Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England
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Royal marriage in the thirteenth century was a highly valued and, indeed, valuable tool in the diplomatic armoury of the English king and his kingdom. It offered a potential means of recruiting powerful political allies to cement the king’s position as well as a way of engineering peace between neighbouring rulers through the creation of a personal, dynastic bond. Inheritance customs and the property settlements that accompanied royal unions also meant that prudently arranged alliances might bring with them movable wealth and new territories to augment the prosperity of the ruling house. The high level of personal importance that King Henry III attached to marriage was made clear in a memorandum dispatched to the English proctors at the papal curia in 1224. This document furnished Henry’s agents with the reasons for the marriage of his youngest sister, Eleanor, then just nine years old, to a man twenty-five years her senior, William Marshal junior (d. 1231), Earl of Pembroke. The political background to Eleanor’s first marriage and the relationship that she subsequently forged with her new husband are the subjects explored within this chapter. In particular, we shall consider precisely why it was that the young king felt compelled in 1224 to justify and defend his choice of bridegroom for this sister to his agents in Rome.
WILLIAM MARSHAL JUNIOR AND THE CROWN
The father of Eleanor’s bridegroom, William Marshal senior, was a younger son of John Marshal, a minor baron who held the hereditary post of royal master-marshal, by his second wife, Sibyl, the sister of Earl Patrick of Salisbury.2 Through service in the households of Henry the Young King (d. 1183), Henry II (d. 1189), Richard I (d. 1199) and John (d. 1216), William senior had reaped the rewards of royal patronage. Most notably, he secured the hand in marriage of Isabella de Clare (d. 1220), the daughter and sole heiress of Richard fitz Gilbert de Clare, Lord of Striguil and of Leinster, and a claimant to the earldom of Pembroke, thereby acquiring her extensive estates in England, south Wales, Ireland and Normandy.3 It was a measure of William Marshal’s importance within the Angevin dominions that, unlike the queen, he was appointed as one of King John’s executors and was personally charged with safeguarding Henry III and the English throne.4 With the agreement of the remaining loyalist barons, the older Marshal was appointed regent just a short time after the young king’s first coronation at the end of October 1216, and helped to secure a decisive royalist victory against the supporters of the French prince Louis at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217.5 Ill-health and old age brought William senior’s regency to an end in early April 1219; he died a month later and was buried at the New Temple in London.6 William junior, William senior’s eldest surviving son and heir, stood next in line to inherit the earldom of Pembroke (bestowed by King John upon his father in 1199) and, on his mother’s death in 1220, the bulk of the couple’s English, Irish and Welsh lands.7 The deaths of his parents left William junior one of the wealthiest and most eligible magnates in the kingdom.
William Marshal junior had already made his own mark on English politics by 1220. Whereas his father had been an unswerving loyalist during the civil war of 1215–17, William junior had sided initially with the rebels and was one of the twenty-five barons appointed to oversee the enforcement of Magna Carta in 1215.8 In the event, William junior’s rebellion was not long lived: the young Marshal successfully retook Marlborough Castle from the rebels and fought for the royalists at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217.9 William’s change of heart was rewarded when he received a grant of the lands confiscated from the rebel, David, Earl of Huntingdon, which included Fotheringhay Castle.10 Although Earl David’s lands were restored to him in 1218, William junior hung on tenaciously to Fotheringhay in the face of growing pressure for him to relinquish this stronghold until the summer of 1220, when events in Wales conspired against him.11 The unexpected invasion of Pembrokeshire by Llywelyn the Great, Prince of North Wales, devastated the Marshal lands there and forced William junior’s supporters to agree peace on unfavourable terms.12 When the new Earl of Pembroke sought the aid of the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, against the Welsh settlement, he was met with a demand for Fotheringhay’s return to the crown.13
In the letter in which William junior announced his intention to answer for Fotheringhay, he claimed that he was prepared to do so because ‘I endeavour to obtain the preferment of the lord king and his sister by all means.’14 The royal sister in question was Joan, Eleanor’s oldest sister. The negotiations for Joan’s marriage to Alexander II, King of Scots and Earl David’s overlord, subsequently concluded in June 1221, were, by this time, already well underway.15 As part of the Anglo-Scottish talks held at York in August 1220, Alexander pushed for, and was promised, Fotheringhay’s restoration.16 On 11 September 1220, a curt letter addressed by Henry III to William junior ordered the latter to yield this castle forthwith, ‘lest the whole business of the marriage remains incompleted to our great damage and shame’.17
