by Marion Meade
As pleased with herself at this point as she undoubtedly was, she had no intention of remaining at Bermondsey, in her opinion a less than appropriate residence for the royal family. In the spring, she prevailed upon Henry to begin renovations on the dilapidated palace at Westminster. The assignment was turned over to Thomas Becket, who threw himself into the work of supervision with such zeal that between Easter and Whitsuntide the restoration was completed. In fifty days he accomplished a job that normally would have taken several years. So many workers were hired that they could barely hear one another speak, and, the chronicles tell us, the scene resembled the Tower of Babel.
In early June, then, Eleanor and her household traveled up the broad strand of the Thames to the hamlet of Charing, past the gardens and suburban villas of wealthy Londoners, to Westminster Palace. The plan of the great block of buildings was, in fact, two palaces joined into one. The new palace, the home of the royal family, was adjoined on the east by orchards, gardens, and thick woods, which extended down to the edge of the Thames; the old palace, lying within a separate enclosure to the south, was chiefly used for business offices of state officials and as living quarters for the resident courtiers. There was a spacious courtyard, which, whenever Henry happened to be in residence, would be forever thronged with valets polishing his hunting spears, falconers sunning their hooded birds on stone benches along the walls, the king’s shaggy wolfhounds, and an endless procession of clerks, sergeants, and men-at-arms, intent upon the king’s business. Everything considered, the palace lacked the elegance of others Eleanor had observed during her travels—there were no mirrors of polished steel, no carpets, no mother-of-pearl inlaid chairs—but it was large, functional, and a great deal more comfortable and regal than Bermondsey. Some of her lack of enthusiasm for Westminster may have had more to do with the man who restored it than with the buildings themselves.
Thomas’s efficiency notwithstanding, Eleanor soon found that there was more to Becket than had first met the eye, for the chancellor, so lately trodding the halls of Canterbury in his drab cleric’s gown, had been transformed within the space of a few months from a sparrow into a peacock. And this metamorphosis, fostered by the king himself, had been accomplished so swiftly that Eleanor had no choice but to deal with it as an established fact.
Roger of Hovedon, a royal clerk, wrote sourly of the intimate relationship between Henry and his chancellor, commenting that the king “bestowed upon him many revenues, both ecclesiastical and of a secular nature, and received him so much into his esteem and familiarity that throughout the kingdom, there was none his equal, save the king alone.” In Eleanor’s mind, the king had only one equal, and as his consort, it should have been herself. With reasons that ran closer to the bone than mere jealousy, she was both angry and resentful at the unusual turn in the relationship between the king and his chancellor. Henry had embraced him with such affection, one could even say passion, that they might have been taken for soul mates. They became inseparable: “The King and Becket played together like little boys of the same age, at the court, in church, in assemblies, in riding.” They were together when Henry resided in London and when he traveled through the country; they hawked and hunted, ate together, even caroused together, although the chaste and sober Thomas did not participate in Henry’s wenching. This curious behavior, which would be highly suspect today, surprised Henry’s contemporaries, but at the same time they read into it no deeper meanings. Outwardly, Thomas appeared more regal than the king. In contrast to his master, a man who “wears leggings without any cross-wrappings,” whose “caps have no elegance,” and who “wears the first clothes that come to hand,” Thomas had so many silk cloaks that he was rarely seen in the same outfit twice. Displaying a self-made man’s eagerness for the trappings of status and rank, he preened like a grand vizier, a fact that neither escaped nor distressed Henry. He found it a source of pleasure and sometimes enormous amusement. Various anecdotes were later collected by Becket’s friends to demonstrate his intimacy with the king, such as this one by William Fitz Stephen. One cold day the two men were riding through the streets of London, when Henry noticed an old man in a ragged coat coming toward them.
“Do you see that man?” asked the king.
“Yes,” replied Thomas. “I see him.”
“How poor he is, how frail, and how scantily clad. Would it not be an act of charity to give him a thick warm cloak?”
Becket, not yet following Henry’s train of thought, readily agreed. “It would indeed; and right that you should attend to it, my king.”
Whereupon Henry lunged over and playfully tried to pull the chancellor’s cloak of scarlet cloth and gray fur from his shoulders. When the startled Becket resisted, the two of them played tug-of-war with the cape until their horseplay threatened to tumble both of them from their horses. “At last the chancellor reluctantly allowed the king to overcome him, and suffered him to pull the cape from his shoulder and give it to the poor man.”
What Fitz Stephen neglects to mention is that Becket had dozens of capes just as fine.
Like a man with a new, adored mistress, Henry could not do enough for Becket. The riches that passed through the chancellor’s hands were enormous, and almost daily Henry seemed to heap new honors upon him. He kept a residence of his own, paid for by the king, where there was open house every day, his table welcoming men of every rank, from visiting foreign dignitaries to ordinary knights. There was no stinting.
