Queens Consort (31 page)

The queen’s council had existed as an independent body since at least the early thirteenth century. The three Matildas had held and managed their own dower lands in their husbands’ lifetimes, whereas Eleanor
of Aquitaine and Berengaria of Navarre had theoretically been able to administrate their dower property only as widows. From Eleanor of Provence’s time, the queen of England had the unique legal status of
‘femme sole’
while her husband was living. She could control her property, grant and acquire land and bequeath her own possessions, including crops grown on her estates. The queen’s council also had jurisdiction over local officials and, contrary to general practice, the queen’s tenants could not take her to court, leaving the council as the ultimate arbiter of disputes. The queen, on the other hand, could serve writs in her own name, (Eleanor’s lawyer, Gilbert de Chalfont, represented her in several such suits). The only place where the queen could be held to legal account was the king’s court. This was obviously a highly advantageous position, and one neither Eleanor of Provence nor several of her successors was above abusing.

Before passing judgement on Eleanor’s governance of her finances, it is worth remembering how qualities that were seen as being merely businesslike in a man were quickly interpreted as a sign of unfeminine avarice in a medieval woman. Eleanor was a strict manager, impressively well informed about her sources of income and unembarrassed about extracting her due. She ‘evidently condoned ruthless exploitation of estates in her wardship’
³
and her steward William of Tarrant was widely hated. Despite Matthew Paris’s disapproval of the ‘loss and peril’ Tarrant caused to Eleanor’s tenants, she was prepared to make excuses for him, whether through expedience or indifference. As public discontent with the King’s financial exigency began to mount, Eleanor was named in a complaint by the sheriff of Buckinghamshire, who claimed he was unable to obtain dues on certain lands because of the protectionism that sheltered their owners. Perhaps Eleanor’s grasping way with money could be attributed to her father’s perennial financial difficulties, but Henry, too, seemed blind to the way in which his fund-raising was perceived. Even on Edward’s birth, the joyful citizens of London were so offended by Henry’s demands for increasingly grand celebratory gifts that a saying doing the rounds was: ‘God gave us this child, but the King sells him to us.’

Eleanor’s indifference to her lesser subjects is unfortunately typical of a rather crass political attitude towards her husband’s realm that characterised her daily life in the 1250s. She was simply not very interested in the English. She ordered books and elegant headgear from Paris, the cloth for her dresses was imported from Florence and her carpets from Spain. To the Queen of England, fresh from a visit to her sister the Queen of France and her wondrous court at Paris, her own country might well have seemed
a pinched, prejudiced sort of place, and Eleanor was far too sure of her own status to bother to try to hide her feelings. The messenger evidence from her household bears out the supposition that beyond the Savoyard network, Eleanor had very little contact with even high-ranking English people. She and Sanchia did exchange books with the countesses of Arundel and Winchester, but beyond the formal intercourse of court ceremony, Eleanor’s relationships with the magnate class were relatively limited.

If the Queen saw herself as rather too grand for the parochial concerns of her husband’s barons, the events of the 1260s forced a change in her perceptions. She and Henry had hoped to prevent the spread of further factionalism, by resolving their differences after the ecclesiastical dispute, but by 1258 the mood was once more turning against the Lusignans. In April, a group of magnates marched on Westminster and issued an ultimatum, demanding the exile of all Poitevins and the inauguration of a council of twenty-four men chosen to assist the King. In June, the Parliament held at Oxford enumerated a list of ‘provisions’ which called for all castles to be held by Englishmen, all alienated lands to be restored to the crown and a new arrangement for the government, consisting of three annual Parliaments, an elected council of fifteen served by twelve representatives from the baronage, the annual appointment of local sheriffs and a justiciar to travel the country hearing complaints. Further reforms (the Provisions of Westminster) had a personal impact upon Eleanor. The sale of wardships in the King’s gift was to be decided by a committee of five and that same committee was to determine in which areas the tariff of queens-gold should apply. An oath of allegiance, upon pain of excommunication, was imposed, and at some point Eleanor swore it, which indicates how powerful her contemporaries considered her to be. Constitutionally, a queen had only a customary relationship with government, since she did not take an oath on coronation, but in Eleanor’s case, her allegiance was formally required along with the King’s.

