3

The English Side of the Equation

But what about the English side of the equation? What were the personalities and political currents which faced Eleanor on her marriage?

The picture must naturally start at the top, with Henry III. In 1255, when Eleanor was first to meet him, he was forty-eight years old and had been king for nearly forty years, having acceded to the throne in 1216 at the age of just nine, on the death of his father, King John.¹

As a king, Henry was in almost all respects highly unsatisfactory. The political story which follows will illustrate why without need for much further explanation. However, he had two limited plus sides: he was a distinguished patron of the Church and of the arts, and he had a talent for showmanship. His taste for and appreciation of beauty and his profound piety induced him to be largely responsible for the magnificent building of Westminster Abbey. He also oversaw extensive redecorations in most of the southern royal palaces, including the Tower of London, which included paintings and carvings of the very highest quality. He adored metal and jewel work, pictures and sculpture; moreover, he had both good taste and an ability to communicate his vision of how things should be done to the many workmen who sought and gained his patronage.²

As for his ‘set pieces’ of monarchical showmanship, these were plainly masterpieces; even the cynical chronicler Matthew Paris, who writes only to find fault, admired them. One which had recently taken place at the time of Edward and Eleanor’s marriage was the marriage of Edward’s sister Margaret to Alexander of Scotland in 1251, and a consideration of this conveys not just a sense of Henry’s talent in this department but also something of the atmosphere of the English court. The focus on the great event was plainly considerable. In his determination to produce a magnificent and memorable display, there are a good 130 orders evidenced in the administrative records, scattered over a period of months prior to the wedding. These come from the king directly, and cover all manner of clothes, gifts, catering and decoration. So we can see that the king and queen wore heavy silk robes furred with ermine, while twelve-year-old Edward and his companions went through at least three costume changes over the day. The edited highlights are Edward’s violet twilled-silk tabard embroidered with three gold leopards front and back and trimmed with miniver (squirrel belly), another made of cloth of gold, again twilled with miniver, and a third with a particoloured tunic of chequered cloth of gold and plain coloured cloth, to be worn with a brightly striped shirt underneath. One can only imagine that Edward had to be forcibly inserted into these garments by his companions, Ebulo de Montibus and Nicholas de Molis. The young Scottish king was presented with a sword with a silk-covered scabbard and a decorated silver pommel and silver gilt spurs. Margaret departed to her marital home bearing, aside from her own trousseau of clothes, ten cloths of gold for religious offerings, a costly bed, a number of ornate saddles and over £300 worth of jewellery, including thirty-five brooches and 173 rings. The feast featured (among many other items) salted fallow and fresh roe deer, a multitude of hams, 10,000 haddock and 500 conger eels plus over 12,000 gallons of wine. All in all, very little expense was spared to give the impression that a great and powerful king was in charge of events; but the records show the reality – an aesthete more concerned with catering than politics.

On Eleanor’s arrival, another of these set pieces was put in place – a well-conceived and well-executed show to emphasise the importance of the royal wedding and, through this, the status of the royal family. In this way Henry III was perhaps a forerunner of Henry VIII, with his keen eye for the well-staged and publicised shows of kingship and the well-thought-out dynastic painting. In the ‘keeping up with the Capets’ aspect of kingship he was therefore not without talents.³

In almost all other key respects, however, Henry was spectacularly untalented. He had none of the Norman or Angevin military talent. While he was apparently tutored in the military arts by distinguished knights, the skills seem never to have taken with him. Matthew Paris, mocking his crusading ambitions, described him as a ‘petty king, untaught in military discipline, who has never galloped a horse in battle, wielded a sword and brandished a spear’. His one major military expedition was into Poitou in 1242, where he attempted to reclaim some of the territory which Louis IX had been steadily gaining there. In sole command of the campaign for the only time in his life, he advanced northwards along the Charente from Saintes – neglecting the obvious precaution of taking the fortified castle of Taillebourg which lay en route. While King Louis may well have been the least militarily talented member of his own family, he knew better than this. He promptly proceeded to Taillebourg, cutting Henry off from his base and coming very close to capturing him. Henry was forced to take advantage of a brief truce to flee back to Saintes – leaving Louis to turn the English retreat into a costly rout. The result? An expensive five-year truce and the loss of Poitou. At home, his lack of military skills would later help to prompt the resurgence of problems in Wales at a time when the lack of clear succession to the leadership of Wales should have enabled the English king to make hay.⁴

Henry also appears to have been almost totally devoid of political sense. The first and key charge against him is his playing of favourites. Throughout his majority rule he tended to seize on a person or group and elevate them to undue prominence, while acting with ill grace or ingratitude to other key players on the political scene. As will be examined in more detail below, this tendency was politically disastrous. His choice of non-English favourites in particular was inflammatory, because it eroded the political status of powerful families with powerful interests to defend, and it was particularly ill timed as the loss of the Plantagenet foreign empire, and with it the nobility’s related landholdings in those areas, created a more inward-looking, nationalistic society in England.

