The question of Eleanor’s rights in the continental possessions claimed by Louis of France under the terms of the so-called Treaty of Paris placed the Countess of Leicester firmly at the centre of events. Earl Simon was in France in May and early June 1258, and again between November 1258 and February 1259.18 The peace settlement and the Montforts’ personal, financial grievances against the English crown became intertwined when the couple refused to renounce Eleanor’s claims to her natal family’s continental possessions in a blatant attempt to obstruct the Anglo-French talks.19 It was a measure of Eleanor’s strength of character and her obstinacy that she stood firm in the face of mounting pressure to acquiesce to her brother’s wishes. At his trial in July 1260, Earl Simon remembered how:
he was not in England when the countess was asked for the renunciation, and that the countess was unwilling to make it until the king had assigned the land to her as he had agreed. And the earl says that the countess showed the king that she was not bound to make the renunciation of her hereditary right unless she received compensation.20
The land in question on this occasion related to the £400 fee settled on the couple in 1253.21
In February 1259, Richard of Cornwall and his eldest son, Henry, followed by the king’s younger son, Edmund, all formally renounced their rights in Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, Maine and Poitou. Henry III surrendered his own claims on 24 February.22 All that now remained was for the king’s eldest son, the Lord Edward, and for Eleanor and Simon to follow suit. Edward reluctantly conceded in May, but the Montforts held out.23 Chief among the stumbling blocks that Henry encountered in seeking to secure their cooperation was Eleanor’s Marshal dower. Hence a royal order issued on 10 March 1259, whereby Henry announced that he intended to send Earl Simon to France in the company of Peter of Savoy, Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, John Mansel and Robert Walerand. Henry assigned Simon’s companions the express task of making peace with the Montforts in their actions against the crown, including that touching Eleanor’s dower.24 In 1260, the king later recalled ‘that the earl [of Leicester] granted by his letter that he would make his wife and his children make the renunciation if the king paid to the countess what he owed her, and made good the wrongs done to her if he had done any’.25 The earl, for his part, recollected that ‘the king put himself on arbitration regarding the countess’s dower in Ireland’.26
Eleanor and Simon’s obstinacy and their sheer determination to press home their own interests proved an effective, if not insurmountable, obstacle to Anglo-French talks: the Montforts’ refusal to renounce their rights delayed the ratification of the Treaty of Paris for nine months.27 Yet their actions came at a high political price, as not only did their behaviour sour relations irrevocably between Eleanor and her brother, but their tactics drew criticism from members of the English baronage. Matthew Paris recounts a dramatic episode that took place in 1259, in which he placed the blame for the breakdown in friendly relations between Earl Simon and Richard de Clare, a fellow reformer and negotiator, squarely on Eleanor’s refusal to resign her rights in Normandy. Richard and the Earl of Leicester argued so violently that they had to be physically restrained.28
Faced with the Montforts’ intransigence, Henry III’s hand was forced into making a series of concessions to Earl Simon that were clearly intended to purchase his youngest sister’s cooperation. In May 1259, the king ordered that the earl was to be repaid the money that he had expended in the crown’s service in Gascony, and Simon and his wife were subsequently granted nine English manors ‘in tenancy’ to replace the £400 fee.29 More than a hint of Henry III’s mounting annoyance at the couple’s and, in particular, at Eleanor’s behaviour was betrayed by another royal directive issued on 20 May 1259: the king instructed Simon’s fellow negotiators, who now numbered John de Balliol among their ranks, that if Eleanor continued to refuse to resign her rights, they were to find another way to satisfy the king of France.30 On the same day, the English king wrote to Louis, describing how, in the presence of the great men of his realm in London, he had offered to submit himself to an award negotiated on his behalf at Saint-Germain-des-Prés in France and give security to his sister that he would honour this intention. This was all to no avail – Eleanor still declined to fall in with his plans.31
On 24 May 1259, as a result of intensive discussions to which Eleanor and Simon were both party, Henry III empowered Richard, Peter, John de Balliol, John Mansel and Robert to make an award provided that they examined the Montforts’ claim that the king had used force to persuade Eleanor to make peace with William Marshal junior’s heirs.32 The matter of whether Eleanor had been in the king’s power and authority when she accepted an annual cash sum in place of her Irish dower had, of course, already been raised in the late 1240s.33 The Montforts’ decision to resurrect this earlier accusation on an international stage betrays the level of resentment harboured by the couple towards the English crown. Once more, the king of France was kept closely abreast of matters in this intensely personal, and now increasingly bitter, family dispute between Henry III and the Montforts. When, on the same day, the English king informed Louis that he had personally authorized the payment of all debts owed to the earl and countess by the English crown,34 it seemed as though the Montforts’ gamble had finally paid off.
