Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (9 page)

The author of the
History
also waxed lyrical on the subject of William junior’s first marriage to the daughter of the count of Aumale, recalling the negotiations that had attended this match and the universal praise the two fathers received for bringing successfully to fruition a union of ‘two children from such very worthy fathers/and mothers’ until ‘Death’ prematurely robbed William junior of his first bride.
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Viewed against the existing network of Marshal marriages and the qualities and marital relationships constructed within the
History
, it appears that William junior expected his new, youthful, royal bride to be tutored to fill his mother’s shoes in the long term; there might well have been an expectation that Eleanor, like Isabella, would play an active role in family affairs. The value of the connections – both personal and political – that Eleanor brought to William junior on their marriage were reflected by her presence on the Breton campaign of 1230.

THE DEATH OF WILLIAM MARSHAL JUNIOR

Eleanor returned to England from Brittany by the summer of 1230,
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but was reunited with her husband once more in the autumn. On 18 September 1230, the same day upon which instructions were issued by the king to furnish William junior’s messengers in England with a ‘good boat’ for their return to Brittany, Henry also saw to it that another ‘good boat’ was found to convey ‘the sister of the lord king, the wife of the earl’, overseas, presumably to rejoin her husband.
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The timing of this request – a matter of weeks before Henry III left for England – was significant, and provides another strong indicator of Eleanor’s importance to her new husband’s position. In the king’s absence, and with her husband continuing the war on Henry III’s behalf, Eleanor provided the English crown with a figurehead and focus for personal ties of loyalty to the Angevin dynasty, and a visual reminder of Pembroke’s marital relationship with the English crown.

It was not until 22 February 1231 that William and, presumably, Eleanor finally returned to England.
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Pembroke was at Gloucester on 2 March 1231, when the earl witnessed a charter issued by the king.
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At the beginning of April, the Earl and Countess of Pembroke attended the wedding of Eleanor’s brother, Richard, now Earl of Cornwall, to William junior’s second sister, Isabella. Isabella’s first husband, Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, had died at Penros in Brittany on 25 October 1230, leaving her free to marry again.
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Immediately after Gloucester’s death, the custody of his estates and of Richard, his eight-year-old son and heir, had been granted to the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh.
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This came at a time of growing resentment within England against de Burgh’s influence over the king and his domination of royal patronage; it is therefore possible that Isabella’s personal willingness to enter into a union with Richard of Cornwall suited her personal interests, as well as those of her brother and her future husband. Richard of Cornwall and the Earl of Pembroke had already joined together as part of a wider baronial alliance in 1227 against de Burgh. Richard, for his part, might well have resented surrendering his claims to the honour of Berkhamsted to de Burgh’s nephew, Raymond.
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The younger Marshal, on the other hand, opposed de Burgh’s promotion of the claims of another nephew, Richard, in Ireland, and probably resented losing the justiciarship there in June 1226.
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In 1231, therefore, Cornwall and Pembroke renewed their earlier association through marriage.
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It is, unfortunately, impossible to know whether Eleanor played a role in negotiating this match behind the scenes, but she was certainly well placed to serve as a go-between between her husband and brother and between her future sister-in-law and her brother. Richard and Isabella were, as the Tewkesbury annalist recalled, subsequently married on 30 March 1231 by Peter, Abbot of Tewkesbury, at Fawley in Buckinghamshire, much to Henry III’s dismay.
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Within seven days of his sister’s marriage, William junior was dead, dying from a swift and unexpected illness on 6 April 1231, and was buried a few days later at the New Temple in London, near his father.
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This sudden turn of events left Eleanor a widow at the age of sixteen.

