Eleanor of Castile: The Shadow Queen

by Sara Cockerill

  Finally, we should note the repeated emphasis on avoiding any appearance of covetousness. It is therefore plain that Eleanor and Edward have perceived that the errors of Eleanor of Provence must not be repeated and that acquisitions by Eleanor must be defensible.

  ‘Plan A’, as it appears from this letter, seems to have borne fruit, for on 30 September Eleanor was granted the manor of Haselbury, to be held at pleasure for the Lady Eleanor’s maintenance.

  This was not the end of Eleanor’s own acquisitions in this period. Later, on 17 October, Eleanor was granted manors in Derbyshire at Bakewell, Haddon and Codnor ‘late of the King’s enemies Ralph Gernon, Richard de Vernon and Richard de Grey’ to be held for life. Again, the evidence of planning of an estate is evident – Bakewell and Haddon are practically next door to Eleanor’s holding of Ashford, making effectively a single holding in what is now the Buxton–Chatsworth area, and Codnor is not far off. At around this time Eleanor also acquired forfeited manors at Gayton le Marsh and Tothill in Lincolnshire, Martley in Worcester and Chesterfield in Derbyshire. Finally, in February, Eleanor was granted further rights over the manor of Somerton and, in April, full rights over it and two further manors, Pitney and Wearne, just to the west of Somerton, north of the current B3153.6

  All the appearances therefore suggest that at this point Eleanor began to acquire an actual landholding of her own, which would of course in the long term enure to the benefit of the Crown. In addition she did so actively, rather than leaving it purely to her clerks to manage in consultation with Edward’s staff. Finally she did so cautiously, making great efforts to avoid being characterised as greedy. All of this bears the stamp of a plan entered into with Edward and subject to his instruction to keep in the shadows, and this appearance will be borne out as the story of Eleanor’s property business proceeds.

  There is a strong impression that Edward, fond of his mother as he indubitably was, had well perceived how divisive an influence she had been as a queen, and had resolved that his own wife, however able, would never embarrass him or demean him as his mother had his father. Instead, Edward set Eleanor defined tasks to be carried out quietly and without notice – principally to enlarge their financial provision by acquiring property for herself, which would enlarge the royal holdings and make up for some of the alienations of the past in due course.

  All of this business activity took place against a backdrop of a restored court and progress in dealing with the remaining rebels. Eleanor and Edward will have been with Henry III on his re-entry into London in early October, and present at the celebration of the Feast of the Confessor at Westminster Abbey on 13 October. Thereafter, Henry and Eleanor moved to Canterbury, where there is record of Eleanor soliciting a favour from Henry for William Taylor for his services specifically to her – he received houses in the parish of St Dunstan at her instance. This is the William Taylor who appears likely to have been the source of urgent financial relief during the war years.

  Meanwhile, Edward proceeded to Dover, where he took the surrender of Dover Castle from Eleanor de Montfort and saw her off to exile. Following this, on 29 October, he welcomed his mother, accompanied by Edward’s younger brother Edmund, who was now twenty years old. By the end of the month, the whole family was reunited in Canterbury.7

  In December, the court moved to Northampton to prepare to deal with the rebels at Kenilworth. However, the resolution here was repeatedly delayed by other distractions. First, a division of the rebel forces meant that Edward had to go off into Lincolnshire to deal with Simon de Montfort the younger, while in the new year Edward moved on with Roger Leyburn to deal with the Cinque Ports. Still the rebel forces kept on reappearing in spots – in East Anglia, the Midlands and Hampshire – forcing him and his associates to rush off to deal with each new group.8

  In the end, Kenilworth was still under siege when, on 13–14 July 1266, Eleanor gave birth to her child at Windsor, where it appears likely she had been since spring. A large court was at this point assembled at Windsor. Prestigious prisoners (such as Robert Ferrers, the Earl of Derby) were despatched there upon capture, and visiting dignitaries, such as the Duke of Brunswick and John of Brittany, were also entertained there. She is therefore likely to have been kept busy with the responsibilities of a hostess right up until the last days of her pregnancy.

