Authors: Lisa Hilton
This degree of ruthless ambition for her son is an unattractive aspect of Eleanor’s character, but her relationships with her children also provide an insight into a gentler facet of her nature, one that connected her emotionally with both Henry and her daughter-in-law Eleanor of Castile. Medieval motherhood for women of her class has proved a vexed issue for scholars, notably in the case of Eleanor of Aquitaine, but Eleanor of Provence’s aspirations for and interest in her children was not confined to their roles in adulthood; she also exhibited a relatively involved concern for them as infants. For example, from July 1252 to July 1253, she spent thirty weeks at Windsor with her children which, given her demanding itinerary, suggests a genuine commitment to devoting time to them.
Her accounts illustrate her participation in her children’s day-to-day lives, showing orders for gowns for Beatrice, a silk tabard for Edward, tunics and robes for both boys. And, like any modern mother, Eleanor
found herself constantly buying shoes. An order of hawking gloves for herself and Beatrice suggests that she took her children hunting with her when they were old enough. Introducing them to activities appropriate to their status was a significant part of their education, as was ensuring that they were dressed according to the pageantry expected of the royal family on formal occasions. At Margaret’s wedding, the mother of the bride is depicted in silk robes trimmed with gold and an ermine cloak, while the twelve-year-old Prince Edward wears a gold tabard decorated with the royal leopards of England. Eleanor also initiated her children into the ritual of jewel-giving, providing them with gifts to present graciously to their attendants. In 1253, Beatrice and Edward were supplied with brooches to give to their respective nurses, Lady Agnes and Lady Alice, and to their cousin Edmund, Sanchia’s son.
When Edward fell ill on a visit to the monastery of Beaulieu in 1246, Eleanor insisted on remaining with him for the three weeks it took him to recover, in flagrant contravention of the house’s male-only rule. Although Edward by now had his own household, Eleanor sent for three of her own doctors to attend him and paid for his medicines herself. She was obviously displeased with the monks’ response to her anxieties, because the prior and cellarer of Beaulieu were dismissed once Edward was well again.
There is no more touching illustration of the speciousness of the argument that royal mothers’ concern for their children was predominantly a matter of political expediency than the reaction of Eleanor and Henry to the death of their youngest child, Katherine, in 1257. Katherine had suffered from some form of disability since birth — Matthew Paris cruelly describes her as
‘muta et inutilis’
— and during her last illness her parents were desperately worried. Eager for news of her condition, Henry presented a messenger from his wife with a robe and had a silver statue of Katherine placed on St Edward’s shrine. When she died, both Henry and Eleanor were reported as being ill with grief. They built her a beautiful tomb at Westminster and engaged a chaplain to say a daily Mass for her soul, a sincere if conventional gesture of mourning, but their real feelings were expressed more poignantly in the presents they made to the nurses who had tended to little Katherine on her deathbed. Eleanor’s empathy with other mothers is shown in a late letter to Edward, after he had become King, on behalf of Margaret de Nevile, the mother of a royal ward. ‘We pray you, sweetest son, that you may command and pray the aforesaid Margaret de Weyland, that she will suffer that the mother may have the solace of her child after her desire,’ she wrote. ‘I know well the longing
of a mother to see a child from whom she has long been parted.’
Eleanor was close to both her elder daughters, Margaret and Beatrice. When, in 1251, Margaret, aged eleven, had been married to Alexander III of Scotland, the tension between the two countries made visiting difficult. In 1252 Henry asked that Margaret might be permitted to come to the English court, but his request was denied, so in 1255 Eleanor sent an envoy, Reginald of Bath, to investigate her daughter’s situation and report back. Reginald was allegedly poisoned by the Scots after advising that Margaret was miserable, and Eleanor and Henry immediately set off for Scotland, accompanied by troops. Margaret and Eleanor were able to spend time together at Wark in Northumberland, and the next year she and her husband came to London and Woodstock. In 1260, Margaret was at Windsor, with Eleanor in attendance, for the birth of a grandchild. Eleanor was considerate towards Margaret’s servants in Scotland, Matilda Cantilupe and Geoffrey de Langley, who received New Year gifts of dishes and a goblet.