So Henry’s favouritism created hostility in the powerful nobles whose support he needed. His lavish gifts to his favourites exacerbated that hostility, and they also materially damaged his own position by impoverishing the Crown and limiting his ability to offer patronage elsewhere or to deal with crises as they arose. Ultimately, much of Eleanor’s life’s work became to make good some of the damage wrought in this respect by her father-in-law.

If further drawbacks to kingship were needed, Henry also blatantly lacked any interest in the legal and administrative work which Henry I and Henry II – and also to a certain extent his father, John – had established in English minds as the duty of the king to the country. Henry had no interest whatsoever in the workings of the system of justice in the country or in the abuses which caused dissatisfaction among key sections of the population. He was not even prepared to buy popularity by the easy means of his presence – he travelled as little throughout his dominions as he could, basing his court at a small nucleus of favourite palaces, largely southern, for the majority of his time. Here he would stay for weeks at a stretch, attending to the ceremonial and religious aspects of kingship and moving only when an extraordinary reason demanded it.⁵

Finally, although plainly not without personal charm, he lacked the politician’s instinct for the correct use of charm, and even more importantly the ability to select and use people of talent. He was also apparently (in the Angevin way) prone to fits of temper, but never learnt to use them to impress, as Henry II had and Edward would. Henry appears to have had a tendency to lose his temper to the point of irrationality, generally with someone to whom he owed gratitude or a favour, and this tendency showed him to be no politician. Worse, it alienated people he needed – usually just at the point when he needed them most.⁶

Some excuses for Henry can be found. He had no model of kingship to follow in his early years; King John died when Henry was only nine years old and had been much occupied with political and military crises in his latter years, sending his wife and children away from him to safety. Unlike Louis IX, who also lost his father young, Henry had no great regent in his mother. Louis, of course, was sheltered and trained by the redoubtable Blanche of Castile. In England, Henry had no parent at all. In the wake of John’s death, Henry’s mother, Isabella, countess of the politically important – but vulnerable – Angoulême, left England and her children and returned in 1218 to her territories. There she contracted a territorially impeccable marriage with Hugh de Lusignan, the head of the most dangerous set of her neighbours. The Lusignan approach will become apparent, but by way of introduction they had on more than one occasion tried to kidnap Eleanor of Aquitaine, their nominal overlord. On one occasion they merely killed the Earl of Salisbury and took the young William Marshal hostage. At a later date they succeeded in kidnapping Eleanor herself and took the county of La Marche as the price of her release. Following her second marriage in 1220, Isabella settled down to raise a further, large, family – which was to prove more than a little significant in the decade after Eleanor arrived in England.⁷

All in all, however, when one looks at the English court under Henry, he appears as one of the people least naturally gifted in the skills required of a king. Even before Edward emerged as king in waiting, there were quite a number of other people who might have discharged Henry’s job with more credit.

One of them was his own wife, Eleanor of Provence. Despite her name, her most significant familial heritage was from Savoy; her mother, Beatrice, came from the sizeable and talented ruling family of that region. At the time of his marriage in 1237 Henry may not quite have appreciated what he was getting, given that Eleanor was only twelve. In time she herself proved quite a formidable political operator, and her family still more so. For the first few years of the marriage Eleanor’s role was conventional: she was, it seems clear from the descriptions, beautiful, which appealed to Henry’s aesthetic sensibilities. Being so much younger than Henry she was initially inclined to idealise him, which soothed him. She shared with him a love of arts and romance – and he showered her with presents and remodelled apartments for her in at least nine royal residences. One of his rare forays outside his usual round of castles was a trip early in their marriage to Glastonbury so she might see the site celebrated in Arthurian romances.⁸

Eleanor also fulfilled her primary function: Edward was born on 17 or 18 June 1239, when she was about sixteen years old, and he was followed a year later by Margaret, with Beatrice and Edmund following in 1243 and 1245 respectively. So, for the early years of her marriage she was simply the beautiful, adored young queen and mother of a growing family, and her relationship with Henry seems to have been idyllic. Bolstered by her popularity, Henry adopted her relatives (known as the Savoyards) as his first significant group of foreign favourites and established them in a variety of positions of power. But Eleanor had an eye to her financial affairs and to power, too, and by the middle of the decade she had begun to flex her political muscles, ably advised by a her politically acute relatives, sometimes in opposition to her husband. Their main battleground, the question of relatives, will be examined in more detail later in the chapter, but there is certainly evidence that by the early 1250s Henry had begun to find some of Eleanor’s assertions of her rights a little wearing. In particular, in early 1252 she even forced him into litigation over a dispute regarding the right to present a clergyman to a living, and had the unforgivable cheek of being found to be in the right. The relationship between Henry and Eleanor in fact deteriorated to the extent that, later in 1252, just a couple of years before the marriage of Edward and Eleanor, Eleanor of Provence was actually banished from court by her husband and her finances frozen.

