Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (14 page)

Simon’s relatively swift climb to a position among the king’s inner circle of counsellors inevitably provided the dowager Countess of Pembroke and the Lord of Leicester with numerous opportunities to become acquainted with one another. Simon was, for example, in attendance upon Henry III when the court was at Worcester on 24 July 1236 and the king gave his sister four stags in the Forest of Dean. On this same day, the sheriff of Buckinghamshire was instructed to see that Simon received a forty-shilling rent that pertained to the honour of Leicester.
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Simon’s position as a royal confidante might have ensured his presence at a number of royal occasions at which Eleanor was required. Yet a history of meetings at the English royal court offers what is, at best, a partial explanation for what followed. The circumstances surrounding Eleanor and Simon’s marriage were remarkable. What motivated the king’s youngest sister to marry de Montfort? Paris offers a simple and straightforward reason for Eleanor’s remarriage and one which has a ring of truth about it: ‘Wishing to become a mother, she married the earl of Leicester.’
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Eleanor desired a child and wished, perhaps, as Margaret Howell commented, to experience ‘the sexual and personal satisfaction involved in procreation’.
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Faced with the enthusiasm of Simon’s suit and personal feelings of attraction, the twenty-three-year-old Eleanor regretted her earlier vow of chastity to such a degree that she was prepared to incur ecclesiastical censure and imperil her immortal soul by marrying again.

The prospect of marriage to a candidate of Eleanor’s own choosing was not, of course, one lacking in other, practical attractions. A new husband might prove to be an invaluable ally in Eleanor’s ongoing struggle with Gilbert Marshal and perhaps a more effective and forceful ally than her brother the king, if only in the level of personal support that a new husband might give her. Remarriage promised Eleanor a potential solution to her immediate financial worries. Yes, she might lose a measure of the independence that she enjoyed as a widow – after all, her lands and property would come under the legal authority of her new husband – but she would gain a share in her new husband’s wealth, in the sense that responsibility would fall to him to provide for her maintenance. The drawback here was that Simon’s financial situation, like that of his bride, was somewhat insecure: he had already incurred heavy debts in his pursuit of the Leicester inheritance.
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Even so, it is perfectly possible that at the time of their courtship Eleanor was not fully aware of the uncertainty surrounding her new bridegroom’s financial affairs. Indeed, Eleanor might have looked upon Simon’s enjoyment of the king’s favour as something that was to be valued in itself, especially at a court in which a new queen was beginning to establish her place in Henry’s affections.
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In agreeing to become Simon’s wife – or in letting him know that she was willing to accept his suit – Eleanor made a conscious decision to marry a new husband who was beneath her in social rank. She would not, like her sisters, acquire crowns through marriage or, in her case, remarriage. Rowena Archer’s study of women as landholders and administrators in the later Middle Ages observed that marriages between countesses and, from the fourteenth century onward, duchesses and the officials or estate servants of their deceased husbands were not entirely uncommon.
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No such earlier relationship underpinned Eleanor’s union with Simon, but Eleanor is unlikely to have been blind to the difference in status between her and her new husband. Even if Simon was seven years her senior, Eleanor might well have hoped that she would retain if not necessarily the upper hand, then a measure of equality or degree of influence in her relationship with her new husband. In anticipating her second marriage, perhaps Eleanor had learned from her own past experiences, as well as from those of her sisters and, indeed, her mother. In effectively selecting her own bridegroom, Eleanor deliberately placed herself in a very different situation from that in which her older sister, Isabella, for example, had found herself three years earlier. Isabella’s marriage had been entirely negotiated and agreed between Henry III and the representatives of her new husband, Emperor Frederick II, whereupon the new bride was dispatched to the Holy Roman Empire to marry a much older man of dubious reputation, if exalted rank, whom she had never met.
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It was also a very different situation from that in which Eleanor had spent much of her own childhood as a bride promised, but not delivered in good time, to William Marshal junior in a bid to guarantee his loyalty to the crown. Eleanor might also have paused to reflect upon the circumstances of her mother Isabella of Angoulême’s marriage to Hugh (X) de Lusignan. After all, the queen dowager’s remarriage to a man of her own choosing, who was closer to her own age and of lesser social rank than her first husband, and whose territorial interests in the south of France were tied closely to her own, had allowed Isabella to forge a more assertive political role in widowhood than had ever been possible during her first marriage to King John.