Yet the matter of Eleanor’s dower refused to go away. Eager to secure a new valuation of Eleanor’s dower and a new assignment, the couple pushed for further concessions. On 26 June, news arrived in England from Henry’s agents at the French court that Eleanor had agreed to a settlement.35 Spurred into action, Henry III’s officials worked hard to secure the Treaty’s ratification in July, only to have their ambitions thwarted yet again by those of Eleanor and her husband.36 Simon and Eleanor now demanded that the king should pay what the Montforts considered to be the true value of Eleanor’s dower in Ireland and Wales – 2,000 marks per annum. The couple also demanded that the crown should compensate them for twenty-six years’ worth in arrears, an impossibly large sum for a cash-strapped English king to pay, let alone collect from the Marshal co-heirs.37 The couple had overstepped the mark and overplayed their hand. In the face of their inflexibility, Henry III was left with no other alternative but to negotiate the Treaty of Paris around them. When, in October 1259, Earl Simon returned to England he had no other choice but to consent to an amended form of the Anglo-French treaty that the French king had finally approved and which omitted all mention of Eleanor’s rights.38 Outmanoeuvred, Earl Simon demanded Eleanor’s share of the former Angevin lands in parliament before the representatives of the French crown.39 When, on 24 November 1259, Henry III finally visited Paris to ratify the Treaty, Earl Simon again managed to delay proceedings for at least another eight days. It was finally agreed on 3 December 1259 at Saint-Germain-des-Prés that 15,000 marks which Louis was supposed to pay to Henry under the Treaty’s terms were to remain in the French king’s hands until the quarrels between the Montforts and the English crown were resolved. Henry III promised to settle these differences within the next two years.40 In the short term, this change of tact worked well for the English crown; Countess Eleanor fell in with Henry III’s wishes. On 4 December 1259, the Countess of Leicester renounced her claim to the Angevin lands before Earl Simon, King Henry and King Louis and their respective courts, and the Treaty of Paris was published.41
The deal that Henry III brokered with Louis in December 1259 marked the beginning of renewed attempts to settle the issue of Eleanor’s dower. In reality, and much to the Montforts’ frustration, this new arrangement achieved little. A year passed before the English king gave serious consideration to the Montforts’ grievances. On 7 January 1261 and again on 11 January 1261, Henry III issued letters in which he promised to submit to the arbitration of the king of France, or to that of Queen Margaret or of Peter the Chamberlain.42 On 14 March 1261, the king again expressed his willingness to submit his quarrels with Earl Simon and Countess Eleanor to the French king’s judgement, and secured the earl’s ag
reement, presumably with the support of his wife, to do the same.43 With the matter still progressing slowly, two new teams of negotiators were appointed on 5 July 1261 – Philip Basset, the royal justiciar, and John Mansel, treasurer of York, for the king and Walter de Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, and Peter de Montfort for the Earl and Countess of Leicester. On this occasion the Duke of Burgundy and Peter the Chamberlain were appointed as intermediaries.44 When, however, the duke and Peter the Chamberlain refused to act, Henry III wrote to Louis IX, requesting that Queen Margaret might become involved.45 The fast-moving political events in England, however, meant that matters had still yet to reach a satisfactory conclusion in 1263.46
If controversy over Eleanor’s refusal to renounce her rights had placed her and her husband at the centre of Anglo-French negotiations, it remains difficult to trace her movements with any precision during the months preceding the final ratification of the Treaty of Paris in December 1259. Although it is likely that she accompanied her husband in England and France, the couple also experienced time apart. In August 1259, for example, it was Simon alone who paid a brief visit to Archbishop Odo Rigaud of Rouen, one of the chief French intermediaries, in a break from the talks.47 When in England, Eleanor’s formal attendance was not presumably required, as a woman, at the great councils or parliaments of this time. Nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that, even if her gender prevented her from attending these meetings, she was familiar with much of the business discussed there. In July 1259, for example, Eleanor apparently secured royal assistance for Thomas of Ash, a Kent landholder who was heavily indebted to the Jews. ‘At the instance of the countess of Leicester’, the king ordered a survey to be made of Thomas’s lands and tenements, a move that brought Thomas a temporary respite from repaying his Jewish debts.48 Eleanor was almost certainly at