Beatrice, as Duchess of Brittany, was even further away than Margaret, but evidently trusted her mother: she sent some of her children to live with Eleanor while she was away on crusade with her husband. Eleanor had to endure the grief of outliving both her surviving daughters, who died within a month of one another in 1275. Beatrice’s request to be buried in the Franciscan convent in London, a place Eleanor favoured and where her own heart was placed after her death, suggests that they enjoyed a religious connection which may have given Eleanor some consolation. A surviving book of hours, probably presented to Beatrice by Eleanor on her marriage, also points to a spiritual affinity. Edmund’s first wife, Aveline, too, died early, after giving birth to twins in 1274.
Eleanor took comfort in her closeness to her brood of grandchildren after the loss of her daughters. Edward and Eleanor had fourteen children in total, though many of them died young. After the demise in 1272 of Richard of Cornwall, who had been left
in loco parentis
while they were away on crusade, their daughter Eleanor and son Henry lived with their grandmother, and thereafter Eleanor continued to stay with her for long visits when she was not travelling with her father and mother. Henry’s death in the sad year of 1274 was also attended by Eleanor of Provence, and, as John Carmi Parsons remarks, ‘it was perhaps better that the dying boy … was supported by the grandmother he knew intimately, not the mother he had met for the first time in his memory only some ten weeks earlier’.
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Eleanor founded a Dominican priory at Guildford in Henry’s memory.
The two Eleanors were united in their concerns for the children’s welfare and, one suspects, in deploring the English climate: a letter from the elder to the younger in 1290 warns of the dangers of a long visit to the north. They went on a pilgrimage together to St Albans in 1257, attended the consecration of Salisbury Cathedral in 1258 and held court together at Mortlake in 1259. The most notable instance of the two women working together was their successful prevention of an early marriage for Edward’s eldest daughter. Both women had been married in their early teens, and their collaboration here suggests they had discussed their experiences intimately. Perhaps Eleanor of Provence took pains to avoid causing the kind of difficulties mothers-in-law could create after hearing about the experiences of her sister Marguerite of France with the overbearing Blanche of Castile. And for her part, Eleanor of Castile was a support to her mother-in-law when she herself became Queen in 1272.
When Henry III died at Westminster that November, Eleanor of Provence found herself suddenly isolated. Sanchia had died in 1261, Peter of Savoy in 1268, her mother and Boniface were also dead and all her children were abroad. Though Prince Edward’s succession passed uncontested, the grievances of the past still lingered. The King had passed away to the sounds of riots outside his palace. He was buried on 20 November, after which Eleanor travelled to Windsor to join her grandchildren Eleanor, Henry and John of Brittany. Edward and the new Queen joined her there when they returned to England in December.
For the next decade, Eleanor lived mainly on her dower properties at Guildford, Marlborough and Ludgershall, though she also spent time at Clarendon, Westminster and Windsor. By the mid-1280s, now in her early sixties, she was considering a retreat to the cloister. Curiously, for one who had had such a cold and troubled relationship with the country of which she had been queen for nearly forty years, Eleanor chose to spend her last years in England. Her choice of retreat was Amesbury, a daughter house of Fontevrault, though Fontevrault itself would have seemed a more obvious destination. Perhaps Eleanor’s determination to die in England was a gesture of reconciliation.
Like Berengaria of Navarre, Eleanor changed her title when she entered the convent, styling herself ‘a humble nun of the order of Fontevrault of the convent of Amesbury’, but typically, she did not choose to retire altogether humbly. Fifty-seven oaks were used in making the improvements to Amesbury she considered essential for her arrival, and she never became a fully professed nun, choosing to retain both her wealth and a degree of influence in the outside world. Although she entered
the monastery in July 1286, she was still exchanging letters with her daughter-in-law that year about the murage rights of Southampton, which had been passed on in dower to Eleanor of Castile. She also maintained a correspondence with Edward and kept a sharp eye on her lands and business. The fact that she still had one foot firmly planted in the world gave rise to a degree of mockery, yet it was her removal to Amesbury that led to the only known conflict with Eleanor of Castile. Beatrice’s daughter Eleanor of Brittany took the veil there in March 1285, eventually rising to become abbess of Fontevrault itself, and while her vocation may well have been genuine, this was not the case with Edward’s little daughter Mary, who was enclosed at Amesbury at the age of six in August the same year. Eleanor of Castile objected to the move, probably because Mary was too young to know her own mind, but Eleanor was selfishly bent upon keeping her granddaughter with her. (Mary showed that her vocation was not all it might have been when, after her grandmother’s death, she took to visiting her father’s court and developed a taste for extravagant gambling. There were also slanderous rumours of a liaison with the Earl of Surrey, her nephew by marriage.)