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Even if, as King Henry III later alleged in anger, Simon seduced Eleanor, it seems unlikely that Eleanor’s participation in the seduction was carried out without a measure of calculation on the part of the bride, as well as that of the groom. Henry III’s personal role in overseeing the legitimization of their union was also incredible. According to Paris, the king himself had placed Eleanor’s hand in Simon’s. It was exceptional for a thirteenth-century king to have a clandestine marriage, a
matrimonium clandestinum
as Paris described it, contracted in his presence, with the accompanying mass celebrated in his own private chapel.
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The arrangement of the marriage, apparently with the king’s connivance, or at the very least his tacit approval, was a very striking indication of Eleanor and Simon’s close relationship with the monarch. Henry not only condoned but effectively colluded in this marriage, a marriage of which even his younger brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, initially remained ignorant.
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Perhaps the couple did successfully ‘pull the wool’ over the eyes of Eleanor’s older brother. Perhaps Henry was a romantic whose heart was softened by Eleanor’s love affair.

If anything, though, Henry’s initial approval of the Montfort–Marshal match makes it unlikely that Eleanor and Simon had, in fact, risked consummating their union before their marriage. Henry was a monarch who was noted for his religious devotion and his spirituality, and he might well have taken a dim view of an illicit sexual liaison by his youngest sister.
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Furthermore, the monastic chroniclers who recorded the marriage and from whose pens we might have expected vitriolic criticism of any irregularities in sexual conduct were silent on the matter. The Worcester annalist simply noted that ‘Lord Simon de Montfort took to wife the sister of the lord king, who conceived for him a son.’
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The Waverley annalist similarly observed, without critical comment, that ‘Simon de Montfort took to wife Eleanor, Countess of Pembroke, relict of William Marshal, sister, namely, of Henry IV [i.e. III], King of England.’
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Even Paris, who provides the most detailed description of Eleanor’s second marriage, made no allegations of sexual impropriety before the match, but noted the bride’s earlier vow of chastity and the need for special dispensation to be sought from Rome.
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Paris’s initial silence on this matter assumes added significance when it is borne in mind that this same chronicler had artfully blackened the reputation of Eleanor’s mother by casting her as an adulteress during her marriage to Eleanor’s father, King John.
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The clandestine nature of Eleanor’s second marriage held the key to its successful outcome. Had Eleanor’s willingness to renege on her vow and consider remarriage become public knowledge, then her freedom of choice in the matter and her personal happiness might well have been jeopardized. In its early days, news of the Montfort marriage was carefully concealed. It apparently escaped the attention of the royal clerks, who continued to describe Eleanor as the Countess of Pembroke.
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The need for secrecy was, to some extent, justified by the ferocity of the reactions of the king’s other counsellors once news of the marriage became public. Frustratingly, the means by which knowledge of the marriage was disseminated remains unclear. What is clear is that the news came as a great shock to many at court and that it found little favour with those closest to the king. In a short passage that was subsequently marked up for deletion from his
English History
, Paris noted that the marriage was expressly made ‘against the counsel of Archbishop Edmund [of Canterbury]’.
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The archbishop’s opposition was understandable, as the churchman and peace-broker who had presided over Eleanor’s earlier vow of chastity. The remarriage of the dowager Countess of Pembroke posed a direct threat to the earlier agreements over her dower, which had bound her Marshal in-laws into a closer relationship with the English crown. Some contemporary writers made a strikingly accurate connection between the Montfort–Marshal marriage and a short-lived rebellion led by Eleanor’s other brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, and her brother-in-law, Gilbert Marshal.
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Both men had been left in the dark about the union, presumably in anticipation of their opposition.

The timing of Eleanor’s second marriage and her choice of groom was unfortunate. It came at a time when the English baronage was highly sensitive to the presence of foreigners at the Henrician court, to the possible disparagement of royal wards through marriages to them and to the more general issue of the disposal of valuable wardships to the king’s favourites without wider baronial consultation on the issue.
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Henry III’s decision, later in January, to support the marriage of Richard de Clare, the heir to the earldom of Gloucester, to the daughter of Montfort’s fellow counsellor, John de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, was seen as a particularly controversial move.