court again when Simon attended the Westminster parliament of October 1259. The affairs of this parliament were dominated by the publication of the Provisions of Westminster, a series of wide-ranging legal and administrative measures intended to reform the government of the realm.49 On 15 October, just two days into this reform-dominated parliament, the reformer and justiciar, Hugh Bigod, authorized a royal pardon for Ralph de Burstal, a man who had killed in self-defence ‘at the instance of Eleanor, countess of Leicester, the king’s sister’.50 Ralph’s pardon was issued on the same day that Simon entered into a momentous agreement with the Lord Edward to uphold the reform movement and secure his aid to enforce support for the settlement of Eleanor’s dower.51 On 12 November 1259, when the royal court visited Canterbury en route to the Kent coast, Henry III turned his attention once more to the Jewish debtor Thomas of Ash. On this occasion, Henry III, who was keen to encourage his youngest sister’s cooperation – whatever their personal differences – before they reached Paris, again conceded that Thomas’s lands and tenements should be surveyed and valued, so that Thomas’s lot might be alleviated further by paying a reasonable fine at reasonable terms.52
THE FORTUNES OF THE REFORM MOVEMENT
The years that immediately followed the Treaty of Paris were of momentous political importance for Eleanor, her husband and their eldest sons, who were now approaching adulthood. The events of these years in England and France are well known and need recounting only briefly here. After the ratification of the Treaty, Simon de Montfort travelled to Normandy and then to England, where he arrived in January 1260. The English king, however, delayed his return from France until April. Relations between the king and the reformers fractured further, so that when parliament gathered in London, both the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Gloucester, with whom Montfort was at odds, arrived with armed retinues. Countess Eleanor’s other brother, Richard of Cornwall, stepped in to act as a mediator. It was Richard who, in May 1260, secured an important political victory for the royalists when he persuaded the Lord Edward, Eleanor’s nephew and Henry III’s heir, to break with the Montforts and return to his father’s side. It was a measure of the resentment that the king now felt towards the Montforts that he attempted to bring his brother-in-law to trial in the summer of 1260.
Relations between the king and the Montforts softened in the autumn of 1260; Henry and Simon, the Montforts’ two oldest sons, were among the young men who were knighted by the Lord Edward during the court celebrations that marked the feast of St Edward the Confessor (13 October). The king’s overarching concern, however, to revoke the Provisions of Oxford, the key piece of reforming legislation of 1258, finally paid off. In April 1261, his agent at the papal curia secured a bull which revoked the Provisions and paved the way for the king to recover power. One result of the rapidly changing political situation was Simon and Eleanor’s decision to leave England and, in effect, enter exile in France during the early autumn of 1261, a little while after the Earl of Gloucester deserted the reformers for the king’s party. The Montforts were to remain in France until late April 1263. Henry himself followed Earl Simon to France in the summer of 1262, where he amassed evidence to support his charges against the Earl of Leicester. This leant further impetus to the quarrel between the English king and the Montforts, greatly diminishing the chance of a settlement between them; the attempts of Louis IX at arbitration ultimately proved to be fruitless.53
The Earl of Leicester’s return to England in April 1263 was apparently prompted by a visit from a delegation of English magnates, who sought his help to aid the reformers. Following a secret meeting of the king’s chief opponents at Oxford, at which the reformers renewed their commitment to the Provisions of Oxford, Earl Simon assumed the leading mantle of the reform movement. It was Simon who headed the baronial sympathizers in opposition to the king in May, after which the quarrel between Henry and the barons erupted into violence. By June the Earl of Leicester had assumed control of the baronial army in the west, whence he proceeded to advance on Henry III in London. En route to London, Simon secured Kent, where Eleanor held a small collection of dower properties, and, in particular, the royal castle of Dover, in order to prevent Henry III from fleeing abroad. Fragile peace terms were agreed between the warring factions, but the Lord Edward subsequently stirred up trouble for the reformers; Henry III, for his part, remained in regular contact with Louis IX in France. It was the French king who summoned the English king and his baronial opponents to the French court later in the summer, in an unsuccessful attempt to settle their differences.