The match agreed at York in August 1220 reworked the terms of an earlier treaty that had provided for a double marriage between Alexander II and Joan, and Alexander’s eldest sister, Margaret, and the English king. It was now agreed that Alexander’s sister would marry a subject of the English king instead.18 For the time being, the identity of the new English bridegroom remained unclear. Yet the royal memorandum of 1224 that announced William’s later marriage to Eleanor indicates that the young Marshal, as one of the greatest lords of Henry’s realm, was regarded as a serious, and potentially threatening, alternative candidate for the hand of the Scottish princess to that championed by the English crown.19 In the event, Margaret married the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, during the autumn of 1221 in a union possibly arranged at Joan’s wedding to Alexander earlier that year.20
In the meantime, the young Marshal was tempted by the prospect of an alternative match between himself and a daughter of Count Robert of Dreux, his erstwhile competitor for Marlborough.21 As the royal memorandum of 1224 also explained, this potential match was similarly fraught with danger for the English crown: Robert was an alien (a foreigner) and such an alliance might introduce more aliens into England.22 This was an especially pertinent consideration in view of the events of 1215–17 and the fact that William’s younger brother, Richard, held all his lands in Normandy and owed homage to the French crown, a point that the king readily acknowledged.23
Another candidate for the Marshal’s hand who emerged at this time, and was named in the English memorandum, was none other than a daughter of Henry (I) de Louvain, Duke of Brabant (r. 1183–1235). Although Henry de Louvain supported his son-in-law, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV, as an English ally at the battle of Bouvines in 1214, the duke had subsequently allied with the victor, the Capetian king Philip Augustus.24 This change of alliance was not altogether surprising: Henry (I)’s second wife was Philip’s daughter, Marie of France, the widow of the Marquis of Namur.25 By 1221, Henry was the father of four daughters by his first wife, all of whom had already made highly advantageous marriages.26 Perhaps the recent death of Arnoul (III), Count of Loos and Graf of Rieneck, the husband of one of Henry’s younger daughters, Adelaide, prompted the Earl of Pembroke to consider applying for her hand.27 A marriage alliance between William junior and the Brabantine house, with its Capetian sympathies, clearly presented yet another threat to the future security of the English crown and to any long-term ambitions for the recovery of Henry III’s lost continental possessions.
It is, of course, possible that the royal memorandum of 1224 was written as much as an apology, as well as a justification, for the decision taken by the boy king and his counsellors to marry his youngest sister, Eleanor, to a nobleman, rather than a foreign potentate. In view of the sheer extent of the Marshal’s estates within the English king’s dominions, it is easy to appreciate the appeal of allying these considerable resources to a cash-strapped crown.28 The proposed marriage between William junior and Eleanor was a match with a clear political purpose, a union that not only promised safety against internal foes, but also increased protection against external foes by countering the po
tential threat of a Francophile Marshal marriage.29
The situation in England in or around 1221 made arrangements for a Marshal/Plantagenet alliance all the more urgent. From the safer vantage point of 1224, Henry III later recalled that William junior’s loyalty to the crown had come under suspicion: ‘magnates in England … were struggling to turn the heart of [Pembroke] from us by malicious confederations’.30 Faced with a possible rebellion, Hubert de Burgh, the main architect of this new union, now sought to placate Pembroke, his former rival for the hand of Margaret of Scots.31 The prospect of a marriage between the younger Marshal and Eleanor also served the immediate purpose of providing a bargaining counter with which finally to recover control of the royal castles of Marlborough and Ludgershall (whose custody was often linked to the former) from Pembroke.32 As the memorandum of 1224 explained, the crown hoped that this would encourage other custodians to resign possession of further royal castles. This was all part of a wider programme for the recovery by the crown of its castles and estates from the nobility of the realm.33 ‘After Easter [1221]’, the Dunstable annalist recorded, ‘William Marshal the younger was being urged by the royal council to surrender the castle of Marlborough’ into the hands of Pandulf, the papal legate. If other lords failed to follow suit, the annalist continued, then Pembroke would receive Marlborough back again, presumably as a conciliatory gesture.34 In actual fact, under the terms of the marriage settlement, Marlborough’s return was promised if the king failed to deliver the bride to her groom within a specified timeframe.35 If concerns about the direction of William junior’s loyalties were conducive to a royal marriage, then the prospect of Marlborough’s return sealed the deal for the minority government.
