Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (8 page)
Read Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England Online
Authors: Louise J. Wilkinson
Pembroke was frequently employed on royal business after his marriage to Eleanor was consummated in 1229. Even if the royal campaign overseas planned for 1229 was postponed, Pembroke and his knights were summoned to serve the king in Brittany in 1230.
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Eleanor accompanied her husband and the royal court on the Breton expedition. Perhaps Pembroke was hopeful that by keeping his long-anticipated royal bride by his side, it would remind the king of his new ties of kinship and strengthen Pembroke’s stature as a senior adviser on the campaign. Eleanor’s attendance alongside her husband also increased the likelihood that the couple might conceive an heir. Her presence during the initial stages of the campaign is confirmed by a remarkable letter sent by Nicholas de Neville to Ralph de Neville, Bishop of Chichester and royal chancellor, which describes Henry III’s crossing to Brittany.
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The letter reported how Henry, with a retinue of about thirty ships, landed on the isle of Jersey before nine in the morning on 2 May. The rest of the great fleet, meanwhile, had diverted to the port of St Gildas. The king, however, remained on Jersey ‘because his sister was just a little fatigued by the sea’.
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Once Eleanor recovered, Henry and his ships set sail for St Malo at three in the morning on the following day, together with Eleanor’s husband, the Earl Marshal, where they joined the remainder of the English fleet.
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The king’s sympathy for Eleanor’s seasickness – that he stopped for her and then refused to leave her behind – provides yet another striking demonstration of the king’s personal interest in his sister’s welfare and hints at his affection towards her.
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On their arrival at St Malo in Brittany, the royal party prepared to receive their ally, the Duke of Brittany. The king and his retinue then proceeded to Dinan in the company of Isabella of Angoulême and from there made arrangements to travel on to Nantes for a family conference with his stepfather, Hugh (X) de Lusignan, Count of La Marche.
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Eleanor’s presence in Brittany on this occasion is intriguing. In accompanying her older brother, Eleanor was presented with an opportunity to meet with her mother for the first time in thirteen years, a further testimony to royal favour. Eleanor’s presence was also not without its potential for political leverage from the crown’s point of view. Henry might well have hoped that, in bringing his youngest sister with him and thus engineering a family reunion, her involvement would incline the queen dowager and her husband to lend their support to the king’s campaign. It is, of course, possible that Isabella requested, and perhaps anticipated with pleasure, her youngest daughter’s presence. Henry III’s and Eleanor’s maternal connections mattered – on both personal and political levels.
If there was any attempt to play upon Isabella’s sentiment during the early part of the summer of 1230, it failed to secure a steadfast ally for the English crown. On 8 June 1230, Ralph fitz Nicholas, the steward of the king’s household, informed the royal chancellor in England of the Count of La Marche’s defection to the French crown.
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One cannot help but wonder how Eleanor reacted to this news – with sadness or with a degree of cynicism at her mother’s behaviour. Eleanor’s role during the remainder of the Breton campaign went unrecorded, but her marriage to Pembroke, as well as the earl’s extensive experience and wealth, undoubtedly holds the key to the king’s subsequent decision to leave Pembroke, along with the Earl of Chester and Count of Aumale, to continue the campaign after his own return to England in October 1230.
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Eleanor’s involvement in the Breton campaign raises the question of the personal dynamics within the relationship between Pembroke and his bride. English law, feudal custom and religious teaching expected and exhorted wives to be attentive, submissive and obedient to their husbands, who legally controlled their wives and their wives’ property during marriage.
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In practice, a husband’s authority within marriage and a wife’s level of subservience might be tempered by the personalities involved and by practical necessity; a long-running motif within medieval literature was the image of the wife who acted as her husband’s deputy in his absence, managing the noble household and its administration when he was engaged in family business elsewhere or in service to his lord or the king.
