Nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that, even if her gender prevented her from attending these meetings, she was familiar with much of the business discussed there. In July 1259, for example, Eleanor apparently secured royal assistance for Thomas of Ash, a Kent landholder who was heavily indebted to the Jews. ‘At the instance of the countess of Leicester’, the king ordered a survey to be made of Thomas’s lands and tenements, a move that brought Thomas a temporary respite from repaying his Jewish debts.
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Eleanor was almost certainly at court again when Simon attended the Westminster parliament of October 1259. The affairs of this parliament were dominated by the publication of the Provisions of Westminster, a series of wide-ranging legal and administrative measures intended to reform the government of the realm.
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On 15 October, just two days into this reform-dominated parliament, the reformer and justiciar, Hugh Bigod, authorized a royal pardon for Ralph de Burstal, a man who had killed in self-defence ‘at the instance of Eleanor, countess of Leicester, the king’s sister’.
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Ralph’s pardon was issued on the same day that Simon entered into a momentous agreement with the Lord Edward to uphold the reform movement and secure his aid to enforce support for the settlement of Eleanor’s dower.
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On 12 November 1259, when the royal court visited Canterbury en route to the Kent coast, Henry III turned his attention once more to the Jewish debtor Thomas of Ash. On this occasion, Henry III, who was keen to encourage his youngest sister’s cooperation – whatever their personal differences – before they reached Paris, again conceded that Thomas’s lands and tenements should be surveyed and valued, so that Thomas’s lot might be alleviated further by paying a reasonable fine at reasonable terms.
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THE FORTUNES OF THE REFORM MOVEMENT

The years that immediately followed the Treaty of Paris were of momentous political importance for Eleanor, her husband and their eldest sons, who were now approaching adulthood. The events of these years in England and France are well known and need recounting only briefly here. After the ratification of the Treaty, Simon de Montfort travelled to Normandy and then to England, where he arrived in January 1260. The English king, however, delayed his return from France until April. Relations between the king and the reformers fractured further, so that when parliament gathered in London, both the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Gloucester, with whom Montfort was at odds, arrived with armed retinues. Countess Eleanor’s other brother, Richard of Cornwall, stepped in to act as a mediator. It was Richard who, in May 1260, secured an important political victory for the royalists when he persuaded the Lord Edward, Eleanor’s nephew and Henry III’s heir, to break with the Montforts and return to his father’s side. It was a measure of the resentment that the king now felt towards the Montforts that he attempted to bring his brother-in-law to trial in the summer of 1260.

Relations between the king and the Montforts softened in the autumn of 1260; Henry and Simon, the Montforts’ two oldest sons, were among the young men who were knighted by the Lord Edward during the court celebrations that marked the feast of St Edward the Confessor (13 October). The king’s overarching concern, however, to revoke the Provisions of Oxford, the key piece of reforming legislation of 1258, finally paid off. In April 1261, his agent at the papal curia secured a bull which revoked the Provisions and paved the way for the king to recover power. One result of the rapidly changing political situation was Simon and Eleanor’s decision to leave England and, in effect, enter exile in France during the early autumn of 1261, a little while after the Earl of Gloucester deserted the reformers for the king’s party. The Montforts were to remain in France until late April 1263. Henry himself followed Earl Simon to France in the summer of 1262, where he amassed evidence to support his charges against the Earl of Leicester. This leant further impetus to the quarrel between the English king and the Montforts, greatly diminishing the chance of a settlement between them; the attempts of Louis IX at arbitration ultimately proved to be fruitless.
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The Earl of Leicester’s return to England in April 1263 was apparently prompted by a visit from a delegation of English magnates, who sought his help to aid the reformers. Following a secret meeting of the king’s chief opponents at Oxford, at which the reformers renewed their commitment to the Provisions of Oxford, Earl Simon assumed the leading mantle of the reform movement. It was Simon who headed the baronial sympathizers in opposition to the king in May, after which the quarrel between Henry and the barons erupted into violence. By June the Earl of Leicester had assumed control of the baronial army in the west, whence he proceeded to advance on Henry III in London. En route to London, Simon secured Kent, where Eleanor held a small collection of dower properties, and, in particular, the royal castle of Dover, in order to prevent Henry III from fleeing abroad. Fragile peace terms were agreed between the warring factions, but the Lord Edward subsequently stirred up trouble for the reformers; Henry III, for his part, remained in regular contact with Louis IX in France. It was the French king who summoned the English king and his baronial opponents to the French court later in the summer, in an unsuccessful attempt to settle their differences.

In December 1263 Henry III broke the truce between the two sides by laying siege to Dover Castle. At this point, Louis IX stepped in, once more, in an attempt to manufacture a peace settlement. In late December a party of baronial supporters, which included the Montforts’ oldest son, Henry, but not Earl Simon, who was then recovering from a broken leg, departed for France, where both sides presented their complaints against the other. In the Mise of Amiens, issued on 23 January 1264, Louis IX made his judgement against the barons and roundly condemned the Provisions of Oxford. During the spring of 1264, England descended into civil war, as the royalists and baronial sympathizers vied to take control of key castles and ports. On 5 April 1264, Henry secured a significant victory for the royalists when he captured the town and castle of Northampton from the Montfortians. It was, however, the king’s own defeat and capture at the battle of Lewes on 14 May that changed Simon and Eleanor’s fortunes most dramatically. In one fell swoop, the Earl of Leicester and his supporters effectively secured control of royal government and Henry III was reduced to a mere cipher as a captive in their hands. The Mise of Lewes, an agreement hammered out between the two sides on 14–15 May, helped to secure the persons of the Lord Edward, Henry III’s eldest son and heir, and Henry of Almain, Richard of Cornwall’s eldest son and heir, who surrendered themselves as hostages on behalf of their fathers; Richard of Cornwall had also fallen prisoner to the barons at Lewes.
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ELEANOR, 1260–3