He ordered his hall to be strewn every day with fresh straw or hay in winter, and with green rushes or leaves in summer, so that the host of knights who could not find room on the benches might sit on a clean and wholesome floor without soiling their precious clothes and fine underwear. His board was resplendent with gold and silver vessels and abounded in dainty dishes and precious wines, so that whenever food or drink was commended by its rarity, no price was too high to deter his agents from purchasing it.
The chancellor’s personal brand of hospitality was as gracious as his menu was lavish. If we can believe the chroniclers, there was grace in his every gesture, refinement in his every word and action. He played the perfect host, supervising the smallest detail of domestic service, noting the position of each guest, inquiring for the absent, and if a man modestly took a lower place than his rank demanded, Thomas would have him reseated properly. So sumptuous was his establishment, so much the center of all that was going on in London, that Henry himself was known to ride his horse into Thomas’s hall as he sat at dinner. Leaping over the table, he would sit down amid the courtiers in their finery and demand to be fed. But Henry was no fool, and above and beyond his love for Becket, there was another reason why he permitted his secretary to play king. Certain aspects of kingship bored him: Keeping a splendid court, extending hospitality to visitors, impressing foreign rulers, in fact all the pomp and ceremony associated with monarchy were chores on which he disdained to waste his time and which he willingly shifted to Becket.
To Eleanor’s great chagrin, the court over which she should have presided and which no woman in Europe knew better how to conduct, had somehow slipped through her fingers and drifted down the Thames to Thomas Becket’s splendid mansion. Visiting dignitaries who should have come to pay their respects to the queen were instead taking their meals and exchanging elegant chitchat with the chancellor, and even the king himself seemed to prefer Becket’s company to her own. Whether or not she admitted it, Becket, so amusing and sociable, was better able to handle the king’s moods than she. Like the doting mother of a temperamental child, Thomas could sense a storm coming before it arrived; he knew how to ward off Henry’s unaccountable—and accountable—rages, gentle him along until he’d soothed his master into good humor once more. Standing on the sidelines at Westminster, Eleanor watched it all with detachment and made no attempt to compete. She was too experienced a woman to make an issue of her husband’s infatuation with Becket, no matter how much she may have personally loathed the man, and she affected to notice noth
ing in the hope that their attachment would wear itself out in time.
In general, Eleanor was not overly fond of clerics, and the virginal Thomas, whose celibacy was unnecessary, since he had never taken priestly orders, impressed her as the worst kind of prude and hypocrite. Contemporaries, noting that in youth Becket had taken a vow of chastity from which he had never deviated, did not seem to find it unusual that he feared intimate relations with women, nor did any of them, friend or enemy, ever impute to him homosexual leanings, which of course does not mean that he did not have them. He did not seem to dislike women, although the evidence we have eight hundred years later to prove that he did is scant. It was said that he adored his mother, “taking her as his guide in all his ways, as his patroness in life, and placing all his trust in her, after Christ.” And in a letter he wrote later in life to a nun named Idonea, he encouraged her to rely on female strength, citing Scriptural references to “the courage of a woman when men failed, leaders were terrified and the priests had fled.” Despite his almost feminist rhetoric, he did not like the queen any more than she did him, but any open show of hostility would have been unthinkable. As a cleric, he probably inclined toward the Church’s view of her, that she was a “loose” woman, who had divorced and remarried under highly suspicious circumstances. He had heard the tattle about her frivolous behavior in Paris and her reputed infidelity at Antioch and undoubtedly received an earful of gossip from his friend John of Salisbury, who had observed her firsthand while she was seeking Pope Eugenius’s approval for a divorce.
If Eleanor resented the honors Henry bestowed so prodigiously upon his chancellor, she seemed to have adopted a mask of indifference to his growing wealth and power. By virtue of the fact that he was constantly at Henry’s side, she had ample opportunities to observe the man, and her resentment toward the manner in which he had usurped her place would not totally have clouded her objectivity nor prevented her from making a sharp analysis of his motives. Like everyone else, she could see how much Henry adored Thomas, but what would have interested her far more were Thomas’s feelings for her husband. Behind the chancellor’s open, easy friendliness, did she detect hints of insincerity? In off moments, when Thomas let down his guard, did she catch some message in his eyes that spelled out less worthy emotions—that the chancellorship was a highly lucrative job and nothing more, that befriending Henry was a necessary, if tedious, requirement for keeping that powerful position? It is tempting to imagine that she sensed there would be no need of her interference, that Becket himself would be the architect of his own ruin.
