by Lisa Hilton
The archbishop of Canterbury, Eleanor’s uncle Boniface, found himself in conflict with Aymer de Lusignan, who had been appointed archbishop elect of Winchester, over the appointment of a prior to the hospital of St Thomas at Southwark. Aymer installed his own candidate while Boniface was travelling abroad, but Boniface’s official, Eustace de Lenn, excommunicated the new prior on the grounds that Boniface had to confirm the election. When the prior defied him, Eustace had him imprisoned at Maidstone, and Aymer promptly sent a group of armed men to release him. They set fire to the archepiscopal manor and kidnapped Eustace. Both Eleanor and Henry were furious at this undignified pettiness, but Eleanor saw in the situation an opportunity to strike against the Lusignans. When he learned that she had tried to interfere, Henry packed her off to Guildford in disgrace, took over control of her lands and deprived her of her right to queens-gold. Peter of Savoy was also forced to leave the court for a time. This seems an exceptionally stern reaction, but Henry’s patience had been sorely tried. As well as the embarrassment of the court case, Eleanor’s involvement with one of his most difficult subjects, his brother-in-law Simon de Montfort, had been plaguing him for years.
While the LusignanSavoy conflict can be seen at the simplest level as two competing families struggling for royal favour, De Montfort had been an ongoing source of a variety of problems for Henry since 1239. Simon de Montfort senior had been the leader of the crusade against the Albigensian heresy in the Languedoc, and though he had acquired a reputation for greed and cruelty, his high standing in England was reflected in the promotion of his son, who was given a share of the earldom of Leicester. De Montfort junior had made a scandalous secret marriage to Henry’s sister Eleanor, the widow of William Marshal. Eleanor had taken a vow of chastity in the presence of the archbishop of Canterbury after her first husband died, but De Montfort persuaded her into a clandestine ceremony at Westminster. Henry and his brother Richard were deeply angered by the offence to themselves, to the Church and to their sister’s dignity, but De Montfort was shameless. He cavalierly used the King’s name as security for loans and there was an ugly incident at the churching ceremony for Queen Eleanor after the birth of Edward when Henry, having discovered that De Montfort had borrowed 20,000 marks from Thomas of Savoy against his name, rounded on Simon and Eleanor, calling them fornicators. For a time the couple were forced into exile, but by 1247 De Montfort had been restored to favour and appointed governor of Gascony, with Eleanor’s support: it is possible that she feared Richard of Cornwall still had designs on the province, which she was determined would form part of Edward’s apanage, hence her desire to have her own man in place.
In 1249, Eleanor persuaded De Montfort to free a rebel lord, Gaston de Béarn, a cousin of hers, requesting a pardon and the restoration of his lands. De Béarn did homage to both Henry and Edward, but raised another rebellion as soon as he was released, leaving Eleanor’s strategy of appeasement looking very foolish. In 1251, another family occasion provided the arena for a public quarrel. The wedding of eleven-year-old Princess Margaret and ten-year-old Alexander 111 of Scotland, to whom she had been betrothed since the age of four, was spoiled by Henry and De Montfort falling out over money. Henry had undertaken to reimburse De Montfort for the maintenance of the royal castles in Gascony, but De Montfort’s administration was proving expensive and ineffective, and now Henry refused to pay up. Mindful of the safety of her eldest son’s inheritance, Eleanor nagged Henry into handing over the money. The next year, Henry’s mistrust of De Montfort was confirmed when his brother-in-law was put on trial to answer charges of corruption and incompetence brought by Gascon landowners and churchmen. The King was enraged when Peter of Savoy spoke up for him and the English lords cleared him of the charges.
By 1252, then, it appeared that the rather trivial dispute over the prior of St Thomas’s was only one of a series of situations in which Eleanor had put her own interests above her husband’s wishes, and in which she had not been afraid to use her powerful family, whom Henry himself had supported, against him. The apparent eight-year gap in their sexual relationship puts this incident at the climax of a dispute which had been going on for some years, and Henry’s exasperation might be seen more as a reaction to Eleanor’s presumption over a long period than a specific response to a single event.