There was, however, no escape from the fact that the marriage of the king’s sister, even that of his youngest sister, was a matter of tremendous political importance. According to the papal mandate of June 1222, it was with the counsel of numerous bishops, earls and barons that the Earl of Pembroke agreed to marry one of the king’s sisters, and swore an oath to this effect. Hubert de Burgh, for his part, then took an oath on behalf of the king to deliver one of Henry’s sisters to him as his bride.36 It was not enough for the papal legate and the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, to agree the match with Pembroke in line with their own political agenda; the marriage was made conditional upon the consent of the English magnates. The initial absence of leading figures like Ranulf (III), Earl of Chester, slowed down proceedings, as did the veracity of the debate generated by the more widely perceived advantages and disadvantages of a union such as this.37 David Carpenter has argued that Chester, one of the greatest barons in the realm whose estates easily rivalled those of Pembroke, might well have been one of the magnates who initially opposed the proposed alliance with Eleanor. This just might explain why the memorandum of 1224 singled out Chester by naming him as one whose consent had expressly been secured.38 As a result of a lack of consensus, and to Pembroke’s deep frustration, the marriage was delayed.
THE QUESTION OF DISPARAGEMENT?
One of the issues seized upon with great vigour by critics of the match, so the memorandum of 1224 recalled, was the fact that in marrying the younger Marshal, Eleanor was not entering into a union that obviously facilitated ‘a great alliance in foreign parts’.39 In the aftermath of Joan’s marriage to the King of Scots, Hubert de Burgh and Pandulf found themselves open to accusations that they were disparaging Eleanor by marrying her to one of Henry’s subjects, rather than finding her a husband of equal status. The disparagement of minors was such an important and highly topical political issue that it had merited inclusion in Magna Carta in 1215: cap. 6 had specifically laid down that heirs ought to be married without disparagement, that is, not to someone of lesser social status.40 This was also an accusation to which de Burgh was vulnerable on a far more personal level. From obscure beginnings as the son of a minor Norfolk landholder, Hubert’s meteoric rise in royal service to justiciar had facilitated his own marriage to Margaret, the sister of the king of Scots, on 3 October 1221.41 The obscurity of de Burgh’s birth was not lost on other members of the nobility. When, for example, false reports reached the English royal court in 1225 of the Earl of Salisbury’s death overseas, the justiciar’s nephew solicited the Countess of Salisbury’s hand in marriage. According to Roger of Wendover, the countess sternly rebuked him ‘because the nobility of her family’, as well as the fact, as she first pointed out, that her husband was alive, prevented such a union.42
In comparison with that of de Burgh, Pembroke’s noble status and lineage was, on his mother’s side at least, far better established. Yet, in the memorandum of 1224, the matter of Eleanor’s possible disparagement was considered of sufficient weight to be tackled head on. The memorandum noted how the younger Marshal was a ‘great potentate’ in England and Ireland, and recalled how he had recaptured for the English crown ‘our castles which Llywelyn, prince of North Wales, held’.43 This was a clear reference to Pembroke’s successful Welsh campaign of 1223, as a result of which Cardigan and Carmarthen had been captured for the crown from the Welsh and William junior regained control of Cilgerran for himself. Pembroke had subsequently been placed, alongside the Earl of Salisbury, in charge of a cavalry force that recovered the castle and lordship of Kidwelly.44 These events all conspired to bring Llywelyn to terms in the autumn, whereupon Pembroke was appointed custodian of Carmarthen and Cardigan in November that year.45 Having thus established Pembroke’s credentials, the memorandum of 1224 pointed to the example of the former king of France, Philip Augustus (d. 1223), whom, it was claimed, had married ‘his daughters, sisters and nieces’ to ‘the Count of Namur, and the Count of Ponthieu, and his other men’, that is to other great subjects.46 In a similar fashion, the memorandum went on, the ‘niece’ of the present king of France, Louis VIII, ‘namely the daughter of Guichard of Beaujeu’, had lately been given in matrimony to the Count of Champagne.47 Taking this all into consideration, Henry III and his counsellors finally agreed that it would be ‘to our profit and honour to marry our sister’ to Pembroke.48