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The disparity in both age and experience between Pembroke and his royal bride strongly suggests that Eleanor was very much in her first husband’s shadow. The fifteen-year-old Eleanor’s presence alongside her husband on the Breton campaign, coupled with the existence of effective estate stewards on the Marshal estates, prevented Eleanor from assuming a role in the administration of Pembroke’s extensive lordships as her husband’s deputy or representative in his absence. Yet Eleanor’s status as the king’s sister might well have re-configured the sexual politics within their relationship in certain situations. Research into religious patronage by women in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England has illuminated the role of ‘persuasive wives’ as channels of benevolent influence and as active participants in religious patronage alongside their husbands.
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Like other great nobles of his day, the younger Marshal was a patron of religious houses throughout his estates in England, Ireland and Wales. He was a keen supporter of the new orders of friars who arrived in the British Isles in the 1220s, founding a house for Dominican Friars in Kilkenny in Ireland.
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He was a benefactor of Reading Abbey (Berkshire), where his father’s body had rested on its journey to its final resting place at the New Temple in London.
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William junior also made gifts to Tintern Abbey (Monmouthshire),
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Mottisfont Abbey (Hampshire),
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St Paul’s Cathedral, the resting place of his first wife,
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and St Mary’s Hospital, Roncevaux (in the Pyrenees).
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William junior confirmed the grants made by his father to William senior’s foundation of Cartmel Priory (Lancashire)
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and Duisk Abbey (Ireland),
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as well as making gifts in his father’s memory to St Thomas’s Abbey, Dublin.
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Useful points of comparison with William junior’s activities are offered by William senior’s religious benefactions and by mention of his wife, Isabella de Clare, in his charters. A striking feature of the charters addressed by William Marshal senior to religious houses was the way in which he sometimes, quite deliberately, associated Isabella with his grants by naming her in
pro anima
clauses – clauses concerned with the safety of the souls of the grantor and other beneficiaries after death.
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Since Isabella was the great heiress through whom the elder William had secured vast estates, her appearance in her husband’s charters was not only an expression of his concern for her spiritual welfare, but also a reminder of her importance as the conduit through whom the greater part of the Marshal family’s wealth and influence had been secured and would be passed on to another generation. It reflected the importance attached to Isabella’s Anglo-Norman and Irish ancestry, as well as, perhaps, the length of her marriage to William Marshal senior; she had, after all, thirty years to build up an adult relationship with her husband. When Isabella was eventually widowed on William senior’s death, she secured control of her inheritance, fulfilled her commemorative responsibilities towards her late husband and, in doing so, associated William junior with her in her charters.
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Although William junior’s wife, Eleanor, was not a great heiress like her mother-in-law, she was the English king’s sister in an aristocratic society that valued royal birth, noble lineage and impeccable political connections. When William junior married Henry III’s sister as his second wife, he deliberately associated Eleanor with him in at least some of his charters. This is clearly apparent in his patronage of the New Temple in London, his father’s burial place. When William senior granted the church of Speen in Berkshire to the Templars there, the
pro anima
clause of his charter included his wife as a beneficiary.
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When William junior confirmed his father’s gift of the advowson (the right of patronage over the church) of Speen, it was his turn to state that he did so expressly for the salvation of his own soul and that of his own wife, Eleanor.
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Admittedly, it is difficult to determine whether the association of a wife in a
pro anima
clause might simply have been a matter of form, rather than reflecting a desire on William junior’s part to celebrate his wife’s connections. It is, none the less, striking that the younger William’s charter mentioned his new, royal, wife by name.
William junior’s attitude towards Eleanor as his wife might well have been influenced by the example set by his parents in other respects. In the
History of William Marshal
, a work probably informed by the younger Marshal’s personal testimony, Isabella de Clare emerges as a figure who was treated by her husband with the utmost respect. It is worth noting that, as was also the case with William junior and Eleanor, there was a significant age gap between the older Marshal and his bride. At the time of their marriage in 1189, Isabella was in her teens and William senior was in his forties; William received his young bride, who was, as we have seen, a substantial heiress, as a reward for his services to the crown.