Eleanor’s punishment lasted only two weeks. She returned to court at Clarendon fifteen days after the incident and her queens-gold was restored ten days later. She and Henry kept Christmas at Winchester, spent a few days at Westminster and travelled together to Windsor in January. Chastened, Eleanor exchanged New Year gifts with the Lusignans. Since the days of the Anglo-Saxon kings, such gifts had been part of the pageantry of English royalty, combining an impressive display of wealth and patronage with a certain mystical symbolism, and in January 1253 Eleanor gave more than sixty of them at a cost of over 200 pounds. She presented sixty-one rings, ninety-one brooches, thirty-three ornamented belts and ten gilded goblets. Geoffrey de Lusignan and William de Valence were among the recipients and Eleanor accepted a gift of plate from Aymer de Lusignan. Magnificent jewels and plate were a component of the largesse a queen was expected to dispense as a courteous demonstration of her status, but often, as was the case with the Lusignans, they carried a diplomatic message (echoed, in the aftermath of the St Thomas’s quarrel, by the kiss of peace exchanged by Aymer and Boniface at a council held at the end of January). The distribution of plate and goblets was a particularly symbolic act for a queen, recalling the Anglo-Saxon emphasis on the king’s wife as the ‘peaceweaver’ celebrating concord by acting as a cupbearer for the king and his lords.
One outcome of Eleanor’s reconciliation with Henry was her last child, Katherine, born in the November of that year. Another was that when Henry was obliged to return to Gascony to quell a rebellion in the province that spring, Eleanor was appointed regent, a position she held for ten months between August and May. As a measure of her status, she was awarded a large increase in her dower and the right to bequeath 3,000 marks beyond her own possessions in her will, while Peter of Savoy, who had also been returned to favour, was awarded 15,000 marks. During this period Eleanor attended two Parliaments, met foreign embassies, sat in council and in meetings of different sections of the Westminster administration and took a close interest in the financial arrangements for Henry’s campaign, all while either pregnant or newly delivered. In her husband’s absence, she organised her own banquet for her churching after Katherine’s birth, a reminder that as regent she was responsible not only for the execution of royal power, but for the maintenance of the splendour of the crown as demonstrated in formal state occasions.
Eleanor was also prepared to make use of her sexual relationship with Henry to get what she wanted. She had inherited the patronage of two previous queens’ institutions, the hospital of St Katherine by the Tower and the Augustinian house of Holy Trinity, which had charge of the hospital. In 1253, the prior of Holy Trinity installed his own candidate as master of the hospital, and the hospital appealed to Eleanor. She wrote to the bishop of London, Henry Wingham, a former royal chancellor, and the prior of Holy Trinity, threatened by Wingham with the consequences of Eleanor’s anger, was forced to back down. The canons of Holy Trinity complained to the Pope, who expressed his disapproval, but Eleanor grandly ignored him and in 1273 gave the hospital a new charter of endowment, providing for a master, three brothers, three sisters and twenty-four poor men, of whom six were to be scholars. Eleanor’s secret weapon was the canons’ description of her as the King’s ‘nicticorax’, or ‘night bird’, the implication being that her influence over Henry in bed might provoke him to punish Holy Trinity if the prior would not relent. Eleanor bequeathed the patronage of St Katherine’s to all future queens and dowager queens of England, and the foundation still exists today, as the Royal Foundation of St Katherine — still in the gift of the queen consort and still abiding by the rules so imperiously set down by Eleanor.
In the spring of 1254,
Eleanor was preparing for another visit to Gascony, this time with a happy prospect in mind. Edward was to be married to another Eleanor, the thirteen-year-old sister of Alfonso X, King of Castile. The background to this match stretched as far back as 1152, when Eleanor of Aquitaine had first made her duchy part of the Angevin possessions on her marriage to Henry II. When Eleanor’s daughter Leonor became Queen of Castile, her husband, Alfonso VIII, maintained that she had been promised Gascony as a dowry, and though there was no formal confirmation of this assertion, he had used it as a pretext to invade the province in 1206, when King John was being assailed by Philip Augustus’s encroachments to the north of the Angevin lands.
