Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (5 page)

Eleanor’s correspondence with Marsh, who acknowledged and thanked her for her missives, in the late 1240s and early 1250s raises the question of the level of Eleanor’s literacy.
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The existence of Marsh’s letters, which were written in Latin rather than in the French vernacular, certainly suggests that Eleanor possessed at least a competent reading knowledge – or level of comprehension – of this language. It is also possible, although difficult to prove, that, like Isabella of France, Eleanor did not leave the composition of her letters to Marsh solely in the hands of her clerks, but checked their contents in person. On one occasion at least, Marsh thanked the countess ‘for remembering to tell me in your letter to my poor self, so carefully written’ some heartening news concerning her family.
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When Eleanor became a mother later in life, she was certainly aware of her maternal responsibility to oversee the religious and literary instruction of her only surviving daughter and namesake, Eleanor.
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The fragment of the adult Eleanor’s household roll that survives for the year 1265 records the purchase in February that year of twenty dozen sheets of parchment in London by Brother G. Boyon in order to make a portable breviary for the countess’s daughter.
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The parchment was then carried to Oxford, where the breviary was written and the text completed by the spring.
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The breviary, which usually took the form of a small, thick volume or series of volumes, was a type of devotional work popular with priests, monks, nuns and the laity alike in the Middle Ages, due to its size. Breviaries usually contained material including hymns, Psalms, prayers for the religious offices from Matins to Compline, and, indeed, often the Psalter in its entirety.
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In commissioning such a work for her daughter and in appointing a male religious to oversee its execution, Countess Eleanor took a guiding hand in her daughter’s spiritual guidance and counsel, and perhaps recognized the opportunity to instil her own religious values and views on morality into her offspring.

The role played by figures like Cecily of Sandford in Countess Eleanor’s upbringing might well have provided an element of stability and emotional support that was perhaps lacking elsewhere in her daily life. Indeed, established in their respective households and, for the most part, in the custody of different guardians, Henry III, his brother and his sisters emerge as remarkably isolated figures in their childhoods. It is, for example, difficult to gauge how often they maintained contact with one another, remembered significant family anniversaries and celebrated the great feasts of the religious calendar. Obvious occasions when they might have been permitted to come together and socially interact with one another were the Christmas courts of Henry III’s minority, which were usually held at Winchester until 1221, under the watchful eyes of Peter des Roches.
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If anything, the shared experiences of their parents’ absence after 1217 might well have heightened the value placed upon sibling relationships, especially among Eleanor’s older siblings. The relationship that Eleanor’s eldest sister, Joan, enjoyed with her brothers is strongly suggestive that this was, in fact, the case. The text of a letter survives that was addressed to Henry III and written in Joan’s name in or around 1220, when she was nine or ten years old and in the household of Hugh (X) de Lusignan. Its purpose was ostensibly to reassure her brother, the king, of Hugh’s continued loyalty, against the immediate political background of Isabella of Angoulême’s impending marriage to him. Having set the king’s mind at rest with regard to her own safety, Joan asked for news of Henry and their brother Richard. Even if allowance is made for the possibility that this letter was written under Hugh’s or Isabella’s guidance, with their interests firmly at heart, its tone was that of a caring younger sister and encouraged Henry to respond as an affectionate older brother.
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After Joan’s marriage to Alexander II, King of Scots, in 1221, she became a regular visitor to the English royal court, especially when it visited York. She also corresponded with Henry, imparting Scottish intelligence about the activities of Hugh de Lacy and his fellow rebels in Ireland in or around 1224.
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In fact, as Jessica Nelson observes, Joan’s preference for the English royal court, and by implication for her natal family, over her husband’s court, company and kin, attracted contemporary comment. Matthew Paris noted, with a critical eye, her refusal to return to Scotland in spite of her husband’s repeated requests for her to do so.
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When Joan died on 4 March 1238, it was in England, at Havering in Essex, and her deathbed was attended by her brothers. According to the Melrose chronicler, she passed away in their arms, in a moving family deathbed scene.
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She was subsequently buried ‘with great grief and with equal magnificence’ at the abbey of Tarrant Keynes in Dorset, a house in the patronage of Henry III’s wife.
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The circumstances of Eleanor’s early upbringing and the physical remoteness from her siblings during infancy might help to explain her later ‘independence’ of character, observed by John Maddicott in his biography of Simon de Montfort.
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The chastising tone that Eleanor’s correspondent, Adam Marsh, was prepared to adopt towards her when the need arose indicates Eleanor was prepared to receive and, perhaps, listen to his advice. Indeed, a striking feature of Marsh’s letters is their candid language. From the pen of Marsh, the adult Eleanor emerges as his friend and valued patroness, as well as the determined, forceful, wilful and, at times, quarrelsome wife to Earl Simon, a woman who manipulated and subverted gender expectations, themes that will be explored in this book.