Eleanor of Provence died at Amesbury on 24 June 1291, and was buried there on 8 September with Edward, Edmund and a large gathering of magnates and clergy in attendance.
The Westminster Chronicle
described her as
‘Generosa et religiosa virago’
, a rare accolade for a woman. Eleanor had not been popular, but she was respected. Her informal role in government had been essential during the Montfort revolution and her position had been affirmed internationally even as De Montfort was issuing writs in Henry’s name, as a powerful counter-influence to the depleted command of her imprisoned husband and son. Eleanor’s resourcefulness, intellligence and above all her conviction of her own authority emphasised the implicit power of English queenship. After the uneven career of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the almost total lack of influence of Berengaria of Navarre and Isabelle of Angoulême, Eleanor of Provence re-established the role of consort on its great Anglo-Norman model. Her financial acuity did not make her lovable, but the thousands of pounds she disbursed in ‘secret gifts and private alms’
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had created a discreet diplomatic network on which she drew in crisis. Her snobbery and lack of sympathy for her husband’s magnates contributed directly to a pivotal struggle for power between lords and crown, but it was her perspicacity and energy that also helped to solve it. At the end of her life, despite its many defeats and disappointments, Eleanor had made her peace with the English. The differences between the posthumous reputations of Eleanor and her
daughter-in-law exemplify the way in which monarchs could manipulate posterity, to the extent that Eleanor of Castile is the better remembered of the two. Yet it was the first of three southern princesses who was the greater English queen.
CHAPTER 9
ELEANOR OF CASTILE
‘Wise, religious, fruitful, meek?’
O
f all England’s medieval queens, Eleanor of Castile is celebrated more for her death than for her life. The twelve ‘Eleanor crosses’, three of which survive, built by Edward I to commemorate the staging posts of her body’s last journey from Lincoln to Westminster for burial have enshrined her image as a beloved wife and devoted consort. As time passed, Eleanor’s reputation became bound up with the crosses themselves: they represent her as ‘pillar of all England’, whose death was ‘tearfully mourned’.
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Their magnificence, though, is as much a testament to Edward’s conception of the dignity of his kingship than to Eleanor’s own qualities. Her contemporaries had a more ambivalent attitude to their Spanish queen, who was by no means as revered in life as she became in death. Her reinvention through the propaganda of her husband’s memorials provides an interesting example of the way in which commemoration, traditionally a responsibility of royal women, could be effectively manipulated into an immortalisation of majesty.
Until the outbreak of the civil wars of the 1260s, Eleanor occupies a modest place in the chronicles. After her marriage in 1254, she appears mainly in relation to her mother-in-law’s activities, as when Eleanor of Provence appointed her own clerk John de Loundres, to set up the Princess’s wardrobe in 1255, or at New Year 1259, when she was provided with two sapphire rings to present as a gift to a knight of Gaston de Beam’s household at Mortlake. It is possible that she crossed to Brittany for the marriage of her sister-in-law Beatrice in 1260, in which case she would have been reunited with her mother, Jeanne, and brother Ferdinand; she was certainly in Aquitaine with her husband from 1260 to 1262, returning to England in June.
During the crisis of 1263, Eleanor of Castile, like Eleanor of Provence, drew on her maternal inheritance to assist her imprisoned husband. She
summoned archers from Ponthieu for the garrison at Windsor, where she remained until after the defeat at Lewes. Suspected by Simon de Montfort of trying to raise mercenary troops in Castile, she was obliged on 17 June, along with her first child, Katherine, to rejoin King Henry’s household. The extent to which she was marginalised at this time can be seen in the fact that with Eleanor of Provence in France, Edward imprisoned and the King on forced progress with De Montfort, she was effectively abandoned. When Katherine died that September Eleanor, isolated and grieving, was forced to borrow forty pounds for her expenses from Hugh Despenser. Perhaps it is not going too far to suggest that this period, in which Eleanor herself is barely more than a footnote to broader events, carries the key to some aspects of her future character. Acquisitiveness can be a defence against insecurity, a way of cheating fortune, and Eleanor proved herself determined never again to experience the humiliating poverty and frustrating ineffectuality that had threatened to overturn the status on which her sense of self had been constructed for a decade.