Eleanor was deeply affronted by what she saw as the Provisions’ attack on her prerogative, and from the start she was intent on overthrowing them. In November 1259 she left for France to witness the confirmation of the treaty of Paris and to attend her daughter Beatrice on her journey to marry John, Duke of Brittany. Before she embarked, she defiantly made a gift of the first available wardship with a value of forty to sixty pounds to her steward, Matthias, completely ignoring her promise to the committee. The treaty of Paris was published on 4 December, but the family celebrations were marred by the death of the Dauphin, Prince Louis.
Henry was one of the coffin-bearers at his funeral, and Beatrice’s marriage, which had been scheduled for the same day, had to be put back a week. Eleanor and Henry remained in France until April, but already they had sought a papal dispensation to absolve Henry from his oath of allegiance to the Provisions.

The chroniclers of Waverley, Tewkesbury and Bury St Edmunds all lay the blame for Henry’s repudiation of the reforms at Eleanor’s door. She was seen as ‘the root, the fomentor and disseminator of all the discord which was soon between her husband King Henry and the barons of his kingdom’.
⁴
In May, the papal bull cancelling the threat of excommunication over Henry was issued at Winchester. The King had made three statements to the barons in Parliament to try to establish his own position, but the publication of the bull prompted them to call an independent Parliament at St Albans on the same day as Henry summoned them to Windsor. Neither Parliament was held, but it seemed that armed conflict was now inevitable, and Henry and Eleanor withdrew briefly to the Tower. War was avoided by Henry’s acquiescence to the treaty of Kingston in November and for a while it appeared that the ‘Queen’s party’ was back in control.

The next spring, however, the violence began in earnest and Eleanor and those loyal to her provided a focal point for the rebels. Those among them who sincerely promoted reform objected to her obstruction of the Provisions, while many English lords had long resented the Savoyard usurpment of royal patronage. Attacks on Eleanor’s supporters began in the west of the country in Gloucester and Hereford, spreading to Bristol, Worcester and Shrewsbury, and then as far as Peter of Savoy’s lands in East Anglia. By June, Henry and Eleanor were back in the Tower, where Henry received a delegation of Londoners who demanded that he reinstate and swear to the Provisions. The letter had been sealed by Simon de Montfort.

By July, the whole of south-east England was in rebel hands. If Eleanor had refused to accept responsibility for her own part in bringing about this situation, she was rudely reminded of the hatred she had provoked when she attempted to flee the Tower and ride to Prince Edward at Windsor. She was mobbed on London Bridge by a howling, jostling crowd who pelted her with rubbish and pursued her, jeering, back to the Tower, where Henry refused to allow her to enter. The Queen was forced to seek asylum in the home of the bishop of London. As seems to have been the case with the St Thomas’s squabble ten years earlier, Henry apparently felt that only the strongest measures could force his stubborn wife to submit to his will, and the fear and shame of London Bridge
cowed Eleanor sufficiently for her to appear with him at Westminster three days later, Henry having used her absence to accept the barons’ terms. The incident was deeply shocking, not just to Eleanor, but to her family, and especially to the King and Queen of France. That the people should so far forget the deference owed to an anointed queen as to physically threaten her was terrifying: it was revolutionary. Eleanor was to have the last word with the Londoners, though. After the wars had ended Henry gave London Bridge into her keeping and she was too stingy, or too vengeful, to repair it. The nursery rhyme ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ commemorates the city’s protests.

Family discord now had to be forgotten in the pursuit of a greater interest — the preservation of the crown. Three areas of support were open to the royal house: the Pope, the French and mercenary troops. An agreement was negotiated with the barons whereby Henry and Eleanor would be permitted to leave for France to seek arbitration from King Louis, on condition that they returned. In January 1264, Louis pronounced his judgement at the Mise of Amiens. His decision was attributed by several chroniclers to Eleanor’s influence — he was held to have been ‘deceived and beguiled by the serpentlike fraud and speech of a woman: the Queen of England’
⁵
— and unsurprisingly comprised a rousing defence of Henry’s prerogative. Equally unsurprisingly, Montfort, who had been kept away from Amiens by a riding accident, entirely rejected Louis’s conclusions. Despite Louis’s support and that of the Pope, whom Eleanor was urging to appoint a special legate, Henry was not really any stronger. He and Edward returned to England as they had agreed, but Eleanor remained proudly at her sister’s court. This was a war of arms, not words, and accordingly the Queen set about raising an army.