2

The Marshal Marriage

‘we have no greater treasure than our own marriage and [the marriages] of our sisters’
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Royal marriage in the thirteenth century was a highly valued and, indeed, valuable tool in the diplomatic armoury of the English king and his kingdom. It offered a potential means of recruiting powerful political allies to cement the king’s position as well as a way of engineering peace between neighbouring rulers through the creation of a personal, dynastic bond. Inheritance customs and the property settlements that accompanied royal unions also meant that prudently arranged alliances might bring with them movable wealth and new territories to augment the prosperity of the ruling house. The high level of personal importance that King Henry III attached to marriage was made clear in a memorandum dispatched to the English proctors at the papal curia in 1224. This document furnished Henry’s agents with the reasons for the marriage of his youngest sister, Eleanor, then just nine years old, to a man twenty-five years her senior, William Marshal junior (d. 1231), Earl of Pembroke. The political background to Eleanor’s first marriage and the relationship that she subsequently forged with her new husband are the subjects explored within this chapter. In particular, we shall consider precisely why it was that the young king felt compelled in 1224 to justify and defend his choice of bridegroom for this sister to his agents in Rome.

WILLIAM MARSHAL JUNIOR AND THE CROWN

The father of Eleanor’s bridegroom, William Marshal senior, was a younger son of John Marshal, a minor baron who held the hereditary post of royal master-marshal, by his second wife, Sibyl, the sister of Earl Patrick of Salisbury.
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Through service in the households of Henry the Young King (d. 1183), Henry II (d. 1189), Richard I (d. 1199) and John (d. 1216), William senior had reaped the rewards of royal patronage. Most notably, he secured the hand in marriage of Isabella de Clare (d. 1220), the daughter and sole heiress of Richard fitz Gilbert de Clare, Lord of Striguil and of Leinster, and a claimant to the earldom of Pembroke, thereby acquiring her extensive estates in England, south Wales, Ireland and Normandy.
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It was a measure of William Marshal’s importance within the Angevin dominions that, unlike the queen, he was appointed as one of King John’s executors and was personally charged with safeguarding Henry III and the English throne.
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With the agreement of the remaining loyalist barons, the older Marshal was appointed regent just a short time after the young king’s first coronation at the end of October 1216, and helped to secure a decisive royalist victory against the supporters of the French prince Louis at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217.
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Ill-health and old age brought William senior’s regency to an end in early April 1219; he died a month later and was buried at the New Temple in London.
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William junior, William senior’s eldest surviving son and heir, stood next in line to inherit the earldom of Pembroke (bestowed by King John upon his father in 1199) and, on his mother’s death in 1220, the bulk of the couple’s English, Irish and Welsh lands.
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The deaths of his parents left William junior one of the wealthiest and most eligible magnates in the kingdom.