Although the banishment lasted only a couple of weeks and the couple reconciled after this, producing one more child (a daughter Katherine), and despite the fact that she was entrusted by Henry with the regency in early 1254, the adoration of Eleanor which observers marked in her early years as queen seems to have gone by this stage. Whether the rift was ever fully mended may be open to doubt. There were almost certainly no more children after Katherine, although Eleanor’s fertility was proved; she was only just approaching her thirties at this time and there were no lengthy enforced separations for some years after this. As both Henry’s mother and Eleanor of Castile herself demonstrate, it was quite usual for a woman in a flourishing marriage to keep producing children well into her forties – Henry’s mother had ten children by Hugh de Lusignan after her thirty-third birthday, and Eleanor of Castile was bearing children up to her mid-forties. It therefore appears that there may have been a degree of estrangement in the marriage, due to Henry’s dislike of having to face Eleanor’s abilities and determination.⁹

Eleanor of Provence may well have taken such estrangement in her stride as, tutored by her Savoyard relatives, she had determined on an important political role for herself in controlling Edward as the heir. A Savoyard, William de Dya, was appointed joint custodian of Edward, along with the Englishman Hugh Giffard, and Bernard of Savoy was appointed keeper of Windsor Castle, where the children spent most of their time. With her people in place even when she was not present, Eleanor could trust that her children, and in particular her son, were being raised to mind her priorities.¹⁰

Aside from her political role in managing the royal heir, Eleanor carved out for herself a rather greater wifely role than had become traditional, following the disgrace of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the succession of two non-interventionist queens in the form of Berengaria of Navarre and Isabella of Angoulême. In particular, impelled by necessity, she established something of a financial powerbase for herself during Henry’s life. The means by which she did this was the provision to her by Henry of a succession of highly remunerative wardships and her attempts to increase her own prerogative income. Both of these steps were controversial. The wardships which she acquired were high profile, and were then exploited by her, in a fashion which her own biographer concedes was ruthless, in pursuit of quick and substantial returns. Her attempts to expand the ambit of her prerogative income, including an ambitious attempt to expand the incidence of the tax known as ‘queen’s gold’, were controversial both at a national and local level. The former can be seen in the fact that questions were asked at the Oxford parliament of 1258. As for the latter, the queen’s gold issue provoked a very serious hostility to Eleanor among Londoners in particular, and this hostility was to come home to roost in later years.¹¹

It seems likely that Eleanor was a warm person who got on well with other women and formed strong friendships; Howell found evidence of long correspondences with more than one intimate friend, and on reading her letters a lively, charming person speaks through the years. To add to her beauty she obviously also had a keen interest in style and dress. Howell notes that her wardrobe records a wide variety of beautiful and luxurious items of clothing: gowns in vibrant colours trimmed with borders worked with gold or silver thread or decorated with pearl buttons, capes trimmed with fur, indoor slippers and goatskin boots. Overall, they present the impression of a queen for whom style was an indispensable aspect of queenship.¹²

Another major player in the English political world was Henry’s younger brother Richard of Cornwall. Richard appears also to have lacked any great interest in or aptitude for martial endeavour. Although he did go on Crusade with Simon de Montfort in the earlier years of Henry’s reign, he does not appear to have returned with any great reputation as a soldier. The reputation with which he returned was far more as a politician, supported by a number of actions on Crusade, including the conclusion of an advantageous truce and negotiation of the return of numerous high-ranking hostages, including Simon de Montfort’s brother. But there is no reason to doubt his courage. The debacle at Saintes in 1242 illustrates both his bravery and his political abilities: he crossed the River Charente to the enemy camp armed only with a pilgrim’s staff to make a personal appeal to King Louis for a short truce, which was granted. Powicke concludes that he was in better control of his temper than Henry and that he made better use of his wits.¹³

In the early part of Henry’s majority reign, Richard was a powerful force in arguments for administrative reform, speaking on behalf of influential barons. He was also very good at business, accumulating a large range of estates, often as the price of his agreement with his brother at difficult moments. He worked hard at the management of his properties, becoming, largely by his own efforts, one of the richest men in the kingdom. By the time of Eleanor’s introduction to English politics in 1255 Richard was, in a quiet way, a great man at court, married to Eleanor of Provence’s sister Sanchia – a marriage to which he was reconciled, characteristically, by a large grant of money. Richard’s biographer makes the good point that while Henry and Richard were both tied by their marriages to the Savoyard faction, Henry impoverished himself by giving them gifts – whereas Richard made them loans, which he ensured were repaid.¹⁴

The third relative who had abilities better suited to kingship than Henry was in many ways the most important: Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. De Montfort was the son of the famous general of the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars in southern France. As a younger son, Simon had arrived in England with next to nothing and had been warmly welcomed by Henry, presumably on the strength of his great charm and his equally considerable reputation (the origins of which are mysterious) as a warrior. As to his charm, the records provide clear evidence of that most ephemeral of characteristics: his ‘pleasant and courteous way of speaking’ is noted by one chronicler and its effect can be traced in his personal conquests of other, perhaps better, judges than Henry, such as Robert Grosseteste and Louis IX. It can also be seen from the records which remain of his 1253 trial, where both partisan and non-partisan chroniclers were plainly swept away by the force of his advocacy, and also from both his ability to get people to act against their own interests and his ultimately well-placed confidence that he was a fit match for one of the greatest heiresses of his day.¹⁵