  The child was a healthy baby boy, who must have been conceived very shortly after the couple were reunited in September of the previous year. This birth was the cue for national rejoicing. The Londoners, for example, took the day off work and danced in the streets. Henry III hailed the ‘delightful news’ of the birth, and rewarded the bringer with a pension of £20 annually. Eleanor could scarcely have timed the heir’s arrival better – his birth was perceived as a new start after the years of faction and division.

  Interestingly, the child was named John, not Henry after Edward’s father and the saints’ day (St Henry the Pious) on which he was born. The significance of this decision is tantalising, but elusive. St John the Baptist’s feast day was 24 June, and the only possible religious reference is to the little-known St John Gaulbert, the merciful knight who became the patron saint of foresters. It may be that the name was in part a nod to the dead Joan, who had never even met her father, or to Eleanor’s mother. However, one suspects that the name was at least in part a coded message to remaining baronial resistance, Edward’s grandfather John having fought the barons until his dying breath.9

  If this was the message, it is ironic that, in the wake of John’s birth, Edward, together with Richard of Cornwall and the Pope’s legate Cardinal Ottobuono, was busy persuading Henry to take a more moderate line with the defeated baronial opposition. Their success in this endeavour resulted in the policy statement known as the Dictum of Kenilworth of October 1266, whereby the Disinherited were offered the chance to be restored to their lands upon payment to the royalist occupiers of a fine of two or five years’ income of those lands, depending on the degree of offence. The Kenilworth garrison surrendered in December and it appeared that all that remained was the suppression of rebels on the Isle of Ely.

  However, in early 1267, John de Vescy raised a rebellion in protest against the terms of the Dictum of Kenilworth and in particular the sting in the tail of the Dictum, namely that the lands would only be returned to their former owners after the payment of the fines. Vescy and other former Montfortians pointed out the problem with this: how were they to pay the fines if they could not occupy the land and take its revenues? The apparently reasonable approach was, for many, forfeiture by the back door. Vescy and his supporters therefore retook their lands and vowed to defend them. Edward went north to deal with this threat, and succeeded, retaking Alnwick after some hard fighting. The interesting point about this rebellion is that it provided the occasion for the reconciliation between Edward and John de Vescy. After his victory, Edward pardoned Vescy, who became again one of his and Eleanor’s closest friends.10

  It may well have been Vescy’s actions, as much as Gilbert de Clare’s intervention, which prompted Edward later to support the crucial addendum to the Dictum of Kenilworth which enabled the former rebels to re-enter their lands before payment of the fine, thereby paving the way to a final settlement with the barons in mid-1267.11

  Meanwhile, however, the Dictum of Kenilworth played merry hell with Eleanor’s land acquisitions. All of the lands acquired in 1265, apart from those in Lincolnshire, were lost to her when the former owners paid their fines. Effectively therefore, she had to start again. However, with the birth of an heir, her position at court was improved and grants began to be made to her directly; again, it would seem, with an element of forward planning by Eleanor. For example, on 15 September 1265, Henry III had confirmed Edward’s grant to Eleanor of a major acquisition: the manor of Ringwood in the New Forest and the issues and profits of the New Forest. In 1270, this grant of the stewardship of the New Forest was confirmed to her, along with a grant of the manor of Lyndhurst (adjacent to Ringwood), thereby giving
her a large, valuable area of property which could be run as a single unit. In exchange, she transferred to Alan Plongenet (the previous holder of the New Forest stewardship) the manors of Pitney and Wearne.12

  A second area in which property was acquired was Leicestershire, where, between 1267 and 1270, she acquired grants from the king of progressively greater rights over the substantial neighbouring manors of Great Bowden and Market Harborough, and these grants were supplemented in 1268 by the complementary hundred of Gartree – a property which included both these manors.