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The king himself acknowledged Richard of Cornwall’s anger at Eleanor’s marriage in letters that he dispatched to the barons of the Cinque Ports on 3 February 1238: Henry III thanked the barons for their services and instructed them to be on their guard against false instructions from Richard, which might harm the king’s interests.
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Interestingly, it has been the actions of Henry III in endorsing his youngest sister’s alliance, rather than those of Eleanor or Simon, which have incurred the criticism of modern writers. For Maddicott, ‘The marriage exemplified all Henry’s most characteristic shortcomings: his failure to consult the magnates on important political matters, his patronage of aliens, his promotion of family interests above those of the kingdom, [and] his lack of judgement in lightly entering into the most far-reaching commitments.’
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The marriage also reveals a great deal about Eleanor and Simon’s hopes and aspirations, and their self-interest. Yet, were those hopes and aspirations subsequently realized, or did the political fallout from Richard and Gilbert’s rebellion dim their stars? In spite of the rebellion, both Simon and Eleanor profited personally from Henry III’s continuing benevolence towards them. On 3 February 1238, as the king took steps to limit the potential damage caused by his younger brother’s rebellion, he arranged for the payment of a loan of £120 to Simon and Eleanor.
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The precise purpose of this loan was not recorded. It might have met the couple’s immediate expenses at court or the demands of their various creditors. Some of this money was possibly intended to help Simon amass funds for his journey overseas to secure a papal dispensation for his marriage to Eleanor. Paris informs us, in a passage notable for its dramatic tone, how in the spring of 1238 Earl Simon, fearing for the validity of his marriage, collected together a great sum of money and set sail, with great stealth, for Rome.
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Although Paris might well have over-exaggerated the furtive nature of Earl Simon’s departure to enhance his narrative, Eleanor’s earlier position as a vowess might by now have become the unwelcome subject of common gossip. This, together with the wider political fallout from their marriage, made a papal dispensation to validate their union in the eyes of the church and the wider political community all the more necessary. On 27 March 1238, the king furnished Simon with royal letters, addressed to the Pope and his cardinals at the Roman curia, which asked them to support his new brother-in-law’s representations.
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It is just possible that extra urgency was also leant to Simon’s departure in these final days by his wife’s suspicions that she had recently become pregnant – a son was subsequently born to the couple on 28 November 1238, eight months after Simon set out on his journey.
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It is, nonetheless, striking that Simon chose not to travel directly to Rome. Instead, he visited the court of his brother-in-law, Emperor Frederick II, whose wife, Isabella, had recently been delivered of a child, and from whom, after entering the emperor’s service, he solicited further letters of support, trading no doubt upon his marital connection with the empress.
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During Simon’s absence from the realm, Eleanor dwelt at Kenilworth Castle, where she ‘lay concealed’, so Paris tells us, ‘in a state of pregnancy … awaiting the issue of the event’.
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Her seclusion and the uncertain status of her marriage did not, though, prevent Eleanor from attempting to protect her own and her husband’s financial interests. She remained a recipient of the king’s generosity and favour. On 23 April 1238, Henry III wrote off a long-standing debt of £60 that Eleanor owed him and, two days later, dispatched five tuns of wine from Southampton for her enjoyment.
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Further gifts of venison and wine followed during the course of the summer.
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Yet the king’s bounty did not protect Eleanor’s purse from the resentment that Gilbert Marshal bore her over her remarriage. Gilbert, like his brother Richard before him, seems to have expressed his displeasure by withholding the payments for Eleanor’s Irish dower. In May 1238, the king, who had agreed to stand as Gilbert’s surety when the settlement of 1234 was first hammered out, paid Eleanor £200 to cover the sum that Gilbert should have paid to her at Easter.
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When the Earl of Pembroke failed to compensate the king for this sum, Henry threatened to recover the £200 directly by seizing the earl’s lands and chattels.
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At the beginning of September, presumably in response to a plea for help from his sister, Henry granted the Montforts permission to seek an aid, a form of financial levy, from their tenants to help cover their expenses.
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Simon’s visit to Rome and the delays over Eleanor’s dower placed a severe financial strain on the countess.