3

The Chaste Widow

‘Woe is me! Is not the blood of the blessed martyr Thomas [Becket] fully avenged yet?’
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The death of William Marshal junior in April 1231 was greatly lamented in royal circles. The king, so the chronicler Matthew Paris recalled, was overcome with grief at the loss of his brother-in-law, attributing it to divine vengeance for Henry II’s role in the martyrdom of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170. The depth of Henry III’s sorrow was also strongly conveyed within the records of the English royal chancery. On 25 May 1231, a little over a month after Pembroke’s death, a letter addressed to the king’s subjects in Ireland spoke of the recently deceased earl, ‘over whose death we violently grieved and [still] grieve’.
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The date of this letter was significant. By the end of May, the recently widowed Eleanor was in a position to inform her brother whether or not she was carrying her dead husband’s child, and thus a future heir to the Marshal estates. She was not.
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This left as William junior’s heir his younger brother, Richard, a liegeman of the king of France. His succession to the Marshal family’s English, Irish and Welsh lands raised the spectre of a Capetian–Marshal alliance that threatened the security of the realm. The royal letter, therefore, announced the king’s intention to take William junior’s Irish lands into the crown’s hands.
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Next, though, came a curious twist in the tale. When Richard crossed the Channel in the summer of 1231, the English king informed him that he had learned that Eleanor was pregnant after all. Henry refused to entertain Richard’s claim to the Marshal estates until the truth of the matter had been determined.
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Thus, Eleanor’s potential, if not necessarily her actual, maternity offered the crown a convenient excuse for delaying Richard’s succession.

Eleanor’s personal reaction to William’s death mirrored that of the king; a keen sense of sorrow and loss on her part is suggested by the young countess’s subsequent decision to make a ‘solemn vow’ to live out the remainder of her days as a chaste widow.
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In a formal ceremony presided over by Edmund of Abingdon, Archbishop of Canterbury, Eleanor took her vow alongside her erstwhile governess, Cecily of Sandford. Having received a ring ‘in testimony of perpetual celibacy’, Eleanor cast off her former finery and adopted clothes of russet, a relatively cheap and coarse cloth, as a mark of her new spiritual status.
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In committing herself to such a vow, Eleanor effectively ruled out the possibility that she might remarry and bear children, a decision that was neither taken lightly nor rushed into. Although Paris assigned no date to the ceremony during which Eleanor took her vow – it appears in a passage in his
Chronica majora
that describes Cecily of Sandford’s death in 1251 – the presence of Edmund of Abingdon as Archbishop of Canterbury is instructive. Edmund was elected archbishop by the monks of Christ Church on 20 September 1233 and subsequently consecrated in Canterbury Cathedral on 2 April 1234.
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If Paris’s dating can be trusted, the earliest that Eleanor took her vow was in the spring of 1234, three years after her husband’s death. So what, then, had happened to Eleanor in the intervening period that persuaded her to become a vowess?

THE MARSHAL DOWER

William Marshal’s death in 1231 left Eleanor, in theory at least, an extremely wealthy young widow. In addition to the ten and a half manors that Henry III granted William junior and Eleanor in 1229,
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she was entitled to a third of her dead husband’s lordships in England, Wales and Ireland as her dower (or widow’s share). No figures survive that indicate the precise value of the Marshal estates in 1231, but by 1247 the English and Welsh properties alone were valued at £1,333 per annum, and the Irish estates at £1,715.
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In 1247, Margaret de Lacy, the widow of another earl of Pembroke – Walter, a younger brother of William junior – stood to receive as her Marshal dower English and Welsh lands worth £444 per annum and Irish lands worth £572 per annum.
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If allowance is made for changes to the overall value of the Marshal lands between 1231 and 1247, it is clear that in 1231 Eleanor was entitled to a life interest in a substantial portfolio of properties. As a result, Richard Marshal, William junior’s next heir, stood to lose possession of a third of his lands to a young widow of just sixteen, who might very well live outlive him, as she had his older brother.