So what was Eleanor de Montfort’s role in all these events? For much of the early 1260s, Eleanor was active in France, alongside her husband, where she pushed for the further enrichment of her family by pursuing a claim to a share of her mother’s inheritance in Angoulême. In September 1242, Henry III had, at his mother’s behest, renounced all his rights in Angoulême, and promised that Richard of Cornwall and Eleanor would follow suit.
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Eleanor, who had not resigned her claims, seized upon the opportunity in the latter part of 1260 to sue her Lusignan half-brothers, Geoffrey and Guy de Lusignan and William de Valence, as well as her nephew Hugh (XII), Count of La Marche, for a share of her mother’s lands.
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There was certainly little love lost between the Montforts and the Lusignans. Furthermore, as Margaret Labarge astutely observed, Eleanor might well have looked to add to the Montforts’ French properties in response to the difficult situation faced by Simon at the English court.
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Following the failure of arbitration between the two sides, Eleanor and Simon pursued their case to Paris in the latter part of 1262, where they were both active in soliciting support from figures such as Louis IX’s brother, Alphonse of Poitiers.
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Although the return of William de Valence to England in 1261 had ended the countess’s litigation against him, she was still in arbitration with Guy de Lusignan six years later, and her suit against Geoffrey and Hugh also failed to reach a speedy judgement.
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In the pursuit of Eleanor’s maternal rights, the earl and countess were partners in litigation. It was a measure of the value that the Montforts attached to Eleanor’s claims in southern France that they continued to pursue their rights there during their self-imposed exile from England in 1262.
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The couple’s French lands offered a potential safe haven from their troubles in England, should their relationship with the English king breakdown irrevocably.

When the couple visited England in 1263, Eleanor’s attendance at the English royal court was expected in spite of the highly charged political climate. A letter of safe conduct issued at St Paul’s Cathedral in London on 16 June 1263 made provision for Simon, in the company of Eleanor and their children, to visit the king, provided that they came without arms.
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The timing of this safe conduct was significant. It was during the late spring and summer of 1263 that Montfort strengthened his position at the head of the reform movement, against a background of mounting violence towards prominent royalists.
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The king’s safe conduct should be seen as part of his wider and, ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to curb the growing disorder, which found expression in a whole series of royal letters issued between 12 and 15 June, appointing new castellans and military commanders in the northern and south-eastern counties, and reissuing the earlier Provisions of Westminster as a sop to his critics.
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His inclusion of Eleanor and her children in the safe conduct reflected Eleanor’s importance as Henry’s sister and as the crucial familial link between the king and the earl. In spite of the impact of Eleanor’s intransigence on the progress of the Treaty of Paris, and in spite of the bitterness that Henry III clearly harboured towards Earl Simon as one of the architects and subsequent enforcers of the Provisions of Oxford, the king retained at least a vestige of outward respect for his youngest sister.

AFTER LEWES

In the aftermath of the battle of Lewes in May 1264, Eleanor de Montfort, Countess of Leicester, was pre-eminent in status among the highborn women who remained in England. Henry III’s queen, Eleanor of Provence, was overseas, and Eleanor of Castile, the young bride of the Lord Edward, was in Montfortian hands. The countess was soon to prove adept at safeguarding and promoting her own, as well as her husband’s and children’s, interests.
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It was a measure of Eleanor’s close relationship with her husband, as well as her competence in estate and household administration, that the most important royal captives after the king spent time, so the London annalist observed, ‘under the custody of the countess of Leicester’ at Wallingford Castle in Berkshire.
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First, Eleanor’s nephew, the Lord Edward, was transferred in May from Dover Castle in Kent to Wallingford, along with his cousin, Henry of Almain, Richard of Cornwall’s eldest son and heir. A little later, Richard of Cornwall himself was also transferred from the Tower of London to Wallingford.
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The royalist chronicler Thomas Wykes commented upon the harsh treatment of royalist captives at Dover, while under the guard of its recently appointed constable, Henry de Montfort.
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Although the Lord Edward’s modern biographer, Michael Prestwich, found ‘no solid evidence’ of Edward’s poor treatment, it is curious that Earl Simon apparently decided to transfer his royal nephew from Dover into his wife’s care at Wallingford, rather than into that of any of his other close supporters or kin.
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There were, admittedly, excellent reasons for removing the Lord Edward from Dover and Richard of Cornwall from the Tower on the grounds of security. In the summer, news reached the barons that the English queen was actively recruiting mercenaries and soliciting the support of her allies – the king and queen of France, her uncle Peter of Savoy and other royalist exiles – in order to mount an invasion of England to rescue her husband.
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The Dunstable annalist noted the barons’ efforts to fortify the English coast against this threat.
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Dover Castle’s situation on the English Channel rendered this great fortress and its royal hostages vulnerable to the queen’s potential military operations. Richard of Cornwall’s residence in London, the kingdom’s capital, might have left him similarly exposed should an invasion force land in the south east.