However, he had gradually come to cast a very uncomfortable shadow over Henry. To add to his reputation as a great warrior had come two important additions: status and money. In terms of status, he was already very well born; although it is conventional to describe his father as coming of the minor French nobility, he was in fact descended from William the Conqueror via one of Henry I’s numerous illegitimate progeny. He also had a claim to the prestigious, though impoverished, English earldom of Leicester, which he made good by purchasing the claim and persuading Henry III to endorse it. However, to this he added hugely by his marriage, in 1238, to the king’s own sister Eleanor, widow of William Marshal the younger, Earl of Pembroke (following some attempts at other, even more stellar, heiresses).

Eleanor herself, it should be noted in passing, has a tolerable claim to being a better candidate for king than Henry based on pure ability. Powicke considered her the most able of the daughters of John – who included the Queen of Scots and the Holy Roman Empress. Recent scholarship, particularly that of Wilkinson, has highlighted her considerable abilities as a politician in her own right in networking for her family and in fighting the cause of her dower rights, as well as some military ability in holding Dover Castle in 1265. Certainly, the picture of her which emerges suggests a rather tougher personality than Henry could claim to possess.¹⁶

The Montfort marriage was not a marriage designed by the king. It appears that he was probably charmed into it by de Montfort and Eleanor and that he consented without appreciating the political storm it would cause for him. The possible alternative is that Henry’s hand was forced by a suggestion that the couple had anticipated the ceremony. This alternative, though romantic, is generally considered unlikely, given the favour in which the pair remained immediately after the marriage. But however he was cozened into it, Henry was still casting recriminations about the circumstances of the event some time later: in 1239, while in a rage, he openly accused de Montfort of having seduced Eleanor before the marriage – one classic example of Henry’s unpredictable and misplaced rages referred to above.¹⁷

However it was brought about, not only did this wedding bring de Montfort very near the throne in kinship, it also, notionally at least, brought him considerable wealth. Eleanor’s first marriage, to William Marshal, entitled her to a third of her late husband’s lands for life by way of dower. These vast lands had substantially come to Henry III’s childhood regent, the great warrior William Marshal the elder, through his marriage to Isabel de Clare, heiress to the earldom of Pembroke. Eleanor’s rights had also been increased by the dowry given her by Henry on her marriage. Overall, Eleanor was therefore entitled to over £500 per year in respect of the Marshal lands in England and £400 in respect of their Welsh and Irish lands. This was nearly double de Montfort’s own income as Earl of Leicester, and transformed him in one swoop from a mid-ranking noble into a considerable magnate.

In the years which succeeded his marriage, de Montfort’s star continued to rise. He was acknowledged as a military leader internationally as well as in England; he was offered the post of Governor of Jerusalem, and later that of Constable of France. To add insult to injury, so far as Henry was concerned, de Montfort was one of the few people who distinguished himself at Saintes in 1242, fighting a rearguard action to protect Henry.¹⁸

All of this led to a relationship where Henry depended upon and violently resented de Montfort in roughly equal measure, and where it is likely that de Montfort’s contempt for him was never entirely absent from the king’s mind. He appointed de Montfort to Gascony in 1248 to protect the area for Edward and yet refused to back his actions there, instead embracing the chief noble of the region, Gaston de Béarn, whom de Montfort had sent to England in chains, recalling de Montfort and putting him on trial. The result was that de Montfort was acquitted in circumstances which were humiliating to Henry. And yet, even after this, in the run-up to the wedding of Edward and Eleanor, Henry was again asking for help from de Montfort, which de Montfort gave – as was his way, at a price.¹⁹

So much for the key personalities within the royal family. What of the wider political context? In truth, England was notionally secure but politically fraught; in marked contrast to Castile where, in recent years, faction had largely been buried in an exterior focus: reconquest. Many different issues fed into the English situation, and any full treatment of them lies well beyond the scope of this book. However, there were effectively three key themes: issues of local governance and justice; resentment at the costs involved in Henry’s scheme to procure the throne of Sicily for his second son, Edmund; and the issue of ‘aliens’. It was this latter issue, which encapsulated resentments arising out of Henry’s adoption of a multitude of foreign favourites, which was probably the single most burning problem underpinning the considerable difficulties at the English court at this time. It was also an issue which hovered over the marriage of Eleanor, an ‘alien’, to Edward.

