Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (3 page)

John’s wife and the younger Eleanor’s mother, Isabella of Angoulême, was none other than the daughter and heiress of Adomar, Count of Angoulême, the lord of a strategically important territory in south-western France, situated between Poitou and Gascony.
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Eleanor’s maternal grandmother, Alice de Courtenay, was the daughter of the French lord of Montargis and Châteaurenard, and a cousin of Philip Augustus. Through her Courtenay connections, Isabella also enjoyed kinship with the kings of Jerusalem, and was a half-sister to Peter, Count of Joigny, the child of one of her mother’s earlier marriages.
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Isabella’s marriage to John in August 1200 accorded well with Angevin interests south of the River Loire, promising increased stability across the border regions of Poitou and Gascony. In marrying Isabella, John also decisively stepped in to prevent her union with another powerful Poitevin neighbour, Hugh (IX) de Lusignan, Lord of Lusignan and Count of La Marche, a union that threatened John’s dominance within Aquitaine.
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It was unfortunate, to say the least, for John that the offence he caused Hugh (IX) led to this count’s rebellion and an appeal to Philip Augustus’s court. These events, in their turn, resulted in the French king declaring John’s continental territories forfeit, thereby helping to trigger the ultimately successful Capetian invasion of Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Touraine, along with a significant slice of Poitou.
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Isabella of Angoulême did not enjoy anything like the level of personal wealth or political influence enjoyed by some of her twelfth-century predecessors as queens of England.
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In short, John deliberately denied his queen consort access to material resources that might have allowed her sufficient independence to act as a patron and thereby make a significant mark on court politics, possibly by forging her own faction.
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Isabella was unable to avail herself of the full revenues from her inheritance or her dower (those lands set aside to provide for her in the event of her husband’s death) during John’s lifetime. It is also probable that she did not receive, as Eleanor of Aquitaine had done, any income from Queen’s Gold, a surcharge on voluntary offerings, Jewish amercements and sums owed by moneyers that was traditionally levied by the crown.
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In this way, John ensured that his queen remained dependent upon his continued generosity and goodwill for her day-to-day maintenance. Furthermore, the presence of royal mistresses and, until her marriage to the Earl of Essex in 1214, of Isabella of Gloucester, John’s former wife, at royal residences in the south and south west of England (Winchester, Sherborne and Bristol) potentially posed a more direct threat to Isabella of Angoulême’s personal relationship with her husband.
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In spite of this, though, John and Isabella of Angoulême remained on sufficiently intimate terms for this Isabella to give birth to five surviving children between 1207 and 1215, and for the king and one of his most trusted aides, Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, to bestow occasional gifts upon the queen as her household moved from one royal residence to another.
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Fourteen years after their marriage, John still spent time in his wife’s company, especially when it was politic to do so. In 1214, John used Isabella’s position as countess of Angoulême to his advantage in his dealings with the Poitevin nobles, when she accompanied him overseas.
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During this trip the couple’s eldest daughter, Joan, was betrothed to Hugh, the eldest son and namesake of the lord of Lusignan and count of La Marche to whom Isabella had previously been betrothed before her marriage to John.
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Later that year, after the king and queen’s return to England and a brief sojourn together at Exeter, John placed Isabella under the armed protection of one of his most trusted servants, Terric the Teuton. This was probably for the queen’s personal safety as the political situation in England deteriorated, rather than for more sinister reasons.
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In November 1214, Terric, the constable of the royal castle at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, escorted the queen when she visited Berkhamsted, a castle earmarked as part of Isabella’s future dower.
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When, during the following month, the king visited the great fortress at Corfe in Dorset, he instructed Terric to convey the ‘lady queen’ to Gloucester Castle. Once at Gloucester, Isabella was installed in the chamber where, John recalled with a surprising eye for fatherly detail, their eldest daughter, Joan, had been nursed.
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During the early months of 1215, under Terric’s watchful supervision, the queen and her household visited Berkhamsted again and later Winchester in Hampshire, where she enjoyed the company of her eldest son, Henry.
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Mother and son then travelled on together to Marlborough Castle in Wiltshire in May 1215.
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With the resumption of civil war between the king and his rebel barons later that summer, when the king refused to be bound by the terms of Magna Carta, Isabella and Henry moved, yet again, on John’s orders so that they might enjoy the greater protection offered by Corfe.
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It was against this immediate political backdrop that Isabella of Angoulême gave birth to Eleanor, her third daughter to survive infancy. The chroniclers’ failure to note Eleanor’s entry into the world was also, in part, a reflection of the patriarchal values to which the noble landholding elite of thirteenth-century England subscribed. These values were firmly underpinned by church teachings on gender roles and scientific beliefs about gender difference inherited from the ancient world. Women were regarded as weak and irrational creatures, who were inferior to men, and who therefore ought to be subject to male authority.
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The male-dominated military society into which Eleanor was born favoured patrilineal primogeniture, the descent of lands through the eldest male child.
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Sons were typically preferred to daughters as a means of securing the succession, stabilizing the future of the bloodline and exercising effective lordship.
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Thirteenth-century chroniclers noted the births in 1207 and 1209 of Henry, the heir to the throne, and of Richard, King John’s younger son, as well as that in 1210 of the royal couple’s eldest daughter, Joan, but not apparently those of the younger Isabella or Eleanor.
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In order to establish the dates of birth of John’s youngest daughters, we are reduced to conjecture. If the statement of the St Albans chronicler, Roger of Wendover, is accurate and Isabella was twenty-one at the time of her marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, in 1235, then she was probably born in 1214.