For that matter, Thomas was not her only rival for the king’s time and attention. As she had discovered by now, Henry was a notoriously unfaithful husband. As king, infidelity was his privilege and prerogative, one which he would make use of all his life. He took his pleasure among the trollops along the Thames; he scouted amusing taverns, where he picked up women; in his travels around the country, his retinue swarmed with “court prostitutes” and waferers, the makers of thin sweet cakes, who had a reputation for being pimps. Sometime after he and Eleanor arrived in England, she became aware of the existence of his illegitimate son, Geoffrey, the son of the prostitute Ykenai, and also another infant William, whose surname is recorded as Longspee or Longsword, and whose mother was probably also of low birth. The circumstances under which Geoffrey came to her attention have not been recorded—perhaps the child’s mother died—but early in the reign, Henry recognized the boy as his son and brought him to live at Westminster, where he was placed under Eleanor’s care. Why she tolerated the presence of Geoffrey in the royal household is anybody’s guess. Perhaps she felt that Geoffrey, despite his unwholesome lineage, had done her no harm and, as Henry’s son, deserved to be well treated; perhaps she wanted to impress Henry with his good fortune at having a wife who would treat his bastard like her own legitimate children. Most likely, however, the decision was Henry’s, and she had no choice in the matter. In addition to Geoffrey, he had many other bastards, she knew not how many. Passing through a village, he would sleep with a girl once, get her with child, and then forget all about her. If this facet of her lusty husband’s nature caused her any pain, it would have been beneath her royal dignity to express it.
In September, Eleanor moved her household to Winchester, joining Henry, who, in the company of Becket, had been away nearly the entire summer, chasing fox and deer in the New Forest and other royal preserves. “He delighted beyond measure in birds of prey,” wrote Gerald of Wales, “especially when in flight, and in hounds pursuing wild beasts by their keen scent, both for their resonant and harmonious voices and for their swift running. Would he had given himself as much to his devotions as he did to the chase!” Now, after several months of relaxation, the king was ready to return to business. On September 29, which was Michaelmas and the traditional time of year for receiving reports from the exchequer, Henry was anxious to review the crown’s revenues for the first nine months of his reign. On this occasion, however, he called together a council of his barons in order to introduce a plan he had been mulling over during the summer. This was not the first time Eleanor had heard him talk about conquering Ireland, and considering Henry’s insatiable appetite for land, an appetite she saw no reason to curb, she may have encouraged him. If so, any influence she may have had was immediately dispelled by the presence of her mother-in-law. Living in semiretirement in Rouen, devoting herself to pious works and the management of Henry’s Continental provinces, Matilda had maintained a strictly hands-off policy in regard to the English, and although no one could accuse her of meddling, she did surreptitiously counsel her son from time to time. On this, her first and last visit to England after Henry became king, Matilda firmly shoved Eleanor still further into the background. At Winchester, she dominated the council, immediately opposing Henry’s plan to invade Ireland and give it to his youngest brother, William. In her opinion, Ireland, poor and barbaric, was not worth the trouble of conquering, but a more overriding objection lay behind her advice. She brought to Henry’s attention the alarming information that his brother, Geoffrey, discontent with his inheritance, was claiming (and probably correctly) that his father had meant Henry to relinquish Anjou once he had succeeded to the throne of England. Since it was clear to him that Henry had no intention of abiding by their father’s wishes, he was stocking his castles for war, and Matilda, whose shrewd old eyes were rarely fooled, saw that Henry stood in danger of losing one of his mainland estates.
While Henry and Matilda put their heads together over the embarrassing problem of Geoffrey, Eleanor was far from supine. If she could not establish her authority as a sovereign in England, at least she might reap some of the benefits of queenship by having an income of her own. To this end, she used this meeting of the exchequer to declare her financial independence from her husband and introduce an innovation, the payment of queen’s gold. No consort before Eleanor, or after her for that matter, had access to her own financial resources. Although Eleanor received an allowance for her expenses from the treasury, and the pipe rolls are full of entries documenting such payments, she now instituted a method by which all payments to the king must be accompanied by a further payment to the queen. “Whoever promises a hundred or two hundred marks to the King is thereby indebted to the Queen in one mark of gold for 100 marks of silver, and so on.” It is obvious that Eleanor carefully thought out her ingenious idea before proposing it. For instance, she had no intention of leaving her income to chance, nor would she rely on her husband or Richard of Luci to collect her queen’s gold: at future meetings of the exchequer. she would send her own specially appointed officers to handle her collections. “Observe too,” commented the chronicler, “that though the King may refund part or all of a debt owed the crown, it will be for the Queen to decide about her share, and without her consent nothing owing to her can be refunded.”
With Matilda’s departure, Henry and Eleanor lingered at Winchester throughout the autumn and remained there to celebrate Christma
s. These months were a period of inactivity. Eleanor had become pregnant again, and Henry, lacking battles to fight in England, brooded about his menacing brother. In the end, he decided that after the holiday he would cross the Channel to deal personally with Geoffrey. This would have been an ideal opportunity for Eleanor to visit Aquitaine, but such a trip did not, evidently, accord with Henry’s plans. During his absence, England would be officially governed by Richard of Luci, but at the same time he promised Eleanor an active part in the government, even though he was unwilling to appoint her regent. These dollops of executive responsibility that Henry would dole out on occasion were not so much done to assuage Eleanor’s desire for authority but rather for reasons of his own self-interest. His empire, too large to supervise personally, could not have been ruled without some delegation of authority. Never fully trusting his hired assistants during the early part of his reign, Henry much preferred to leave a member of his family on the scene. Eleanor he trusted, Eleanor was industrious, and he must have been aware that she knew how to rule as well as any man he had appointed to office.