As mentioned above, in the wake of Eleanor of Provence’s marriage to Henry there had come to England a very sizeable contingent of her maternal relatives from Savoy. First came William of Savoy, who was already rising fast in the Church. He was quickly in Henry’s confidence and became the first target of the anti-foreigner lobby when Henry attempted to force his election to the wealthy and prestigious bishopric of Winchester. Death intervened to prevent further advancement of William, but he had left behind him a certain number of other Savoyards, some of whom remained in England. The most notable of these was Peter d’Aigueblanche, named for the area of Savoy from which he hailed. By 1239 he was Archdeacon of Shropshire and he became Bishop of Hereford in 1240. Shortly thereafter, two further uncles arrived. The first was Peter of Savoy, who became Eleanor of Provence’s primary adviser and the head of the Savoyard faction at court. The second was another cleric, Boniface, whose election as Archbishop of Canterbury Henry forced through in 1241. The timing of their arrival was propitious for Henry: both Richard of Cornwall and Simon de Montfort were absent on Crusade at the time and would remain so for some time. By the time they returned, the Savoyards were ensconced at the heart of court and had already been richly provided for. Peter of Savoy, for example, was knighted by Henry in early 1241 and thereafter given a wide range of lands, honours and posts of influence, including the honours of Richmond and Pevensey, the custody of most of the key south coast castles, of the lands of the late Earl Warenne, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.²⁰

At this point, the patronage for the most senior Savoyards was not a particular issue. They were useful men, and by virtue of a number of magnates dying without heirs Henry had sufficient land in hand to indulge them without treading on anyone’s toes. But the problem was a cumulative one. In the wake of these ‘headline’ Savoyards came wave after wave of smaller fry. Ridgeway has identified well over 150 Savoyards who enjoyed Henry’s patronage in the years after Eleanor of Provence’s arrival as queen. Although only a minority became resident in England, and many entered the households of Savoyard magnates, there were a significant number who remained at court.²¹

Particularly significantly, many of them were ‘seeded’ into Edward’s household and later into his group of companions, thereby (theoretically) ensuring that the Savoyard faction kept control of their most important asset – the heir to the throne. Two examples will suffice. One of those who accompanied Edward to Gascony after his marriage was Ebulo de Montibus, who came, as his name suggests, from the Savoyard mountain regions. He was a protégé of Peter of Savoy and was placed by him in close contact with Edward in the early years of the 1250s. He witnessed many of Edward’s Acts and was one of those who appeared with Edward at his sister’s wedding.²²

A second example is Otho de Grandison, who was to become one of Edward and Eleanor’s closest companions. He was of a Savoyard family whose interest was needed by Peter of Savoy in the Pays de Vaux. Otho appears to have been put into Edward’s household during the schoolroom years for Edward later referred to Otho as having given ‘faithful service from his earliest youth and our own’. Otho was probably born in 1238, and the date which has been identified for his likely arrival (1247) corresponds with the period when Edward’s household was set up. It also seems likely, from three facts, that his family, though noble, was impecunious. In the first place, his father was given a pension of £20 per annum for the services of his sons. In the second place, the fact that he would part with Otho, his eldest son, indicates that there was not much to look forward to at home. Finally, the fact that Otho for years appears in the records simply as ‘Ottonin’ – even after his father’s death made him Lord of Grandson, and he became a knight only some seven years later, indicates powerfully that the Lords of Grandson did not have enough money to support the knightly state. Otho, as will become apparent, rose to considerable wealth and rank on the back of his strategic placement with Edward in childhood, although his loyalty was to Edward, not to the Savoyard faction.²³

But it was not merely or even mainly in the question of patronage that the Savoyard influx was offensive. Three Savoyards were married, at Peter of Savoy’s behest, to three of the most wealthy Anglo-Irish heiresses, whose marriages were in the gift of the king, removing this source of wealth from the English and Irish nobility. To cap this, following an Anglo-Savoyard treaty in 1246, the male heirs to major English honours began to be picked off by the queen for her relatives. The queen’s cousin Alice de Saluzzo was brought to England in 1247 to marry the underage heir to the earldom of Lincoln. With her came another relative, to be married to the male heir to the substantial Irish honour of Connacht. Next was the lordship of de Vescy, which at that time controlled Alnwick and much of Northumberland. The Vescy heir, John (another future close friend of Edward and Eleanor), was married to Alice of Saluzzo’s sister Agnes. Then came the matches of Eleanor of Geneva to Alexander Balliol and Margaret of Savoy to the heir to the earldom of Devon. Still further examples can be given. Each of these marriages represented control of vast tracts of land and revenue and affected the running not just of these territories, but their neighbours and those in the affinity of the family for years to come. Thus, although a number of the marriages were happy, and the Savoyards did assist in maintaining peace in difficult areas, feeling ran high over these marriages. It can be seen from Matthew Paris’ reports in his chronicle that the practice was and continued to be resented and the marriage of English heiresses to foreigners was a key issue for the barons in 1258, when the tensions beneath the surface of the English court came to the surface.²⁴