  Again in Norfolk, in 1269–70 Eleanor acquired grants (eventually for life) of the manor of Aylsham, which carried with it rights in relation to the neighbouring North Erpingham hundred, and lands in Scottow. In Northampton, the manor of Kingsthorpe was granted at pleasure in 1267, rising to a grant for life in 1270, and this was supplemented by the grant of the surrounding hundred of Spelhoe. Meanwhile, in Stafford, Eleanor acquired lands at Leek and Densington, appurtenant to Macclesfield, in 1270.

  Thus, by 1270, Eleanor had acquired seven areas of land, each of which contained more than one property which could be run in tandem for operational efficiency. In addition, in 1268, Henry permitted her to claim ‘queen gold’ in Ireland.13

  Other instances of Eleanor’s rise in status can be found in this period: in November 1267, Henry granted Castilian merchants at Southampton a seven-year exemption from murage (a tax for building or repair of town walls); her chaplain Bartholomew de Haya was granted the right to hold his houses free of livery obligations; she obtained a pardon for an indictment raised against a petitioner for the death of a relation; and she also obtained relief for another against outlaw status resulting from his involvement with a death. This last is particularly interesting as she first appears here as ‘the King’s daughter Eleanor, consort of Edward his son’, a terminology implying a higher status. Other pardons and interventions, including one on behalf of the son of a delightfully named lady – Licoricia – succeed these. They show that Eleanor was using her influence in this respect on a regular basis; an interesting point when her very different operations as queen come to be considered. By 1269, she was in a position to get a licence for her own merchant to be permitted to trade in England. This merchant, Gil Martini, was later to source Castilian goods for her.14

  Another way in which Eleanor’s influence was felt, and which points the way forward to future operations, is that it was at this point that she first began to deal in debts owed by Christian debtors to Jewish moneylenders. In April 1268, Henry III gave her all the debts owed by William fitz William of Hartwell to Jacob son of Moses of Oxford and any other Jews in England. Similarly, in the subsequent years she was given the debts of Richard de Ernham of Froyle and Thomas Bassett of Welham. However, at this stage at least, these debts do not appear to have been used by her has a means of personally obtaining the debtor’s lands. The fitz William debt was apparently conveyed to Alice de Luton. She also appears to have intervened to enable William, her tailor (probably the same William for whom she obtained lands earlier), to buy up the de Ernham debt to a Jewish moneylender and to claim the ransom for this debtor’s lands, which had been placed in her hands. Interestingly, Eleanor also petitioned Henry III to assist favourites of hers who were hampered by Jewish debts themselves. In December 1269, she obtained Henry’s promise that Benedict de Wintonia’s debts would not be interfered with for ten years, and in February 1270 he paid off, at Eleanor’s request, a debt owed by the father-in-law of her cousin Giles de Fiennes.15

  There were also a number of other developments in the way in which Eleanor lived her life. One was the increasing size and status of her household. By the time of her departure on Crusade in 1270, Eleanor had built up a household of some size and significance.

  We know that her household had its origins in 1255 with the secondment from Eleanor of Provence’s household of the clerk John of London to head up her wardrobe (a term probably best translated these days as her private office) and William de Cheney from the king’s household as her steward (butler). Certainly from the outset she would have had a group of waiting women; one of whom, Joan ‘de Valle Viridi’, was with her sometime before 1262, when she is recorded as marrying William Charles, who became one of Eleanor’s knights. Both her ‘ladies’ and William Charles are mentioned as forming part of her household when Henry commanded her to vacate Windsor in the wake of the defeat at Lewes in 1264. Also traceable as a semi-regular part of the female side of the household is the nurse Alice de Luton – formerly Edward’s own nurse.

  Although not named at this stage, it appears likely that her closest waiting woman, Margerie, joined her sometime in the 1260s. This can be inferred from the facts that Margerie was married around 1270 to Robert de Haustede, then a groom in Eleanor’s household, and that he was the beneficiary of two notable kindnesses from Eleanor at this period. In 1266, she procured his pardon from immediate payment of his father’s debts to the Exchequer, arranging for him to pay by instalments, and in 1270 she had the outstanding £24 of the original £48 written off altogether. It appears most likely that such a significant favour was effectively done not for a mere groom, but for a closer attendant. Margerie remained with Eleanor to her death, rising to become her main damsel.