Eleanor’s understanding of the probability of military engagement was extremely prescient. As early as 1259, she had engaged her distant relative Isabella de Fiennes to distribute rings among knights in Flanders with a view to calling on their services if necessary. In the first months of 1260, when she and Henry were in France, Eleanor had begun to cultivate contacts that would provide her in future with a force of French and Flemish mercenaries. That these activities were known of in England certainly contributed to her unpopularity, and gave the lie to any gestures of acquiescence she made in the interests of maintaining (if not actually winning) support for Henry when he was at his lowest ebb. Her refusal to keep her promise and return to England was also crucial. She was able to call on her family network, her sister Marguerite and her mother Beatrice of Provence in mustering men and money. She even went as far
as to pawn the King’s jewels. Her foresight was confirmed when both Henry and Edward were taken prisoner by Montfort’s rebels after the battle of Lewes in May 1264, leaving Eleanor as the leader of the royalist party.

Eleanor had known Montfort for a long time and she understood his hatred of Henry, his ambition and his ruthlessness. But she did not allow herself to be overcome by fear. Instead, she sold off three bishoprics, borrowed from Henry of Castile, persuaded Peter of Savoy to guarantee substantial loans and called up men from France, Burgundy, Gascony, Poitou, Flanders, Normandy, the Brabant, Germany, Brittany, Spain and Savoy. With her invasion force stationed at St Omer, she requisitioned English ships from Gascon ports to carry her soldiers to liberate the King. She worked ceaselessly —
‘insudeuarit’
, notes
Th e St Albans Chronicle
, literally, ‘she sweated at it’ — but as her funds dwindled, so did her support. She had paid no mind to the papal legate, Guy Foulquois, who strongly opposed the invasion from his base at Boulogne and rather feebly pronounced sentences of interdict and excommunication before returning to Rome to get himself elected Pope Clement IV, but her determination faltered as, over the winter of 1264, her unpaid men began to desert, in 1265, she made a strategic retreat to Gascony.

Eleanor had not given up, but all her efforts had come to nothing. Still, it is pleasing to think that one of her well-placed gifts had a tiny bearing on the next stage in the conflict. On 28 May, Edward escaped with the help of Roger de Mortimer, whose wife Maud had received a girdle from the Queen in the New Year gift-giving of 1253. When Montfort was finally defeated at the battle of Evesham on 4 August, his head and testicles were given to Maud Mortimer as a rather more grisly trophy of loyalty. Eleanor herself returned to England in late October 1265, tactfully accompanied by the new papal legate, Ottobuono de Fieschi, the brother of her aunt Beatrice. By arriving with De Fieschi, Eleanor was demonstrating that she came in a spirit of peace, though in fact this was not fully achieved for another two years.

From 1265 to 1267, Eleanor actively supported Henry in the reassertion of royal authority. A policy of disinheriting the rebels drove them to a last, desperate push under the leadership of Robert Ferrers and Adam Gurdon, who were imprisoned in Eleanor’s care at Windsor Castle. In 1267, the Earl of Gloucester fomented an uprising in the northern and eastern counties, and in the spring and summer of that year Eleanor was at Dover Castle, ordering supplies in the event of a siege and overseeing the stockpiling of weapons. Gloucester succeeded in entering London with
an army and, for a brief period, as the Londoners attacked ‘royalist’ property and even the Palace of Westminster, it looked as if Henry’s rule was once more severely threatened, but Eleanor’s groundwork on the Continent now bore fruit, in the shape of the arrival of a mercenary force of a hundred knights in May, and by early July Gloucester had surrendered.

At the same time, Eleanor was busily making good her parlous financial situation. The Pope had sanctioned a triennial levy of one tenth of clerical incomes, from which she personally obtained 15,000 pounds to pay off the debts she had incurred while maintaining her army at St Omer. Her clerk, Henry Sampson, pursued her claims diligently, even though the tax was inevitably unpopular. Eleanor was also determined to compensate Prince Edmund for the loss of the Sicilian crown, which had eventually been presented to her brother-in-law Charles of Anjou. De Montfort’s death had provided Edmund with the forfeited earldom of Leicester and the honour of Lancaster, but Eleanor was involved in some unscrupulous machinations to provide him with an even greater inheritance. The imprisoned rebel Robert Ferrers, the Earl of Derby, was theoretically permitted the restoration of his lands on the payment of 50,000 pounds, a deliberately unfeasible sum. The custodian to whom the debt was to be paid was, conveniently, Edmund. On 9 April 1269, Edmund married Aveline de Forz, the heiress to the Aumale and Devon earldoms, for which Eleanor had negotiated with her guardians, her mother Isabella and grandmother Amice, who had received 1,000 pounds apiece. It appears that the three women had conspired to defraud Ferrers, who was, of course, in Eleanor’s custody, of the initial payments of his fine to enable Edmund to get his hands on Ferrers’ lands as well as Aveline’s.