Had matters stopped with the Savoyard interest, however, all might just have been manageable. There was a limited number of sufficiently ranking Savoyards. However, in 1247 Henry invited four of his de Lusignan half-brothers and his half-sister Alice to come to England and live under his patronage. They were later supplemented by a couple of his de Lusignan nieces. The third of the visiting brothers, William ‘of Valence’, was then married to the heiress to the lordship of Pembroke and was also given a pension of over £800 per annum. An attempt was made to install the youngest brother, Aymer, who was probably in his late teens at the time, as Bishop of Durham. When this attempt was not successful, he was given a rich living in Wearmouth and in 1252 was installed in the even richer see of Winchester – at which time he was still being educated at Oxford. The older Lusignans, Guy and Geoffrey, who remained largely in France, were given rich pensions. Meanwhile, Alice was married to the heir to the Earl Warenne (Surrey), while her cousins were married to the heirs of the earldoms of Gloucester and Derby.²⁵

Predictably, with these new aliens came their own protégés and soon they too were installing themselves as constables of strategic castles or within the royal household. Equally predictably, the new aliens were unwelcome both to the English nobility and to the Savoyard faction. So far as the English nobility was concerned, this new influx of foreigners and their preferments fell into the account which was gradually being prepared against the king. So far as the old aliens were concerned, there were naturally rows, the most severe of which prior to Eleanor’s arrival is worth recounting.²⁶

In late 1252, a quarrel arose between the queen’s uncle Boniface, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the king’s half-brother Aymer, the bishop elect of Winchester, concerning the appointment to the post of prior of the hospital of St Thomas at Southwark. Boniface was away and Aymer installed his own candidate. An official of the archbishopric pointed out that the archbishop’s confirmation was necessary, and when his advice was ignored he took it upon himself to excommunicate the new prior. At Aymer’s instigation the prior elect ignored this interdict, and was then seized and imprisoned in the archbishop’s prison. Aymer consulted with his brother William who, in true Lusignan style, despatched a bunch of armed men, ransacked the prison and surrounding manor and sprung the prior from his prison. They then rounded up the archbishop’s official, who was beaten up and then dropped in the middle of nowhere with instructions to walk home.²⁷

The king was plainly placed in a most uncomfortable position, but was principally annoyed with those who had taken to complaining about the Lusignans – foremost among them, the queen. Nothing was done immediately on the actual dispute, but Henry suspended her control over all her lands and banished her from court, sending her to Winchester. On the other side of the equation, he simply suspended or diverted monies payable to William of Valence. The row rolled on for weeks, but was eventually patched up in early 1253, with Aymer swearing that he had been no party to the raid and being given the kiss of peace by Boniface. Officially the matter was over, but the huge fault lines which had rapidly opened up at the heart of the court, and which had proved so difficult to close, showed just how unstable the position was.²⁸

Aside from the political aspects of the English court, it is worth considering the royal family life. The key point is that Henry III and Eleanor of Provence were devoted parents, and indubitably made themselves beloved by their children. Henry was capable of great charm and generosity, particularly towards those who were no threat to him, and one can imagine that this made him a delightful father. Having lacked a settled childhood himself, he was keen to see that his own children had what he had missed. Many records remain of his concern for his children. In October 1242, he contacted the constable of Windsor to say that he had heard that the children had no good wine to drink and instructed him to present them with two of the best tuns to be found in the castle. (It should be understood that this was not a case of encouraging underage drinking – diluted wine was drunk to ameliorate the health risk posed by unclean water.) Later the same year, Henry instructed the sheriff of Gloucester to send fifteen lampreys, a much-prized though disgusting-looking eel-like fish, to three-year-old Edward – who we may imagine had confided how very much he liked lampreys. He sent fur-trimmed scarlet robes and special ‘two-seater’ saddles for Edward’s first attempts at horsemanship. It is also likely that Henry and Eleanor were comparatively ‘present’ parents: Windsor, where the children seem to have been largely based, was second only to London in the list of Henry’s most visited locations in the years 1236–41, and most of his other favourite palaces were a sufficiently short distance to enable the children to visit their parents far more frequently than was common with royal children.²⁹

Meanwhile, Eleanor, from a notably devoted family, was well placed to recreate that ambience in her own nursery. Nor did she spurn the maternal role; for prolonged periods in every year of her children’s childhood she would base herself at Windsor with them. While Henry minimised his travel, she travelled even less, choosing to stay with her children for parts of the year rather than accompany her husband. So between July 1252 and July 1253 she was at Windsor for thirty weeks of the year, with the rest of the time spent at Clarendon, Marlborough, Woodstock and Winchester for about a fortnight at a time, and with only two flying visits to the capital.

Despite the king providing a separate fund for the children’s household, her wardrobe records provide clear evidence of her closely overseeing their dress, with a detail which bespeaks intimacy. She chose gowns for Beatrice, a tabard of Ypres silk for Edward and – a fact which will resonate with any parent – apparently innumerable pairs of children’s shoes. Her close presence in her children’s lives is also attested by her gift giving to their nurses – in 1253, eleven-year-old Beatrice was given a brooch to give to her nurse from Eleanor’s accounts, and the nurse was also given a brooch directly by Eleanor. Brooches were also given to Edward’s former nurse Lady Alice, and to the nurses of John de Warenne’s daughter Alice de Lusignan, Richard of Cornwall’s son Edmund and Alice de Saluzzo’s son Henry. Inferentially these children were all being brought up with the royal children at Windsor, and Eleanor had formed warm ties to them all. As Howell notes, the picture which emerges is of an establishment which placed children and their wellbeing at its heart – a child-centred household which would not seem out of place today.³⁰