William Marshal junior had already made his own mark on English politics by 1220. Whereas his father had been an unswerving loyalist during the civil war of 1215–17, William junior had sided initially with the rebels and was one of the twenty-five barons appointed to oversee the enforcement of Magna Carta in 1215.
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In the event, William junior’s rebellion was not long lived: the young Marshal successfully retook Marlborough Castle from the rebels and fought for the royalists at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217.
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William’s change of heart was rewarded when he received a grant of the lands confiscated from the rebel, David, Earl of Huntingdon, which included Fotheringhay Castle.
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Although Earl David’s lands were restored to him in 1218, William junior hung on tenaciously to Fotheringhay in the face of growing pressure for him to relinquish this stronghold until the summer of 1220, when events in Wales conspired against him.
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The unexpected invasion of Pembrokeshire by Llywelyn the Great, Prince of North Wales, devastated the Marshal lands there and forced William junior’s supporters to agree peace on unfavourable terms.
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When the new Earl of Pembroke sought the aid of the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, against the Welsh settlement, he was met with a demand for Fotheringhay’s return to the crown.
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In the letter in which William junior announced his intention to answer for Fotheringhay, he claimed that he was prepared to do so because ‘I endeavour to obtain the preferment of the lord king and his sister by all means.’
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The royal sister in question was Joan, Eleanor’s oldest sister. The negotiations for Joan’s marriage to Alexander II, King of Scots and Earl David’s overlord, subsequently concluded in June 1221, were, by this time, already well underway.
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As part of the Anglo-Scottish talks held at York in August 1220, Alexander pushed for, and was promised, Fotheringhay’s restoration.
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On 11 September 1220, a curt letter addressed by Henry III to William junior ordered the latter to yield this castle forthwith, ‘lest the whole business of the marriage remains incompleted to our great damage and shame’.
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The match agreed at York in August 1220 reworked the terms of an earlier treaty that had provided for a double marriage between Alexander II and Joan, and Alexander’s eldest sister, Margaret, and the English king. It was now agreed that Alexander’s sister would marry a subject of the English king instead.
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For the time being, the identity of the new English bridegroom remained unclear. Yet the royal memorandum of 1224 that announced William’s later marriage to Eleanor indicates that the young Marshal, as one of the greatest lords of Henry’s realm, was regarded as a serious, and potentially threatening, alternative candidate for the hand of the Scottish princess to that championed by the English crown.
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In the event, Margaret married the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, during the autumn of 1221 in a union possibly arranged at Joan’s wedding to Alexander earlier that year.
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In the meantime, the young Marshal was tempted by the prospect of an alternative match between himself and a daughter of Count Robert of Dreux, his erstwhile competitor for Marlborough.
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As the royal memorandum of 1224 also explained, this potential match was similarly fraught with danger for the English crown: Robert was an alien (a foreigner) and such an alliance might introduce more aliens into England.
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This was an especially pertinent consideration in view of the events of 1215–17 and the fact that William’s younger brother, Richard, held all his lands in Normandy and owed homage to the French crown, a point that the king readily acknowledged.
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Another candidate for the Marshal’s hand who emerged at this time, and was named in the English memorandum, was none other than a daughter of Henry (I) de Louvain, Duke of Brabant (r. 1183–1235). Although Henry de Louvain supported his son-in-law, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV, as an English ally at the battle of Bouvines in 1214, the duke had subsequently allied with the victor, the Capetian king Philip Augustus.
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This change of alliance was not altogether surprising: Henry (I)’s second wife was Philip’s daughter, Marie of France, the widow of the Marquis of Namur.
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By 1221, Henry was the father of four daughters by his first wife, all of whom had already made highly advantageous marriages.
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Perhaps the recent death of Arnoul (III), Count of Loos and Graf of Rieneck, the husband of one of Henry’s younger daughters, Adelaide, prompted the Earl of Pembroke to consider applying for her hand.
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A marriage alliance between William junior and the Brabantine house, with its Capetian sympathies, clearly presented yet another threat to the future security of the English crown and to any long-term ambitions for the recovery of Henry III’s lost continental possessions.