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Other, circumstantial evidence indicates that 1214 was, indeed, the year of Isabella’s birth. Isabella was not a name that had previously been used within the Angevin ruling dynasty. In naming his second daughter Isabella, John therefore introduced a new woman’s name into his lineage. If, as seems likely, the younger Isabella was born when her parents were in Poitou, then this might explain their decision to name her after the queen, who was, after all, heiress to the county of Angoulême. It might be seen, in part, as a move that was designed to curry favour with her mother’s vassals by acknowledging the older Isabella’s presence on the Poitevin expedition and thereby reminding them of her position as their liege lady.

If the younger Isabella was born in 1214, presumably Eleanor as her younger sister was born in 1215 or perhaps 1216.
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The practice among the nobility of handing over babies to wet nurses soon after birth allowed noblewomen to recover their fertility relatively swiftly, paving the way for multiple pregnancies in quick succession.
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Perhaps it was when the queen was in residence at Winchester, the location of Henry III’s birth, during the early months of 1215 that she had her lying-in and delivery. An alternative location for Eleanor’s birth is Marlborough. Isabella of Angoulême’s need for larger clothes, or for new robes for the celebration of her churching after the birth, possibly lay behind a gift of cloth and furs that John bestowed upon his wife there in August that year.
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In the later Middle Ages, when more detailed records for lying-in survive, it was customary for an English queen consort to withdraw into her birthing chambers one month before the baby was due. She remained within them for a further six weeks after the birth until she attended church for her purification. It is not inconceivable that the English royal ordinances of the fifteenth century had their roots in much longer established ceremonies and practices, some of which were observed in Isabella’s day.
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The ceremony that attended the churching at Westminster Abbey in early August 1239 of Isabella’s daughter-in-law and successor as queen consort in England, Eleanor of Provence, took place around six weeks after the birth of her eldest son, Edward, and was noted by the chronicler Matthew Paris.
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Isabella of Angoulême’s residence in the south and west of England throughout 1215 and 1216 made perfect political as well as practical sense. Winchester was not only home to a royal castle, but was also the episcopal seat of des Roches, her husband’s ally and the man in whose charge Henry, Isabella and John’s eldest son, was placed in 1211–12.
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Furthermore, Winchester possessed strong associations with queenship that might have stood the crown in good stead at this difficult time; it had formed part of the traditional dower lands assigned to widowed queens consort since Anglo-Saxon times.
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It might well have been hoped that the birth of a royal daughter there would strengthen the resolve of the king’s subjects to remain loyal to the crown. Yet such associations were not enough to prevent this city from falling, during the summer of 1216, to the forces of Louis, the son of the king of France who had been invited to take the English throne by the rebels.
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For his part, John also enjoyed strong personal connections with the west and south west through his earlier marriage to Isabella of Gloucester. In fact, the king contrived to ensure that he retained possession of Bristol, with its strong trading links to Ireland and the Continent, after his first wife’s remarriage in 1214.
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By the summer of 1216, Terric, the queen and possibly the infant Eleanor were in residence at Bristol, apparently ready, should the need arise, to flee abroad.
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King John’s death at Newark during the night of 18 to 19 October 1216 deprived Isabella of Angoulême of a husband and her children of their father.
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It was followed, in 1217, by Isabella’s own departure to Angoulême, ostensibly to escort her eldest daughter, Joan, to her bridegroom, Hugh (X) de Lusignan.
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Although one of the first acts of Henry III’s minority government on 1 November 1216 had been to award Isabella seisin of her dower in Devon, Essex, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Rutland and Wiltshire,
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the new queen dowager rapidly found herself excluded from the regency council and from effective political influence within her son’s kingdom. Henry III’s coronation at Gloucester on 28 October 1216 was celebrated under the direction of the papal legate, Guala, a legacy of John’s submission to Innocent III at the end of the Interdict, and under the watchful eyes of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, into whose care John had entrusted his son.
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John’s will had not anticipated that Isabella might play a role in English government and in securing their children’s inheritances after his death, hence her exclusion from the list of his thirteen executors.
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Marginalized from English political life in marriage and in widowhood, it is perhaps unsurprising that Isabella decided to return to her inheritance in the south of France and preside over her own comital court at Angoulême. Viewed through the eyes of modern scholars, however, she has been criticized for taking ‘the earliest possible opportunity to abandon four of the five children [including the baby Eleanor] that she had borne to John’.
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It is, however, possible to place more of the blame, if indeed that is what it should be called, at the door of the regency council. It was only with the Treaty of Lambeth in September 1217 that the civil war was concluded in England and Louis agreed to leave the realm.
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To put it simply, the regency council under William Marshal might well have feared the consequences of Isabella’s influence over her young children. Isabella’s effective exclusion from court politics during John’s reign meant that she was an untried, untested and therefore a potentially damaging force on the English political stage at a time when her son’s supporters were fighting for the very survival of his crown. She was also possibly regarded as a divisive figure due to popular perceptions of her relationship with her late husband; the St Albans chronicler, Roger of Wendover, for example, blamed the loss of Normandy, at least in part, upon John’s infatuation with Isabella.
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While Isabella’s possession of her dower meant that those lands remained in loyalist hands during the final stages of the war, it also meant that significant resources were now in the hands of the queen dowager, resources which might at last allow her to forge her own, possibly destabilizing, faction at the Henrician court. Although Isabella had apparently danced to John’s tune during their marriage, within that marriage John had allowed and expected Isabella to play at least a supervisory role in their children’s upbringings in accordance with the social conventions of their day.
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Isabella certainly spent time in the company of her older children, especially during their early childhoods and the civil war that preceded John’s death. Richard, for example, accompanied his mother and elder sister to Poitou in 1214.
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The queen continued to take an interest in Henry’s and Richard’s affairs after they were placed in the separate charges of des Roches and Peter de Maulay in 1211–12 and in 1215 respectively.
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