No contemporaneous detail remains of the way in which the children were looked after from day to day, but a vignette from the nursery later run by Eleanor of Castile at King’s Langley shows the level of comfort which the children enjoyed. In 1286, the Queen’s Remembrancer notes that young John de Warenne (the grandson of John de Warenne and Alice de Lusignan) had two new robes a year, one at Christmas and one at Easter ‘as the sons of great lords are accustomed to have’; two palfreys and three sumpter horses with men to keep them; five squires, their horses and three valets. For dinner he was allowed three pennyworths of bread, three dishes from the kitchen, a pitcher of wine and two of beer; for supper his allowance was a little larger. At night he had one torch to burn as long as it lasted, and twelve candles.³¹

What else do we know of the Windsor establishment where Edward was brought up? As in Castile, so also in England, hunting, predominantly in the form of falconry, was a favoured hobby: the queen ordered gloves for this pastime for Beatrice and Edmund. But while that would remain his favourite form of hunting, Edward seems also to have taken to hunting with hounds, being given permission to hunt in Windsor forest in 1247. Chess was certainly played as it was in Castile, but more informal recreations seem to have been favoured. Music in particular was a favourite; there are records of dancing and minstrels to play for the children. Indeed, music was so very much enjoyed that in 1242, when the king and queen went to Gascony, ‘Richard the Harper’ was retained for the comfort of the royal children, who were then only two and three years old.³²

Windsor therefore would have been to the royal children very much a family home. However, from quite a young age Edward would have been accustomed to a degree of itinerant life with the court. It is likely Henry had his family around him for Christmas in Westminster or Winchester, and at age seven Edward was with his parents at the consecration of a new abbey church in Beaulieu in 1246 when he fell ill. There are also records of Edward having chambers at a number of the royal castles and palaces: Woodstock, Oxford, Silverstone, Guildford, Havering and Gillingham, for example. Overall, it seems to have been a much more relaxed, and rurally based, upbringing than Eleanor enjoyed. War was far away, not an ever-present reality. Armed camps were unheard of; so too was the prospect of losing a near relative in battle. Administrative business, never a favourite of Henry’s, was predominately carried on away from the children. Life as a royal child in Henry III and Eleanor of Provence’s nursery establishment must have been very much a life of ease and pleasure.³³

The upbringing of all the children, and of the future king Edward in particular, is of course likely to have involved a very great deal of religious observance and doctrine, though little theological debate. Henry III was not a speculative theologian, but an emotional devotee of the cult of St Edward the Confessor – the un-martial king upon whom he had seized as the appropriate model for his own kingship. Similarly, Eleanor of Provence corresponded with theologians, but for her moral guidance rather than from a spirit of intellectual inquiry or debate. Thus the feast of St Edward the Confessor on 13 October was a major event for the Henrician court; Henry was almost always at Westminster for the celebration of this festival and also frequently for the anniversary of the Confessor’s death on 5 January. Even when he could not be there – as, for example, in the year of Margaret’s marriage to the King of Scotland – he ensured that the festival was kept with magnificence in his absence. Further, while travel as a whole was not much in favour, travelling for the purpose of pilgrimage was very much a feature of the court under Henry. One or other of the feast days of St Thomas Becket was often held at Canterbury, and for at least half of the years 1234–41 Henry organised tours of pilgrimage into Norfolk to Walsingham, Bromholm and Bury St Edmunds. Edward will have been present for a good number of these visits of pilgrimage, at least once he passed the ‘danger age’ of about seven and began visiting the court more frequently. The result of his early religious training appears to have been to produce in Edward what Prestwich has described as ‘unsophisticated piety’, with a taste, albeit more limited than that of his father, for pilgrimages and devotional visits.³⁴

A theme which emerges from the household records is that Edward was by no means as robust as a child as he was as a man. As an adult he seems hardly to have known a day’s illness until his latter days. But as a child he was considered more fragile in health. Reference has been made above to the obviously sudden and severe illness of Edward aged about seven at Beaulieu in 1246, which necessitated his staying for three weeks, accompanied, in defiance of Cistercian rules, by his mother – and doubtless a good handful of nurses and waiting women. Records also exist of his being ill at Westminster and Windsor. However, he seems to have gained in strength as he grew, and in his later childhood, as in his adult years, he seems to have enjoyed good health.³⁵

Edward’s companions were not confined to his siblings, not least because the two siblings nearest to him in age were both girls – Margaret and Beatrice. His only brother, Edmund, was nearly six years his junior. Around 1247, various boys of roughly his age were brought in to make up his household and his schoolfellows. Money was frequently assigned by Henry for the expenses of Edward’s household ‘and the other children dwelling with him at Windsor’.³⁶