  Also within the household and bearing ‘yeoman’ status (a subsidiary rank under the steward, approximate to a footman) in the late 1260s was John Ferre, whose brother was in the king’s service. John appears to have been a trusted messenger, since he carried the news of the birth of young John to Henry III in 1266. In the succeeding years, he progressed up the household, being given custody of some of Eleanor’s lands, and accompanying Edward and Eleanor on Crusade in 1270. He was knighted in later years, and became Eleanor’s steward once she was queen. Another yeoman of this period was William de Meleford, who had come from the queen’s household. There was also, from at least 1269, a certain John de Beaumes (recorded as bringing the good news of the birth of Eleanor’s daughter Eleanor to the king). Apart from these, we have evidence of a cook, John of Woodstock, and the chaplain, Bartholomew de Haya, previously attached to Henry III.16

  John of London had moved on by about 1265, being replaced by William de Yattenden, who had links to Edward’s household, as well as that of Eleanor of Provence through his brothers. He too was to accompany her on Crusade in 1270, dying en route. At a similar period, her steward William de Cheney moves on, although his replacement is not clear. It may (as Parsons suggests) have been the businesslike Walter de Kancia, or John de Weston, mentioned in the Close Rolls as her steward in 1264. These changes reflect a move away from the influence of the king and queen and towards her own independent business interests, and are also reflected in the appearance in the records of her own bailiffs and a clerk (a relative of her cook). At the same period, a group of knights and archers also emerges: she had archers from Ponthieu in her service in 1263, as well as former archers of Henry III.17

  The final feature of Eleanor’s emerging household worth noting at this point is the matter of relatives. It might seem that Eleanor was rather unlikely to provide for her relations – there are no overt signs in the records of nepotism. The contrast with the problematic overt ‘alien’ approach of both Henry III and Eleanor of Provence is striking. However, closer examination of the record shows that Eleanor did indeed provide for her relatives from an early stage – but very cleverly and discreetly. What she did was favour not her relatives at large, but only those relatives who could prove a tie to England already; thus, while she was favouring her connections, she was emphatically not favouring aliens. Three families in particular can be highlighted as benefiting in this respect: the Fiennes, relatives of Eleanor through the Dammartin family, holders of land in England since the days of King Stephen; the de Pécquigny family, related to Eleanor through her Ponthevin family; and the de Brienne family, Leónese connections of Eleanor’s, one of whom had married into the English de Beaumont family prior to Eleanor’s marriage.

 
; The beginnings of Eleanor’s patronage emerge early, but become clearer as the years go by. William de Fiennes joined Edward’s household at the time of the marriage. His brother Michael de Fiennes became Edward’s chancellor shortly after the marriage (though his initial appointment to the household has also been suggested to result from a more distant connection to Eleanor of Provence). And, as noted above, Eleanor procured a relief from debt for another Fiennes cousin-in-law. Among Eleanor’s other relations, Roger de Pécquigny was granted a yearly fee at around the same time. Further, advantageous marriages were brokered between different branches of Eleanor’s extended family. In particular, at around this period the Fiennes family and Eleanor’s Brienne relatives contracted a marriage alliance in which her hand can surely be traced. William, eldest grandchild of the Fiennes–Dammartin alliance, married Blanche de Brienne, the granddaughter of Jean de Brienne and Berengaria of León. Their family would become a particularly favoured group among Eleanor’s relatives.18

  Other signs of Eleanor’s increase in status can be seen in Henry III’s expenditure specifically on her account. He provided her with newly built chambers for her especial use at several royal castles, and paid for her and her ladies’ outfitting at Christmas 1268 in identical manner to that provided for the queen and her ladies. Therefore, Eleanor was now truly recognised as the second lady of England.