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If, however, the countess was less experienced in public affairs than her older husband, William senior acknowledged her superiority of birth and status, and valued the wealth and connections that she brought to him on marriage. Throughout the
History
William senior’s wife, Isabella, is never mentioned by her personal name, but is referred to after her marriage simply as ‘la contesse’ as a mark of deference to her rank.
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In spite of, or perhaps because of, Isabella’s youth, she is portrayed as her husband’s frequent companion and trusted confidante, especially in the management of her natal family’s Irish lands. William senior, for his part, is clearly mindful of her personal importance both as the vessel through whom he holds many of his lands and as a figurehead for their tenants’ loyalties, especially on the Clares’ Irish estates. Hence the significance of the couple’s trip to Ireland in 1207, where William senior presented the countess to his men in Kilkenny and announced his intention for his wife to remain behind with them as his representative when he was summoned away on royal business, with the words:
My lords,
here you see the countess whom I have brought
here by the hand into your presence.
She is your lady by birth,
the daughter of the earl who graciously,
in his generosity, enfeoffed you all,
once he had conquered the land.
She stays behind here with you as a pregnant woman.
Until such time as God brings me back here,
I ask you all to give her unreservedly
the protection she deserves by birthright,
for she is your lady, as we well know;
I have no claim to anything here save through her.
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Crouch has argued that the countess’s stay in Ireland ‘may have been by her own insistence, rather than for health grounds’.
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Within the
History
, the countess certainly emerges as a woman who knew her own mind and offered frank advice that did not necessarily accord with her husband’s own views. When, for example, Isabella suffers ‘many a wrong and hurt’ in her husband’s absence, the
History
recalls her personal fury and desire for revenge against those persons who had committed these injuries to her lands and reputation; her husband, however, adopts a more moderate approach and shows mercy to those who come before him and restores their hostages to them.
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Secondly, the
History
’s portrayal of the marriages of William junior’s sisters contains echoes of, and perhaps resonates with, Eleanor’s experiences as his youthful second bride. The
History
records the arrangements in or around 1206 for the marriage of William’s eldest sister Matilda (or Mahaut) with the Earl of Norfolk’s son. The boy, who is described as ‘worthy, mild-mannered and noble-hearted’, is regarded as an eminently suitable match for the teenage Matilda, who was ‘a very young thing … both noble and beautiful’.
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The marriage, which allied two powerful comital families, was to the ‘advantage and honour’ of the two earls who negotiated the union, with the unspoken assumption that it also suited the personal interests and tastes of the bride and groom.
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There are also strong hints within the
History
of the feminine qualities and virtues that William junior might well have hoped to find, and perhaps encouraged, within Eleanor. In a passage where the author names and lists the attributes ‘Of the Marshal’s worthy children’, Matilda, the eldest daughter, is praised in no uncertain terms as a young woman whose character was endowed with ‘the gifts of wisdom, generosity, / beauty, nobility of heart, graciousness, / and, I can tell you in truth, all the good qualities / which a noble lady should possess’.
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Isabella, the second daughter, was ‘a handsome and beautiful girl’, and Sibyl, the third, similarly possessed ‘many fine qualities’.
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Eva, the fourth daughter, made a fitting match with the son of the ‘wise [and] powerful’ baronial family of Briouze, while the youngest daughter, Joan, was married, after her father’s death, to Warin de Munchensy, ‘a powerful man’ who was also of suitably ‘high birth’.
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The
History
’s apparent concern to emphasize that William junior’s sisters had not married ‘beneath themselves’, but had, in the case of the elder three, acquired husbands of comital rank (the son of the Earl of Norfolk, the Earl of Gloucester and the son of the Earl of Derby) or, in the case of the younger two, married men of equivalent wealth and power, betrays a real concern to celebrate and publicize the nobility of birth and the exemplary social connections of William senior’s offspring.
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The powerful political alliances embodied with the marriages of William Marshal senior’s daughters clearly made these women fitting sisters-in-law for Henry III’s youngest sister, Eleanor.