Practically no record remains either of the identities of these companions or the course of education which Edward and his friends followed. However, some small traces remain. Despite the closeness in age, and family ties through his aunt Eleanor, Edward was not educated with Simon de Montfort’s similarly aged boys, Henry, Simon and Guy, all born between 1238 and 1240. They were apparently educated under the aegis of Robert Grosseteste, the saintly and academic Bishop of Lincoln. Henry of Almain, the son of Richard of Cornwall, to whom Edward was very close and who was his father’s eldest son by a number of years, is likely to have been one of the group at least for some period of time after the death of his mother in 1240; Henry was over three years older than Edward and may have graduated from the schoolroom earlier.³⁷

The gift of a brooch to Henry’s younger brother’s nurse suggests that Edmund of Cornwall was part of the household, but his age (he was born in 1249) makes him a more likely companion for Edward’s own brother, Edmund. Similarly Edmund de Lacy, who went on to marry Alice de Saluzzo, the queen’s cousin, and whose son’s nurse was gifted in 1252, may well have formed part of the Windsor group before his marriage, though nine years older than Edward. Within Edward’s household from a very early stage and part of Edward’s own group was Otho de Grandison. Likewise Ebulo de Montibus, who was almost Edward’s contemporary in age. Other possibilities for the group, at least in its latter stages, are John de Vescy, the heir to the Lord of Alnwick, who was married to the queen’s Savoyard relative Agnes de Saluzzo; Edward’s close friend Robert Tybetot; and James, son of the seneschal of Gascony, Nicholas de Molis. Almost certainly present were the sons of Bartholomew Pecche, who was appointed to be Edward’s guardian when Edward was seven. They accompanied Edward and their father to Spain for Edward’s wedding to Eleanor. Some more humble children are also recorded as forming part of the household, including the two sons of one Ferrand, a crossbowman.³⁸

As for what the boys learnt, it will certainly not have been as academic an upbringing as that which Eleanor enjoyed. There was no comparable tradition of scholarship at the English court, nor were there such academic resources. On the whole it is thought that Edward, unlike Eleanor, could not write, though it is considered likely that he could read and had some knowledge of Latin as well as fluency in Anglo-Norman French and English. He was not the first English king to speak English – King John wins that title, and Henry II is reputed to have had a limited English vocabulary. Moreover, speaking English was no great sign of scholarship, it being the language of the lower classes and therefore not deemed a subject for study.³⁹

In further contrast to Eleanor’s childhood, the books which would have surrounded Edward and his companions are not likely to have been very scholarly; aside from religious works, they were probably largely confined to the stories of knightly chivalry which his mother is known to have read, and for which his father also had a fondness. Eleanor of Provence was educated, and read and corresponded with one of the great religious men of her day for spiritual guidance. But there is no whiff about her of the bluestocking; she was in essence a ‘people person’. Her books were acquired for her from booksellers such as Peter and William of Paris and appear to be prettily bound romances, or poems of chivalry like John of Howden’s Rossignos, which recounted tales of Hector, Troilus, Alexander, Caesar and the Knights of the Round Table. That Edward also read these tales can be inferred from the fact that he possessed at least one such in his adulthood. He was thus raised to be, and became, literate, but not bookish.⁴⁰

Another reason for the pull of the romances which were the backbone of his reading is that they were entirely compatible with a major part of his education as a king’s son: knightly skills including horsemanship, weapons training and hunting, both with dogs and hawks. Bartholomew Pecche would have been primarily responsible for this training, but the reported presence of the Nicholas de Molis who had been with Edward at the Scottish wedding indicates that this gentleman, elsewhere referred to by Matthew Paris as ‘a distinguished knight’, probably coached Edward and his companions in knightly skills.

Both mentally and physically, then, Edward was raised to believe in and to attempt to embody the knightly ideal. To add to this, with Richard of Cornwall’s children present or often visiting the Windsor establishment, it is inevitable that Edward will have heard from Richard his crusading tales, similar to those which the earl told Matthew Paris; and the entire household is likely to have participated in the crusading fever which overtook the court in 1250 when Henry III took the cross in imitation of Louis IX, who had departed for the Holy Land in 1248 and had recently taken the port of Damietta in epic style. Queen Eleanor’s copy of The Song of Antioch, a romance history of the First Crusade, was probably quickly dog-eared and formed the subject for discussion and play throughout the nursery.⁴¹

However, though the ideals of knightly attainment were very much to the fore, it seems doubtful that Edward’s training was very rigorous in practical terms. England was at peace, and intended to remain so. Eleanor of Provence would be against any training which was hazardous to her precious eldest son, and so too would Henry III, who himself had no time for fighting, or even for hunting, and regarded tournaments as almost criminal. It would therefore seem that Edward’s knightly training, though doubtless correct and thorough, will have been largely formal. It is highly unlikely that it was anything like as intensive as that which the sons of Ferdinand, raised in fairly spartan conditions, surrounded by active warriors and expected to take to the field in real engagements in their early teens, underwent.

At fourteen, it therefore seems that the young Lord Edward, as he was known, hardly seemed likely to be the dream match for the scholarly daughter and sister of Castile’s very active soldier kings.