A point often overlooked by modern scholars is that William junior might also have made attempts of his own to counter claims of disparagement when his marriage to Eleanor was in negotiation. Between 1224 and February 1225, William junior took the remarkable step of commissioning an account of his father’s life, the History of William Marshal, in Middle French verse. The work of a poet called John, it drew on the memories of those closest to William Marshal senior, including John of Earley, one of the regent’s executors, and ran to 19,214 lines in length.49 Probably completed by the autumn of 1226, the biography celebrated the older Marshal’s career as a warrior, courtier and great statesman, and included vignettes that demonstrated his heroism, loyalty and nobility of conduct.50 Indeed, it might be argued that the elder Marshal was portrayed in such a way so as to make it clear that these values more than amply compensated for the relative obscurity of his birth as the younger son of a Berkshire baron. In the textual introduction to the modern edition of this work, A. J. Holden expresses his belief that ‘The poem was commissioned as an act of filial piety by the hero’s eldest son and successor.’51 In the historical introduction to the same work, David Crouch argues that the author’s ‘most pressing task was to repudiate the criticisms being made of his hero in the 1220s’, including those relating to the family’s retention of their French estates after the loss of Normandy in 1204.52 Crouch also, significantly, draws attention to passages in the text concerning the older Marshal’s claims over Caerleon, which resonate with William Marshal junior’s ultimately successful attempts to recover this Welsh lordship in August 1226.53 While this might, indeed, have been the case, the text served the additional purpose of enhancing William junior’s reputation through his association with his father precisely at a time when William junior’s own background and personal attributes were under particular scrutiny, as evidenced by Henry III’s memorandum to the papal curia. Crouch suggests ‘that the commis
sioning of the History was one aspect of the earl’s need to put his affairs in order before he departed to Ireland [in 1224] for an indeterminate period’.54 It might have done this and rather more. William junior’s appointment as justiciar of Ireland was intimately connected to his marriage to Eleanor, as we shall see below.55 By praising the older Marshal’s character and achievements, perhaps with an eye also to celebrating the connections of his eldest son, William junior might well have hoped that the History would help to counter criticism of his own forthcoming union. After all, William junior earned extravagant praise within the History:
The first son was called William,
and I can tell you that in this kingdom,
as I have heard said, there was nobody
who so dedicated himself to performing noble exploits;
that is what I have heard everybody say,
and no man can help but acquire a great reputation
and involve himself in a grand undertaking
who has that sort of witness to his character.
He became earl after his father
and he was a fine and worthy knight.56
The History’s author was particularly careful to stress the nobility of the connections forged by the marriages of William senior’s children, and especially his daughters.57 Yet the text curiously neglected to mention the royal marriage, a truly extraordinary oversight, which suggests either that the marriage had not yet taken place when the text was written or that William junior and Eleanor had not yet begun to live together as husband and wife, so that the future of the union remained in the balance. What matters here is that those persons who visited William junior’s household in the 1220s might well have listened to the poem in its entirety or to extracts from it; it is also likely that other members of the Marshal family – William junior had four brothers and five sisters – possessed copies of this text. Just one manuscript of the History survives today, but there are references to others formerly in the possession of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, Westminster Abbey and Thomas, Duke of Gloucester (in c. 1397) that hint at its wider dissemination.58 In glorifying his father, this work promised to elevate William junior’s reputation and that of his siblings at a peculiarly sensitive period in the dynasty’s history.