Now the Gascon question had flared up again as Alfonso X began to claim Aquitainian magnates, including the restless Gaston de Beam, as his vassals. When he started to proclaim himself the heir of the murdered Arthur of Brittany, Henry III even suspected that he had designs on the English throne. After Henry’s successful suppression of the 1253 rebellion support for Alfonso in Gascony declined, but a marriage between the heir of England and the Spanish princess would consolidate the resolution of the dispute and accordingly Henry began proceedings that May, which is when Eleanor of Castile’s name first appears in English records.
Eleanor of Provence’s new daughter-in-law was the child of her former rival for Henry’s hand, Joan of Ponthieu, and Ferdinand III of Castile. Ferdinand already had seven sons by his first marriage, so had hardly been short of an heir, but his mother Berengaria (the sister of Blanche of Castile and another granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine) was concerned that he would fall into immoral ways if he did not remarry, and together she and Blanche had arranged the match with Joan. Ferdinand and Joan had five children, of whom Eleanor, born in 1241, was one of three to survive beyond infancy. In February 1254, Henry III nominated the bishop of Hereford and John Maunsel to negotiate the arrangements for the wedding with Alfonso, and on the fourteenth of the month Edward’s apanage was confirmed in expectation of his marriage. It included Gascony and the county of Chester, both of which his mother had worked hard to attain for him.
Eleanor of Provence fitted out 300 ships in preparation for the voyage, but her grand departure was spoiled by a violent outbreak of jealousy between the men of Winchelsea, who were furnishing the Queen’s ship, and the shipwrights of Yarmouth, who were responsible for Edward’s. The Winchelsea men attacked their rivals, some of whom were killed, and the mast of Edward’s ship was stolen and attached to Eleanor’s. In early June, Edward and Eleanor arrived without further incident in Bordeaux, where Eleanor presented three gold cloths to the churches of St André, St Séver and St Croix. It is not certain when the two Eleanors first met, as Edward travelled on to Castile for his wedding, which almost certainly took place on 1 November at the convent of Las Huelgos, near Burgos. Edward and his bride were back in Gascony later that month, but by then Eleanor and Henry had left for Paris.
In spite of its inauspicious start, this journey was probably one of the most pleasant of Eleanor’s life. For once she and her husband were travelling unburdened by war or politics and could relax in the knowledge that Gascony was settled and Edward’s marriage accomplished. They even found time for a little sentimental tourism, visiting the abbey of Fontevrault, where Henry would request that his heart be sent for burial, and the shrine of Edmund of Abingdon, who had married them nearly twenty years before at Pontigny. They moved on to Chartres, where they visited the cathedral, an experience that greatly influenced Henry’s ambitions for Westminster Abbey, and where Eleanor was reunited not only with her mother and youngest sister Beatrice but also with Marguerite, Queen of France, and Sanchia, who had travelled from England. The agreement then forged between Henry and Louis IX, known as the treaty of Paris, might officially have been an arrangement between men, but it was brought about by five women. If the relationships between these sisters and their mother had on occasion been strained by the diplomatic entanglements of their husbands, their meeting in 1254 suggests that they were bound by a strong, even atavistic loyalty — a loyalty on which Eleanor would depend during the greatest crisis of her queenship.
Practically the treaty of Paris did not in fact change a great deal in the long term, but it was regarded by contemporaries as a breakthrough in Anglo-French relations. Henry was to pay homage for his remaining French possessions and renounce his claims to Anjou, Poitou, Maine and Touraine in return for the grant of Gascony as a fief, lands in Cahors, Limoges and the Périgueux and funds for 500 knights for two years. The unofficial agenda, which may well have been managed by the Provençal women, included the marriage of Eleanor’s daughter Beatrice to John, Duke of Brittany, agreements of financial and diplomatic aid from France and promises to protect Eleanor’s interests against the Lusignans who, to the English Queen’s irritation, were very much in the ascendant after the Gascon campaign, where their provision of Poitevin knights through local affinities had greatly aided Henry.