In thirteenth-century England, a widow’s right to dower was safeguarded by the common law and effectively served as a woman’s ‘insurance policy’ against penury in the event of a husband’s death.
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Yet dower and widows’ property rights remained sufficiently controversial political issues to merit their inclusion in the successive re-issues of Magna Carta in the early thirteenth century. Cap. 7 of the 1225 version of the Great Charter, for instance, laid down that a widow ought to have her marriage portion and inheritance without any delay after her husband’s death, and that she should pay nothing for her dower, inheritance or marriage portion. It recognized a widow’s right to remain in her husband’s ‘chief house’ for forty days after his death until her dower was assigned to her, unless her husband’s ‘chief house’ was a castle, in which case she ought to be provided with an alternative residence.
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This was all very well in principle, but, as Eleanor soon discovered, these provisions were unworkable in complex cases where large estates were involved and where the assignment of a substantial mass of lands to a widow might have weighty political implications for the crown.

In Eleanor’s case, at least, her position as the king’s sister, coupled with William junior’s close proximity to the court at the time of his death, ensured that Magna Carta’s initial ‘insurance’ mechanisms came into play straight away. On 15 April 1231, just nine days after William junior died, the king instructed his English sheriffs and the Irish justiciar to assist the dead earl’s executors and took immediate steps to safeguard his sister’s rights.
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Henry also instructed his agents to ensure that Eleanor enjoyed reasonable estover (the right to cut and take wood) in the manor of Inkberrow (Worcestershire). Then, a day later, Henry III informed the sheriff of Worcestershire and other royal officials that Eleanor, Countess of Pembroke, was to reside in her late husband’s castle at Inkberrow until she received her dower entitlement.
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A fortnight after this, Henry III implemented further measures for his sister’s maintenance; the young dowager countess was awarded custody of the manors of Badgeworth (Gloucestershire), Weston (Hertfordshire), Inkberrow (Worcestershire) and Wexcombe (Wiltshire) as a temporary assignment until her full dower settlement was handed over.
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This, in its turn, was followed on 13 May 1231 – a little more than a month after William junior’s death – with another royal order to see that Eleanor was placed in possession of her Irish dower estates.
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It was unfortunate for Eleanor that the process of assigning her dower from such a vast and scattered collection of properties was both complicated and challenging for the officials concerned. The Marshal properties needed to be surveyed and valued before an assignment might be made, a process that dragged on well into the summer of 1231.
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Representatives of the countess or perhaps the countess herself visited the royal court at Oxford in July 1231, presumably in an attempt to hurry matters along. On 11 July, Henry III placed his sister in possession of the manor of Hamstead Marshall (Berkshire), the Marshal family’s ancestral seat, while she continued to await her dower. The king also gave her some oaks from Chute Forest (Hampshire and Wiltshire) with which to repair her mill at Newbury (Berkshire), together with a gift of venison from the forest near Havering in Essex.
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The gift of oaks, at least, suggests that Eleanor was taking an active interest in the day-to-day administration of those lands that were now directly under her management.

With the assignment of such a prestigious Marshal family property – Hamstead Marshall – to the countess, it might have seemed that it would only be a matter of time before Eleanor enjoyed her full dower. Such hopes were soon to be dashed by Henry III’s apparent change of heart towards her brother-in-law, Richard Marshal, a change of heart that was seemingly prompted by the resumption of hostilities in the Welsh Marches. In the power vacuum created by William junior’s death, Hubert de Burgh had attempted to intrude the king’s men into the Marshal lands there, a situation that created confusion and which provided an excellent opportunity for the Welsh prince, Llywelyn, to pursue his own interests there once more.
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In early August 1231, Richard Marshal performed homage to the English king and finally secured possession of his inheritance.
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Not altogether surprisingly, once he had secured his estates, the new earl proved reluctant to address the outstanding issue of Eleanor’s dower. In fact, Richard attempted to withhold the Worcestershire manor of Severnstoke – one of the manors specifically earmarked for Eleanor’s upkeep in 1229 – from his royal sister-in-law. On 6 September 1231, Henry III stepped in and ordered Pembroke to allow Eleanor to enjoy this manor, otherwise the sheriff would intervene and eject the earl’s officials by force.
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