In December 1263 Henry III broke the truce between the two sides by laying siege to Dover Castle. At this point, Louis IX stepped in, once more, in an attempt to manufacture a peace settlement. In late December a party of baronial supporters, which included the Montforts’ oldest son, Henry, but not Earl Simon, who was then recovering from a broken leg, departed for France, where both sides presented their complaints against the other. In the Mise of Amiens, issued on 23 January 1264, Louis IX made his judgement against the barons and roundly condemned the Provisions of Oxford. During the spring of 1264, England descended into civil war, as the royalists and baronial sympathizers vied to take control of key castles and ports. On 5 April 1264, Henry secured a significant victory for the royalists when he captured the town and castle of Northampton from the Montfortians. It was, however, the king’s own defeat and capture at the battle of Lewes on 14 May that changed Simon and Eleanor’s fortunes most dramatically. In one fell swoop, the Earl of Leicester and his supporters effectively secured control of royal government and Henry III was reduced to a mere cipher as a captive in their hands. The Mise of Lewes, an agreement hammered out between the two sides on 14–15 May, helped to secure the persons of the Lord Edward, Henry III’s eldest son and heir, and Henry of Almain, Richard of Cornwall’s eldest son and heir, who surrendered themselves as hostages on behalf of their fathers; Richard of Cornwall had also fallen prisoner to the barons at Lewes.54
ELEANOR, 1260–3
So what was Eleanor de Montfort’s role in all these events? For much of the early 1260s, Eleanor was active in France, alongside her husband, where she pushed for
the further enrichment of her family by pursuing a claim to a share of her mother’s inheritance in Angoulême. In September 1242, Henry III had, at his mother’s behest, renounced all his rights in Angoulême, and promised that Richard of Cornwall and Eleanor would follow suit.55 Eleanor, who had not resigned her claims, seized upon the opportunity in the latter part of 1260 to sue her Lusignan half-brothers, Geoffrey and Guy de Lusignan and William de Valence, as well as her nephew Hugh (XII), Count of La Marche, for a share of her mother’s lands.56 There was certainly little love lost between the Montforts and the Lusignans. Furthermore, as Margaret Labarge astutely observed, Eleanor might well have looked to add to the Montforts’ French properties in response to the difficult situation faced by Simon at the English court.57 Following the failure of arbitration between the two sides, Eleanor and Simon pursued their case to Paris in the latter part of 1262, where they were both active in soliciting support from figures such as Louis IX’s brother, Alphonse of Poitiers.58 Although the return of William de Valence to England in 1261 had ended the countess’s litigation against him, she was still in arbitration with Guy de Lusignan six years later, and her suit against Geoffrey and Hugh also failed to reach a speedy judgement.59 In the pursuit of Eleanor’s maternal rights, the earl and countess were partners in litigation. It was a measure of the value that the Montforts attached to Eleanor’s claims in southern France that they continued to pursue their rights there during their self-imposed exile from England in 1262.60 The couple’s French lands offered a potential safe haven from their troubles in England, should their relationship with the English king breakdown irrevocably.
Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England Page 15