After the success in France Eleanor turned to another project close to her heart: the establishment of her second son, Edmund, as king of Sicily. At this time, Sicily comprised not only the eponymous island but also a large tranche of southern Italy, known together as the Regno. The plan, or ‘the business of Sicily’, as contemporaries called it, had been in train for some time, since the death of the Emperor Frederick II in 1250. Frederick had controlled the Regno, but when he was succeeded by his son Conrad, the Pope decided to install his own candidate. Edmund was suggested, along with his uncle by marriage Charles of Anjou. In 1254, Henry accepted the proposal and the Pope conveyed his formal agreement, followed by a confirmation of the grant of Regno in May. Again, the hand of the Savoyards can be seen in what has been mooted as the first stage in the creation of a Mediterranean empire. The papal chaplain who acted as a go-between for Henry and the papal nuncio, John d’Ambléou, was a Savoyard close to Peter of Savoy, and Eleanor’s uncles Peter, Philip and Thomas were among the nine proctors appointed to manage Edmund’s succession. Even the Pope had Savoyard connections — his niece, Beatrice di Fieschi, was married to Thomas of Savoy However, Eleanor’s hopes were thwarted when Conrad died just a week after the confirmation and the Regno was seized by Manfred, Emperor Frederick’s illegitimate son. In December, Pope Innocent also died, and it appeared that the only means of acquiring Sicily for Edmund would be a military campaign. Both Eleanor and the new Pope, Alexander IV, pushed for armed intervention, but the pontiff insisted that any campaign would have to be financed by Henry. To the great resentment of the English clergy, he ordered a diversion of the crusading tax from the English Church for five years to raise funds. In 1255, Edmund was invested as King of Sicily at Westminster, looking somewhat foolish in traditional Sicilian dress, but his prospects of success appeared even more remote when Thomas of Savoy failed to put down a rebellion in Turin and was taken prisoner by his own subjects.
It is quite possible that the Savoyards, whose complex trans-European involvements always geared towards the bigger picture, had never seriously intended a war to be fought on Edmund’s behalf, and had supported the scheme merely to gain leverage with the Holy See to extract concessions in matters with which they were more closely concerned. Now the priority was raising the ransom for Thomas’s release, but Eleanor’s funds had been exhausted by the pursuit of Sicily, and Gascony had eaten too much crown revenue. To both help her uncle and keep her ambitions for Edmund alive, she was obliged to borrow. She did so with the help of her clothes merchant, William, one of a group of businessmen who arranged to lend Eleanor, Henry and Edward a total of 14,500 marks against the religious foundations of Cirencester, Chertsey, Abingdon, Hyde and Pershore, to be raised through letters of obligation issued in the names of Eleanor and Peter of Savoy.
Dear though it was to Eleanor, the ‘business of Sicily’ and the costs it incurred were seen as another instance of the Queen and her foreign relatives attempting to enrich themselves at the expense of the English people. Neither Henry nor Eleanor had taken ac
count of the volatile atmosphere in their kingdom, and it has been suggested that they saw diplomacy as simply a family matter (which in fact it was) and England as little more than a piggy-bank to dip into to fund their schemes. But the mood in England in the mid-thirteenth century was angrier and more restless than they realised. In addition to the resentment over the hated crusading tax, the clergy were weary of Henry’s interference in ecclesiastical elections and courts and of his holding sees open to profit from their revenues. The combination of the costs of Gascony and the papal commitment in Sicily led the King to push his sheriffs to extortionate measures in the shires, which affected smaller landowners badly. Their disgruntlement was compounded by Henry’s favouritism towards his own relatives — Richard of Cornwall, Peter of Savoy and the Lusignans were, for example, exempt from any writs in Chancery, which effectively meant that there was no recourse against them if they chose not to honour any debts. Eleanor’s management of her finances was also making her unpopular.
